A short form offer is simply a lead offer that converts with a short form (not many fields required). A short form registration offer converts on the 2nd page submission. The first page will look a lot like an email submit. Usually with just a single form field required (email or zip code).

Once the user puts in their zip code or email (as shown above) they will be taken to a page asking for their shipping information. This is the case with nearly all short form registration offers. If the user enters their information on that page and submits it you are paid for the lead.

What are the benefits to running a Short Form Registration offer?

As you can see, the advertiser that owns the offer is getting quite a bit more information about the user that is generating the lead (who is interested in getting the product). With more information comes a more qualified lead and that means you are going to get paid more for that lead. Most of our short form registration offers pay $2+ and about $1 higher than the exact same email submit offer.

So, you’re sending the advertiser better leads and you’re getting paid more. Sounds pretty good right? You’re probably thinking, that’s great, but your conversion rate will decrease because more information is required of the user. Believe it or not, that may not be the case!

Let’s use the Apple iPhone 4 Verizon offer as an example. The email submit pays $1.30 and the registration version pays $2.00. If you have a 10% conversion rate with the email submit your EPC is $0.13. If you have a 7% conversion rate with the short form your EPC is $0.14. Depending on how well your ad copy is written and your traffic source, you could see a majority of your users completing that 2nd page on the email submit and unless you’re promoting the registration version of the offer you would never know.

Split test!

Everyone says test, test, and test some more and this is no different. If you’re running an email submit and it’s profiting or close to profiting you would be crazy not to split test a similar registration offer with that traffic. It does not need to be the exact same landing page. If you’re running an iPad email submit you will have no problem finding an iPad registration offer. This is the case for most niches. Also, if you were blacklisted on an email submit usually you can run a short form registration and won’t run into that problem.

The current top 500 paying keywords on 7Search can be found using their tool @ http://7search.com/scripts/searchterms/top_paying.asp?n=500

Here’s my simple setup process:

1. Open your 7Search Account
2. Create a campaign*
3. Name your campaign and write you adcopy
4. Include your keyword an partner tokens in your url
5. Choose your daily budget
6. Geo target your ad in your campaign
7. Choose your keywords and set your bids
8. Adjust your bidding to whatever you want your ads to rank
9. Run the campaign and watch your results
10. Run reports to find and add any negative keywords
11. Write specific titles and descriptions for any high volume keywords
12. Drop poor keywords to phrase or exact match
13. Use day parting if you can
14. Block any crappy partners or domains
15. Add more keywords
16. Rinse and repeat with more campaigns

* To insert the keyword that you are bidding on that the user has searched for in order to see your add simply add the variable ###KEYWORD### to your ad title, ad description, display URL, or destination URL. This can really help your CTR.

For your destination URL you need to pass 3 variables into your link so you can track everything properly. Those are:

###KEYWORD###
###AFFID###
###RID###

As I explained above, the ###KEYWORD### variable will pass the keyword as a subid into your link. The ###AFFID### is the affiliate’s ID number from 7Search that you are getting traffic from. The ###RID### variable is that affiliate’s website ID that they are generating traffic from. Obviously, each affiliate has their own ID, but each affiliate can have many websites so each website has it’s own ID as well. It’s common to see that one website from an affiliate on 7Search may be generating conversions, but another may not.

Using The 7Search Keyword Tool:

One of the great things about 7Search is that they have their own keyword tool you can use here: http://conversion.7search.com/scripts/advertisertools/keywordsuggestion.aspx.

Type in your main keyword you would like to work with. For each campaign there should be a main keyword obvious. 7Search returns suggested keywords with some very cool data:

The keyword
Estimated searches per month
Estimated clicks for the top position
The top 3 bids for that keyword
Using this data you can access how much volume is possible and how much it’s going to cost you.

A thing to note is that 7Search’s keyword data is a month behind so select “Show Estimates” from the drop-down menu.

You can get “estimated” data on:

• Searches
• Top Clicks
• Top Cost
• Top Bid
• Bid #2, #2, #4 and #5

Another great feature is that if you click on the keyword, you can see the other advertiser’s ads. Now this is where you have to put your thinking cap on because I clicked on “recipe” and I see a couple of diet ads (food for thought!).

To get around this, your first step is to Increase your CPC bids. But, in many cases this just isn’t enough. You’ll have to keep bumping the CPC, sometimes over $1 your original bid before you start getting any impressions. In some case, it doesn’t work at all. This isn’t a reliable method of sharing impressions across all your ads.

