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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-08

Posted at February 8, 2010
Tweets, Peeps and Blurbs
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-01

Posted at February 1, 2010
Tweets, Peeps and Blurbs
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-25

Posted at January 25, 2010
Tweets, Peeps and Blurbs
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Avoid The Top Three Affiliate Marketing Fails – Part 1

Posted at December 1, 2009

The Festive Season‘Tis the season to make money. Everyone and their dog needs an extra buck during the holiday season and folks are turning, in droves, to affiliate marketing on the internet as their “get rich quick” solution. I wish I could snap my fingers and get everyone’s attention at once before I point out a few things to them… alas, this little article series will have to do.

There are some basic features that most failed affiliate marketers share. There are more than three, but a few issues seem to show up over and over again – and I’m not even a person who voluntarily works with affiliate marketers and I see this… so they merit some individual attention.

Affiliate Marketing Fail #1 – Lack of Research

This is an odd conundrum. Folks who are jumping on the affiliate bandwagons are often using shortcuts to get into business for themselves… I don’t mean to insult anyone but that act in itself is just a tad bit lazy. So expecting new affiliate marketers who are all hyped up on the latest “Amway” presentation to slow down for five minutes and actually do some real research is probably futile. But the sad fact is that if you don’t stop and think out your plan of action, you will royally screw yourself.

I have two real life incidents to illustrate how folks who get all caught up in the hype (emotion) of the next great thing have wasted time and money because they failed to engage the brain (logic) and actually plan their moves. In another article I wrote about a gentlman who planned to take the world by storm by selling lessons on how to use Google. You see, he had paid some ridiculous amount of money to take a class himself on how to use Google – you know, how to use all the advanced operands and so forth. He took notes and downloaded recordings and basically copied the entire course and decided to sell it himself, as well as have affiliates sell his course for him. He spent several thousand dollars having a company re-do all the instructional work as new Flash presentations. He then hired the same company to build him a new Flash-based web site. He could afford this because he only had to spend 4 cents per click to bid on “google” in Adwords – Google’s keyword estimator said so. He was going to make a killing because his advertising, and that of his affiliates, would be so cheap.

Not once had this guy ever bothered to actually type in “google” into Google’s search field and see what came up. You can imagine my reaction to this “killer PPC strategy.” It was pretty much, “Dude, you really think Google is about to let anyone advertise on their brand for 4 cents a click? Wake up.” At one point he actually bid up to $10 a click and his ads still never ran.

Now I’m not talking about some heavy duty, all-night research here – this is basic. Type in a search term and see who you compete against. It’s not hard. If you see NO ONE advertising in the paid ad space, there’s a reason. There is no such thing as the magic keyword that no one ever thought to bid on…

But what if there are advertisers?

My second example is an actual affiliate, who decided that he could make a fortune using PPC to push ads to his affiliate site, which is how it’s supposed to work, right? He bought a domain name, paid someone to build a site, and was in the process of collecting bid proposals for PPC work when I ran across his RFP… to build an Adwords campaign for electronic cigarettes.

Ok, yes, there are people advertising these things because they spring up faster than Google can squash them. But the plain fact is that it is against Adwords policy to advertise any cigarette product, electronic or not. They state it quite plainly in their editorial guidelines. The same thing happened with a site that sold organic herbs who decided to carry and advertise absinthe… great idea. Too bad it’s against policy. Google disables the ads and if you keep re-enabling them, Google will ban your account, plain and simple. If you want to set up another account and try again, good luck – have some spare credit cards all with separate billing addresses and knock yourself out.

In both those cases, a complete lack of familiarity with PPC guidelines cost these folks more money than they ever made, simply because they didn’t take the time to research the market, or ask an expert before jumping into their venture with both feet.

If your businesses success is predicated on PPC success, you owe it to yourself to either dig down and get the facts or hire a consultant for an hour and get their opinion of your plan… and you must have a plan.

