[Photo cred]

Ever make one of those really n00bish mistakes? Yea, well that was me recently.

I’ll be honest with you. Launching a profitable ecommerce store is pretty dang difficult. There are so many more steps than I am used to.

You know like… selling a product, being in charge of pricing, product fulfillment, customer support, etc. And on top of all that, you need to find a way to successfully (profitably) market the product.

With all the new and sometimes difficult steps to the process, I knew I was bound to get something wrong along the way. I just didn’t realize that it would cost me over $10,000 to learn.

It all started a few days ago when we decided to install a chat client on our ecommerce site. Although Adhustler’s experience with chat has not been the best, we still wanted to see how it would do on our site.

One of the sick features of the chat program we use, ZopIM.com, is the ability to follow visitors around the site and also see where they came from (the keyword / site referrer).

After watching the visitors pour in… I started to realize one huge mistake we had made.

Not monitoring our negative keyword list.

As more visitors started coming in for products we didn’t have… I knew something was up. Imagine paying DOLLARS for a person who will NEVER buy from your site… because you don’t have the product they are looking for.

To make a long story short, I ended up paying over $10,000 in advertising costs (PPC keywords) for products that my ecommerce store doesn’t sell or carry. Yikes!!!

You’re probably thinking I am the worlds worst PPC marketer but it might make more sense that it wasn’t entirely my fault. Well, it is actually, but I’m trying to make myself feel better. Hahaha!

1. The software we use to build our PPC campaigns had the negative keywords that would have prevented much of this. We THOUGHT we imported it into adwords… but apparently we didn’t. Mistake number 1.

2. We were so focused on site conversion, optimization, etc that we put less emphasis on the PPC campaign. In my mind it was extremely targeted, extremely well grouped, and had a ton of 10/10 quality score keywords. We also had the conversion tracking pixel so I wanted some data to go through before we really went through the campaign with a fine tooth comb.

3. I blame adwords broad keyword system. Darn you!!! lol.

After fixing the problem, our site conversions have skyrocketed. Where we were seeing a 1.5% conversion rate before, we are now seeing a much higher percent (over double).

HOW To Find Good Negative Keywords

The best way to find good negative keywords is to see what people are ACTUALLY typing in.

To do this is actually pretty simple.

• Select a date range. If you’ve never done it before, select “All time.”
• Click the See search terms tab -> all keywords.
• Check the ones you don’t like.
• Click “Add negative keyword”.
• …
• PROFIT!

(btw the screenshot above is one I just took from Google’s help page…)

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2011.

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*me being vanna white for the adoori booth lol*

Finding the perfect advertising method for reaching your target audience has never been more complex. How can you make your campaign a success without spending too much money? How can you get your audience to engage with your ad in the right way? How can you get your audience to respond to your call to action?

Enter Adoori, an advertising network in a sea of advertising networks. With a unique focus and an easy to use platform, Adoori sets itself apart from its competitors. Affiliates have been drawing attention to Adoori lately, which is why you should take a closer look. Will the network really take your advertising to a new level? Let’s find out.

About Adoori

Adoori describes itself as “a platform which provides both advertising and publishing products and services globally.” Sounds like the description of a hundred other advertising networks, right? What makes Adoori unique is that it focuses on pop-under ads. Pop-under ads appear behind the window instead of in front of the window like pop-up ads.

You can choose the link your pop-under ad targets, which means you can use Adoori to send traffic to your personal website or a landing page. Eventually, the network plans to add other types of ads. For now, affiliates are finding new ways to make successful pop-under campaigns.

Pop-under Benefits

Pop-under ads are unique and have a serious advantage over pop-up ads (no pun intended). For one, most people see a pop-up ad and immediately look for the “x” to close the window. Pop-up ads have a stigma that says they are annoying, distracting and unwanted. Pop-under ads, on the other hand, hide under the window until it is closed. Why does that work?

• People are less annoyed to see the ad
• People aren’t scrambling to find the “x” to view the page they actually want
• People are more likely to be interested because it seems less invasive

How it Works

The first thing you notice about Adoori is how easy it is to create an account. Notice that the sign up page only asks for your e-mail, username and password. The user-friendly platform is almost immediately apparent.

Setting up a campaign is also fairly straightforward. Your dashboard will highlight all of your basic information. For example, your account balance, impressions and total costs. From your dashboard, you simply create a new campaign, give it a name, target your link and place your bid. The bidding system that’s available is one of the best features of Adoori.