Another thing we can do – switch to CPM. CPM has its downfalls. Actually, that seems to be all CPM has going for itself. Facebook has even said “run CPM if you don’t want clicks on your ads.” CPM clicks generally cost more CPC-wise, and have a very low CTR. The quality of those that do click is also a fair bit lower than its CPC bidding clickers. What it is good for is getting a general idea of what is working, though. The ads will share a greater portion of views across more ads, however we still aren’t perfect. In many cases, you might find only 5 – 10 ads get any impressions and we fall into the same problem you had before.

Another idea is to resubmit ads not getting impressions. Simple remake the ad, stick it in the same campaign and delete the original. I think Facebook gives a little priority to new ads to give them a small test. If you remake all 50 ads though, you’ll run into the same problem, but this shows us something. Less ads in one campaign gives a fairer share of impressions.

So a more true solution is to break up your many ads into multiple campaigns. 3 – 10 ads per campaign will ensure a better share ratio. 1 ad per campaign almost insures you will get impressions on the ad. It’s a lot of extra work to set that up, but if you have a large variety of ads that need testing, this might be the only solution left for you if all others fail to perform.

My top recommendation for Internet marketers of all levels is to make sure you’re profitable with at least one method before moving on to try another. Attempting to learn a new technique before mastering your first one has stalled a great many careers on the web. If it is time to consider learning a new method then mobile WAP might be the one for you!

What is WAP?

WAP stands for ‘Wireless Application Protocol’ and it is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. WAP browsers are available on virtually any phone or PDA or tablet today and a great many of these devices are capable of interpreting far more sophisticated pages. Notably, smartphones and most tablets have very advanced browsers. Promoting WAP compatible offers merely ensures marketers will be able to reach the widest range of devices.

Why Would Anyone Want to Advertise on a Phone?

Mobile advertising is the cutting edge of a growing market. We’ve had the television for around 60 years and there are 1.5 billion in use worldwide. PCs have been around for about 30 years and we have about 850 million of them. Mobile phones have been in use for just 35 years and already the world usage of mobile devices is at 4.6 billion. Not only is the market huge, it is expanding . Within 2 years the number of people with access to mobile broadband is expected to hit 1 billion! The speed of this expansion has resulted in a nice gap between the adspace available on all these devices and the number of marketers ready to market on them. This has the effect of keeping prices and competition for traffic nice and low and payouts for offers nice and high.

The availability of great demographics and targeting are also an amazing feature of mobile advertising. In some cases you can target users by age, mobile device, cellular carrier and region on top of whatever search term they are using! Depending on what you are offering, drilling down to a specific demographic like this can be a powerful advantage.

Mobile devices also represent an unparalleled chance to reach consumers in a very personal space. Many users spend over 1 hour using their phone while shopping, for example! Approximately 25% of mobile customers use their devices for 1-3 hours at home every day. It is predicted that in the next few years up to 35% of all searches will originate from mobile devices. Access to people in these situations can be a huge advantage to marketers, especially when combined with the level of demographic targeting that mobile allows you to apply to your WAP offers.

WAP Dating Offers

There are lots of different offers available in WAP compatible formats, but the dating vertical is particularly interesting, as mobile devices tend to feel more personal to people than even laptops and certainly desktops. The additional privacy and security people feel when using mobile devices makes them a terrific platform for dating offers! The advantage of lots of specialized targeting options is another perfect fit for dating. As with other marketing it’s important to find those magic spots where the offer and your promotion line up perfectly with your traffic, so make sure you think about how the situation might be different for a mobile user than for somebody using an ordinary desktop browser. This will open up all kinds of ideas about how

One easy way to give your earnings a boost is to add seasonal focus to your methods. As many of you know, PPC search traffic is still alive and well. Although it is currently one of the cool methods to bash, the simple fact is that if you can get offers in front of people who are looking for them, they’ll tend to buy! The laser-targeting possible with paid search ads means you can get excellent quality traffic, too. As with all marketing methods, everything pivots on how well you understand your target demographic. This time of year subtle changes can affect the searches people perform. Instead of looking for just ordinary stuff, consumers will sometimes intentionally seek a holiday version of products. There are lots of specialty festive products such as Christmas decorations, too, but I’m talking about rethinking your target market’s mindset during the holidays.

In it’s simplest form this may just involve adding words like ‘holiday’ to your targeted keywords to take advantage of some extra targeted searches. For example, if you were bidding on ‘cheap plane tickets’ you may wish to try ‘cheap holiday plane tickets’ and other similar variants. But for every combination of product and target market you should be able to exploit the changes in attitude brought about by the season. Dating offers are a good example. Most people like to be with their loved ones over the holidays, but there are lots of times when this can’t happen; play up the ‘don’t be lonesome for the holiday’ angle!

Being quick to reevaluate the changing motivations and attitudes of your traffic when others have just optimized their campaigns and forgotten them will always put you ahead of the game.

