Archive for October, 2008
PPC Classroom Is Open
Posted by: | CommentsHi all. Well today was an interesting day, especially if you tried to get into ppc classroom. I had my husband get up and wait for the launch at noon and by 1 he called to say nothing was happening. Finally I got home around 2 and sometime around 2:30 I got a link off their site and signed up. I ended up being one of the people double charged.
I was so excited to get in, but… it didn’t last long. First there were the upsells of course. That’s fine, except, if you clicked yes on any of them to get more information or add to a cart or something, the order was instantly processed. And these were not cheap upsells, they were worth it, but it was a bit shocking that the site was a little misleading.
Unfortunately that’s not the only place I was less than thrilled. Once you could actually access the site, around 6pm tonight a lot of it wasn’t ready. The modules and training are, and I guess that is the most important part but I loved the monthly niche idea and the videos and the bonuses. Guess what? None of them are working. Not only that but there is no access to a forum. I thought for sure they should have had a forum up for pre launch because so many people wanted to talk about it.
So, needless to say, I did start the training, and while I suppose there isn’t a lot of need for note taking the information is fantastic and I already learned from the first module I chose to work in. So it is worth your time, I just dont like all the hassle.
What did you think?
PPC Coach Review
Posted by: | CommentsI have had a couple of people request I post some further information on ppc coach, so I wanted to give my thoughts. First off, I joined May 28th under a friend of mine. He loved it, and I was struggling with learning ppc.
The first month was horrible. I don’t know how else to explain it. The site is less than user friendly. While the forums are set up, and you can ask anything you want it can be hard for a newbie to the forum (not a newbie to IM) to get around. Meaning, even though I have done IM for a couple of years almost now, it was hard to find the information I needed.
Coach says that he has everything mapped out for you, but I disagree a little bit. Each month for the first 3 months there are 2 strategies of making money with ppc available. There are also around 4 scripts, and lots of tools available as well. However each of the months only comes with a small summary of information on how to do the month. That can be very difficult to people who have no idea. This is where it gets sticky.
Each of the strategies has its own forum, so you are basically going to read the whole forum to know what to do. That can take some time. Along with that there are videos for the tools and scripts, but putting all the pieces together is stressful and time consuming.
However, I have been there since May 28th, so there must be a reason, correct? Well, of course there is. The first month is difficult. It can be very hard to follow the forums and coach and videos and well, Everything. But… the community is a huge help. Like I said you can ask anything and you will almost always get a response from Coach himself. That is impressive to say considering he has 500 plus students. You can send him private messages and he will get back to you, but remember he has the same 24 hours a day we all do and 500 students 
so it takes some time and he won’t always remember your last pm, so leave it all threaded for his sake.
On top of this, it seems that anyone who has had any success here is more than glad to give back. Instant message names are shared, emails, etc, all willingly. They all just are so helpful and you won’t get any flack for being a newbie and asking what might seem is a dumb question. In fact Coach has on the site “the only dumb question is the one not answered”.
After the first month or so, I picked things up and got moving, doing the first months’ method and getting some success for myself. I started referring people and still pm Coach or Harry (if you join you will see who this is, absolutely awesome, smart guy) and Coach v.2 when I have trouble and I do get great answers.
Another thing I really like about ppc-coach is the tracking script. Now it was the most difficult thing I have ever worked with at first because I could not understand it. But now that it is working and you can get it to work, dont worry, lots of help for this too, it is the best tool I have for ppc. I have tried Prosper and liked it, but it was way more time consuming to work with. I didnt like having to enter all of my ad stuff there and keywords, and do that all on adwords as well.
Coach‘s tracker works with subids and it tracks everything down to the keyword and cost of the ads so you can figure out your ROI, and that is the most important number, correct. Not to mention this is all installed on your own site so no one will be able to see your information, pretty great huh? Oh, and you dont have to worry about installing your snippet code into the merchant thank you page either, because you will see which subid has an actual conversion and which doesnt.
These are all the things I think you have to know when you go into ppc coach. It can be hard at first so do your best to network with others and get a good team of people who will help you by answering your questions. Read and watch everything and ask questions until you get the answers.
You will learn a lot from this site, there is no doubt about that. You will learn about the glitches, slaps and oddities google throws at you. You will learn about dealing with cpa and affiliate networks and you will learn about doing your own webpages and all about landing pages and the elements needed to make google happy.
Now, why do I also want to join AffiliIT?
The owners are two of my favorite bloggers on affiliate marketing. They have a great out look on just making campaigns for search and making them last, and turning each niche into a business. From everything I have seen of their work they teach a great deal about keywords, research, landing pages, etc, for setting up campaigns and rolling with the product you have chosen. While I think you can learn a lot at ppc coach I havent picked up a great information about just choosing a product I want to create and promoting ppc style.
I really like all the strategies that coach offers on his site and like he has said before there is a method to his madness when he gives a certain strategy each month. But I want to learn the Affiliit way of doing things which will be yet another strategy to add to my toolbox. Not to mention all the tools that will be offered on AffiliIT as well. So yes, I will continue my membership with coach and I recommend anyone interested in ppc go there to learn. Not because I’m a success, not because I’m a super affiliate, because I’m still learning and that is what this blog is, me learning and my journey with ppc marketing. But I think if you stick out the first month on ppc coach you will be able to find enough success to keep your own journey going.
And yes, I have already joined AffiliIT. I love the videos and I think it will be greatly worth my time.
