The Google Content Network is extremely profitable when it’s done the proper way. You usually can get reasonably cheap traffic and depending on the offer can convert pretty well. If you can put a good campaign together that becomes profitable later, your return on investment (ROI) are usually much higher when compared to search.

Whether you’re using keywords or site placements your first priority is to get data and analyze it properly, so you can find out which keywords or sites are working and which aren’t.

After you launch a new campaign always bid high enough so that your ads are getting shown in top 3 spots.

Here’s one way to run Content:

• Create a keyword based campaign for Content only.

• Create 5-20 ad groups that are each based around a particular theme within your topic. For example, if you’re doing flower arrangements you might have had groups for Red Flowers, Green Flower, Roses, Tulips and so on. In each ad group have 20-50 keywords that are all related to each topic.

• Get your tracking working (Tracking202, Prosper202 or even Google Pixel).

• Bid minimum USD$1.00 a click or higher and let it run for a week.

• Look at your placements and sort by impressions – Exclude all that have high impression counts and few/no clicks.

• Look at your cost per conversion. If it is above break even for your payout, exclude those placements and put them into a new campaign and reduce your bids by 50%.

• Do this once a week until all you have left are your main campaign with sites that you convert profitably and a second campaign that has sites that converted but not profitably with lower bids (over time you should see the cost per conversion go down and hopefully become profitable).

• Tweak your bids/positions on your main campaign to find the sweet spot.

• Add other ad groups and keywords to expand your reach.

That’s just a basic outline of one way to run it. There are other ways to do it obviously. Keep in mind you still have to split test with your ad copy, landing pages and type of offers.

The more you spend, the faster you can get your data and optimize or cut bait.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since it’s the same process for all Performance Marketing, spend money to find what works, ditch what doesn’t and keep what does.

Most beginners are so focused on search engine optimization and other free sources of traffic that they put almost no attention on paid traffic.

Yet paid traffic is just so much easier to scale than free traffic. If you find an offer that converts at $1.00 a click, then as many clicks as you can get for $0.50 you’re doubling your money. It is like investing your money on a Savings account and getting 100% interest. If you spend $5,000.00 you get $10,000.00 back. It’s that simple.

Tip #2 – Understand Your Stats and Earnings Per Click

The most important number is not conversion. It’s not your payout either but your EPC or earnings per click.

Let’s say your product sells for $40 and your conversion rate is 1%. Then your EPC is $0.40.

You know that for every click under $0.40, you’re making money. This is important for affiliates. You should not be looking at payouts or conversion rates like it’s the golden egg. What really matters is your EPC.

Tip #3 – Google Adwords Quality Score

Quality Score is one of the most difficult aspects of AdWords. There are so many factors that can influence your quality score that makes almost impossible to keep a perfect QS for every single keyword you are targeting.

The way Google come up with the QS is a secret and sometimes a mistery. However we know that there are two processes.

The first part is the Pre-Run scan. Before you get any traffic, the AdWords bot scans your site and decides how relevant your landing page is. It gives you a score that is generally between 6 and 8.

Second part, this is your on the run score. Your QS is calculated in real time on a per click basis.

Phase one quality score is only important for getting your ad to run. Often times if your QS is too low, you ad won’t even show. The key here is keyword relevance. Have your KW in your title tag, H1 tags and body text. It’s all about your landing page.

Once you get a 7 or 8 in phase 1, then phase 2 is all about CTR. Your landing page becomes just 20%-30% of the equation. Most people put way too much emphasis on it at this point.

You now want to optimize for Google’s eCPM. What Google effectively earns per 1000 impressions they give you. For example:

Advertiser 1: 1% CTR, 0.50 Per click. For every 1,000 impressions Google gives him Google makes $5.
Advertiser 2: 3% CTR, 0.25 Per Click. For every 1,000 impressions Google gives him, Google makes $7.5.

What’s amazing is that Advertiser #2 will actually rank higher than advertiser #1, get more volume and pay half of what Advertiser #1 is paying. That’s because Google’s eCPM is higher for them and it’s in their best interest to rank your ad higher. They make more money charging you less.

So the most important thing to optimize for in the later part of the game is your CTR. If you can write great ads and beat out your competition in CTR, then you’re well ahead of the game.

Tip #4 – Don’t Add to Many Keywords per AdGroup

Each Ad Group allows you to write a unique ad. Most people lump together somewhat related keywords and write one ad for all those keywords. For example:

How to Get a Boyfriend
Where to Meet a Nice Boys
Meet a Boyfriend
Tips for Getting a Boyfriend
(Plus 10 more)

They put them all in one Ad Group and write one ad for it.

