The product which had been speculated to run into the thousands during the product’s pre-launch phase, has finally been revealed to cost only $77 (accurate at the time of this blog post, but might be revised…).

What do you get from that?

A comprehensive 9-module course spanning topics like:

• Marketing research, including finding and screening affiliate offers
• Keyword research
• Direct linking vs creating landing pages
• Setting up your Google AdWords campaign
• Designing landing pages optimized for high conversions
• Understanding and enhancing your Google quality score (QS)
• Launching your PPC campaign
• Introducing split testing into your campaign (to further increase conversions)
• PPC bid optimization strategies

Having worked with Amit on a PPC coaching program for a select group of clients previously, I have seen firsthand how he goes through in a detailed, step-by-step manner the system which he has developed and follows.

Granted about 60% of the course material might be found on Amit’s SuperAffiliateMindset blog or in Google AdWords documentation or during his presentations at events like the first PPC Classroom live event in Vegas last year or in his Affiliate Summit presentations.

What makes Amit different from other affiliate marketers is how he goes about giving you a system with step-by-step detailed instructions on setting up your PPC affiliate campaigns.

I say “first hand” because as a PPC newbie, I was the “guinea pig” during our coaching process, and I got direct instructions from Amit as I was setting up the campaign (and got feedback and pointers when I messed up).

By the second week of his guided coaching, I was able to break even on my PPC spend, and turn a small profit.

Where I think Amit is relentless is in optimizing his campaigns, especially in going “a mile deep” to extract the maximum profit from each niche he’s involved in.

[If you’ve listened to his recent PPC Classroom interviews, you’d know that the bulk of his income comes from just THREE niches].

If you’re looking for great value, you can’t go wrong with his PPC Classroom course.

Where I think PPC Classroom stands out from the pack of similar products in the market is the business management elements he’s added to the course.

In particular, it’s how your structure your business that will ultimately create the lifestyle and the income you desire.

If you look at the PPC Classroom’s sales page, I’m refering to bonus #9, #10 and #11 – which deal with:

• The super affiliate mindset (also the name of his blog)
• Time management and productivity secrets
• How to build a super affiliate dream team

The “Super Affiliate Millionaire Code” covers the mental skills that successful affiliates need to possess. Having the technical and theoretical knowledge is one thing, but having the “inner game” skills or mental mindset is another.

A new season of “The Pickup Artist” has recently debuted on VH1 and not suprisingly, successful pickup artists and successful affiliates have a lot in common. In this report, Amit covers the strategies he uses to get himself “in the zone” to suceeded.

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The second guide “Time management and productivity secrets” might as well be entitled “the lazy affiliate’s guide to success”. In it, he talks about his lifestyle, sleeping 8-9 hours a day and working 4-6 hours a day.

Here’s a hint. I’ve often written that quality overrides quantity in most cases. Amit likewise similarly shows through what he does in his own business, how you can accomplish more in your business (and personal life) with less time.

Amit reveals that taking time out to plan your tasks and projects is responsible for a big chunk of his success.

If you’ve been to affiliate conferences, you’ll notice that the trend seems to be for successful affiliates to be over their ideal weight. In this guide, Amit reveals several methods he uses to manage his physiology or physical states, including his diet, health and nutrition, and maximizing his energy and concentration levels.

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The third report on building a Super Affiliate Dream Team will be an important reference for experienced affiliates who’re building their businesses and bringing them to a new level.

Almost every business owner will know that the key to scaling and growing your business will usually lie in either:

• Automating your business systems through computers and software (as top affiliate John Hasson has done)
• Building a team and/or outsourcing tasks to specialists

Regardless of your choice, it’s important to focus on your role as a project manager or overseer, rather than to go down the solopreneur or do-it-yourself route.

Amit provides specific examples of how he conceptualized, planned, outsourced and launched a project from start-to-finish, and smart marketers will be able to piece together their own team building or outsourcing framework from the steps laid out.

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Aside from the core materials which will give a strong foundation to new PPC marketers, and give an insight into Amit’s marketing techniques, in my opinion, experienced internet marketers will probably gain the most from the 3 additional reports dealing with the business management and business growth elements of your internet business.

