CPA Share

Hey Guys,
I’m not really busy the moment I arrived back into Santa Barbara and Havent had a chance to recap my recent travels…

I was in Las Vegas not attending the affiliate summit but I had some meetings and I really wanted to get a chance to meet my CX Digital Affiliate manager Debrani. I stayed at a ridiculous suite at the Venetian and had a great time. Although they gave me trouble when I was checking in (They wouldn’t accept my amex because I wasn’t 21, it took a few minutes to convince/talk to them) that was no where near the amount of trouble the Wynn gave me for my age. When I was walking with my friend Larby, and my CX Digital affiliate manager Debrani at the Wynn I was pretty thirsty so i walked up to a little cafe/bar and asked the bartender for a glass of water, He replied “Are You 21?” I replied “No” and he than told me “I can’t be in the casino alone etc.” He refused to give me water even after I told him I wasnt alone and was with Debrani who IS over 21 etc. They than carded Debrani for her to get me a glass of water, Vegas is pathetic in terms of age.
On Saturday Night i attended the Affiliate Dinner with Steve, One of the AffSpy guys. I went as “Paul Borque” (The Uberaffiliate) because he wasn’t in Vegas yet and I wasn’t cool enough to get invited etc. After that dinner me and my friend Larby hung out for a while and we just checked out vegas (As people under 21, it sucks).

Sunday was pretty sick since that was when I got to meet Debrani and when I got to go to the CX Digital Party At The Palms. I don’t know what I should blog about and what I Shouldn’t (I don’t want to get you guys in trouble) Lol BUT I will just sum it up in a few words: FUCKING AWESOME

I liked Vegas and had a pretty productive stay etc. Once I got back from Vegas I had two days to catch up on stuff and was than back on the road for SMX WEST.

I got into SMX west on Wednesday Night which was kind of weird since it was the first time I showed up for a conference right smack in the middle of it. It was pretty cool hanging out with a lot of Industry Leaders who I have met and chilled with at other conferences, I don’t see them to often . I also got to meet some people whom I have talked to in the past etc like Shoemoney and some people from various companies like Doubleclick etc. It was really funny when I was checking into the Hyatt Santa Clara (which is a piece of shit hotel by the way) I saw a few people from CX Digital walk by me which was totally ironic since I was 1. Wearing a CX shirt and 2. Had no clue that they were going to be at SMX.

While chilling in the bar of the hotel with a lot of people Neil Patel came up with this genius idea to actually go to Ihop for breakfast. After about 30 minutes of drunken laughs (I wasn’t drunk, sucks) we got up and hustled over to Ihop. A lot of fun shit went down but to sum it up I have to tell you guys what Jay (forgot his last name) did. This guy Jay was pretty hammered and ordered 12 eggs sunny side up. He ate them all with a whole bottle of Tobasco on top. He than had a bit of a run in with the cops lol but I left in my cab when the cops started being complete dicks.

Thursday Morning was kind of harsh waking up at like 9am since I ended up going to sleep at like 5 am and had to go speak. I was on the panel “Generation Google: A Talk With Todays Teens” and got to talk about how me, and other teens use search engines like google, yahoo, and msn. Although I wasn’t able to really talk about how I do Search Marketing/How I Promote To “Todays Teens” I enjoyed speaking on a panel and hope to do more . If you want to read more about my panel you can check out The Live Blog Of My Panel

Well I’m going to go do another blog post on how I’m going to elite retreat BUT,
Later
-Harrison

Hey Guys,
I got this E-mail today and it seemed like good news to me!

“Pricing Update:
Minimum Bids will no Longer be Fixed at $.10

Starting in the next several weeks, the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10.

This update is intended to align your minimum bids with the value and quality of your keywords. It also is designed to help improve the overall search user experience by rewarding advertisers for better quality with lower entry points into keyword markets.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as:

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them)
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

A keyword term becomes “active” — switched “on” in the system and eligible for display — when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. If your bid falls below your minimum, your keyword will not be displayed. You’ll be notified of such changes and will have some time to adjust your bid.

What You Should Do to Prepare
• Get to know your keywords and their value.
Since minimum bids can vary by keyword, it is important to know which keywords work best for your business. Remember, you can check and set your bids at the keyword level. Learn more.

• Improve ad quality to potentially receive lower minimum bids.
Your minimum bids generally take your quality into account. In some instances, higher quality means that you could have a lower minimum bid. Learn more.

• Learn about updates to the account interface.
Become familiar with new tools that can make managing your keywords simpler. Learn more.

