Week 4:

Welcome back for another week of the getting started course.  We are now on week 4 and by this time you should be much more comfortable with Internet marketing and the different components of marketing. 

Obviously you are not going to know everything within 3 weeks, nor are you going to know everything within a year.  The great thing about Internet marketing is that it is always evolving and there will always be something new to learn.

This week you are going to be more proactive with your research and your implementation strategies.  It is time to put your head down and really start working away.  In order to see results, you have to implement.  You will be implementing ad campaigns and article campaigns this week.

Let’s get started…

Task - Write 1 Article/Day

You should be very proactive with your article writing this week.  Aim for 1 article per day or a total of 5 articles this week.  Remember, try to focus on keywords that do not have a lot of competition, or write an article about a product or service that receives volume traffic and is either new, or has limited competition.

Upon writing your articles, you will want to submit them to an article website.  Remember not to submit the same article to multiple websites or you will limit your success.  Google takes away search engine ranking points for duplication of content.  If you are going to submit similar articles, make sure that only 30% of the content is the same and have a different headline and title of your page. 

Research (Spend at Least 5 Hours)

Browse the Internet and look for new ideas, products/services, affiliate programs, and keywords.  See what other people are doing and determine whether you think they are profitable doing it.  If so, record the idea, the webpage, and research it in even more detail.

Some ideas to get your research going:

1. View affiliate networks for industry ideas (clickbank.com, cj.com, linkshare.com, regnow.com, shareasale.com)
2. View forums and newsgroups to see what others are talking about
3. Visit the news website to see what is new and hot
4. Check out social networking sites such as myspace.com and xanga.com

As mentioned before, always document / take notes of your research. 

Refining Your Campaign

Refining your campaign can be one of the most awkward tasks for the best of Internet marketers.  As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of keywords that are underperforming and just costing us money.   It has been said that 20% of an advertisers keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are underperforming.  If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.

There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance.  Are your keywords performing?  What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR?  Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low? 

There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign.  However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make. 

My-Linker (www.my-linker.com)
This is a program that is exclusive to Wealthy Affiliate members and allows them to analyze merchant page conversions on a landing page.  You can set up specific campaigns within my-linker which enable you to attach a linking code to your site and track the effectiveness of your web page.  The higher the merchant page click-through, the better job your page is doing obtaining the visitors interest enough to send them to affiliate sites.

For more details, please visit:

www.my-linker.com

You will be able to log into my-linker using the same Wealthy Affiliate login username and password.  Instructions on how to use my-linker can be found upon logging into the application.

Google Conversion Tracking
Some programs online allow you to append your Google conversion tracking code to their URL so that you can track sales.  An example of this is Beating Adwords affiliate program.  The conversion code is dynamically passed to the order page, so that when someone purchases the product a conversion is calculated within your Google account. Using Google conversion tracking allows you to determine exactly which keywords are making you money, and which aren’t.

You can also email merchants and ask them to put your conversion code on their order confirmation page.   Typically the merchant will only do this for their high volume affiliates, but it is worth a shot.


Testing Campaign Performance

There are a few different tests that you can implement relatively quickly to test components of your campaign.   There are two components that we are going to discuss how to test for campaign optimization: Ads and Landing Pages.  These are discussed in more detail below.

Split Test – Ads

Split testing ads is very easy to do within your Google Adwords account.  What you want to do is create 2 ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.  You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not “optimized”.  This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time.  Of you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time.  For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better. 

Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad.

Split Test – Landing Pages

There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs.   Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.

Conversions

To test conversions you will need to set-up 2 different Clickbank accounts.   You will create one landing page using the first clickbank account linking code, and one landing page using the other clickbank account linking code.   You will then want to create two different ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s.   You will also want to have your ads served equally and you can adjust this within your campaign settings.

By having two different Clickbank accounts, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales better based on which CB account is making sales.   Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better.

Based on your results you can perform several different tests, and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions.   By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your campaigns overall profitability.

Merchant Page Click-throughs

One of the most important “actions” that an affiliate needs a visitor to perform on their page is to click-through to the merchant pages after reading the information.  If your visitors never visit the merchant pages, then you will never make a commission…so it’s pretty important to keep an eye on this.

To track merchant page click-throughs, we have created a program called My-Linker (mentioned earlier), that will allow you to create specific campaigns where you can insert your Google Conversion Code, thus tracking merchant page conversions. 

You will need to insert the code that is generated by my-linker in place of your affiliate links, and then you will be able to track which keywords are producing the highest merchant page conversions, and which ones are underperforming.  This detailed information will give you insight into which keywords are performing and will give you an overview of how effective your landing page is at getting people to following your links to the merchant page.

For more information on my-linker, please login to the following the My-Linker.com website using your Wealthy Affiliate login information.

www.my-linker.com

Competition Check

Check back with your competition and see if they are still advertising under the same keywords that you searched for previously.  You can closely monitor many different industries using the top keywords too, and you should take full advantage of it.