Be sure to check out Amit Mehta and Anik Singal’s PPC Classroom 2.0.

Just as celebrity fans check the magazines to find out who’s dating who, what they wore to the MTV awards, or who they’re currently feuding with, likewise in the internet marketing world, legions of marketers constantly scour the blogs and forums to find out what a successful marketer’s shopping trip cost, how much they paid (or overpaid) for a rare painting, or just pictures of their $1,000 dinner.

While reading this news can be a source of motivation for some, the risk in spending just about all your time on this pursuit can be detrimental to your business growing efforts.

I’ve been talking to my friend NickyCakes about issues of time management and prioritization, here are a couple of issues for consideration:

• Prioritization: Are you spending 90% of your time relaxing, spending your time checking out cool stuff to buy, planning your next vacation, researching your business (ie: reading blogs and forums, chatting over IRC), leaving 10% of your time to actually running your business? Or should it be the other way around?
• Focus: How much of what you are doing now will help you get what you want? Or could that time be better spending doing something more productive?
• “Secrets” of Internet Marketing: As mentioned by guests on the Friday Podcast, although you can learn strategies and techniques from blogs, forums, books, courses and networking at seminars and conferences, ultimately your success will rely on taking action, as well as testing and measuring your results. If you’re looking for a magic wand or magic dust to achieved your desired income level, you could be looking for a long time.

You can check out Harrison’s tips on setting up his PPC campaigns.

Although I shouldn’t have been that surprised, still it’s quite amazing how different their approaches are from each other. Which goes to show that there are multiple avenues to achieve your goals with PPC and affiliate marketing.

Note: I’ll be painting in broad strokes here, so expect some generalizations.

(left-to-right) Jeremy Palmer, Amit Mehta, John Hasson

Jeremy Palmer is a name that comes up often, especially if you’re a Commission Junction (CJ) affiliate or if you attend the Affiliate Summit. I’ve found that Jeremy and I use a similar approach in looking at offline research avenues, including books, magazines and reports to research niches, and develop deep, content rich sites.

Given his experience as a web developer, I guess it’s not surprising that he tends to build sites from the ground up. Also, having presented and watched his Black Ink project unfold, I’ve seen how Jeremy uses a systematic approach to building his campaigns.

You can check out Jeremy’s appearance on the Friday Podcast.

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Amit Mehta has spoken at the past 3 Affiliate Summits, and given his background as a researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, it’s not suprising how he has a rigorous process to set up keywords and test them. In particular, his PPC optimization process and use of statistics, as well as split-test are among his strongest competitive edge.

Not forgetting that Amit’s quite the “mindset” man in my book (You would not expect anything less from someone who blogs at the SuperAffiliateMindset.com blog). His mental attitude and “inner game” skills sets him apart from many affiliates. Also, his business acumen and ability to scale his business through team building and outsourcing are pretty impressive.

You can check out Amit’s recent appearance on the Friday Podcast.

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John Hasson might not be a name that you are familiar with, unless you’ve attended the last 2 Affiliate Summits where John has spoken at. With his background as a programmer/developer, I was very impressed at the level of automation and scripting that John uses in his PPC campaigns.

Having developed a number of shareware applications and his experience as a Microsoft .Net developer gives him an edge, especially when it comes to interfacing with merchant and affiliate networks APIs and backend systems.

John came out with a number of great insights, especially for new affiliates.

Stay tune for John’s appearance on this week’s Friday Podcast (coming out on Friday!)

Just about any PPC marketer will be concerned if they get an email like this because AdWords downtime could translate into a significant of profits.

Before you jump to the page and entering your account information, I checked that the HTML email was going to a *.cn (China-based) domain, so it would be pretty unwise to enter your username or your password.

Mozilla Firefox had earlier been patched with a “phishing site” notification, similarly Internet Explorer showed a similar warning when I tried to access the site.

Just take note of the destination URLs in your emails before clicking on them, also if needed view the message headers and you can usually spot their point of origination (unlikely that the Adwords team would be sending notification emails out of Africa or Russia).