This is a great way to both kill your quality score and your CTR. Instead, it’s crucial to write just one ad per keyword so that your ads are laser targeted, your QS is high and your CTR is off the charts.

(By the way, I’ve gotten 25% CTRs before, which is insane.)

Here’s how to do it.

Tip #5 Use Excel to Edit then Upload in AdWords Editor

Most people trying out AdWords try to do it in the web interface. This is an insanely slow way to do things. It’d be impossible to do most of the advanced techniques, and one keyword per adgroup would be suicide.

I often launch with as many as 5,000 keywords; doing that in the web interface would take months.

Instead, you can edit everything in excel and then just copy and past it into AdWords editor.

You can do all your keyword research, group them into Ad Groups and then just copy and paste. You can write all your ads in excel and just copy and paste it into AdWords editor.

Doing this, creating 1 keyword per adgroup takes about 10 minutes once I have my keyword list. I can write ads for 200 keywords in about an hour.

It’s much faster, more streamlined and you’ll make far more money.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant, the Network, the Publisher and the Consumer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies

Getting Ads Approved:
1. Facebook ads get approved by employees, not interns. These employees are regular people and make mistakes, so getting an ad dissaproved now doesn’t mean it won’t be approved an hour from now.

2. The facebook approval team works on Pacific standard time (PST). This means that you are going to get your ad approved during the hours of 8am to about 8pm. It generally takes between 1-6 hours to get an ad approved. Sometimes you will see weird hours like 4am…but not usually.

3. Read the ad guidelines (www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php). If you follow all of these guidelines and still cannot get an ad approved, you’re probably doing something wrong. If you really think you’re not doing anything wrong, contact a facebook rep. PM me if you need one. One of the easiest things to miss in the guidelines is to put the name of the product you are promoting in the ad copy, this always tends to get my ads approved.

4. If you are promoting an international product/service that redirects non-international traffic to another campaign, you are going to get your ad dissaproved (remember, facebook employees are in California). To remedy this, I usually direct link them to the offer (rather than use my affiliate link). Once the ad get approved you can switch to your affiliate link. Remember to keep a close eye on your ad approval because if it gets approved while linking directly to the offer site, you won’t get credit for sales/leads.

Impressions/Clicks/CTR/CPC:

1. The first few hours of a new ad will pretty much determine the performance of your ad going forward. If Facebook sees a .01 CTR in the first 2 hours, they will simply stop giving you impressions. To help with this, remember to set your new ad live at the optimal time based on your demographic. Try to determine when the most users are online in the area you are targetting, common sense usually works with this.

2. Your CTR is one of the most important factors when determining what Facebook will set your CPC to. CTR is almost directly proportional to your CPC. Things that influence your CTR the most are your image and your ad title. Facebook states that the ad title makes more of a difference than the image but I believe the image is most important.

3. Targetting is also very important. Facebook has stated that the smaller target audience you are going for, the higher CPC’s you will be paying. The logic behind this is that you have less volume to go after therefore they need to charge you more. Since targetting a smaller audience will also (most likely) raise your CTR, it is a balancing act between targetting for a higher CTR and keeping the volume large enough.

4. Structuring your ad groups is also very important. This is somewhat of a follow up to #3. You want to be able to determine who is clicking on your ads and who is converting. The only way to do this is to split up your ads into groups based on who you want to target (age ranges, male/female etc.). This means smaller volume but the ability to target better. Again, this is a balancing act.

5. Once you find 2+ ads that works well, keep pushing impressions to one until you see a drop in CTR and then switch to another one. Keep going back and forth like this and you will see a steady CTR.

Misc:

1. One thing I always like to do is use a redirect whenever possible. Instead of direct linking to your offer page or landing page, I use a redirect script. I do this because if i ever want to change where the ad goes to, I dont have to redo the ad and resubmit.

2. Your account will start with a daily limit of about $200. This can be raised after a little history and an email to your account rep. Building history to your facebook account is almost as important as building history to your adwords account.

3. DO NOT use the visa business app free $100 unless you plan on promoting a local business. This is the quickest way to get your account banned. They not only ban your advertising account, but they ban your entire Facebook account.

This was most of what I could think of for now. I will update this thread if i think of anything else. I hope this helps people!

Merchants
A merchant is a company that sells products or services. As an affiliate, you’ll have the option to partner with these merchants and help them sell their products online.