Although the platform and campaign creation process will be clear-cut for most, new advertisers could get confused along the way. The most obvious flaw is that there are few helpful resources for new advertisers who might not understand some of the terms or processes used. It’s hard not to notice that a FAQ page is missing.

Fortunately, the platform has a saving grace. Adoori ensures the traffic is always defaulted by the user’s IP location because advertisers buy their local traffic. This saves time for advertisers and makes the entire process that much easier.

Why it Works

Instead of targeting by content, you are targeting by location. This could be seen as both a disadvantage and an advantage. On one hand, your loan ad could appear on a fashion website. On the other hand, affiliates who are able to think outside the box can find ways to make location targeting work for their campaigns.

You will notice that there is tons of Premium traffic in the US, UK and Western Europe. The best part is that it is unique traffic because the frequency cap is 1/24. Another feature worth noting is the amount of exclusive publishers.

Finally, when it comes time to pay, Adoori makes it reasonably simple. You can choose a recurring PayPal payment option, which means you will save 3% in processing fees. Fortunately, a credit card payment option will also be available later this year.

Conclusion

Overall, Adoori is a unique network that could mean huge profits for the affiliates with the right strategies. If you’re going to sign up, check out the special mixed country offers. These offers will allow you to target multiple countries at a discounted price. Also, be sure to look at gaming, shopping online and traveling ads because they are all performing well on the Premium traffic network.

How can you make pop-under ads work for your campaigns?

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2011.

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FINALLY, I have made a profit with ecommerce. Below is my case study / story of exactly how I achieved this.

Back Story

Just a few months ago, I decided to branch out from affiliate marketing and expand my business from mostly focusing on affiliate marketing and expand to other areas – such as ecommerce.

One of the main reasons why I decided to branch out from mostly focusing on affiliate marketing was because I figured that it would be a lot easier to run a legit ecommerce site on PPC engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) vs trying to be an affiliate for them and [attempt to] bypass Google’s “slap happy affiliate hands.”

To be honest, I thought it would be simple at first. Then, I realized it wasn’t going to be so easy.

Finally Hit A Profit

I’m thankful to say that December resulted in a NET profit (after advertising expenses and product costs) in the $x,xxx range. Sure, it’s not much, but we’re now profitable and ready to start pressing forward towards scaling.

I’ve received a lot of questions about how I built my PPC campaigns and so I figured I would do a case study on it and show you exactly what I have done to make my profitable ppc campaign.

How I Built A Profitable PPC Campaign For My Ecommerce Store

Building my ecommerce PPC campaign was actually relatively easy… time consuming, but still easy.

• We went into one category of products and listed every keyword we could think of for that set of products.
• We also listed negative keywords that we would NOT want to be showing up for. This is an important step that many people overlook. For example, if you run a “job” website, you probably would want to have a whole host of keywords that would bring visitors that are certainly NOT looking for a job… (e.g. blow). This can have a huge impact on your overall success. If you were selling TV’s you would probably want to negative keyword things like “replacement parts,” “stand,” etc. You get the idea.
• We then Google searched some of the keywords we thought of to see what ads came up… Competitive analysis… (Pro tip: To find if they are bidding on broad or exact/phrase only – try typing the keyword + aksljfdlaksj9. Assuming most people won’t be bidding exactly on “yourkeyword aksljfdlaksj9″, their ads will show if they are bidding broad.)
• Finally we had enough information to begin building our campaign.

My Secret Weapon For PPC Building

Ok, so imagine how long it would take for me to manually go through 30,000 categories and repeat the above steps. I’m sure we can both imagine how mind numbingly awesome that would be. Thankfully I didn’t have to. “I have a softwares that does all that.”

One of my long loved secret weapons for building PPC campaigns is using a tool called SpeedPPC (yes, I’ve worked out a special discount for you all – and yes, it’s my affiliate link).

Basically, I took all the information above, plugged it into the software, and it generated a complete campaign file for me that I simply uploaded to Google desktop tool, made some changes and poof – done.

How It Works – How I Did It

Ok, you probably don’t believe me, so let me explain it in more detail. The way the software works is through a method called Seed/Expansion keyword list building.

You have your list of seeds (in my case all my product categories), and your list of expansion keywords (keywords that would be added onto the seed to make a complete keyword).

The software automatically combined the two, sorted the list into adgroups by seed, made ads based off the ones I researched using the seed (autoreplaced so they seed was in the ad copy), and then exported it to a Google desktop compatible CSV.

