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3 Principles For Successful Online Ad Campaigns

written by Guest Blogger on February 3, 2012

I’d like to share 3 principles for online advertising that I frequently see marketers (especially new marketers) get wrong. Let’s jump right in:

1 – Create & Test Ads That Are Radically Different From One Another

It is important to create and test ads that are as different as possible from one another. There are two reasons for this:

Reason #1: Small differences from one ad to the next usually mean small differences in how they perform. Big, dramatic differences from one ad to the next frequently result in big, dramatic differences in how they perform. If you want the increase the chances of hitting a home run with one of your ads, go for big differences.
Reason #2: When have a big performance difference between your ads, it will take less time, and a smaller budget, to determine the best performing ad.

Example A: Let’s say you’ve split-tested two similar-looking ads. After 10,000 impressions for each of them, Ad A has received 85 clicks, and Ad B has received 90 clicks. Which is the best performing ad in terms of CTR? The answer is: You don’t know – the numbers are too close to make any conclusions! You’re going to need to spend a lot more time (and money) running the ads to get statistically significant data.

Example B: Let’s say that your ads looked radically different from each other and therefore got very different CTRs. After 10,000 impressions each, Ad A has received 30 clicks, and Ad B has received 170 clicks. In this scenario Ad B is the clear winner in terms of CTR. Ad B also got a high CTR that you would likely never have gotten if you had only tested a few subtle variations on Ad A.

There IS a time to test smaller tweaks to your ads. The time is after you have already determined a high performing ad and want to improve it even further. But don’t miss out on your chance to discover that high performing ad in the first place!

2 – Beautiful Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Better!

Ugly and unprofessional looking ads frequently perform better than beautiful professional-looking ads.

It’s anyone’s guess as to why ugly ads work well; mine is that they stand out more. “Banner blindness” kicks in when your banners look too much like all the other banners that people are constantly seeing.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an ad that looks like it was designed in MS Paint by a 5 year old outperform a slick professional ad that looks like it was designed by Michelangelo.

New affiliate marketers sometimes get discouraged because they can’t design ads that look as good as the ones provide by a merchant. Don’t worry about looks; worry about performance. And don’t assume anything about how your ads will perform – test them to find out – you’ll be surprised at how hard it is to predict which ones will perform best.

3 – Click Through Rates Matter… But Conversion Rates Matter More

There seems to be an undue obsession with CTRs among many internet marketers.

The CTRs of your ads certainly ARE important. Ads with higher CTRs generate more traffic and can also mean lower CPCs (depending on your ad network). But CTRs are not the most important statistic to look at.

Example:

Say that you’re split testing two ads…

Ad A has a 1% CTR and a CPC of $0.50.
Ad B has a 2% CTR and a CPC of $0.25.

You’re paying half as much per click for Ad B so at first glance it looks like Ad B is better, and it might be. But it also might not be. If you look at your conversion rates you might see that Ad B has a 1% conversion rate (per click) whereas Ad A has a 5% conversion rate (per click).

Let’s look at the math. Say you spend $100 on clicks for each ad:

Ad A (CPC $0.50) gets 200 clicks from the $100. With its 5% conversion rate, Ad A generates 10 conversions from its 200 clicks.
Ad B (CPC $0.25) gets 400 clicks from the $100. With its 1% conversion rate, Ad A generates 4 conversions from its 400 clicks.

Do you see what happened? You spent $100 on each ad, and Ad A got more conversions even though it had a lower CTR.

Conversions (not CTR) are what ultimately determine your return on investment, and that’s what really matters!

Wrapping Up

Remember the internet marketer’s mantra: Test, test, test! Constantly testing new ads and optimizing your campaigns is the only way to lasting success.

To view case studies from campaigns that other internet marketers have run, check out AdChop.com. AdChop shares case studies from a variety of sources, including campaigns that promoted Clickbank products.

Justin Clark is an affiliate marketer who runs AdChop.com, a growing collection of internet marketing case studies.

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The Best Products for Bloggers To Sell On The Internet

written by John Chow on February 2, 2012

You know you need your own product in order to stand out from the crown and realize the maximum income from blogging. Now the question is, what is the best product to sell?

Long before I got into blogging, I was an Internet marketing and sold countless things on the Internet. Of all the things that I’ve sold, by far the easiest and most profitable was the information product.

Information products are eBooks, downloadable software, membership sites and any other products that are delivery electronically and have no psychical shipping and handling.

What makes information products so much better than any other products? The reasons are many but they can be boil down to these main ones.

They Are Easy To Create

Most bloggers have enough blog posts to make many eBooks. My first info product was created by taking a collection of posts from my blog and repackaging it.