There was also a port about this at KezNews.

So the question is “Was it worth a 20+ hour plane ride each way?”

Certainly a resounding YES!

I got to meet a bunch of great people and the stellar cast of speakers presented great content. Now it’s a matter of hunkering down and putting some of those ideas into practise.

The turnout was very respectable with the room filled to the gills…

It was great to hear how Anik took one of his info product sites, added CPA offers to it and have it generated $42,000+ to date this year.

Andrew Wee and Anik Singal

Just as you’re seeing a convergence of search marketing and PPC marketing, I believe the worlds of info marketing and lead generation/affiliate marketing are going to draw closer in the coming year.

Andrew Wee, Kirt Christensen, Greg Cesar

I look to Kirt Christensen as one of the pioneers in Internet Marketing, together with his partner, Terry Dean.

It was certainly illuminating to hear about his strategies for positioning yourself as a PPC management agency and it was pretty impressive hearing about some of the biggest Internet marketers he manages PPC campaigns for.

Greg Cesar is someone who’s in my mastermind and this was the first opportunity I got to meet him. It was refreshing to hear about some of his unconventional approaches to affiliate marketing, and he talked about how he uses one media channel (still untapped by almost all internet marketers) to go gang busters, especially on affiliate offers.

If anything, I am finding that the networking opportunity far outweighs the learning from the content sessions. I met Andre Chaperon who was top affiliate for the PPC Classroom promotion, Ryan Kaltman (AKA “Magic Ryan”, the Rich Jerk’s business partner). Ryan’s like a ball of energy and having him show gross YouTube videos during a posh dinner certainly breaks the monotony of it all. (plus some unmentionables which I’ll not go into here…)

After working on a number of projects, I finally got to meet up with my business partner, PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta.

Greg Cesar, Amit Mehta, Andrew Wee

If you have caught Amit’s Affiliate Summit East presentation, then you know that Amit delivers 110% on his content.

His keynote speech and presentation at PPC Classroom Live were no exception…

One thing that newer internet marketers fail to grasp is the mindset element, and there’s an overemphasis on the tactical elements (eg. landing pages, keyword lists, quality score). If you take a step back, you’d realize that the business systems and mindset are what makes you the mega bucks…

Simon Leung, Andrew Wee

Simon Leung’s changed his look from his avatar, so here’s how he looks now.

I was pretty jet lagged, so I had to crash during his talk.

Andrew Wee, Ros Gardner

It was my first time meeting Ros Gardner too. We had just missed each other at Affiliate Summit West earlier this year.

She did an interesting presentation, comparing her $1+ million earnings against Jeremy Palmer’s $1+ million earnings and doing an analysis on how their methods differ.

If anything, her disclosure that blogs are the main platform that she uses, ties in with what I’ve been hearing from other super affiliates recently.

David Bullock, Andrew Wee

Dave Bullock’s talk on Taguchi testing certainly raised my awareness on the specific details about Taguchi testing. It’s not something I’d do right now (split testing seems sufficient for now), but perhaps in the future.

Super Affiliate Accelerator Insider’s Breakfast

On Sunday, Amit and I hosted an Insider’s Breakfast for our Super Affiliate Accelerator breakfast.

It was great meeting up with the Super Affiliate Accelerator members and share some techniques to bring their business and their campaigns to the next level.

Affiliate Radar Rakeesh, Andrew Wee, Mark Roth

I’d spoken to Affiliate Radar creator Mark Roth a number of times and was involved in the launch of Affiliate Radar, so it was great to meet up with Mark and Rakeesh.

I also met Jay Stockwell who developed SpeedPPC.

And if you need proof of the Affiliate Classroom team’s dedication…

Rachel Honoway, Andrew Wee

Affiliate Classroom VP of Marketing Rachel Honoway lost her voice during the event.

After some googling, I discovered that “Vegas Throat” is common, and is mainly due to the dry desert air.

I’ve made a mental note to bring some “Pi Pa Gao” a Chinese herbal throat/cough mixture, so I’ll be fully prepared to speak at Affiliate Summit West in February.