Certainly, consider running special holiday offers like: Lead – Original Santa Letter (US). Those are easy money! But give some thought to how you’re going to catch those extra seasonal clicks while you’re at it. Just a few changes and additions will let you take advantage of more volume on offers you’re already running!

Building a keyword list with Ubersuggest is insanely easily. You can automatically take all the suggested keywords and have them put in a text file and download it just by clicking the txt box in the search. You can also go through and add keywords individually from the results. As you go through simply click the green + (look familiar?) next to the keyword and it will add it to a saved list on the right side of the page. You can then download that list once you have your complete keyword list built.

Another great feature within Ubersuggest is the ability to get even more suggestions. If you see a keyword in the results that you really think you could do well with you can click it and Ubersuggest will give you more keywords based on that keyword.  So, if you click on a suggested keyword, Ubersuggest gives you even more suggestions based on that keyword!

Great keywords are descriptive keyword phrases like “Miami fitness club” or “5 minute home workouts.” These are the types of terms that will bring you a more targeted audience. If you can position yourself in front of 100 people who specifically want what you have, that’s usually more lucrative than being in front of 3000 people who may actually be looking for something completely different. That’s why it’s best to try to be as specific as possible when choosing your keywords.

Once you’ve identified 5-10 ideal keyword phrases, you can then tailor your online marketing goals to target those phrases and begin increasing your visibility when it comes to them.

Update your ads constantly. I know you want to be the lazy marketer that sets and forgets everything. Unfortunately, being an affiliate marketer isn’t that simple. One thing I do everyday is consistently change my ads. I’ll usually upload a few new images everyday, and then I will change up the ad copies weekly. This allows my target demographic to see new ads everyday. Banner blindness begone!

Another thing I’ll do is rotate my landing pages/offer pages. You’d be more surprised than not to see that if you can find two high converting offer pages, you’re overall EPC may be higher than when you are just linking to one offer. “Offer blindness” is what I’ll call this. The user sees the same landing page over and over again, and if they aren’t signing up for one, they might sign up for a different one. Try rotating! It works!

Scaling out your ads is an obvious option here. Find new targets to hit. Try implementing smaller target markets with the use of likes and interests. Write your ad copies based around those ads. This will ad a boost of life to any campaign, and even small markets can give you a long lasting campaign.

Lastly, but still very important – you need to budget your ads. This includes setting a daily budget as well as managing bid costs on each ad. Ad bid prices change on a daily basis, so its always one of my daily tasks to go back and check the bids on my best performing ads. Increasing bids by 1 or 2 cents can do amazing things for your impression count.

“Trying way too hard?” – that’s right, my biggest critique of affiliate’s ad copy is that they make it way too detailed and convoluted – you’re not writing a brilliant novel here, you’re just trying to capture people’s attention, don’t make this harder than it is.

Some fun facts, 60% of people read only headlines. However, if you don’t have an image that catches their eye, you never even activate that 60% readership. I’m going to break this down very simply, I apologize if this is old news for some of you but I just see way too many bad ads so I think there is some value in this.

Step 1: The image. If you’re testing on FB, you can test a lot at once because there is huge volume available at your finger tips. Test a few variations of your ad copy and a few different headlines also. If you’re on POF, I don’t recommend testing more than 5-10 images at once and maybe 2 headline variations because you don’t have that much volume at your disposal unless you’re using extremely broad targeting. It’s critical that you find images that get good ctr, otherwise you will never get cheap enough clicks to profit. Don’t blame the offer if you can’t get profitable, chances are you just don’t have high enough CTR, because there are affiliates dominating every one of the top offers that we recommend so it is possible.

• Targeting Males: Split test face shots, body shots, and face + some cleavage depending on your demographic. Note: Use your discretion here, don’t run images of half-naked college girls if you’re promoting a 40+ offer, this is not going to work out well for the advertiser or you in the long run.
• Targeting Females: Split test face shots, body shots, and shirtless pictures. If 40+, same as before, don’t have some ripped 20 year old guy, it’s not going to work out well. P.S: Images of couples rarely perform well.

Step 2: The headline. Ok, you’ve grabbed their attention with the picture of that smoking 50 year old, now what? The best headlines appeal to the users on some personal, emotional level. People don’t respond to your clever witty headlines, however brilliant you think they are. They respond because your headline connects to them on some emotional level, some basic need they have or something about their demographic (i.e., body type, interest in hiking or pets, etc). Don’t make it harder than it is, human beings are pretty simple, do some brainstorming and test out your results. Also, don’t make the headline too long, people have extremely low attention spans.

