It’s not often that I review other PPC products, because frankly, they’re my competition. And a lot of the products out there suck. But there are a few select products that I think are worth it, and in the interest of spreading the love around, I want to tell you about them.

PPC Coach  is one of those products. You won’t find a lot of hype on their sales page, no promises that you’re going to start making thousands of dollars a month instantly. And I like that.

As I’ve always maintained, it is very possible for anyone to make money online, but it isn’t by any means a guaranteed thing that doesn’t take any work.

And that’s what PPC Coach is offering you – help, support, and training to help you do the work.

You’ll still have to do the actual work, but they will be exactly what their name implies – the coach that helps you get the job done.

It’s run by guys who are affiliate marketers themselves, and are offering the same products and knowledge that they are using to make money themselves.

The realize that there is more than enough money to be made to go around, and want to be able to help other people make money online (while making money themselves, of course – nothing wrong with that.)

So what do they have to offer?

PPC Coach is a membership system, where you pay monthly to access their information and support. Here’s some of what you get:

- The PPC Coach will answer any and all PPC-related or affiliate marketing questions you have.

- Access to the PPC Coach Members Forum, where other members can post questions and post answers for you to see.

- Access to specific hand-picked merchants to promote.

- Tutorials and guides that are updated and added to frequently.

- Step-by-step instructions on how to do videos online.

- The opportunity to build relationships with like-minded individuals who want to succeed just as much as you do.

- Great contents and prizes monthly. Everyone likes prizes, don’t they?

And Chris, who is a member of PPC Coach, believes in the product so much that he’s willing to offer people a discount on their first month of membership.

Now, this savings in coming right out of his pocket. By his reasoning, the product is so good, that you’re guaranteed to stay longer than a month, but you get the opportunity to find that out for yourself for a reduced price.

He runs a site called PPC-Coach where he offers additional support and information to supplement what PPC Coach offers.

I have always believed in the power of a genuine testimonial over all the hype in the work, and the fact that this guy is willing to put his money where his mouth is says a lot.

So check it out, see what they have to say, and whether or not it’s right for you.

So, you did it.  You set up tracking, got approved on some networks, picked offers, made landing pages, set up campaigns, and optimized until you started making some profit.  Good for you.  You might not be mentally challenged after all.  But now what?

Hiring

Chances are, if you’re making good money, you’re likely spending a good part of your day testing and optimizing, as well as coming up with new stuff to promote.  At some point, you won’t have much time left to do anything else, but may still have a desire to expand.  This is when you might consider hiring outside help.  You’ll probably need actual office space for this, which can be surprisingly cheap compared to what you’re likely making if you’re having any decent success to the point where you need to hire.  There are plenty of places to find employees but your best bet is going to probably be local universities, especially if they have any kind of work study type programs where they can’t afford to quit the job or screw you over because their credits rely on them staying at the job.  You may try craigslist too.  Be careful, though, because in this industry it’s easy for a newbie to learn enough information to make it on their own and then just jump ship to do just that.  Teach them exactly what you need them to do, and nothing more.  If you’re hiring them to manage your campaigns, don’t even tell them what an affiliate network is, etc.  Just show them exactly how to manage the campaigns, and how to create ads, etc.

Start a Network

What most people don’t know is that a good number of the bigger affiliate networks out there were actually started by affiliates who wanted to expand into other areas.  Honestly, it doesn’t take much more than a directtrack license and a list of affiliate friends to get off the ground.  It definitely requires hiring though, especially if you get big.  You will likely need a full staff after things get rolling.  Also, unless you want to give shitty payment terms to your affiliates, you better have a decent bankroll saved up.

A big misconception is that running a network runs almost no risk.  Totally untrue.  There is so much fraud going on right now it’s crazy, and the network is the one who ends up on the hook for that.  Add this to the fact that you’re floating a lot of money while waiting on getting paid by the merchants and things could be disastrous if you’re not extremely careful who you let on your network.  If you DO decide to go this route, please read this post if you want to stand out from the other thousands of identical networks out there.

Your Own Offers

You won’t find much info about this out there.  Why?  Because the barrier to entry is high and the people doing it already don’t want you to have a piece.  At Affiliate Summit West this year, there was a table at club XS that ordered 30some bottles of Crystal…acai merchants.  Setting up your own offers and doing it right, especially for a physical product rebill type offer can be HARD WORK and VERY RISKY.  If theres anything legally wrong with what you’re doing, you get sued.  If the customers aren’t staying on your rebill long enough for you to be profitable..you lose your ass.  A million things can go wrong, especially the credit card processing, which needs to be rock solid, and even then if you fuck up at all, they can hold your earnings for months and months forcing you to close up shop.  High risk for potentially very high reward.  If this is something you’re interested in, good luck to you.  You’ve got a long road ahead, but there may be lots of lambos and shiny stuff at the end.