Did you know that some entertainers (specifically singers) will not perform in Vegas due to possible damage to their vocal chords due to Vegas Throat?

Interesting…

After the event, we headed to the Voodoo Lounge on the 51st floor of the Rio, and here’s a shot of the skyline:

It was good to chill after the event:

Evelyn Grazini, Ros Gardner, Rachel Honoway

And here’s a pic of Anik and Ros getting jiggly with it…

So the next time I’ll be in Vegas will be in February for Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit West where I’ll be on the Media Panel, moderated by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille, together with Anik Singal and Valerie Stevens (Insight Magazine Online)

Here’s a couple of techniques to bump your CTR (clickthrough rate) and conversions:

• Behavioral-based bid management

Research shows that consumers are surfing shopping sites and doing price comparisons during work hours. Bump your ad positions during office hours to get better ad positioning (and consequently, higher conversions).

• Match your consumers stage in the buying cycle

Your keywords determine your websites’ visitor profile. For buyers early in the buying cycle, they’d be looking for information, product reviews, so create an appropriate content site.

Buyers in the later stage, primed to buy, will be looking for coupon codes, bonuses, and other goodies, so a coupon site or inventive site will convert better for that demographic.

• Highly targeted landing pages

Spend more time focusing on targeted and highly relevant keywords. Instead of “holiday events”, shoot for adgroups containing “holiday ice skating show” or “holiday ice capades” pointing at a page containing specific event information and you’ll see your profits spike.

• Specific buy phrases

Especially during the holiday season, consumers might be typing buying phrases like “gifts for dad”, “electronics under $25” or “xbox360 christmas promotion”. Include these in your campaign and get ready for the ka-ching to come in…

For more tips, visit: Industry Newsletters for Holiday Season

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My Answer:
There’s a lot of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) being spread, especially by marketers who aren’t using paid traffic, typically certain members of the Web 2.0 fraternity.

Yes, you can lose lots of money, and not generate a single sale, but only if you don’t have a plan in mind. I was in that category before, bidding on low competition keywords, having subscribed to the “long tail keyword” strategy.

The fact is that with quality score playing a dominant role in Google AdWords, you will need to bid reasonable prices to get the conversions.

I have a stock portfolio which generates 10-20% on an annualized basis. If you’ve refined your PPC campaigns and are able to generate at least 50% on a monthly basis, you’ve outperformed most of the mutual funds and equity funds in the market.

So let’s look at some PPC newbie pitfalls:

• Not enough keywords in your adwords campaign

If you’ve only 20-200 keyphrases in your campaign, it might only generate a handful of clickthroughs and even fewer sales per day.

Reasonably you should have at least 1,000 keywords in your campaign to see good results.

• Poor choice of keywords

It’s not just enough to choose cheap or low competition keywords, you need to have an idea of the type of keywords your intended clicker will be typing, regardless of whether you expect them to complete a CPA offer or buy an affiliate product.

Bad match? A key indicator is if you’re getting good clickthroughs and poor conversions. While it’s easy to blame it on a poor landing page, the more fundamental issue is your keyword list.

• Insufficient ad budget

While it’s ambitious to want to generate great results from your PPC campaign, it’s going to be difficult to do that with a $5-10 daily budget. A budget should be the result of working backwards from your outcome/result.

You also need to understand your market. If you’re planning to do an ultra competitive area like webhosting, you might do better with a $100-200 daily budget given the high commission payouts and even greater competition in that niche.

• The “Fire and forget” mentality

Successful PPC marketers will tell you that keyword research, setting up the campaign and launching it is only 10% of the battle. The rest lies in being able to effectively optimize your campaign.

Optimize in this case, goes way beyond merely making changes to your bid prices.

The optimization process is a reflection of your optimization strategy – you need to know whether you need to increase your traffic, improve the quality of your traffic, or adopt a different strategy.

Google already provides a powerful suite of tools and analytics package. If you fail to use them, you do so at your own peril.

As you evolve your PPC strategies, you’ll see that PPC is systematic in nature and there’s “more than meets the eye”.

