Saturday afternoon I spoke at the Meetup202 in Orange County about Media Buying. As promised I’ve uploaded my Power Point presentation for those of you that missed it (you should have came we had some awesome food). You can download by clicking on the image below:

Keep check on the blog I’m going to be posting pictures shortly!

As I posted at the beginning of the month, I’ll be heading out to Orange County this week to speak at the Meetup202 sponsored by Habitat Agency.  I’ve prepared a presentation titled ‘Leveraging Display Traffic To Enhance Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns’.  I plan to cover the following items:

- Introduction about myself
- What is Media Buying?
- What offers have been promoted via Media Buying?
- How to select a winning offer for a Media Buy
- Breaking into Media Buying Internationally
- The future of Media Buying

There are a few more things I plan on talking about, but you’ll have to come to hear them.  I’m also going to be giving out a few coupons to our Internet University and will be taking questions.  As of this post, there is only 50 spots left so you may want to go ahead and register now at this link.  There will also be a lunch which is always a good thing…

Can’t wait to see you all and I look forward to your questions!

I was recently asked by a student in Internet University, “when do I need to use an ad server?” Before I answered I thought long about my history media buying and pondered when I made the decision to use one. For those of you unfamiliar with technology, an ad server is basically a piece of software that allows you to upload your creatives and destination URLs for the purpose of optimization and tracking. You have the option of installing the software on your own web server or using a third party solution.

The majority of people in the affiliate marketing industry utilize the third party solutions. First (and most important), many advertising networks and websites have a certain ‘list’ of ad servers that they’re willing to accept. If the server you’re using isn’t on their list, then you can’t use it on that source. The third party solutions also handle the server hardware setup and provide redundant backups (to secure speed and uptime). Installing your own ad server and managing it on your web server can be tedious especially if you’re not experienced at server administration.

So when is the time to begin using an ad server? Third party solutions are fairly expensive and some even require a long-term contract. So what’s wrong with just giving your ad network/website a few creatives, your destination URLs, and letting them run? I for one, like to know the EXACT amount of impressions/clicks I’m getting. I also want to make sure that if I paid for United States traffic, I’m getting US traffic. By allowing an ad network or a website to run your ad without a server, you’re putting a lot of faith in that webmaster. What’s going to stop them from billing you from a few ‘extra’ impressions? With an ad server you are constantly informed which creative is garnering impressions and converting.

Speaking of creatives, when you give the traffic source your creatives to test, how do you eliminate the ones that aren’t working? Chances are you have to contact your rep and let them know to pause the un-performing ad. This is all good unless your rep is out of the office or at lunch while you’re spending hard earned money on a creative that you KNOW is tanking.

I decided to look at some of my own data before I started using an ad server just to see if there were some things I missed. The results were stunning. While I monitored creative CTRs by the day I never looked at them on a ‘monthly’ basis. When I ran a ‘monthly’ report I realized that if I would have paused two of the ads during the duration of this one campaign, I would have made an additional $30,000 net profit that month (give the conversion rate stayed the same). That’s seriously money we missed out on!

I could continue to go on and on about the benefits of having an ad server, but after my $30K figure I’m sure you get the picture. For those of you that can’t afford an ad server, I suggest working with the self-serve advertising networks before moving to a media buy. Get things profitable, learn the ropes, and then move into the ‘big leagues’ with your own ad server. Several months ago John posted a review on the Zedo Ad Server Review which you may want to check out again at this link.

Saturday, August 28th I’ll be heading out to California to speak at the Orange County Meetup202 hosted by Habitat Agency. I’ll be discussing in detail Media Buying providing insights as to how the industry has evolved since the 90s and where I see the future going. From the types of offers that can be promoted via a media, to planning your media buy, International media buying, I’ll be covering it all! I’ll also be accepting questions at the end of my presentation.

I invite you all in the area to come out and hear what I have to say as I’m sure I can help both beginners and experts. The Orange County Meetup202 is one of the larger ones in the United States so I encourage you go ahead and reserve your spot as soon as possible. There is only 100 spots total. I’m very excited and honored to be asked by Habitat Agency to come out and host a presentation. It should be not only a very informative meeting, but a lot of fun for us all!

You can read more details on the official Meetup202 website at this link.

Tomorrow I’m going to be doing a video interview with Eric of Clickbooth discussing media buying!  If you have a question you want to ask me feel free to email them to Eric@clickbooth.com.