Give Back

Don’t be a dick.  You know you’re promoting shady diet rebill offers.  Please give some money to a worthy cause.  Yes, it’s a tax writeoff.  No, you shouldn’t be doing it just because it’s a tax writeoff.  Cakes has a soft spot in his heart for drug and alcohol treatment centers, and likes to contribute to those, but just pick something that you feel is a worthy cause and contribute some money every year.  That is the sign of a true balla in cakes’ opinion.  Honestly, which one of these statements sounds like you’re rolling in dough: “Yo I just dropped $100k on a watch.”  or “Yo, I just fed thanksgiving and christmas dinner to every poor person in the city.”  You got it way better than most people, so don’t forget where you came from.

What NOT to do

Don’t start a blog.  Unless you love writing and are doing it because you love helping people and making friends, then just don’t.  It’s rarely profitable for anyone.

Don’t share your secrets with anyone.  Yeah, you’re excited that you have your first $1k a day campaign, now shut the fuck up about it for as long as possible.  Someone will eventually see your ads everywhere and catch on and copy you but you can make plenty of money before that happens if you keep quiet.

Don’t be an asshole to other affiliates.  There have been plenty of reports lately of affiliates reporting other peoples ads, or merchants calling the FTC about other merchants offers.  If you do this kinda stuff, you’re a total douche who can’t make money in an industry where money pretty much grows on trees.  Congrats on that.  Be respectful of others or you will get shunned in this industry really damn quick.  News travels very fast.

Once you have some successful, or close to successful ad campaigns running, you will likely want to start refining those campaigns to maximize your profits.  Since, as mentioned earlier in this guide, you know jack shit about marketing, your only real option for doing this is by testing.  Split testing is simply the process of making two variations of part of your campaign, be it your ad, landing page, affiliate offer, whatever, and splitting your traffic between the two to find which works better.

Split Testing Ads

Split testing ads is easy with most of the popular PPC platforms such as Adwords, MSN Adcenter, Yahoo, etc.  The basic idea is, have 2 separate sets of ad copy running at all times, and periodically get rid of the one that does worse, and make a new one.  Some people (like nickycakes) do this as often as once a day, and some much less frequently, or not at all.

When starting out, it may be good to make several different ad copies, maybe like 5 or so, but make sure they are all very different.  After running the ad for a while, you can pick out the winner, and start split testing that ad by making very small variations.  Seriously, like only change ONE thing about the ad.  There are so many things to choose from, sentence structure, caps, no caps, display url, etc.  Just change one thing each time you’re split testing ads.

How do you know when the number of impressions the ads have gotten is enough to be statistically significant so you can make a proper decision?  Easy, just use this split testing calculator (thanks dr ngo): here.

Split Testing Landing Pages

This is a little more involved than ad copy split testing, but it’s the same idea.  Split traffic between two different landing pages to see which one converts better.  Your goals will probably be something like reducing bounce rate, increasing clickthrough rate to the offer, and increasing overall conversion rate on the offer.  To do this you will likely need a decent analytics package.  Here are some you may want to check out:

ClickTale (clicktale.com) – This one is a little pricy, but if you have the cash, it’s apparently well worth it.  It tracks literally everything you could want to track on a page.  Where people are clicking, how long they’re taking to enter information in a form field, whatever.

-CrazyEgg (crazyegg.com) – Much less expensive, but doesn’t quite track as much.  You probably want to look into this one if you don’t feel like shelling out a lot of money but want some solid analytics.

-ClickHeat - A free heatmap package.  Not too comprehensive.

-Google Analytics – Decent features and free, but not realtime.  If you’re cool with only being able to see your stats once a day, and not having that many useful stats to look at, its better than nothing.

-Google Website Optimizer – Ok, Nickycakes has never seen this one in action, but apparently it’s pretty good for doing split/multivariate testing on landing pages.  If anyone has some experience to share, please leave it in the comments.