Sample Pictures Of The Process:

Amazing, I know.

Seriously, I have not made a PPC campaign without this tool since like 2008. Highly recommended if you’re looking to build PPC campaigns.

WHY it works…

The reason WHY this tool works so great is because I no longer am stuck bidding on keywords like “generic keyword”. You know, the expensive, almost no profit, keywords that are extremely broad but take no work to setup.

This tool made me thousands of adgroups, perfectly grouped and resulted in numerous 10/10 quality scores and tons of traffic without the price of the good ol’ “generic keyword”. Those quality scores are what allowed me to reduce bids, get more traffic, and ultimately make a profit.

Rockin’ the 10′s

After the PPC campaign was rocking the 10′s (10/10 Quality score), it really came down to making the buyer process convenient and exuding signs that say, “TRUST ME!”.

Combine a well built, well targeted PPC campaign with these and you’ll probably find yourself very close to having a winning campaign.

Full Disclosure and Being Honest

Building the PPC campaign was extremely efficient and easy. Building the entire website, finding the wholesale distributor, coming up with a sales process, optimizing the sales process, finding the right pricing, etc, etc, etc was not easy.

While running an ecommerce store can be extremely profitable, it is by no means affiliate marketing. It’s a real business that requires a lot of attention and work. Regardless of all of that, I love running an ecommerce site. Fun stuff!

I’ll continue to post updated (good and bad) about my ecommerce progress as I continue working away on this new venture!

Go check out SpeedPPC Now!

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2011.

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Epic. Sounds like money to me. Just for full disclosure, I have not yet tried their CPC network… but I plan on it.

Stop Fighting Your Traffic Source

*nerd fight*

The reason I am so excited for this is because an AFFILIATE NETWORK is obviously going to understand affiliates and design their system to work for their affiliates as best as they can. No longer are going to have to fight with them like you might have to with other places (cough Google cough).

Will Integraclick live up to their “Integrity” name?

I think the biggest concern affiliates are going to have is clickbooth stealing their campaigns. Just think. You’re an affiliate manager looking to make some bucks. You go to your “super duper” affiliate and say… “Hey, here is the campaign… our offer at a good payout… ready, set, go.”

One of the things I really appreciated about meeting with Eric is that he was telling me the name Integraclick (Clickbooth’s parent company) comes from the word integrity. Apparently they base their business model on integrity because in the end… that’s the best way to do business. (Someone correct me if I am wrong)

I really appreciated that. In this industry, things can be very shady… so I highly respect companies that at least say they have integrity.

The only way you can ever find out if it’s true is by time. If anything like that does happen, contact me. For now though, I am excited to see this new network launch. As always, those who get in early have a huge opportunity to make a ton of money.

Press Release

Check out the official press release here.

Check out Clickbooth CPC now!

[Image source]
[Image Source]
[FYI, this was not a paid post]

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

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Like Travis mentioned, I believe Google instant is less about saving users time and more about making more money for Google. Initially, I read reports about Google wanting the users to make more search queries and figured that their main revenue increase would come from more search queries.

As I began to research, I realized that Google did put up some parameters so that advertisers don’t get completely owned from the extra searches that people will inevitably be doing. Hmm…

And the more I researched Google instant, the less I thought that this is HOW they would be using it to make more money. Instead, they would use Google instant in a different way.

First, How does this affect AdWords? The ads are streaming too—what counts as an impression?

According to a post I found: [From this post]

According to AdWords Help, an impression will be counted when:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

Ok great… like I was saying, this might cause Adwords to make some more cash, but I don’t think it’s the main way.

The main way I think Adwords will be making more money from Google instant is the suggestive search – instantly showing.

During my research, I tried typing “flowers” into google. Check out the results.

You’ll notice that I typed “flow” not flowers and yet instantly Google pulled up results for flowers. Now, we all know that “flow” is an exact match of a english word so you would expect flow to be the search that Google pulled instantly. Aha… now we are getting somewhere.

Think about the amount of revenue the keyword flowers generates for Google. Now think about the revenue that the keyword flow generates for Google. I bet the difference would blow our minds. And really… HOW can Google monetize the keyword flow well? Not too many advertisers I’d bet.

This got me thinking about how Google can really use Google instant to instantly pull up the highest paying search terms before you even type them.

I continued trying this more and more and short words that were exact matches for english words produced results, nearly every time, for a higher paying keyword.