You may think that your readers would never go for an eBook of repackaged blog posts but you’ll be wrong. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have many pages of blog posts, most new readers are never going to check your archives. As far as they’re concern, all the content in your eBook is brand new. Even if the reader has been a long time reader and read most of your posts, chances are he would have forgotten most of it so to him, your eBook would be new as well.

Cost of Goods Sold Is Near Zero

The nice thing about an info product is the cost of goods sold is practically zero since there’s really no per unit production cost. All the costs are tied up in the initial creation and that can be near zero as well depending on how you go about producing it.

I used to have an online store that sold computer cables and accessories. One of the reasons I chose that niche was because of the high mark up and I was able to pay affiliates a 20% commission and still make money. However, as high as the mark up was, it’s nowhere close to the mark up that an information product can achieve.

Because your cost of good sold is next to zero, you can afford to offer affiliates an insane commission level and still make money on it. Look at some of the info products on Clickbank. Many of them pay up to 80% commission!

Pricing Is Based on Value

Because an information product is all electronic and has no psychical presence, the pricing is based on value instead of on looks and feel.

When you go to a store and see a product, you form a price in your mind based on how the product looks because you’re buying the product you see in front of you. With an info product, you’re not really buying the words in the eBook or the presentation in the video. You based the price on what the information is worth to you. You’re buying the effects those words and images can create if you apply them.

Pricing of info products can be all over the map. They range from free to thousands of dollars. And since the value is in the information and not the form its delivered in, you’ll come across thousand items that can be considered a great bargain to free items that can be considered a waste of time.

Price Changes By Changing The Delivery Medium

The information on most blogs are free. Unless you’re the Wall Street Journal, you simply won’t be able to charge a subscription fee for their content. However, if you move your content to a different medium, the situation changes.

For example, if you repackaged your blog posts into an eBook, you might be able to sell it for a few bucks or use it as a bride to get your readers email address.

Now take that eBook and turn it into a real book and it will sell $20 or so. The information is the same (with a few updates here and there) but because the delivery medium has changed, so has the price.

Take that book and turn it into an online course and the price changes again. Take the online course and turn it into a live seminar and again the price will change.

Through all this, the core information has not change but the price went from free to many hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.

Why would people pay thousands of dollars to attend a Rich Dad Poor Dad seminar when they can get the same information by simply reading the book? Because people place difference value on the delivery medium. A live seminar is seem to be worth more than a book.

By repackaging your information product into a new medium, you extend the life of the product and will make more money.

Scales Easily – Everything Can Be Automated

By far the most attractive feature of an info product is its ability to scale and be fully automated. When you have a physical product, scaling becomes a lot harder. You have to buy more raw good, hire more people, expand facilities, etc. With an info product, you just get a bigger server.

Thanks to numerous software, both paid and free, the selling of information products can be fully automated. And that’s really the key to this whole thing. You want to automate everything so the income becomes passive. This gives you time to do the more important things in life.

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5 Lessons Bloggers Can Learn from Weight Loss

written by Guest Blogger on February 1, 2012

I’ve been working on losing weight for some time now and it has been quite a challenge. A lot of things have happened unexpected and I’m still adapting myself to some of those things right now. One thing, though, is that the journey has been quite adventurous and it is full of lots of great lessons.

Thinking about my weight loss experience brought some things to light about blogging success, and I’ll be sharing some of them with you below.

1. Plan Things from the Get Go

One major thing I realized with losing weight is that you have to plan things from the get go. You need to know what kind of results you want to get from your weight loss efforts and how to go about it. No, you don’t just wake up in the morning and start running today, then you wake up in the afternoon the following day and decide to do push-ups. What do you want to achieve, and what kind of plan will accelerate you towards achieving it?

The same applies to blogging!

Bloggers need to learn to plan from the beginning, and I’m not talking about mind mapping your goal for the next few years. Instead, I’m talking about having a solid plan aided by a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Bound) goal system. By this, I mean you shouldn’t create plans about things you have no knowledge about or just based on assumptions.

When you see a lot of new bloggers today and ask them what their plans are for their new blog the first thing they will tell you is that they want to be making $20,000 a month from blogging in 6 months time. For God’s sake! Even though it is entirely possible to make money blogging, it is plans like these that burn people out and makes them give up, and as a result they end up believing blogging doesn’t work.

Planning is good, but you can’t plan what you know nothing about. Always be ready to plan as a blogger but make sure your plan is S.M.A.R.T.

2. Always be ready to evolve Your Plan

Like I said above, it is totally impossible for you to plan what you know nothing about, so while the above planning I’m referring to might be something basic you need to be ready to evolve it as your knowledge increases.

