Jaime Irvine runs Neptune Local, a local online advertising company based in Santa Monica. Recently, he and his team launched Chirofresh.com which specifically targets marketing for Chiropractors nationwide.

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!

It's funny... Google Adwords is all about providing a good user experience. You need a good "quality score" and other factors so that you will be allowed to advertise on their system.

Because of this, google has been terminating affiliate account after affiliate account. They've made it quite clear they don't really want affiliates running on Adwords.

That's why this morning when I Google searched "affiliate marketing," I had to chuckle to myself when I saw an Adwords ad advertising Adwords.

To me this seems like a bad user experience and they should slap themselves for advertising to people they don't want as advertisers.

I always encourage people who are starting out with trying to make money online to check out PPC Coach. In my review from earlier this year I laid out why I think this is such a great program and now they're offering 2 weeks for just a buck.

There's no excuse not to check it out at this price. If you were hesitant before about paying $50 a month, now you can check things out beforehand to get a real sense of what the product is like. The best part is that $1 doesn't get you limited access, but really allows you to access everything that a full member can!

What are you waiting for? Go start your $1 PPC Coach trial now!

I wanted to take every Friday for the next couple months or more and interview an affiliate, network owner, manager, etc. Just someone involved in the internet marketing industry.

I think that this will be a great way to learn and hear multiple points of view about the internet marketing industry as a whole.

I'm really excited to get this going and have an interviewed lined up already which I will be posting tomorrow.

If you are an affiliate, network owner, or have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for some time, please feel free to contact me so I can interview you.

Thanks!

I've been thinking for a while that there is no really good place for someone to find a coder, designer, etc specifically for Affiliate and internet marketing.

I then began to think of putting up a Job board on my website just for that purpose. After thinking about it for a little bit longer, I decided to expand that to all affiliate marketing related jobs.

So without further ado, if you would like to look for or post (it's free) a job related to affiliate marketing, This is your place!

The current categories are:

• Advertiser Manager Jobs
• Affiliate Manage Jobsr
• Graphic Designer Jobs
• Internal Marketer Jobs
• Management Jobs
• Media Buyer Jobs
• Programmer Jobs
• Sales Jobs

http://Jobs.JonathanVolk.com

Let me know what you think and feel free to post!

Thanks!

Have you ever spent time translating your campaigns to advertise to customers in multiple languages or countries? Google Translator Toolkit just recently added AdWords campaign support to help make translating quick and easy.

To easily translate your keywords and ad text, you just upload an AdWords Editor Archive .aea file into Translator Toolkit. You can then share your translations with your multilingual optimizers or professional translators, who can optimize and localize your campaign through Translator Toolkit’s campaign editor. Then just download your campaign and upload back into AdWords Editor.

How cool is that?

I know the applications for this are many, so, enjoy.

Ok - Short little post for today, but don't let that fool you. It's a great little gem.

When I try to expand my Google Adwords Content network campaigns here is a little trick to help you find new adgroup ideas:

1. Look through your referring URLs. You can do this in the adwords report tab and click on performance report.
2. With those URL's try to find some competition. Someone as close to your advertising model as possible.
3. Google search: "www.sitename.com"
4. Look through CACHED results as well as current results to see where their ad comes up.
5. Based off Ad copy, try to come up with new adgroup ideas.
6. Profit.

I've used this technique many times before and it has always landed me some sweet little increases in revenue.

Enjoy.

So I was recently reading on Chad's CDFNetworks Blog (which I highly recommend), and he mentioned something I had never tried before with a PPC Campaign.

In the post, 2 dead simple way to optimize a google adwords campaign, he mentions using the Google Adwords conversion optimizer.

Honestly, I had never used the conversion optimizer and as such was surprised to hear that it actually could provide something of value. Most of the time automated optimization tools don't provide the value you would expect.

I have a small Adwords campaign that's been running for a while. It was optimized somewhat and generated around $30 to $40 bucks profit each day. Obviously, not the center of my focus, but an extra $1000 bucks a month is always nice.