Bravo Google. I’m looking forward to seeing the revenue difference in the reports!

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

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There is a good chance that you have heard about the changes to Google search, dubbed “Instant” for the way you see your search results. If you have had the chance to try out this new interface it feels pretty slick and carries with it a few key changes for the outcome of your next marketing and promotional decisions.

#1: Is it about speed, or about pageviews?

Google has an obsession with speedy services. In fact, previous employees have relayed the unofficial chant of the insiders of “make it fast” instead of “make it look good”, even going so far as to use timers when evaluating new project ideas. But what is an even bigger driving force lately for Google than speed? Revenue.

Sure, if the average user spent 9 seconds constructing their search query and 15 seconds picking which link best fits their needs then Google Instant really does make your searching experience quicker. But how would getting you in and out of Google in less time mean they are able to drive more revenue?

Results, by the character
Now, instead of only showing you a single set of results for a complete search query you will now see results immediately for each additional letter you add to your string. This also means that with each new letter, a new set of ads show up. Brilliant.

These additional pageviews for ads not only mean more opportunity for users to click on them, which makes Google money, but also that a spike in search volume should help cool off bid prices a bit.

#2: Long-tail searches are worth even more than before

Most people understand that long tail keyword searches are actually worth more than generic keyword searches because the user is more qualified. However, long tail has been tough to crack for many because of the low search volume, which made finding a decent ROI difficult. That is changing, starting NOW.

Example…

Generic Search:
Used cars

Long tail search:
Used 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited

A user who searches for the long tail term is much more likely to be in a “heated” buying mode as opposed to someone who just searches for “used cars” may be in an information stage looking for such things as blue book values, replacement parts or many other non buying activities in addition to qualified buyers.

Since Google will now start showing results on the fly, users are much more likely to refine their search in real time for what they are actually looking for. That is, we can expect not only more results to show up (duh!), but we can expect users to actually shift their search behavior to more specific search terms that are more qualified. Booyah!

How do you see Google Instant changing the game for marketers? Leave a comment below or continue the discussion with me on Twitter @TravisKetchum.

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

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I love SpeedPPC and talked Jay into giving my readers one last shot at getting Speed PPC for the sale price.

Combine this software + the knowledge from this post = Profit.

Go check it out now.

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

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“Google doesn’t like affiliate marketers”

I’m sure you’ve heard that sentence in some shape or form this past year.

Affiliates are whining that they’ve been slapped or completely banned from advertising on Google adwords.

Many have decided to abandon the adwords field in search for less hostile environments, on the endless quest for green pastures (and by green I mean “dollar-bill” green).

The promise land? Facebook, some say (wink @ Mr Volk)… Or Yahoo, or Plenty Of Fish, or PPV… or let’s just do SEO.

The truth is Google Adwords isn’t going anywhere.

Adwords is still the best place to instantly get quality visitors to almost any website. You can do it fast, you can do it cheaply if you know how and you can do it without getting slapped or banned.

And they have nothing against affiliates, they just have something against you!

Yes, you:

If you promote scams…
If you’re dishonest or shady in any way with your visitors…
If you’re not adding any value to the world wide web and its users…

It’s all about quality and value. Not in your eyes, but in the eyes of searchers and in the eyes of Google.

Here are 3 ways to effectively promote an affiliate website with Google in 2010.

1) Build A Double Opt-In List

The idea is that people won’t see your affiliate offers until they’re on your list. Lead generation is one of the best thing you can ever do to build a stable business just like John Chow does and Google is perfectly fine with it. As long as you provide value and you’re transparent about what you do with people’s information.

Set up a lead generation campaign, send visitors to landing page with a form that collects emails. After a visitor fills the form, send them to a page that asks them to confirm their subscription and nothing else.

Once they’re on your list, start building a relationship with an auto-responder and send them to your great (I mean AWESOME) affiliate offers that add value to their lives!

Do not send them to affiliate offers early in the auto-responder or might be labeled a “thin affiliate”, deliver massive value instead then when you’ve established trust with
a subscriber after the 3rd, 4th or 5th email, tell them about one affiliate offer then another.

Don’t just promote one offer or just one type of offer, find a curriculum of offers
that complement each other in the same niche.

For example if you’re in the scrapbooking niche, start with an ebook that teaches scrapbooking, then promote a CPA offer on a cutting machine, then promote a special scrapbooking desk that helps in keeping things tidy, then promote a special software that allows people to use their computer for designing scrapbooking shapes… you get the idea!

