A little while ago I wrote about SpeedPPC's birthday sale.

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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This is a guest post. Chris Thunder is a Google Adwords Professional helping business owners thrive using Adwords on TenCentClic.com and helping people like you reduce their adwords costs with the 10 Scores ebook available at TenScores.com. If you're interested in writing a guest post, please click here.

"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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If you've been following me for a while or have read my free affiliate marketing guide, you'll know that I am a HUGE fan of using SpeedPPC for my PPC marketing campaigns. In fact, just about every majorly successful PPC campaign has been largely in part due to SpeedPPC.

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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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!

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

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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.

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2009.

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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!

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2009.

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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 interview 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!

© JonathanVolk.com - A Blog about Making Money Online, 2009.

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