Considering I’ve never done a video interview before, I’m really looking forward to this!  I’ll be sure and post the video once it’s available!

If you think that media buys are no longer profitable since re-bill offers have came under fire, think again.  I wrote a guess post on Zac Johnson’s blog where I discuss how promoting CPS offers via a media buy can equate to some massive profits!  For those of you unfamiliar with Zac, he’s been working online as long as I have (since 1998) and is someone I have a ton of respect for.  He’s also a very successful and well known blogger in the Internet Marketing industry!  You can check out my guest post at the link below:

Cashing In On Media Buys Without Re-bill Offers

We’ve used animation many of times to take campaigns from losing to massive profits.  A lot of times if you can raise your CTR (click through rate) just a tenth of percent you can increase the entire bottom-line of your media buy.  Here is the banner I’m going to show you how to make:

You can watch the video below:

Additionally, you can download the animated PSD file I created in the video at this link.

Good luck!  Let me know if you have any questions!

Are you having a hard time getting your media buy profitable?  Nothing is more frustrating than watching your cost per acquisition constantly increase no matter how many creatives, landing pages, and offers you test.  One option that many affiliates (and direct response marketers) overlook is email marketing.  When successfully paired with media buying, email marketing can take your campaign to a whole new level of profit.

In direct response marketing we all strive to get the consumer to visit our landing page, read our sales pitch, and purchase the product (or complete a lead).  While this can be a very successful marketing technique, not all consumers can be easily convinced with one simple sales pitch.  Let’s face it…  At one point in someone’s life they’ve been ripped off.  Whether they purchased something that wasn’t what they expected or they went out to eat and got a sorry cooked meal, it’s likely almost everyone out there has been ‘burned’ at one time or another.  By combining email marketing into our buy we’re able to use another vehicle to garner the consumer’s trust over a series of different sales pitches.

Let me give you a real-life example.  During a recent media buy we averaged 29% CTR from our landing page to our offer page.  Once the consumer hit the offer they converted at 4%.  For this particular buy this was good enough to be profitable but the margin was still slim.  Now let’s use some simple logic and think about this.  29% of the people that clicked our advertisement proceeded to the offer.  So 71% of all of our traffic simply left.  They were obviously interested in what we were pitching (because they clicked the creative) but felt that our sales pitch was too weak, we were not legitimate, or for whatever reason, didn’t convert.  How can we save some of this traffic?

This is where the squeeze page comes into play.  A squeeze page is a page that persuades a consumer to enter personal information to receive what they came for.   Most of the time this is an email address.  For example, if we were promoting a product in the weight-loss niche, we ask the visitor: Are You Ready To Lose Weight? – Check Out The ‘Diet of 2010′  We would then tell them, ‘Simply enter your email address to see the exact diet Hollywood has been using for years’.  Once the visitor enters their email address they are then directed to the landing page.

Now instead of losing that 71% of the traffic, there lies another opportunity to ‘convince’ the visitor to buy what we’re selling.  Also, if the visitor goes onto convert, it’s possible you can sell them something else (maybe even a product in another niche).  This can be accomplished by using a service such as aWeber to begin an automated email sequence.  While this is a science in its own, here is a typical sequence:

* Followup One – Sent as soon as email address is entered
As soon as the visitor enters their email address I like to send them an email (they’ve expressed initial interest by 1) clicking our ad and 2) submitting their email address).  Normally I like to create a sense of urgency; ‘Hurry, You’re Special Offer Is Ready!’  Still using weight-loss as an example, my email would go on to pitch my product once again, urging this deal is not going to last.

* Followup Two – About 24 hours after the first email
With this email we want to back off the sales pitch a bit.  Yes, we’re still going to try to sell the product, but we’re going to try to get personal with them and maybe talk about the benefits of losing weight.

* Followup Three – 24 hours after the second email
This is now taking a somewhat aggressive approach.  The biggest mistake many affiliates make (especially when starting with email marketing) is letting their list get cold.  In this email I like to ask; ‘You Have Questions, Don’t You?’  I then base my email around a question and answer segment about my product.

* Followup Four – 24 hours after the third email
A lot of times the user is either going to read and purchase or go ahead and unsubscribe from your list.  That’s fine, we’re direct response marketing here, this offer may not be in existence a week from now.  We want to be aggressive.  This email we want to offer the visitor another ‘bonus’.  Let them know if they order your product today they can also order another ‘extra’ with a coupon code.  Make them feel like they are really getting a deal.