So I decided to try and turn the adwords conversion optimizer for this campaign. When I activated it, I went right with the recommended CPA goal and let it work it's magic.

I then checked my stats the next day. $50 bucks profit! Above average results already... Impressive for just one day, but I wanted to see how far I could take this campaign. It became my mission to make this $30 dollar per day campaign a $100 per day campaign simply by using this optimizer. I was not sure if I could make it, but I love trying.

I slowly began to lower the CPA goal and guess what!? Two days ago, I hit around $110 bucks profit! Epic, right?!

Yesterday the campaign hit $70 profit, and today it looks to be on track to do the same.

Even if nothing else, this optimizer has increased my profit on a "nothing" campaign with essentially no work.

Worth checking out for sure! Now, to try it on a larger scale campaign!

Who's the guest?

This post comes from Ryan Gray of SuperAffiliateTwins.com. Ryan Gray is an affiliate marketer that along with his two business partners (John Kirkpatrick and identical twin Brother Richard Gray) make upwards of $600,000+ a month using various marketing techniques. You can read more about pay-per-click affiliate marketing and how to make money online at their blog located at SuperAffiliateTwins.com. They will also be holding a real-life case study soon using this very manual.

PPC Affiliate Marketing 101

If you’ve read Jonathan’s blog for any amount of time you know he makes more money in a month than the average American makes all year. This is all thanks to being involved in Affiliate Marketing. At every conference I attend, I’m asked at least once how it’s possible to begin promoting CPA offers via pay-per-click platforms. This prompted me to write this simple beginner’s guide to pay-per-click marketing to give everyone out there a new look on how to promote CPA offers.

Many people feel that with Google becoming stricter with their quality score that it is becoming near impossible to promote CPA offers utilizing their technology. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While things are not near as simple as they were six years ago (or even a year ago for that matter), pay-per-click Affiliate Marketing is still a very lucrative market and there is a lot of money to be made.

Step 1: Set a Monthly Budget
Before you sign up for an affiliate network, create a landing page and type every keyword you can think of into Google’s Adwords, you need to determine a monthly budget. In this industry you have to be willing to invest money to learn before you can get started. It is very normal for your campaign to start out losing money. You have to find out which keywords are converting and which ones aren’t to become profitable. I recommend starting with $5,000 a month. Many of you may see this number and think it’s ridiculous. Well you have to look at it this way…

The average student that obtains a MBA (Masters in Business Administration) makes $60,000 right out of college. To obtain the MBA degree they invest upwards of $15,000 - $50,000. Compare this to Affiliate Marketing. I’m telling you to invest $5,000. It’s possible you can lose the entire $5,000 but it’s also possible that you could begin making thousands of dollars every month. You have to be willing to take risks in any business. Before you begin, put away some money you are willing to invest. Do not spend money you do not have or get yourself in credit card debt.

Step 2: Pick an Offer to Promote
After you sign up for an affiliate network, pick an offer to promote. Jonathan has recommended some excellent ones in the past (e.g. Azoogle Ads). I recently conducted a Webinar with Will of PPC-Coach. One of the main questions people kept asking is “what offer should I start out promoting”. People go on to say that their Affiliate Managers tell them that the “Electronic Cigarette or Acai/Colon” are some of the top offers on the network. I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but if you’re trying to start your Affiliate Marketing business with the top offers of any Affiliate Network, your failure rate is going to grow exponentially. The reason these offers are the most popular is because the most experienced Affiliate Marketers are running them. These guys are people like Jonathan and me who are willing to invest $10,000+ to see if they can’t become profitable.

Experienced Affiliate Marketers like to go after offers with high payouts with aggressive landing pages. So for a beginner, you need to stay away from these offers. Let’s look at this way. Say you have $200 of your $5,000 budget and you want to test on a campaign. The average Acai/Colon payout is $35. If you spend $200 it’s possible you won’t have a single conversion. The higher the offers payout, the more money you’re going to have to invest to see if the campaign is profitable. To begin, start with offers with low-payouts (less than $10). This way, you can spend $100, and if you don’t see at least a few conversions you know the offer is not going to work for this particular campaign. By choosing offers with a lower payout, you’re going to lower your failure rate.