Split Testing Offers

This one is extremely important.  There are so many similar offers out there that it’s impossible to tell which one is going to convert best with your landing page.  IGNORE the EPC data that the networks give you for the offers.  They are often meaningless bullshit, and will have no bearing on how well it will convert for you.  They could have had some idiot direct linking ppv traffic to the best offer on the network driving the EPC down to like 1/10th of what it will perform for you.  So, as usual, test for yourself.  Just like with ad copy split testing, assuming there are several choices for similar products, split test 2 of them, wait till you have enough data to determine which is the better offer, drop the underperformer, and split test the winner with a new offer.  Pretty simple.  If you have enough traffic you could, of course, just split it between all of them at once and find out the winner in a day.

Split Testing Call of Duty 4 Guns

So, which SMG is better? The P90 or the MP5?  Try 5 rounds with the P90 and then 5 rounds with the MP5 and see which one gets you more kills and headshots.  Obviously the mp5 is going to win hands down unless you’re spray-and-pray newbslice, but again, it’s good to test for yourself.

It’s worth starting off by saying that I am much more of a product peddling affiliate than one who promotes the kind of offers found on CPA networks. I make most of my money through Clickbank, which offers a HUGE number of products across various different niches you can promote. If you thought the only way to make money through Clickbank was by promoting crappy ‘get rich quick’ eBooks, the kind of stuff that Nickycakes vomits over, then your dead wrong. When it comes to Clickbank, you’ve got to be creative and not just look at the top performing ‘high gravity’ products.

Now the idea here is to produce a number of different content based ‘review’ sites promoting the same products in a small niche of your choice. You would then advertise each review website on Google through a separate Adwords account via the Adwords MCC (My Client Centre), allowing you to have all your review sites displayed for the exact same identical keyword search terms you are targeting in your campaigns.

If you target the same keywords in multiple campaigns within a single Adwords account, only the ads from one of your campaigns will be displayed at any one time to a user searching for one of your keywords. However, by creating new accounts through the Adwords’ MCC, you will be able to create a new campaign in each account and have all your ads in all your campaigns displayed for the same keyword search terms.

While I have personally not had any problems with Adwords for doing this, I’m assuming this really depends on how you go about implementing this method. If for example, your review sites all use the same content, are all under one domain through sub domains, and are blatantly there to promote one product, then don’t be surprised if Adwords comes down on you with a ban hammer.

Take note of the following if you are particularly worried about having your Adwords account banned:

• Make your content high quality – the higher the quality, the stronger the pre-sell
• Use separate domains – a no brainer, you MUST have a separate domain for each site
• Have new content written for each site – that means new reviews for the same products
• Use a new Clickbank account for each site – so you aren’t caught out by savvy competitors
• Cloak all your affiliate links – you should always do this anyway for obvious reasons

I normally outsource all of my reviews to inexpensive ghost writers. I then check over all the content written for me by my writers and I always end up making changes to the content so it actually functions like a good sales copy. For the actual sites, I use Wordpress with a free theme slapped on. There are tons of themes to choose from, and you can easily have it modified into a review style site. If you can’t modify themes on your own or don’t want to hire someone to do it for you, there are a few review style themes you can choose from as well. Google it.

Three final points worth considering:

1. I use this particular strategy to promote paid products as an affiliate. I’ve always been more comfortable investing my time and money into developing content rich review sites for products which don’t have an expiry date. This allows me to optimise my sites for the search engines without worrying about the offer expiring, in addition to gaining a large share of PPC traffic which would otherwise have gone to my competitors. Having said that, there is no reason you can’t use this method to promote CPA offers via the PPC > landing page > offer approach.
2. This strategy works best for smaller niches which aren’t madly saturated with competition. Dominating small niches in the sponsored links section of the Google SERPs through multiple placements is far easier and more effective than to attempt to do the same for a much larger and more competitive niche.
3. Don’t start all your campaigns at once. I had one campaign running for months before I started a new campaign advertising a new site on a new Adwords account. That put aside, you want to know your first campaign is generating a solid profit before you go onto expanding, otherwise you will feel like an idiot if your three new campaigns on your three different accounts fail en masse.

The main point of this post was to make you aware of how you can put your Adwords MCC to good use. I also spend as much time and money on PPC as I do on building links to my site and developing site content for SEO purposes. There is nothing better than having your websites listed at the top of Google’s organic AND paid listings, no matter how small the niche is. In fact, the smaller the niche, the easier it is for you to dominate it.

I didn’t really get into any real depth here, mostly because I’m lazy, but hopefully you should have gained several ideas from this post.

Cheers,

Amin