* Followup Five – 48 hours after the fourth email
If the user didn’t unsubscribe after your forth email, you want to relax a bit and leave them thinking.  The fifth followup email should be something like; ’10 Reasons Why You Should Lose Weight’.  Again, they have interest in losing weight (or they wouldn’t have clicked our ad) so let’s try to sell them.

* Followup Six – 48 hours after the fifth email
If they haven’t unsubscribed by now they are obviously still considering what you’re selling.  Go back to creating that sense of urgency. i.e.: Are We Raising Our Price ?  Let them know in your email this deal is special and that they would be special to receive it.

If they still haven’t unsubscribed or bought by now, it’s possible they are just not interested.  If you want to remain persistent you could continue with your email series, but I personally would work on optimizing my previous six emails.

Using this method we can greatly increase the number of conversions we receive.  Just think, out of that 71% of the traffic that was leaving our site, if we could convert 4% of them.  That’s a HUGE difference in the entire campaign (even 1% of the 71% would be good).

You’re paying for traffic so you should take full advantage of it.  Remember to test, test, test and optimize, optimize, optimize and it’s likely you’ll be pleased with adding email marketing to your next media buy!

We all know that media buying can take a lot of cash. Before entering most buys you have to sign an Insertion Order with the amount of impressions you want to purchase. You then have to wait a certain amount of time before you can exercise your out-clause and get out of the buy if things don’t work out (some networks are worse than others but I could tell you one nightmare of a story). As I suggest in my Free Media Buying 101 Guide, your chances of succeeding are much greater if you master the campaign on another traffic source before committing to a large buy.

There is one source out there that works pretty well when your doing your initial testing. That is the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange by ContextWeb. It is very similar to Google Adwords, Adbrite, and others in that you bid on inventory (CPM or CPC) but they keep their publishers to a strict standard, hence conversion rates are much better (at least in my experience). Before testing your offer on their network (or any network) I suggest analyzing demographics via Quantcast. Begin by entering the name of the network (or website) into the search field at the top:

You can do this for virtually any website and/or advertising network. It is essential to know your audience before starting a media buy. Ad networks and websites can actually ‘quantify’ their sites and choose which which type of data they wish to share.

The first thing I look at when analyzing a network is what country is the bulk of their traffic. This allows me to choose if I want to target a domestic audience or international. As you can see with ADSDAQ they are primarily all United States:

The next thing I like to analyze is the overall demographics of the network. While they do offer targeting options (such as certain categories or based on keywords) I like to know what makes up the bulk of their audience.

We can then use this data to break up this audience into their sub categories thus ‘laser targeting’ our audience. Like a typical media buy we can play around with frequency capping and ‘set our own CPM’ by bidding the amount to see a ROI. The best part about all of this, you can pause when you want too! You don’t have to have Insertion Order, an out-clause, or many of the other advanced features of a typical media buy. This works great for affiliates that are just breaking into media buying.

Once you completely master your campaign on the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange you can take the demographic data, frequency cap, your winning creatives, to more ad networks/sites and do a traditional media buy (with an Insertion Order and set amount of impressions). By doing this, you’ll greatly reduce your financial risk media buying. I hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions below!

Continuing my Media Buying 101 series of posts, I want to talk a little bit about frequency capping. When purchasing banner inventory by CPM (cost per one-thousand impressions) a frequency cap saves you from spending your budget on a handful of users. A frequency cap determines how many times a unique visitor sees your advertisement. Most advertising networks will allow you to specify the frequency cap of your choice as long as it is stated in the initial insertion order (you may want to check if it can be changed once you’re into your flight).

When paying a CPM > $1.00 I like to set the frequency cap to 2 views every 24 hours per unique visitor. This means that a unique visitor (determined by IP address) will see my advertisement 2 times every 24 hours. This is a very important part to the optimization process, as we’ve also had some very successful media buys with a 4/24 frequency cap (some campaigns the visitor finally clicks after seeing the creative multiple times).

So before you give up on your media buy (thinking it won’t work or you can’t optimize anymore) I highly suggest you play around with the frequency cap. I am amazed by the number of affiliates that don’t even know what this is. Good luck!