Andrew’s in stealth mode and hasn’t given many public talks yet, though he’s certainly an affiliate marketer to watch.

Starting his PPC campaigns in Oct 2007, he generated over $1,000 in commissions in 4 days and has continued using PPC in his marketing campaigns.

I got him in for a Friday Podcast session, where we talked about:

• His start in internet marketing in the area of search engine optimization
• How he made the switch to PPC and some of the tips he’s picked up along the way
• An overview of the PPC case study
• Tips to optimize your landing page
• Key techniques you should use to maximize the success of new campaigns
• How to keep yourself continually motivated and achieving your goals
• Andrew’s preferred affiliate and CPA networks

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

Links:

• CashTactics blog
• PPC Case Study

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.

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!)

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”.

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.

Signing up for the RevenueWire Affiliate Portal means you have free access to a conversion tracker, split tester and probably the most important for new affliate marketers, a comprehensive PPC tutorial, including keyword/keyphrase strategies, biddding strategies and measures to deal with Google’s Quality Score.

It’s quite a useful resource.

Related:

–> Copeac CPA Network

–> Wealth Ninja Affiliate Marketing Guide

–> AzoogleAds CPA Network

Though the results lag real time searches by about 2 months, they’re good for getting an indication of search volume and related searches for given keywords and keyphrases.

In the past few weeks, there’s been speculation that with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing (AKA Panama), the Overture tool might be taken down for good.

[Incidentally, Pepperjam head honcho Kris Jones gives a good overview of Panama with his post: The New Yahoo Search (aka, Panama) Looking More & More Like Google Adwords ]

While there’s no official word from Yahoo!, it looks like traffic to Overture, while dropping since the disruption in the service sometime around mid December 2006, is still very robust.

So it was a little surprising that the Overture tool appeared to be up when I accessed it a short while ago, and ran a keyword search.

Which was a little surprising as the tool appeared to be down when I tried to access it.

In the interim, the WickedFire folks have been compiling a list of other keyword research tools. This’ll be no doubt useful if Overture is eventually removed.

Among the tools I’ve looked into, Wordze seems to be gaining popularity.