On top of using the Google Content Network, targeting sites/pages in the search engines by utilizing keyword lists and using Alexa to target their site base there is still a lot of ways to go about buying up media placements. From now until the end of the month I would like to share a few places I have worked with so that you can test them out for yourself. I think you are going to be surprised at some of the sources too as I have seen a lot of them dogged on as 2nd tier Search Engines and notorious for click fraud. Hopefully by showing you my way of using them you can avoid that.
Today I want to talk about Adbrite. I will tell you that a year ago, Adbrite was absolutely atrocious. I mean seriously, they were in bad shape. Today though, they are shaping up to being a damn good resource ( at least in the last few months) of buying ads on some high traffic websites. Over the last year I’ve seen high profile sites such as the Huffington Post, Whitepages and opportunities to advertise within the Lycos Email Client. Upon joining Adbrite as an advertiser you have three options of displaying ads: Text, Banner and Full Page ads which is sort of their way of tapping into the Pay Per View Market (something we may discuss later). Dont underestimate any of these but I can tell you that in testing the full page ads feature I have been merked in every single vertical I have tried. That’s not to say it cant be profitable but I am being upfront with you now. I’ve done rigorous testing with large budgets and probably close to 60 offers and have yet to tap into a profitable campaign. I believe these full page ads are much better for large companies seeking branding over profit which basically sucks as an affiliate marketer. Text and banners ads have been where it is at for me.
Text Ads – Much similar to the Google Adsense program. One thing I would like to bring to light is that a lot of people believe that Adsense is the top tier of contextual ad programs. I agree to a point but I also disagree. Knowing some of the high profile sites that have come into the Adbrite Marketplace and the fact that Adsense payouts have become increasingly shitty gives webmaster more options to try out other ad programs and this is something that excites me because there are tons of opportunities not being taken advantage of everyday. The ads from Adbrite are Blue Link Headlines with black text followed by a green display url. You can create multi-variants of the ad for split testing but best of all is that you are not going to be crapped on by some dumb quality score. Although we are specifically talking about media buys and to most people that means “banner buying”, dont underestimate the power of text ads especially in markets where a presell excels such as bizopps and weight loss.
Banner Ads – Adbrite’s banner ads are dead simple. There are 5 formats and they are:
- Banner (468×60)
- Leaderboard (728×90)
- Medium rectangle (300×250)
- Skyscraper (120×600)
- Wide skyscraper (160×600)
This gives you a good variety for testing and you should try every one of them.
Full Page Ads – This really just speaks for itself. All you need is the url of whatever you are showing. You are charged per view so keep that in mind. Also keep in mind, I’ve yet to ever be profitable in such a campaign.
Adbrite Site Directory
The Adbrite Site Directory is where the golden nuggets lay. I do not engage in advertising with Adbrite’s category feature advertising. Let’s face it, they aren’t Adsense or the Yahoo Publisher Network however they are on track to breaking into the market in a big way but for now they are just no there yet. I’ve gotten merked in category advertising because the amount of shit sites far outweighs the good ones. Yea I could have monitored them and cut them down accordingly but that’s a lot of work and I dont like a lot of work.
There is nothing complicated here so dont try to over analyze things. The best way to get started is to set up an account with Adbrite and find an offer you are interested in. From here it is as simple as finding sites with them and doing your own research to make an educated decision of whether you want to test it or not.
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Moving along now you would have contacted a site owner and received a not interested/yes interested type of reply and you would have replied by stating that you were interested in one of the banner or text spots located on their site. Now they should be sending over their advertising rates and it is at this time that you should begin a serious process of site evaluation. I’m still getting questions on why not to evaluate the sites thoroughly BEFORE contacting the webmaster so I’m going to take another crack at this one last in the simplest form.