Step 3: Build a Quality Website
Just 2 years ago, you were able to create a one-page website with multiple ringtone carriers on it, and send the visitor straight to the offer. Pay-Per-Click platforms such as Google’s Adwords began to attack these sites by automatically giving them a terrible Quality Score. Google wants to enhance their user’s experience. They don’t want a ton of junk ads all over their website. They want advertisements that are going to add value to their platform. Therefore you need to take the time to build a quality website. This is going to take longer than a few hours. By quality you need to make sure your site has the following:

* Several pages of unique content
- Do not copy someone else’s website and expect to make thousands of dollars. Take your time to create a full interactive website that visitors actually want to visit. This is where a lot of new guys mess up. They simply want to copy someone else’s idea, throw $100 at traffic and expected to begin making instant millions. Folks, it simply doesn’t work like this. If it was this easy everyone in the world would be working from their home promoting products on Adwords. Find a lower paying offer that you’re interested in, sink your teeth into it and become passionate about creating a quality website.

* SEO the Website
- Once you have several pages of unique content you need to make sure your website is Search Engine Optimized. While this could be a whole separate blog post, if you don’t know how to make your website Search Engine friendly, you need to do some research on that before proceeding with Pay-Per-Click Affiliate Marketing.

* Have a professional looking design
- You don’t have to go out and pay a designer hundreds of dollars to achieve this. Search the Internet for some free web templates. Find one that you can modify to be unique and build from there. Remember Google wants to add to their user’s experience.

Step 4: Keyword Research
This is another step where a lot of newbies fail. They think if they purchase a subscription to some random keyword generating software that they’ve found “the holy grail” of Affiliate Marketing. In this industry, it’s all about gaining the competitive advantage on your competition. Purchasing software that everyone else can purchase offers no competitive advantage. Let me give you some quick and effective keyword generating tips.

Say you found an offer and decided to promote screensavers. This is going to be our “root” keyword:

Root Keyword: screensavers

Now, let’s think of some “branch” keywords to add to the “root” keyword.

Branch Keywords:
download
install
buy
create

After we have some branch keywords, let’s get some “specific branch keywords”. This is where a lot of “winning” keywords can be found.

Specific Branch Keywords:
holiday
Halloween
Christmas
Father’s day
Mother’s day
Cartoon
Television

Once we have all these together, we begin to mix them and sort them into Ad groups. A sample Ad group could look like this:

Ad Group Name: download screensavers

Keywords:
download holiday screensavers
download Christmas screensavers
download Father’s day screensavers
download Mother’s day screensavers
download Cartoon screensavers
download Television screensavers

You see where I’m going with this? You’re using your brain as your keyword generator, which is obviously unique to you. Continue to bang out ad groups and keywords until you feel comfortable. I can’t give you an exact number… Also since you’re a beginner only bid on EXACT matches. If you mess around with BROAD/PHRASE an expert pay-per-click marketer is going to beat you out.

Step 5: Write Your Creatives
When beginning a campaign I like to test with about 4 creatives per ad group. This way you have a lot of data to work with as you’re going to want to achieve the highest CTR (click through ratio) as possible. The more people that click your ad, the cheaper your clicks are going to become, which will ultimately make or break your campaign. When writing your keywords remember to include the exact keyword in the headlines. For our sample “download screensavers” ad group we could include the following creative:

Headline: Download Holiday Screensavers
Ad Body: Download thousands of Holiday Screensavers for free at XYZ.com! The web’s best selection of Holiday Screensavers.
Display URL: HolidayScreensavers.XYZ.com

Notice how I tried to sprinkle Download, Holiday and Screensavers into the ad copy. Most all pay-per-click platforms are looking for your ad copy to be relevant to your keyword and ad group.

