By now you should have a general grasp of one or two ideas on how to pick out an offer to promote. It’s much easier to pick out an offer folks than it is to go searching for traffic, demographics, etc and then coming up with an offer so keep that in mind. With that said, let’s begin Day #3 and get into Site Analytics.

This is another skillset we hope to help you develop. This may seem slow at first and I can also say that it is terribly boring but it’s a requirement. So crucial is this skillset that without it, you are going to have a tough time coming out on the positive side in your campaigns.

The easiest way to get started with a media buy is target that from which you took from the offer’s landing page in the first place. What I mean here is that I explained that keywords should jump out at you right off the bat when viewing the landing page. From here we want to save these keywords because there are a ton of uses for them. Remember this is just one way to go find sites but this is also the least technical of them so we will cover this first.

For this exercise I am going to have to pick out an offer and walk you thru this step by step. You should know that this is merely an example.

I’ve gone thru the Convert2Media affiliate network and picked out the Super Green Tea Patch (354) Offer. Upon looking at the landing page I immediately have these keywords come to mind:

• Green Tea
• Speed Up Metabolism
• Burn Calories
• Burn Fat
• Stomach Fat
• Lose Weight
• Weight Loss Tea

Not ten or twelve but let’s keep it simple for this exercise. With these keywords there will be thousands of spinoffs generated from you or you favorite keyword tool. All of these keywords are associated with the offer and I am not creating a Search Campaign here. I am merely coming up with a keyword list that will help me find sites, blogs and/or forums online to advertise on.

There are many ways to do this but the first is simply to take one of the keywords such as “burn fat” and type it into Google. Now at this point you are going to be performing two tasks at once so it is VERY important that you keep this in your mind.

1. The first task is that you are going to look at the search results from Google and Yahoo and take note of every page and site listed on the 1st page. I dont personally nor as a consultant go past the first page although I will admit you probably could find gems their. I am merely targeting the pages/sites that benefit the most from the Search Engines on this given keyword.
2. Your second task is to of course take note of EVERY page/site that is displaying Adsense or some other form of advertising. Buying Media includes utilizing the Google Content Network (which we will talk about later) and it’s dead simple to setup with a Placement Targeted campaign.

That’s it really. Simple huh? Well, it’s NOT REALLY that simple. See, how many keywords do you think you could develop for a PPC Campaign? Hundreds most likely thousands right? Well, you would/will be performing the same two tasks for EACH keyword then. Now at this point I am going to tell you right now that with this little method, you have more work to do than you could possibly perform in a year with just one offer. See, this little method is like a sleeping giant. One that has barely been touched. I know for a fact that 95%+ affiliates are not doing this. How do I know? Because I have done for quite awhile now and it’s a never ending process. For you to truly stretch out onto a HUGE level you have to have help people. With that said, it’s ton of fun getting to that point and the commissions can be tremendous so let’s keep going.

Now you will better understand why I said to pick out 10-12 keywords. If you were to quickly fire up your keyword tool and generate hundreds of keywords you would simply be overwhelmed. So much to the point that when I’ve taught affiliates how to buy media, this step alone has caused them to call me in the middle of the night and say “this is just way too much for me to handle”. Stick with a potent dozen keyword lineup and scale accordingly. You dont even know if this is going to be a web campaign that is going to work so generating a lot of bullshit keywords before you even begin testing is a useless waste of time.

You must have a detailed record keeping system in place. For me I use Excel. I copy every page/site I find in the search engines and paste it into one line within Excel. I need this as my point of reference when I want to run the site analytics on it and potentially communicate with the webmaster. COPY THEM DOWN!

Side Note: This is a crucial tip although you may not come across this alot. Back in the day and still today, we have what we call arbitrage. Basically webmasters create sites and pages to run PPC campaigns on at cheaper margins from what it costs to advertise to what they are paid on the clicks from the ads showing on their sites. These are some of the best pages to advertise on if done right (which we will get to) or they can be pocket burners. I will teach you what to look for and how to target the right ones later on in the series. So you definitely want to check the Search Engine PPC results for any type of Adsense or other advertising they might be running on the pages/sites.

Part 1 Of Finding Sites Using Alexa

Alright we have covered how to generate keywords off the top of your head by looking at your offer. We have also learned to take this small list of keywords and put them into the two large search engines and creating a list of sites/pages that are located on the first page of the results. We have also made it a point to check out the PPC results as well.