DONT WASTE TIME…
It’s simple folks. Why would you ever research a site thoroughly only to find out the site owner is not even interested in your proposition? I mean seriously, I’ve been over this topic sort of before but the whole idea is to get the biggest return in the shortest amount of time possible because this will leave you more time to scale. If your a stubborn head then I encourage you to try it another way and cry about it later. Believe me, I’ve been there before and I’m only trying to keep it dead simple and the least time-consuming as possible.
Alright now so begins the process of a good site evaluation. There are some tools that will aid in this but your best weapon is to reply to the webmaster when they send you the ad rates. When they do send that email it is now time to inquire about their traffic. Some webmasters wont have a clue but you should go ahead and ask about their quality of traffic and anything important that comes to mind. I’m not going to name any examples here because each site is different. I will give you a few things to look for though:
- Forums – Look to see if they have a forum attached to the site
- Blog – Look for a blog attached to the site
- Newsletter – Look for any type of optin form
- Anything else that captures visitors and would keep them returning
Looking for these will allow even more possible advertising for you. You should also ask about these just in case they are hidden. Some of the best advertising is renting optin email lists and mass forum blasts. 
While waiting for the email or phone call back you should do your own analysis as well. I personally use sites such as Quantcast and Compete to gauge traffic levels and pick up any hints of what their traffic types are. By using these tools you should know that you have no idea if they are accurate or not so you should take everything as suggestion only. You should be adding notes to your spreadsheet on this site of everything those two sites return to you. Also take note of the little spot where it says “People who visit this site, also visit” because that is just another source for you to pursue later on for your ads.
Look over this potential site thoroughly. You dont know at this point what the ad rates are so you should prepare yourself now. Where are all the ads located? Above the fold, below the fold? Typically if you are going to advertise on a “pay per impressions” basis then you are going to want the ads above the fold. If you are paying per click then you can try out ads below the fold. I personally do not advertise below the fold.
Negotiation
The time has come and you receive the advertising rates. Now here’s what I do so that I dont have to pay the bulk of the rates upfront. If you hop into buying for a full month before even testing the site, then your just a fool unless of course you just have the cash to burn. I am not going to talk about how I really dont care and I just throw the money down. That is something that I have worked myself up to and honestly I dont have the time to keep testing. I consider a month of advertising AS MY TEST. I dont want you to do this though if you are just starting out.
So you will want to ask the webmaster to pro-rate your ad rate so you can test the traffic. All the while this communication is going on you should be reassuring the webmaster that you are looking for a stable, long-term deal here and as long as it works for both sites, you will be a happy advertiser forever. If it’s banner placements I like to ask the webmaster to allow me to test the site for a week. By only paying for a week’s worth of advertising you cut your cost by 75%. If it’s an email drop to their list then you should only send out to a partial number of their lists to evaluate the response rate. Same goes for a forum blast.
Always negotiation folks the best you can. If it seems like it might cost you a deal then go with your gut instinct. That’s why it’s so important to evaluate the site yourself because their are snakes out there that will take advantage of you. Although, I personally have yet to come across such an instance.
From there on out you are on your own. I cant tell you what will play out because it’s up to you and the webmaster to negotiate some terms. Just use the tip of testing because it’s going to allow you to spend the least amount possible just to see if it’s all worth it.
This is dead simple folks and I’m giving it to you as I use it. No need to make it more complicated than it is. Find an offer, find a site, contact the site, if possible yes then start researching the site on your own, inquire the owner for any additional information, negotiate a testing price and time, move forward.
From here on out I would like a questions post. Any questions you send thru the blog, forum or email will be answered tomorrow and from there I will spend the rest of the month giving out some honey-holes and tons of places to use this method with.
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Although we have covered a couple of excellent ways of finding pages/sites to advertise on, I feel I should point this next one out as well. In doing so, this should give you more than enough help in having a stacked portfolio of sites to contact and get your offers up and running.
It’s as simple as setting up a Google Adwords Placement Campaign except you wont have a campaign. You are simply going to use their “Identify Placements” feature from within the interface to come up with all sorts of goodies. If you dont know how to setup a placement campaign it’s super simple. Follow the steps in Adwords until you get to this point or read their info. You should be familiar with Adwords and Placement Targeting as well as the Content Network because essentially while these are considered PPC type ad services, you are actually buying media placements thru a third party. You can either try your hand thru Adwords or you can contact the webmaster directly.