Business VooDoo
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The Pay Per Click Package Deal – part 3: Means to an End

Posted at May 28, 2009

P3097029If you missed part two, that’s because it was a guest post here as a special on prepping your landing pages before you get into the nuts and bolts of launching a paid ad campaign. I split that part out because so many of the PPC accounts I’ve worked with in the past are put together without any thought whatsoever to what’s going to happen after they finally succeed in getting a click on an ad, that it seemed like a worthwhile break out for an Intelligent PPC segment.

But there’s an even more important part to paid online advertising that is overlooked by practicallyeveryone but the most sophisticated advertisers… ROI. Sure, everyone san say it. Everyone knows what it stands for. Everyone knows it’s a benchmark for paid ad performance. But almost no one knows what goes into the mathematics of making sure you actually earn a Return On your Investment in that paid click.

It’s surprising to me how much news there’s been in the online ad world lately about “post click” optimization. It’s as though it never occurred to anyone that the transaction doesn’t end on the landing page. If you aren’t tracking user behavior, watching the paths your visitors take through your site after the click, you’re missing a huge chunk of the story here. You might beat everyone else’s price on widgets by $200 but if your cart gets the hiccups in the middle of a transaction and frustrated users leave, you won’t see any return on that investment in the click.

And even then, assuming you make the sale, are you tracking ads, clicks and conversions in enough detail to be able to match up the cost of the click with the sale totals? How will you know if you’re actually making any profit on your sales if you aren’t able to relate the individual sale back to the search term that started the process?

When PPC analysts start talking to business owners about advanced analytics to enable bidding to economics, their eyes glaze over.  I don’t really blame them – I don’t know too many business owners who like Algebra. But if you really want to optimize your campaigns, you need to be able to prove that keyword A has a cost of $n per click but has produced $r dollars in sales of item B – then you need to know the margin on item B so you can see if there’s any profit there after deducting the cost of $n from the earnings.  If not, then your keyword is not profitable and you’re bidding to high for the markup – you either need to bid lower, raise the price on the item, or figure out how to target items with higher profit margins to begin with…  if you can’t find the relationship between sales and clicks, you’re up a creek without the right paddle.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman of the Rimm-Kaufman group has a most excellent 3-minute explanation of using economic factors to control bidding.

What it all boils down to is this: if you are not using the proper tracking techniques that allow you to match up the keyword with the items purchased at checkout, you will never know the answer to “what’s my ROI?”

Business VooDoo, Pay Per Click Voodoo
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The TV Commercial Conundrum

Posted at May 20, 2009

There was some information released from Marketing Sherpa this week that I have to admit, surprised me quite a bit. Apparently, according to a survey of marketers who currently use video ads, only 30% of respondents ever actually test a video ad using a free medium.  It seems to me that big brand marketers are an odd breed… These folks will spend tens of thousands of dollars on production of a television commercial that backlashes on them faster than a boomerang, without bothering to take the smallest step toward a viable test market… You Tube.

On another site, I commented about all the uproar over the BK-Spongebob commercial, which seemed to me the latest in a string of missed crowdsourcing opportunities for Burger King. Another famous backlash commercial was the Motrin commercial that ticked off a certain micro-segment of the “mom” market and resulted in Johnson & Johnson yanking the commercial completely (after paying for production and air time) and posting an apology on the Motrin web site, all because a relative “handful” of internet-connected, socially-active moms felt insulted and started talking about boycotts. 

Why don’t these ads get tested in front of the right groups? I heard one TV marketer observe that “pre-releasing” television commercials lessened the “impact of the message.” What? Aren’t you the same people who tell us that you have to see an ad seven million times before we remember what it’s advertising? How can additional free exposure be a bad thing for a video ad?

Marketers, you have, in the internet, the perfect, completely FREE, perpetual focus group, if you’d just learn how to use it. If you’re a big-dollar marketing firm and you don’t include this sort of testing in your video ad production process, you might want to take another look – you no longer have an excuse to be ignorant of the immediate feedback potential of free video streaming sites as viable test beds. Don’t ignore the potential to let the audience tell you exactly what they most want to see from your next commercial.

Curses
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