(* some updates and changes added here by Jen)
Stuck on Keyword Research
Posted by: | CommentsWell, even though I had some success with ppc coach, I have started doing a couple other testing projects in ppc. I learned a lot from ppc coach, and I wanted to go to the level of search campaign for landing pages and sites all for affiliate purposes but giving the visitors a lot of information if they choose to read it on my site.
Anyways, I have started doing the keyword research. To get started I have made a huge list. But then all this ppc classroom stuff has come up and Im not sure what to do. If you read what Amit has posted on his blog under keyword research (the category) you will see he talks about problem keywords and going wide before going deep. The breadth of the list instead of the depth.
Im not sure if I will hear from anyone on this, but I wanted to vent my frustration. Until I figure this out I will stick with my month one methods that work. Oh, and I will be joining ppc classroom with Amit as soon as it launches. I love his blog, there is so much free information there.
Video #2 of PPC Classroom V.2
Posted by: | CommentsI finally finished watching the video of ppc classroom v.2 it is 40 minutes long. Can you believe that? It was pretty great though. And I took notes up until the last 8 minutes (which I did watch) so that I can share what is revealed at different times through out the video. You should absolutely watch this video though. It is an interview of one of the best Super Affiliates who believes in building this whole affiliate marketing thing into one long term business plan. How great is that? Building campaigns that will last, not just one short campaign after another, after another.
To get to the point though, here is what I got in notes:
95% of Amits business is in 3 niches. He does 2-3 niches per year. That’t it. When he started out he did 15 campaigns before his 16th which was a success, thats around 5% success. He now has about 80% success from his campaigns. Most affiliates don’t have that high a rate for their campaign success. How he does it, is with a lot of research. He researches everything, the niche, the products, the keywords, etc. He says that:
Every Failure Brings You Closer to Success
It costs about $50-$100 to test an affiliate offer nowadays.
Minute 7- Research
He talks to his AM to get information on what the top affiliates are doing volume wise, paid search wise and to see when the offer started, along with all the numbers he can get from the AM to use in his research of the offer. If you don’t have an AM who will help you with this, keep looking for someone who will, they exist and you can find them.
He will gage the volume for the offer by typing in non obvious words into google and keyword tools to see how many people are looking for the product. He talks largely about using lateral keywords which reminded me of the post on his site about Deep and Wide Keyword Research. He also gives an example of what he means by this in the video.
Another part of the research is to see how many affiliates are promoting the offer. This is easy to do with Clickbank as it is part of the gravity number, but other places you might have to ask.
Minute 11:30- Niche Research Begins
On Cj.com you can find good offers by seeing the 1-5 bars indicating the network earnings.
On forums and masterminds you can learn about the hot niches that others are working in. This is one of his biggest indicators into what is HOT affiliate wise. He also talks about networking and how it is just as big in affiliate marketing as it is in any other business. This part in particular he talks about a few hot niches by naming them.
You will also learn here that in the beginning he did a lot of research to see what was hot as any new person would almost have to do.
KNOW THE HOT NICHES
Another way to find out what is hot is to ask your AM yet again. Amit talks about this being a HUGE help in affiliate marketing and that it is a good idea to foster a good relationship with your AM in order to become successful.
Minute 15- Landing Pages Information
Right around 15 minutes he talks about landing pages and using review sites to compare different affiliate products. Such as an affiliate review site about Acai berry because there are several of these offers. He talks about the keywords you use with sites like this, compared to keywords you should use when you are promoting a site just about 1 offer. This is really great information and you should definitely tap into this because it is very telling about keywords and the offers we can use to make sales.
Minute 18- More about Keywords
Here he talks about the mindset of the visitor, again and still, about the keywords we use, and about going lateral with keyword research.
Minute 20- Landing Pages
He and his business use the same kind of formats for all of the landing pages he uses. However each one is different based on images, fonts, colors, etc, according to the niche. He says that short pages made to get people to take action are the best Landing pages.
Simple & Easy To Understand (landing pages) Convert Best
You should also always have the most important elements above the fold, such as your images, call to action, etc.
Minute 22:30 Important Tip
This is where Amit tells us we have to check all of our landing pages in different browser resolutions. The thing being you want certain things to be above the fold, like the headline, the call to action button, etc. Here might be a good point to say use a tool to check out the site looks is all different browsers too, just to be sure everyone is seeing it the same way. This tool should work http://browsershots.org/
Minute 25- When its a dud…
Basically Amit says you can figure out something is a dud after hundreds of clicks and testing or no traffic. Actually the information about hundreds of clicks is on his website superaffiliatemarketing.com where he talks about mistakes people make, starting out.
Minute 26:30- Google Accounts
It takes up to 4 months for Google to give you an account Quality Score. With his course though he is going to show us how to make that time smaller.
Minute 28- Clickbank
Here Amit discusses why it is good to get started with Clickbank for affiliate marketing. You dont have to apply to get started, it is a reliable network and digital products convert well.
After this I wasnt taking notes, I didnt realize until today I was going to post, so I didnt take notes through the whole thing. So this should get you to at least minute 30. Go watch the rest here:
http://www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/01/video-interview-2-top-questions-answered/
If you are looking for the free report, you can find it here:
3 ppc mistakes- http://www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/03/surprise-bonus-report/
If you want to see the questions that will be in video 3, check here:
http://www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/06/question-for-interview-3/