There are 4 ways you can use this tool to find places to advertise.
- Categories – Selecting a category is the easiest. You will get a list of results where you can advertise thru a Placement campaign with Google.
- Describe Topics – Remember those keywords I told you to save? Now you can plug them into here and get even more placements.
- List Urls – Remember when I told you to save all the domains from the Search Engines and Alexa? Plug them into here and Google will help generate even more placements.
- Select Demographics – If you know who exactly want to target you can use this feature to retrieve even more sites.
It’s no big secret and dead simple to do but I can tell you that with the way Adsense pays out these days, you are likely to strike up quite a few deals by going to the webmasters direct. Either way you will get on these sites whether it’s by utilizing Google itself or getting in touch with the property owners and working on an exclusive advertising slot.
Contacting Webmasters
Although previously covered, I want to go over this again. You need to come off as a Professional here. Coming off as a regular type affiliate marketer is not a very good idea. You can try it, but unless you start taking yourself seriously dont expect anyone else too, ESPECIALLY when they are going to rely on you to properly pay your ad rates. A good way to do this is get yourself a business entity such as an LLC or S-Corp. If you are making substantial money anyway then chances are you have this all taken care of. If you dont, then now’s the time to do it because you can write off your advertising expenses.
With all the domains you save up you are now going to go to each of them and locate the contact details. Some will be different and have a contact page, an advertise page or some will be hidden. In the case they are hidden, simply Whois the domain and see if you can contact them there. Worst case scenario is that if you cannot contact them in any of these ways, just leave them. Here is a sample email I would send:
Hi Such and Such, (Webmaster name or site name)
My name is Ruck and I handle the Advertising for Convert2Media.com which is a full-fledge marketing agency. I ran across your site (whatever.com) and was intrigued. You seem to have a nice site and wanted to know if you were interested in allowing our company to allow us to advertise with you? It would be a very simple process and we would pay you up front.
Regards,
Contact Details
This first email which initiates the contact needs to be simple AND vague. You dont want to give them your life story. You’ve simply stated that you work with an agency and that you are an authoritative figure (I handle the advertising) and that you are willing to pay them upfront. You have not given them any clue what you are going to be advertising because at this point, it dont mean shit to them and honestly, they dont mean shit to you. This is a 50/50 game right here. You are either going to get a simple no, I am not interested or the typical Yes, I may be interested, what did you have in mind. If they say no and your in a large vertical I usually just move on unless I simply cannot go on breathing without being on that site. I leave it to you on the negotiation part because normally this becomes a pissing match and has not really worked in my favor.
When you get the ones that are interested to reply to you, it’s now time for Super-Sonic status. This is going to be the part where I tell you that you have to pull the finger out of your butt because their is a series of events and a process that has to be completed and you dont have much time considering you need to keep the webmaster/owner warm with a timely/quick response back. In this second email back to them, I will show you how to buy yourself a little time that will allow you to research the site well before jumping into actually paying them. This may seem a little shitty to the site owner as you did contact them to advertise, they are interested but then again there might actually be a chance that you go against your word and kill the deal. I’m sorry folks but that’s the way it is. I am trying to show you how to save the most time possible here.
If they are interested now is the time to pull out that site and go look at it. You need to pay REAL CLOSE attention to the ad placements on the site (if they have some) and if they do not, you need to make notes on how their site is structured so you can suggest the best possible ad placement. By taking notes on what sizes of banners or where the text link ads are located you can fire off this second email saying:
Hello (Webmaster/site Name),
Thank you for your response. Our agency was looking the 300×250 banner ad you have displaying on the left hand side of the content on your pages. We are interested in advertisinging our exclusive diet product which allows users to test for free. We can pay you first and all it would be is a simple code to paste onto your site. We are interested in an exclusive relationship with you and your site if all goes well which would allow us to pay you each and every month. Could you send over your ad rates?