There are plenty of lateral offers you can promote in just one niche, and that is only possible when you have a list. Be the angel that guides your subscribers to discovering new ways of enjoying life a little more in a particular area they’re passionate about.

2) Become a direct reseller of the product

This is done by sending visitors from your website directly to the order form without passing by the product owner’s website. This way you’re no longer seen as an intermediate but as a direct reseller.

Create your own sales funnel and make sure you set things up with a twist. Do not copy the product owner’s website, find an original way to sell the product.

Make sure you capture people’s emails just before sending them to the order page so that you can build a list and promote other offers to them. This is important.

This goes without saying but you’ll need the product owner’s approval before you do this (or you might get into legal trouble with him or her). Most will approve.

3) Direct link to offers that aren’t heavily promoted

Direct link? Yes, direct link. There is an enormous amount of affiliate products to promote, but for some reason affiliates tend to promote the same ones… and no one wins (or at least just a few of them).

A large proportion of vendors don’t have a clue about online marketing so they never touch adwords. And a larger proportion simply focuses on organic rankings.

Find good products that aren’t heavily promoted on Adwords and create direct linking campaigns.

When I say direct linking, I don’t mean masked redirects, I don’t mean iframes… those will get you in trouble. I mean your affiliate link in the destination url and the parent company domain name as the display url. Google has nothing against that.

One important thing for direct linking: choose your offer extremely carefully!

Your name is linked to everything you do in adwords and you don’t want to be associated with a shady business.

So…

a. No scams! Choose big brand name companies if you can. I’m talking about promoting Jenny Craig instead of Acai Berry 3000.

b. Find offers that aren’t heavily promoted in the area of your choice. If a website is promoted by too many different people it gets attention from Google and other advertisers’ mistakes may stain your own reputation. The world is big and networks have international offers to be promoted outside the US.

The draw-back of direct linking is that you might have a low impression share (unless your ads are very high quality). Impression Share is the percentage of times your ad is shown vs the number of time it could be shown.

Google has an enormous inventory of available traffic and it’s hard to grasp its magnitude. 90% of it come from the content network (now called display network). Start with the content network to test an offers, see if you can get some traffic and conversions. Target demographics accordingly and learn how to create magnetic ads.

If your offer is from a great legitimate business, if you get high click-through-rates, Google will love you, decrease your costs and increase your exposure and help you make money.

This should be enough information for the whiners to stop whining and start making some money.

And if you’ve been banned, well… sorry! there’s nothing I can do for you. Unless you buy me a beer then I can show you exactly how to get back in.

Enough said. I have some money to make, you should too…

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

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You’re probably thinking that this is just another pitch but this is one software I would pitch all day long even if it had no affiliate program or sale going on.

What is SpeedPPC?

SpeedPPC is software that helps you to literally dominate PPC campaigns by automating much of the process for you. Let’s say you want to make a campaign for a dating site you own as an example. There are about 1 bajillion (yes, that’s a number…) keywords you could use.

Many sloppy campaign makers would select every keyword they could, throw it into a campaign, and pray for profit. The problem is: there is no structure to their campaign, the ads are not as targeted as they could be, you’ll inevitably miss keywords, and all-in-all it should result in not-that-great results.

Instead what this program does is allow you to automatically structure your keywords, ads, and adgroups into super tight small groups on the fly.

Back to the dating site example: Let’s say you’re going to make a GEO targeted campaign. You get a database of every city (over 50k population I think) with SpeedPPC’s software so all you have to do is enter the base terms like: Dating, singles, date, online dating, etc, etc.

What SpeedPPC does is create adgroups like “San Francisco” where you have keywords: San Francisco dating, San Francisco singles, San Francisco date, etc. It also creates customized ads: “San Fransisco Dating” “Find Your Date In San Francisco…” exactly how you want it.

As you can imagine… this software is extremely powerful. It goes beyond just GEO targeting. You can literally do any two lists. Like I said… I used it for just about every PPC campaign I made. (You know… the PPC campaigns that have brought in several million dollars…)

Sale:

The software normally cost’s $500, which is quite pricey but WELL worth it.

If you’re serious about becoming a PPC marketer for either your own business or as an affiliate, you will easily make this money back because of what it brings to the table.

Right now, SpeedPPC is having a sale to celebrate their 3rd birthday where you can get the software plus a WHOLE LOT of bonuses that add up to over $943 dollars in extra value. This sale only is lasting for the next 24 hours-ish so don’t be lazy and miss out!