Step 3: The ad copy. Congrats, if you’ve gotten them this far, you’re very close to a click and as long as your ad isn’t outrageously misleading, you might even have yourself a conversion in the making. The most important thing about the ad copy is that it flows naturally from the headline. If not, you risk interrupting the user’s train of thought. Make it nice and clean, incorporating the basic premise of what captured their attention via the headline in the first place. Finish it off with a simple call to action (yes, some people really do need to be told to “click here” in no uncertain terms). If the offer allows it, mentioning that they can sign up or create an account for free definitely helps. Don’t go crazy with exclamation points or caps, this has been shown to reduce readership and diminishes your ads credibility considerably if it looks like a 13 year old girl wrote it.

Targeting: The targeting for POF and FB varies significantly. I’ll go over them briefly because you could end up writing a novel about these.

FB: You can go broad — focus on getting a good broad campaign going where you will probably have slimmer margins but get more volume, or you can build lots of smaller niche campaigns around specific interests such as hiking, outdoors, pets, dancing, etc. The only limit here is really your creativity and the amount of time you’re willing to put in. With facebook, often times the biggest battle is just whittling down your cpc over time (yes, you might have to lose some money to make money). Lots of facebook campaigns start out in the red because facebook’s algorithm needs time to assess how users respond to your ad. Once they see that people like your ad, your costs will go down, you will receive better placement, and then you can start to bank on your hard work and patience. If you’re bidding cpc, remember that you need good ctr because if your ctr is low and facebook ends up getting less money from you than their minimum cpm baseline, your ad will get cut off and you’ll have to start over.

POF: Take advantage of their targeting and create your own niche. It works great, promoting from a niche angle and then sending users to the broad offer (use a lander if need be). Your ctr’s will be way better with a targeted headline / adcopy to the user’s demographic and as a result your clicks will be much cheaper and your pockets fuller. The flipside to this is you can also target broad on pof if you don’t want to spend a ton of time building out all those individual, highly targeted campaigns (though I highly suggest you invest some time in this). When going broad, I still would try to use some sort of angle to distinguish your ad from the million other ones saying the same generic thing (and probably losing money). With broad, you’ll probably need to lower your bids in order to get this to work. Also, experiment with session depth and login count as these settings can make the difference between -200% ROI and +200%.

• Over 40, females by and large convert much better than males. The has a twofold effect: (1) targeting females will yield higher CR, but you will have to pay a premium because other people know this so the traffic is more expensive (2) spend the time split testing ad copy to get the male demographic to convert; mastering a niche that other people have written off as “too difficult” or “won’t work” is how you create goldmines out of campaigns.

Bidding: There is no sweet spot (sorry if I just shattered some of your worlds). Certain individual campaigns may have a sweet spot, but as a general rule, there is no magical number that I can tell you guys that will make you rich. I bid differently on lots of my campaigns.

FB: With cpc, bid high at first and then bid low is a pretty generally accepted ppc practice. You bid high at the start so your ad gets impressions and builds up credibility with FB’s algorithm and then once your impression feed has stabilized, you can start to slowly lower it (sometimes, this can stall out the impressions so be careful). Another thing you can try if you want to boost your impressions is mess around with your daily spend cap. Even if your account is only on a $50 / day limit, increase the daily spend cap on individual campaigns as this can help get you more impressions faster (don’t set it crazy high and go out for the day though as you could spend all your money pretty fast this way if your account has a high spend).

• Not all FB traffic is created equal. Make sure to take a look at your referrers and see if your best converting traffic is from facebook or apps.facebook and play around with your bids accordingly to get the traffic that works best for you.

POF: Bidding on POF is so targeting dependent that I can’t even toss out a ballpark figure here as I have campaigns with bids all over the place. Depending on how that particular angle converts, what the targeting is, demo size, etc., your bid prices can vary significantly. P.S.: if you’re running in >50 login count, I’d recommend dropping your bids significantly as your CTR / CR will likely take a hit. However, if you can monetize this traffic, you have a ton of volume on your hands and minimal competition.

Stay Focused: The most important part of marketing isn’t any secret technique or knowledge, it’s the individual drive and motivation to not give up and make things work. It can be very disheartening when you’re getting started testing out a new campaign and the ROI is negative, but this is a completely normal feeling. When I test new campaigns, even with the experience I have of what performs well, I still generally run negative on the initial test. I could play it safe and only use creatives and ad copy that I know perform well, but if I never tested new things, I would never find next gem of a campaign. I recently tested 4 new angles for example, 1 of them ended up being around -200% even after optimization, a few were roughly break even, but the 4th has been between 100-200% ROI for a week now. As you can see, it pays to spend a little and I hope this will help encourage and motivate those of you who are experiencing these feelings and to let you know that it’s completely normal growing pains that every affiliate goes through.

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