For more information on this change, please read our FAQs. ”

A lot of people IM me asking about how to make money and talk about how clicks are too expensive. Although this may not discount clicks in competitive markets you be able to save some money on those long-tail keywords etc! get working guys, and don’t expect to get .03 clicks on the keyword “ringtones” , many are already trying lol (not me, I promise).

-Harrison

ey all,
I am starting to do more keyword stuff than I was the last 2-3months (I found cheap alternate traffic sources which got kind of whored out, I just stuck to it for a while though) and definitely learned my lesson. I hadn’t done keyword stuff for a while and was just trying to be lazy one night and set up a redirect on one of my domains and got to work creating a campaign. After about 4 hours of work a friend of mine instant messaged me, I started telling him how I was working on a campaign etc. After I told him that I had no landing page he virtually stopped dead in his tracks to tell me “Dude! Not Smart!!” This could’ve been my savior but I thought I knew my shit and proceeded. Like 2 hours and 30 minutes after my ads went live i logged on to see if anything had happened, I had like 10 leads with a revenue of like $65.00 or something. I was anticipating see how much I had spent to achieve the $65 in leads so I stayed on my PC for a good hour to see google update, I had spent $133.00 to do $65.00 in revenue :-\, I was glad i had caught it early since I had a 2,500.00/day testing budget set in place, shorty after that I decided I should tweak my ads, keywords, and the keywords on my little meta-refresh page to up the QS a little bit. After working 2 hours on this stupid campaign I uploaded everything into adwords editor expecting a better margin on the campaign.

I went to sleep and in the morning i woke up to see that I had spent $1750.00 to make $900.00 and my ads had all been shut off because of them being direct linking etc.

To prevent this from happening again I have decided that under no circumstances will I not use a landing page on any google campaign I do for now on. Hopefully I can just learn to suck it up and hit up my friend Keeb whenever I am getting a campaign going and get a pimp landing page made. I am also really researching the QS just for personal knowledge; whenever I see anything on it I try to read it and I am always browsing google FAQ etc to see if their is something I don’t know about the marvelous google quality score.

I hope you take my advice and just get a simple landing page to avoid 1. Getting a terrible QS 2. Probably getting your ads shut off and 3. Maybe lose some money

I’m out, its 1:15 am
-Harrison

Hey guys,
between 1099′s, my own campaigns, and random stuff I havent been able to blog and I’m pretty much just posting this to say that although I really want to get this blog going well; shit happens. Sorry.

This last week I came up with a new policy, I don’t want to direct link to a campaign ever again ever ever ever! I have been doing this for like a year+ now and have been able to get away with doing some landing pages and sometimes just cloaking etc…Well it’s done that failed I’m never ever ever ever direct linking again…sorry I just well, got “OWNED” hehe..

I’m Glad I Finally Decided No More Direct Linking,

I’ll be doing another post about all that tomorrow when it’s not 1:00 am ok guys and girls?

Later,
Harrison

Hey guys,
I have been e-mailed the question of ‘what to promote’ numerous times and I have had this unique idea for promoting Affiliate program affiliate programs through PPC but in a more honest opinion type of matter which I want to do and am probably an idiot for giving away, when you get rich just e-mail me and I’ll give you my paypal

I briefly thought about an idea similar to the one I’m giving to you guys like 6 months ago when I referred a lot of people to Millnic Media and made low $x,xxx off that 6% commission. I wanted to start promoting Millnic on the affiliate blogs by buying advertising but decided not to when I noticed they already were on the spots that I had hoped to approach, so I never did anything with until recently.

Just a few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me for a signup link to Incentaclick and I gave it to him happily. I than forgot about it until last week where i had earned over $2,000.00 from just one friend, I have now signed up one more person and am continuing to get more people signed up under me for as many networks as i can decide.

So This Is What You Can Do To Make Money
Make a landing page that has like 3-4 affiliate networks logos on the page with a rating you give them (Give an honest opinion, don’t rate the one that pays 5% out a 10/10 and the one that pays 2% a 3/10 the 2% one will probably make you more money). Write honest reviews for each of the networks, if you haven’t done much with that specific network just go look at their main website and see if you can figure out what to write from that. Once you do this collect a bunch of affiliate marketing relevant keywords; some that I would gather would be Affiliate Network Names (They can be the ones on your landing page or competing networks, both work), Big Blog names like shoemoney and johnchow etc, and last but not least use content network on some of those blogs (have not tested this but it is something I plan to test when I get to promoting networks through ppc)

Let me remind you as I don’t think I explained myself correctly. I have not promoted any affiliate networks affiliate programs through the methods I have suggested yet but I will be working on it when I am not swamped to the brim. I noticed that this is a niche with money to be made and I figured I’d blow it and let you guys make tons off of it instead.