The price for this Birthday sale:
Just $347

Check out this video below for more information:

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

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My partners and I have been in the local internet marketing space for the past 12 months or so. We initially jumped into it after reading a number of different blogs, and thought we could replicate a similar model in our area of Los Angeles.

There are a number of different ways to set up an agreement with a local business to handle their marketing and there are better people than myself in how to explain the different relationships that can be built. Here is a great article from Adhustler. Take a few minutes and read. I will wait. Twiddling my thumbs.
Ok, you are back.

For the first few campaigns that we ran for local businesses, we went with the pure performance or affiliate based marketing. We charged to build a website upfront. Then we covered the upfront costs of the marketing and advertising, and our clients paid us a commission on what leads they converted as customers. In our heads, and in my theories on business in general, this was a win-win. The more customers we drive to the business, the more money we make and they make. In addition, as there is little to no risk on the part of the business, the upfront sale was much easier and made getting clients pretty simple and straightforward. Sounds gravy, right?

From our experiences, the downside of this model in the local space is three-fold:

1. There is plenty of trust that you must have in the business, as you can’t track every conversion 100% of the time. You need to be able to rely on the business to make sure they are counting every conversion. I don’t believe we had a problem with this, but do want to make people aware.
2. If you are covering the marketing costs, the business has no pure downside to not converting the lead. If they do not call back the lead or convert it, no “skin off their bones” as they are back at square 1. They haven’t taken the “hit” on the marketing and seen the money leave their pocket. Very key with some local businesses.
3. This is the most important thing I can tell you, “local businesses suck at sales.” Let me say that again “local businesses suck at sales.” If you are reading this post or others on this topic in the blogosphere, you will see that line over and over and over.

These businesses maybe great at being a chiropractor, a dentist or a landscaper, but they do not structure sales correctly in their office. Now, not all 100% of these local businesses are that bad at sales and there are the exceptions. If you want to go with an affiliate based model, make sure the business is one of these exceptions. Go to their office, meet their sales team, get a run-through of their sales process, show them graphs, data or whatever that emphasizes the importance of answering the phone right away and/or contacting customers back quickly and efficiently. If you have a bad feeling about the sales of the office or their integrity (remember it can be difficult to track conversions), walk away. Scratch that, run away.

Here is a snapshot of one campaign that was about average for our clients. Unfortunately, I can’t give you exact specifics, but here you go for the first two months of the campaign. This was a chiropractor in and we primarily focused our marketing on Google and Facebook:

Ad Spend: $2435
Leads (Phone and Email): 36 email and 15 phone
Revenue for the Chiropractor: $10,300+

From our experiences, the affiliate based model didn’t work for us. We were wasting money and spinning our wheels, although we felt we were delivering enough leads to them. I still do believe it can work with the right group, and there is still tremendous upside with going this route. That being said, we have changed our model (for the most part) to a management fee structure and/or per lead structure. If the right group came to us, we would consider structuring it differently, but for majority of our new clients we have gone this route.

With this current setup, it is less risky, but there is not as big of upside. In order to be the “big baller” with this type of model, it needs to be scalable. Our thoughts are to do just that by specializing in one specific niche and expanding that throughout the country. We have had success with chiropractors, and if it works in Pasadena with a local chiropractor, then it works in Des Moines, Little Rock, Minneapolis, etc. We have launched a company called ChiroFresh where we are doing just that.

The bottom line, local internet marketing is a ton of work. In any marketing and advertising, the data is the key to the puzzle and gathering enough data is tough with local clients—there just isn’t enough or it takes awhile to gather enough. With a national affiliate campaign, you can gather enough data to make changes in a couple of days, but that isn’t the case on the local level. If you are lazy, don’t jump into it. That being said, if you are lazy you probably shouldn’t jump into any affiliate style marketing either.

If you do want to jump in, you should concentrate in verticals that are high paying industries and products, along with good promotional offers that you can market well. I would recommend not building websites for local companies as you will want to bash your head in. They will want to make a 1000 different changes, all of which will not help your marketing campaigns for them. There is money to be made in local internet marketing, but it is not clearly defined. Be prepared for plenty of trial and error and prepare to lose some capital upfront, but I do think this is a good place to be in the long-run, and mobile advertising will be bigger than ever here.

Hopefully you have find this helpful and good luck!

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