One other thing I learned from learning to lose weight is that the same trick that worked for someone else might not work for you, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it either. Instead, include it in your plan, monitor it for a few weeks to see how it works and let your plan evolve accordingly. If something doesn’t work for you, don’t just follow it blindly. Let your plan evolve, keep on learning and trying new things and you will be on your way to success.

3. Early to Rise, Early to Bed

Just like Benjamin Franklin says in his book, The Way to Wealth; early to rise, early to bed makes a man wealthy, healthy and wise. This particular saying has been so helpful to me when trying to lose weight and I have also noticed it is completely applicable to blogging.

I have never seen someone interested in losing weight jugging or exercising in the afternoon, inside the hot sun, and I rarely see people planning to lose weight exercising in the evening either. Most bloggers live a very unhealthy lifestyle not because they eat junk food, but because they spend too much time sleeping and hardly make effective use of the most productive time of the day, the morning.

If you want to succeed as a blogger you need to make it a principle to rise early and you need to look for a way to get the best out of your morning, just exactly like someone losing weight will make use of the morning for most of his/her exercise.

4. Don’t EVER Give Up

Not for a single day…or even a minute.

If you’re trying to lose weight and you lose a day because it is not comfortable for you that might be spelling disaster for your plan. Comfort is what makes us lax, or even give up sometimes. Make sure you don’t give comfort a chance.

Yes, I know your reason for blogging is to be comfortable but you should also realize that there is time for everything. It can spell disaster for you if you give up now because missing a single day will lead you to missing the next…and before you know it your blogging will be on the verge of collapse.

Yes, blogging is difficult, but that is the fun of it. If it were so easy everyone will be doing it. Keep pushing harder, keep persevering and never give up…not even for a minute. You will have yourself to thank for it soon enough.

So you get an idea of what I mean, Problogger and six figure blogger, Darren Rowse, published at least a post on his Problogger blog every day for years, and even after commemorating his 5000th blog post on Problogger he said he has never missed a day, not one! That’s what it takes to succeed!

5. Invest, and take care of, Your Emotions

What weight loss also taught me is that success in every field requires both physical and emotional investments. In other words, marketing the hell out of your blog and writing a lot of good articles would do little to help if you are not emotionally invested in your blog.

Take a look at example of successful bloggers – such as Darren Rowse, Brian Clark and John Chow – and you will notice that one thing they all have in common is that they are passionate about their blogging. They believe in it, they have dreams about it and it is one of the few things they wake up to every day. In other words, they don’t just plan for success, they are committed to it.

Blogging when you don’t believe in blogging will only hurt you because you will always fail with that kind of mindset. The real key to success is to really believe in what you’re doing, be passionate about it and never give up, and you’ll be able to achieve success sooner than you expect.

Are You Doing These Things?

These are some great adventures in weight loss for me and while losing weight is a good thing, something even better is that I have learned some lessons to help my blogging. Do you think all these lessons are applicable? Share your thoughts below in the comments section!

This is a guest article written by John, an expert that helps people get Bistro MD coupon and Diet to Go Coupon.

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The Most Profitable Way To Make Money Online

written by John Chow on January 31, 2012

When it comes to making money online, most bloggers stick to the tried and true advertising model. They might add a few more revenue channels, but the most parts, they will stick to advertising or promoting affiliate products. There is nothing wrong witch sticking to the advertising model. It can be quite profitable. However, if you want to get into the big money, then you should really look at creating your own product. Here’s why.

It’s The Most Profitable Way To Make Money Online

Of all the methods there are to making money by blogging, by far the most profitable is by selling your own product.

Having your own product means there’s no wholesale or middle-man markup. You get to keep all the money. I have done very well promoting other people’s product but I’ve made the most by selling products that I control or have an interest in.

You Have Total Control

When you sell your own product, you have total control over it and can control its quality. You don’t have to worry about whether the company your promoting will deliver to your readers or whether they will even pay you.

This level of control will give you great piece of mind. You know that you’re delivering a quality product to your readers instead of some affiliate product that you may have not tried yourself.

It’s Easier To Sell Your Own Product

From my experience, it’s far easier to sell your own product than it is to market someone else’s. If you’ve build up a good relationship with your readers, they will trust you and will be receptive to any offer you send them. However, they will be far more receptive if the offer is one of your own product.

Your readers know you and know the quality of work you put out. If something has your name on it, they’ll be much likely to buy than if it’s just a product that you recommend. This makes the product much easier to sell.

In fact, chances are you just need to present it instead of trying to do clever sales job. Before launching Blog Profit Camp, I pre-sold over a dozen copies even before writing any of the course of the sales copies. Word got out that I was launching a new product and some readers wanted it even before I started on it.