Which PPC Ebook Should I Buy?

The first challenge, PPC marketers will face is the plethora of PPC ebooks (primarily focused on AdWords) out there. There’s a large number of PPC-focused forums and affiliate marketing forums with large PPC sub-sections.

So which do you choose?

Before buying anything, I’d suggest time checking out the AdWords Help Center and reading the Inside AdWords blog. (They’re both FREE).

As you know, I buy just about every Internet marketing product out there and a number of AdWords “Insider” ebooks merely rehash the content contained with the Help Center.

So save your $47 (use it for your PPC costs instead) and check out the resources, the Google AdWords team has provided for free…

Can I Test Google AdWords For Free?

If you’re new to using paid traffic, you might have a slight phobia as I did (as I’ve been using free social traffic generation methods to bring traffic to my sites). But here’s a way to get free adwords traffic.

There’s a number of free AdWords coupons out there (so you can have a free PPC trial if you choose to).

You can google for “$25 AdWords Coupon”, “$35 AdWords coupon”, “$50 AdWords coupon” and “$100 AdWords coupon” (which seems to be the denomination that these coupons come in).

They aren’t always available though, but your web hosting account normally comes with some credits.

Ok, The Traffic Has Come In. But Not The Profits!

Now here’s the challenge for new PPC marketers:

• Not bidding on enough keywords: It’s great to have a precision, sniper-like approach to PPC, trying to aim for the 5-10 successful sales-converting keyphrases when you’re starting out. But you’re unlikely to know what they are unless you test sufficiently.
• Bidding on too many keywords: I applied a number of Amit’s techniques and generated a keyword list containing 2,000 keyphrases. As I sorted them out, I realized that I put in a number of terms which might not convert, so I had to go back and remove them. But then I’d created other problems for myself…

One key realization that PPC Super Affiliates are using (and that I’m starting to get a handle on) is to have a detailed game plan in mind. Among the points, your “PPC business plan” needs to contain:

• What type of traffic you’re planning to attract
• What specific keywords and keyphrases will attract that traffic profile
• The ads which will get them to click
• What action they’re supposed to take once they’ve clicked to your site
• What will motivate them to take the action
• How to create an incentive or motivate them to come back again (so your lead generation cost for the 2nd and subsequent visit is marginal or cost nothing)

As you can see, the strategy is more important than the action in any PPC Campaign.

The problem is that most new PPC marketers will logon to AdWords and “figure things out”, typing whatever comes to mind, rather than have a set plan.

That’s just like going to war without a game plan and shooting at anything that moves…Good luck…

If you engage in pointless actions, like submitting a 50,000 keyword list which is irrelevant and untargeted to your traffic, it WILL NOT convert, even if you’re paying $0.01 per click.

Having a game plan is very essential or having someone show you their game plan is critical to your success.

Having worked with Amit on a marketing campaign recently, which generated more than 700% ROI on our PPC spend, it’s very clear that our Super Affiliate Accelerator project is going to yield some interesting results.

Here’re some of the more hotly debated items from the the AdWords blog post “Websites that may merit low landing page  quality score“:

 Types of websites that will be penalized with low landing page quality scores:

• Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information
• Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
• Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer

If we receive user complaints about ads for the types of websites listed above, the advertisers of those websites may not be allowed to continue running AdWords ads for those websites.
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“Data collection sites” will hit affiliates who use PPC to drive traffic to zip/email submit type offers or to an opt-in page for a free report.

And who’s going to file a “user complaint”? The visitor? Unlikely. More likely, a competitor who’s already trawling the adwords results appearing in the SERPs. [Just wait till a “report poor quality page” button unceremoniously appears on your Google toolbar…]

But that’s not all…

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The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

• eBook sites that show frequent ads or install malware
• ‘Get rich quick’ sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

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Do note the use of “are likely” in term terms above.

It’s not a guaranteed slap, merely “likely”.

In case you missed the affiliate guidelines:

Affiliate Policy
We allow affiliates to use AdWords advertising. Please note that we’ll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same Display URL per search query. We also monitor and don’t allow the following:

• Redirect URLs: Ads that contain Display URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
• Bridge Pages: Ads for webpages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
• Framing: Ads for webpages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site.
  