Heres Where I Benefit From This, Here are MY affiliate links from a few networks you should sign up if you haven’t: Incentaclick – Ask For Debrani Copeac – Ask For Danielle Neverblueads – Ask For Victoria Azoogleads
RocketProfit Millnicmedia Pepperjam Network XY7 and HydraMedia

Tell me what you guys think of my idea,
-Harrison

A problem that many new search/affiliate marketers have is the way they test their campaigns. I hope this post helps you get a grasp of how I like to test out offers. My testing methods always change a little bit depending on the campaign and you will learn that as you become more experienced search marketer your methods of testing will change and adapt to the markets at that time.

When I decide I want to ‘test’ a campaign before blasting the campaign it usually means that I feel the campaign has room for tremendous growth but holds a slightly higher risk than other campaigns or is an offer that I feel will perform different than other offers of its kind (this can make my research trends data 100% worthless sometimes).

Basically this is a quick overview and step by step on how you can really test a campaign and not come to the conclusion that a campaigns a 100% failure if you lose money your first day, Don’t give up guys, Please!

1. Budget: I like to test my campaigns by spending like 10% of my goal spend. Although 10% sounds like a low number it can be a pretty nice number when your spending mad money on ppc . If your starting out small i recommend you either make your budget 50% of your goal or by putting your goal as the daily budget and lowering your bids in order to decrease volume or get some cheaper clicks. When I just started messing around with AdWords I had an experience where I started testing with my goal as my budget but made my bids about 30% lower than what they should be. To my surprise i spent my whole daily budget the next day and saw a decent consistent ROI after that, that was kind of a fluke and probably doesn’t happen all the time but you might find yourself on a luck streak and start making more than you could imagine on your FIRST STAGES of a campaign!

2. Ads – My friend Jeff says that I am a little over the top when it comes to writing multiple ad variations. I disagree with him because in this business to many ads shouldn’t really be a problem. The whole point of testing is to find out what works and what doesn’t, once you test a campaign you can delete the ads which you didn’t make any money on and keep using the ads which worked. When you start a campaign I suggest you write up like 3-4 different ads. I love to do 10-20 ads for a new campaign and than narrow down the ads that I’ll actually use when going full power on a campaign.

3. Quality Score – Generally it’s a good thing to get your quality score’s all to the “OK” and “GOOD” score before you start going full power on a campaign. Although sometimes I say fuck it and just bid higher; one issue that I get e-mailed about quite a bit is issues with the quality score therefore new affiliates should really take it seriously and be concerned with original content, relevancy, etc. As you learn how to Affiliate market you will adapt to the quality score and form your own little strategies on dealing with quality score.

4. Last But Not Least, When To Stop etc – Determining weather a campaign is a good one (+) or a (-) on your income sheets is pretty important when testing a campaign as its pretty much the whole purpose. Before you start testing be sure to come up with a goal on how many leads per day and how much profit to earn, regardless of if you hit your goal or not having a ‘goal’ set in stone can make it a lot easier to determine if a campaign is working for you. HINT: If you have a campaign and its making .01% profit it’s still profitable, why pause it? Some people think that affiliate marketing is only worth it if you make 2x your money when doing it on a little scale and i disagree because most people doing search engine marketing hope to make A LOT OF MONEY and not do it on a small scale for a long time, you’ll get their soon.. i promise

Since I just re-read this post and I think it’s missing something feel free to contact me via email @ GevirtzMedia@gmail.com and I’ll gladly answer any questions you have about scaling a campaign

Goodnight Guys (2 40 am)
-Harrison

Hey Guys,
This last few weeks I have been getting pretty frustrated with the different engines and how long it takes to create a campaign in google and than move it to Yahoo and MSN. This made me decide to start looking at Pay Per Click Software like Doubleclick and Pagusano to test out and maybe start using on a more common basis. As of now, I have only talked with Pagusano and am waiting for a call to see Doubleclicks system.

These are the three key things that I am looking for in whichever application I end up using.

1. Multiple Search Engines – As i discussed above, I feel that I have been wasting time doing the same campaign’s two-three more times just to obtain presence in all engines. With a PPC Software I would like to be able to create a campaign that will upload itself to all search engines in a matter of minutes (Therefore eliminating the hours i spend in Yahoo, MSN, and probably even google). My only concern with a set up like this is that the application doesn’t upload everything or doesn’t track 99.99% accurately (nothings perfect, sorry) therefore putting my ROI’s and stats in jeopardy; This probably shouldn’t be a concern of mine but I always asses my risk before I go in full fledge (In this case deciding if I should trust some software with my “livelihood” (I put it in quotes because I know some of you don’t think i even need a livelihood.)