It Increase Your Brand Name

Being able to show your own product is great brand building tool. My first product was an eBook and it help to separate me from all the other bloggers out there. Then I wrote a real book that you can buy at book stores or Amazon.com and that really help to elevate my brand.

When you have a something that the blogger next door doesn’t have, it gives you a leg up and makes you unique in a very crowded field.

The increased brand name has its own rewards. Not only are you more well known but there’s an entire site income to be made from speaking engagement. Since publishing my book, Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul, I’ve received many invitation to speak at various conferences and trade shows. Not only does this increase my brand even more but it also means my conference trip is fully paid for.

What separates you from the other 100+ million blogs in the blogosphere? Most bloggers can’t answer this question. Well, the easiest way to separate yourself is by having your own product.

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What You Must Do To In Order To Sell Your Site

written by Guest Blogger on January 30, 2012

I know on the Chinese calendar 2011 was the year of the Rabbit, but in the online world it was definitely the year of the PANDA!

As most of you are aware, Google unleashed several updates to its algorithm in 2011 to clean up the search results and make them more relevant for the users. As a result, there were thousands, if not millions, of sites that got affected by this for better or for worse. For all the webmasters who make a living online, it was a fun ride to say the least.

As someone who sells sites for a living, I was contacted by hundreds of webmasters who were looking to sell their sites. Pretty much all of the conversations with these webmasters had the same outcome. They would ask me what their site was worth and I first asked them what they made from it the prior year (2010). I would get all sorts of responses for that question, but my follow up question: “Did you get hit by Google’s Panda update?” got me the same response almost every time. “Yes, it did, and my revenues and traffic have decreased ever since”.

It seems like when most webmasters got the rug pulled from underneath them, they were quick to give me a call to try and sell their sites. The biggest problem with doing that is it was almost impossible to put a proper price tag on the website. You certainly could not price it on what it was doing prior to Google’s update even though webmasters wanted it to be priced that way. However, it did not make sense to price them on post Panda earnings either as many people knew there was another update on the way that may reduce earnings and traffic even more. As you can imagine, that’s a less then ideal scenario for a seller or a purchaser.

It was a tough time in 2011 for webmasters who experienced this, but there was light at the end of the tunnel. Most webmasters got smart, learned from their mistakes, and are now slowly seeing the fruits of their labor. Some sites just did not stand a chance after Google’s updates, but quite a fair number of them are seeing their traffic go back up by doing the right things.

At our Web brokerage firm, WeSellYourSite.com, we evaluate sites on a daily basis. We probably look at 50-100 sites per week and determine if they make a good investment or a bad one. Google’s update made things a little challenging for us in that regard, but it was nothing we could not handle. We simply passed on the sites affected by Panda and focused on the quality sites in sellable niches.

Some of the most popular/sellable niches last year and moving forward include:

Group Buying
Couponing Sites
Free Sample Sites
E-Cig Affiliate Sites
Forums (covering all sorts of topics)
Drop-Shipping Businesses (E-commerce sites that hold no inventory and ship direct from the suppliers)
Viral marketed entertainment sites
Affiliate driven content focused properties

Many sites in these niches were bought and sold in 2011, but all of the sites, regardless of the niche, had a few things in common:

They all had proper bookkeeping.
If you are operating a website and thinking of selling down the road, be sure to keep track of all of your revenue and expenses from the first day your business starts operating. Use any reputable accounting software (we use Quickbooks and Freshbooks) and just make sure that all revenue generated is provable via bank statements, merchant statements and/or tax returns . Separate earnings and expenses by specific website properties and do not mash them into one.
They all had a history of generating income.
All of the sites that were sold were able to show at least 12 months of income. As well, the income was either steady or growing rather than decreasing month over month.
They all did not get hit by Google’s Panda Update.
Website buyers/investors were simply scared and turned off if they saw a site that lost its revenue and traffic due to Panda. They were scared that it will happen again and could not stomach making such a risky investment.
They were all priced between 2 and 3.5 times net profits over and above $50,000.
This is the range where deals happen. Website Sellers who want more than this often really do not want to sell but would sell if they got a price that the market is not willing to bear.

If you want to sell, DO THESE THINGS!! Regardless of the type of site you are operating, please keep these points in mind when considering a sale and valuation.

All this being said, these are the types of quality sites that website brokers like us sell on a regular basis. There are certainly other sites that get sold that do not fit these criteria and can be found on any number of website selling marketplaces online.

The websites selling marketplace is still in its infancy. Even though webmasters have been buying and selling sites for several years, there is still a much higher demand for quality sites in the marketplace yet the supply remains low.

Whether you are just starting out or already established, make sure to keep in mind what we have mentioned here as you will be well on your way to getting the best value for your site when you are ready to exit.