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So domain redirects, iframes are “likely” to go out the window in time too.

Does this have anything to do with Google’s CPA ads?

The jury is still out, though Geordie observes:

Kiss the “work from home and make millions in your lawn-chair” sites good-bye. Feed-scraping travel and comparison engines are in for it too by the look of it (bizrate.com anyone?). When you read their affiliate guidelines, it’s clear that they’re targeting those affiliates using poor direct-linking strategies etc… not affiliates in general…

And an AdWords insider mentioned also on the hitlist:

extra long sales-letter style ebook pages due to their not approving of the ‘business model’ employed by these advertisers. Looks like judgment day is nigh for those sites too.

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Now before anyone screams or writes a “Death of AdWords” report and gives it away or sells it for $7, realize that this directly affects the landing page.

I’m assuming if you’re planning to be in Internet Marketing for the long-haul, you’d have had a solid business plan in place and focused on creating a credible site, rather than a single HTML page hosted on a $2.99 .com domain…

It’s an interesting evolution to see Google’s developers working towards developing more human-like algorithmns.

Although the content scoring metrics might seem crude now (and probably a few genuine content sites might end up as collateral damage), smart marketers will focus on building a solid content site and using PPC to drive traffic and convert them to an offer on the “backend”, that’s the difference between a ‘speed dating/speed seduction’ type deal, rather than the old ‘wine-and-dine’ to build a long lasting (business) relationship.

If you’ve been focusing on building a long term business, neither this nor any future development should derail any plans you might’ve had. If you didn’t, you’d be scrambling to do some quick fixes till the next announcement…

Taking a longer term view, content creators and copywriters could see their cachet increase significantly as more site owners beef up their content.

“Death of AdWords?” Hardly.

This latest development will merely be a blip in affiliate earnings, if at all.

Who’s Mark Roth?

He’s generated more than 1 million leads using Google’s AdWords PPC program.

In the process of his PPC efforts, he had customized software and a management platform developed to facilitate his affiliate marketing and CPA marketing efforts.

With PPC and its associated databases of keywords and keyphrases, there is a significant amount of data management involved. While you can still track keywords on Excel spreadsheets up to about 1,000 keywords effectively, you’d be hard-pressed to go beyond that without automating your systems.

…Which is where Affiliate Radar comes in. Mark mentioned that it’s the same system he uses in his marketing campaigns. Here’s an overview of Affiliate Radar’s features:

Affiliate Radar’s key feature is to manage your PPC and conversion tracking efforts from a central console. It currently supports Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter from a central interface.

Besides the ability to track your keywords with it’s broad, exact and phrase match variations, Affiliate Radar allows you to replicate successful campaigns across the different ad networks, as well as track and remove non-performing keywords from your ad groups.

Here’re a couple of slides from Affiliate Radar’s feature set:

If you’re new to PPC traffic generation, Mark and his partner Amish have created a suite of training videos to guide you through the setup process.

As most PPC software and tools involve some degree of complexity, the Affiliate Radar videos are a godsend.

Here’s an overview of the Campaign Launcher which allows you to manage your ad campaigns across the networks:

In addition, Affiliate Radar incorporate a keyword research module, tapping on WordTracker’s keyword database.

Affiliate Radar’s keyword tracking tools include:

The keyword tracking functions across 12 affiliate networks, including:keyword tracking across 12 affiliate networks

• Affiliate Traction
• AzoogleAds
• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
• DirectTrack
• Hydra
• Kolimbo
• Maxbounty
• NeverBlueAds
• Promote AR
• Rocketprofit
• ShareASale

I think one of the key differences between Affiliate Radar and other PPC products in the marketplace is that Mark is an active PPC practitioner, rather than a marketer who decided to develop a PPC product as a side project.

As a result of this emphasis, you can be sure that Affiliate Radar will continue to see continual enhancements over time.

For more information, you can check out:

–> Mark Roth’s Affiliate Radar