2. Quick UI – I notice that Google Adwords, MSN AdCenter, and Yahoo/Overture All are ridiculously slow. I’ll press the submit button for a campaign and sit at my screen waiting for it to load and waste 5-10 minutes sometimes (It pisses me off). If I use a 3rd party application I want it to be really fast; Efficiency is one of my big goals this year and with a faster system I could skim off 10-15 minutes of work per campaign just because I wont sit and stare waiting for google to load!

3. Customer Support – With a ton of products that offer services like this they claim they offer “Awesome Customer Support” and they say things like “Just give us a call, were here to help!” Most of them are bullshitting you therefore it’s best to do your research before your softwares broken and need to call support! I’m going to be doing my research about the Customer Care that Doubleclick, Pagusano, or whoever I end up using offers.

Some other features which would be really great would be:
1. A mobile bases platform so I can check stats on the go or have stats texted to me.
2. A way to have multiple accounts at each ad-network in your on portal (Probably has it).
and 3. Ability to track your competitors placements, alexa charts, estimate spend etc. The goal of this tool would be to have an analyzing tool in your portal instead of having to open up Keyword Elite or something.

I’m excited to see which application I choose and how I end up doing when being able to use another companies infrastructure and tools for my own campaigns. When i start demoing these programs I’ll be sure to do some write-ups for you guys just in case any of you are looking for a management software to.

-Harrison

guys,
stealing peoples ads is just lame. i was DOUBLING my money on a campaign and today i barely broke even.

Be ethical,
-harrison

- i try to be

Hey readers,
as most of you know my little “Post” was selected and placed on shoemoney.com regarding why i think YSM is the best PPC engine out there. I would like to follow up on that post and go a little bit more in detail on the 3 top PPC networks for now and than maybe some smaller ones some other time . Lets start with probably the most nortorious network/company.

Google Adwords
Google adwords is a HUGE advertising network which represents the biggest search engine out there in addition to having 10s of thousands of sites with available inventory (To Purchase Space on). If properly bidding and strategizing you can get past the evil google Quality score but it still happens which has greatly affected me in the past. I do use google adwords a little bit but have struggled in the past due to the ridiculous competition. I do have some campaigns running and hope to increase my adwords use as i become a more experienced affiliate/search marketer.

Yahoo/Overture
This is the network which i stated was my favorite to shoemoney. It still is a great advertising network which i believe is best because keyword/bid competition is not as severly ridiculous like adwords. YSM’s new portal is pretty lame though, I am a little confused by the new process of creating a campaign in Panama and have had to contact support several times because of me being an idiot/and or me just getting lost. YSM does require you to prepay when not a ‘Premium Publisher’ which does suck but can quickly be resolved with only a few hundred dollars per month! I also have come to the conclusion that YSM also has the most available resources for advertisers to make the most of their campaigns. To say the least; I <3 YSM!

Microsoft’s Adcenter
Adcenter is a great new advertising network with very little competition and a great deal of small tools to use. Some problems with adcenter are the terrible volume and something very few people have noticed when using the {Keyword} tool. When using the {keyword} parameter in an advertisement they count the :blah as text therefore ads get denied. It’s very inconvenient and has not been addressed by adcenter yet. I have complained once before and i don’t think they have gotten to it yet . Adcenter’s volume does suck but I get .05 clicks in 3 clicks of a button.

Since im in class and the teacher wants us to turn our PC’s off i have to cut it short but i will be posting more about this. On another note i just bought a mac thanks to Millnicmedia I will take picture of my brand new Mac Book Pro when i get it

Lates,
Harrison

I have been thinking about this and I wanted to know if we were in agreement. I believe that this summer will be fu**ing huge! I feel that this industry is about to hit it’s peak. I’m not sure whats coming to the affiliate marketing industry but I think that whatever comes this summer is going to be a great explosion for the whole search engine marketing industry.

I was on the phone with Cameron Olthuis and we were talking about the next big boom in affiliate marketing. He said some things which enlightened me. There are so many industries which need to get into Aff marketing. In other words affiliate marketing is very limited to Ringtones, Blockbuster, E-mail submits, Finance and a few other niches which work well but people like me like to challenge the system and Want More! Affiliate Marketing needs to explore new horizons and small stores need to launch websites and affiliate programs so affiliate marketers can promote offers on a more local targeted scale vs. targeting a whole country or continent…

Thats My 2 cents, Lets see what happens this summer (Only like 12 school days till summer )
Bye – Harrison