Please note: I’m just using Screensavers as an example. You have to be sure and check the pay-per-click platform’s guidelines/limits to see how much text you can use.

Step 6: Prepare to Launch
Once you have completed all of the above steps you want to be prepared to launch your campaign. Set your bids at a level that you feel will provide you with enough traffic. I actually like to ask my Affiliate Manager what the average EPC (effective per click) of the offer is and bid somewhere in the middle. If the EPC of an offer is $0.50, start your bids at $0.25. You can adjust up or down once you determine where your ad is and how your CTR is performing.

If your budget is $5,000 a month be sure to set your daily spend limit at $161.29 a day. Be sure to check your credit/debit card that it can handle this charge daily. If your credit card is declined, kiss this Google account goodbye (I’m speaking on experience). Make sure the funds you have saved up are available and easy to access.

Step 7: Launch
Turn on your campaign, make sure everything is working and get off your computer. If you refresh your stats every second you’re going to get very frustrated. Get offline for a full 24 hours. Let your campaign run.

Step 8: Optimize
After 24 hours is up, log on and see what’s going on:

If you have 0 conversions…
Investigate why. Is your quality score good? Is your site relevant to the keywords you created? Don’t give up; there is a reason why you don’t have any conversions.

If you have conversions but are losing money…
Find out what keywords are converting and which one’s aren’t. Throw out the big spenders that aren’t converting.

If you have conversions and are making money…
Look at the keywords that are converting. What can you do to get more out of them?

After you make your optimizations wait another 24 hours before optimizing again. Remember small changes always work best. Don’t do anything drastic.

Once you get your campaign profitable you want to optimize every 24-48 hours. Let things run and make small changes. Don’t give up, remember your budget. Follow my advice, work hard and you will make money! People are making money; the only thing holding you back is yourself. Don’t read a forum or expect to take some magic pill. There is NO substitute for hard work!

You know, there are just so many times when Jacob and I are working on marketing campaigns when we wish there was an automated tool to help us do this or that.

Thankfully, Jacob and I have been able to find a tool or make one that does what we need. Here a couple of the top tools we use. Some are free and some are not but regardless of price, these tools will save you tons of time. Time... you know, that one resource you can't buy more of (oh wait, resveratrol?)...

• SpeedPPC - This is one tool Jacob and I used a lot. In fact, MOST of the campaigns we have made this year have been built using this. It just saves so much time and take your campaign quality scores to another level.
• Workspace Macro Pro - This is a great tool where you can create macros and have them repeated over and over automatically. For this, you essentially record yourself doing a set of actions and can play it back whenever. Can save a ton of time for repetitive tasks.
• Adwords Editor - If you're not using Adwords editor to edit your campaigns, you can be wasting a lot of time. This and other desktop tools are really useful at increasing efficiency.
• Xobni - Xobni is a tool I use every single day of the week, 365 days a year. It's an outlook plugin that I seriously can't live without. It indexes emails for extremely quick searching, links email to linked in profiles, facebook, etc. This way you can see a face with each email if they have a profile. It shows the persons telephone number if they have ever sent it to you via email, etc. If you have a lot of emails, this is a great tool to have.
• iPhone... Nuff said.

Really, there are probably hundreds of tools out there that could probably replicate or do something similar to the tools above. Those are just the ones I have found to work best for me.

In a small business environment, it's easy for us to do the long repetitive tasks over and over and feel good about us having worked for 8 hours straight on getting that campaign up. If there is a way to automate it and it costs $500 bucks, we shy away from it because we want to save money. In all honesty, you can make a lot more by being more efficient and working on multiple things.

There are also some tools I did not mention simply due to their nature. I put them in my "do not share" folder. You can find them around if you search for a need you have when creating campaigns.

There is also Elance. Elance is a great place to find programmers who are willing to code projects for you cheaply and efficiently. If you find a tool that might help you out, think about having it created.

After all, we only have so much time!