Regards ->Contact
See yet again we are vague here. We dont actually want them to know our business. We want them honing in on that this is going to be easy (which it is). Dont give them anymore than you have to. Try to avoid Partnerships and any type of revsharing at all costs. Jeez, I cannot tell you how freaking confusing and jumbled that can get. Pay a flat rate unless you think you can handle it otherwise. Taking on partners that you have no clue about is bad business, I dont suggest it.
When they reply now you are going to get ok let’s do this, or I have changed my mind. In the case they changed their mind, this is actually a lot easier to negotiate since they were a bit interested in the first place. Typically if they are on the fence I will run site analytics (covered tomorrow) and find out how much traffic I can actually expect and then jack on their usual rate meaning I will pay more. If they are interested and are ready to keep moving forward, now we have the situation on our hands which is going to make us work our little tails off and find out if the site is truly worth going after. If you had spent all the time researching the site beforehand then you would have wasted hours coming to a Yes/No conclusion. Using this technique first, it only cost you a couple of emails.
We will go over the process tomorrow.
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Moving forward we have covered finding an offer to begin with and knowing the importance of creatives. More importantly the importance of hopefully testing some of your own creatives. Day 2 is really going to seem like a non-chalant charade of crap but look between the lines folks because while this is quite possibly the fastest way to get started promoting CPA Offers, it does require to keep your head on a swivel and take note of everything around you and available. Today we are basically going to target incoming information and how to use it to your advantage as well as develop a mindset which allows your brain to work overtime on even more idea.
This is another method of how to come up with an offer to promote.
This all begins with those spammy Network emails that probably flood your inbox. Yea, I know we suck. We send you an email everytime we get a new offer in. That’s what us networks have been taught from paying attention to all the other networks. While we try to do them in batches on specific days some networks work a lot differently.
What you have to realize is that all networks are not created equal. Each has varying strengths, publishers, in-house marketing teams and advertisers with weird regulations. Things come and go so quickly in this industry so I hope next time you get those types of emails, you spend a little outside thought to what is actually going on. Some offers will hit a lead cap within an hour, day or week and I assure you that affiliates promoting those offers are really in-tune with the informative emails coming from the networks.
With that said, those network emails contain gold. If you have never gotten an idea from one of them and made money with it then you are either not working hard enough, or not paying enough attention to them to take action. Some networks will send conversion rates, epc data and even tell you where (such as web, ppc, email, etc..) that the offer is doing well at. Now we are not going to go into the networks that lie about this data. (Yes, unfortunately some do) but chances are that if you reply to your affiliate manager with the data you got from the network email you may squeeze some trinkets out of them. Some managers have their ass wound so tight you would think it would explode if you asked them their name. Simply dump this manager and get a new one. Chances are that this manager’s shelf life will be short lived in this industry. We are moving towards a new era, one in which people want information that is going to HELP them. They dont want managers telling them about shitty offers just so they can get some leads. There is a financial risk on the publishers part and why some managers/networks even pull this type of shit is beyond me. The main focus is to get the publishers the best return on their investment with the shortest amount of work possible. This allows expansion and we love expansion.
The easiest way to get started is to just pay attention to your network emails. If the emails suck and are not informative then it’s high time you made a much needed suggestion. A lot of networks dont know this data though so then you are up shit creek. Best advice is to use a network that can get this data and will help you with it.
Now that we got the pre-warmup talk out of the way, let’s go thru a simple scenario and explain how the process and mindset should be developed so that you know what to do each time these emails come to you.
I think this will be a two post day. Site Analytics and a plan of attack is almost in order. You now have two quick methods of how to come up with an offer or at least ideas relating to offers with very little work on your part. If keywords, demographics and ideas dont jump at you the second you look at a landing page, you still have the network emails (hopefully) that will aid you very easily in coming up with an offer.
Attack time is this evening.