Disclaimer: You should not be clicking on PPC Ads folks. No matter how much you hate competition, these are people and companies just trying to make money, the same as us. Always right click and open in another window or view them from a preview tool.

Moving Along…

That’s one easy way to get started finding placements for your creatives. Now let me give you another brutally easy method of finding placements. This comes from one of the most talked about resources on the net so I apologize if it is nothing new to you. Hopefully by explaining how I use this you will get a better understanding of just how valuable it is.

Alexa.com - With your list of keywords let’s pick one (burn fat). You should note that there are two methods I use on Alexa so follow closely as I explain each of them. The first one is simply plugging the keyword into the search box and generating results. Please disregard my amazing photo editing skills and only pay attention to the red marks. These outline important elements in helping develop your research skillsets.

#1 - This spot is only going to help fuel related keyword terms. It’s not that big of deal but if you are the type that has a hard time generating keywords off the top of your head, this is an excellent tool to help.

#2 - Ohh yea we are looking to buy media right? Well you can advertise on Alexa directly! One thing you should take note of is that I have NEVER done this nor am I recommending it. For starting affiliates, the price may scare you a bit so take note. With that being said, looking at how much people are paying for their Alexa ad rates, it is always a good idea to pay attention to the ads, the copy and urls. Yes, you want to look at every url just as you did in the search engines. There is gold laying around on every corner of the Internet and I can tell you right now that by developing this type of research skillset, you are going to be outworking most of the other affiliates out there. Pay attention to every small detail.

#3 - I am not quite sure how Alexa ranks their ads but generally the top ones are going to be above the Search Results much like the regular PPC search engines out there. Take notes of what is there.

#4 - The bread and butter of all this Alexa talk. Here we go right at the search results copying down each domain url. These are the sites/pages that you will be contacting later but first perform a set of site analytics which will reveal if they are worth contacting in the first place. It does not end with just generating results based on keywords either.

By hovering your mouse over the “site info for” link you will get a little popup box that gives some examples of “People who visit this page, also visit”. You should take note of whatever that says and check them out. This only adds to your list of resources that we will be looking at later. By actually clicking on that link you are taken to the actual info page on that site. This page is CRUCIAL.

Here you are going to gather all sorts of information on this page which you should be taking note of. Personally I save this all in Excel along with the domain. On the left hand side of Alexa you will see a “related links” link. This link is going to lead you to even more sites that are closely related to what you have been searching for already. This is also a never ending deal folks. You are going to find so many sites, you wont have nearly the time required to research and/or contact all of them. Pick however many you can handle, that is the best advice I can give you.

Part 2 Of Finding Sites Using Alexa

This is part 2 of using Alexa to find sites to advertise on. This is actually really simple. At the top of Alexa just click on “directory”. Right here it will probably click with you on what I am about to say. All sites in Alexa are put into categories. YES! That’s as easy as it gets. In the case of the Super Green Tea Patch offer I personally would be surfing to “Health”, then “Weight Loss”, then I would check out each and every site for each and every category here. There is most likely going to be a lot but working smarter is what counts in this business and I can tell you that by developing this skillset on how to find sites to advertise on, you are going to quickly get a knack of how to do it. By doing this you are opening yourself up to endless possibilities of promoting your offers.

When you finally dig down thru the directory search you are going to repeat the same steps as in part one. Here you will also get related sites, and places people visit after reading that site. It never ends and neither should your research but for this type of advertising I can tell you that 12-15 sites is essential to start. There is no reason to overwhelm yourself unless you get responses from the webmasters on if they are even interested in you advertising on their site.

That’s it for today folks. There are many more ways to go about finding sites but I want to start off with the simplest because I know how overwhelming it can be starting out. Once we get thru a few more ways to find sites tomorrow, we are going to construct how I approach webmasters and agencies. This will be the step where you find out if a site is even worth your time in researching the overall statistics and analytics of it. With this being said you are probably wondering why we dont conduct our research BEFORE we contact the site owners and I can tell you that there is only a 50/50 chance here that they will be interested in the first place. By doing it my way, you cut out the 50/50 and get much better 95%+ that you are going to be advertising on the site. However, there is a process that you must do at a rather quick pace in a very short timeframe and you will better understand it when we get there. For the time being over the next couple of days, I will show you resources and methods of how to scrape up sources of advertising.