Pop Ups / Under & Exits
These are advertisements displayed in a new browser window. These advertisements or websites normally popup the same time as your site, but can be timed. A Pop-Under Ad will display behind your site so no one notices that it is there until they leave your site. Exit ads popup once a visitor leaves your site.

Referrals
Affiliates send visitors to a merchant’s site and if the visitor signs up to the merchant’s affiliate program, advertisers program, etc. then the affiliate will either be paid a one of commission or a percentage of the referrals commission,.

Pay per Click
Advertisement system, where publishers pay every time someone clicks on their ads. These system are the most common to drive traffic to an affiliate site. The big three companies are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Pay Per Lead
Affiliates receive a commission for each visitor they refer to a site that completes surveys, downloads, signups, etc.

Affiliate Program
This is where merchants or companies allow web site owners to promote their products or services.

Affiliate Network
A company where merchants can list their affiliate programs. Affiliates can then join theses networks to find merchants’ products and services that can be promoted by using text links, banners, etc. Affiliates can join and track a large number of affiliate programs from one site.

Banner Programs
Affiliates get paid by placing merchant’s banners on their site. These banners are a graphical advertisement, typically 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. Affiliates normally get paid per 1000 impressions, per sale, or per click-through.

Pay Per Impression
Earn commissions without your visitors having to make a purchase or clicking on the ad. All Affiliates have to do is place either a banner or text link on their site that takes them to the merchants site. Every time the banner or text link gets viewed the affiliate will get paid. Affiliates normally get paid per 1000 impressions/page views.

Pay Per Sale
An affiliate program that pays you a commission when you refer a visitor to a website then buy a product or service from that merchant. Affiliates usually get paid a percentage or a fixed rate of each product or service they sell.

Raw Visitors
A Raw visitor is counted every time a page is viewed.

Direct Referrals
These are people that you directly refer to an affiliate program.

Indirect Referrals
This is where visitors are referred to an affiliate program by your direct referrals.

Net 60, Net 30, etc
This is where a merchant pays it’s affiliates 60 days after the month for the Net 60 and 30 days after the month for the Net 30.

Pay Per Click Search Engine
These are search engines that allow you to earn on a pay per click basis. Their advertisers also pay on a pay per click basis. If a visitor clicks on a bided link that was referred by you, you’ll then earn a percentage of the bided amount.

Above the Fold
Describes the part of an email message or web page that is visible without scrolling down the page. This term is important because all content above the fold is assumed to be more valuable to the reader as they see it first. The size of the “above the fold” area will depend on the resolution of the users computer monitor and the number of pixels their monitor displays.

Advertiser
The person selling the goods or service; also knows as the merchant. The advertiser or merchant pays affiliates for sending traffic to the merchant’s web site after a product or service is purchased.

Affiliate Agreement
terms between a merchant and an affiliate that govern the relationship. This includes the terms on which the affiliate will be rewarded for the traffic sent to the merchant’s web site.

Unique Visitors
A Unique visitor is counted every time a site is viewed every 24 hrs. E.g. If a site receives a visitor at 2.30pm and receives the same visitor at 6.30pm on the same day then it will be counted as just one visitor. If he had visited the site 2.31pm on the next day then it would have counted as two visitors.

Search Box
A search box is another way for affiliates to link to a merchant’s site. It is coded specially to access a web address that is built into the merchant’s database. So if a visitor wants to search for a product or service on a merchant’s site that you have affiliated with, then they can search for that product straight from your site by using their search box. A Search Box is especially used in Search Engine Affiliate Programs.

Text Links
Text links are links that either describes a merchant’s product, service or their site. When the link is clicked on it will take you to the merchants site. This way of linking is becoming ever more popular as you can make the link and text look the same as the other content within your site. So your visitors won’t know if it is a link to another site or just a link to another page on your site.

2 Tier
These are affiliate programs that pays a commission for at least two-levels deep. For example, if you refer a visitor to a merchants site and they become an affiliate and he / she then refers someone and they also become an affiliate then you’ll be paid what you earn plus what your direct referral earns plus what your indirect referral earns up to two levels deep.

Affiliate Information Page
A page on your web site that explains the terms of your affiliate program including your commission rates, affiliate agreement, a link for existing affiliates to login, as well as a link to the signup page for new affiliates.

Affiliate Link
A URL tracking link that identifies the affiliate and sends traffic to the merchant’s web site. For example, a link might look like http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.asp?AffiliateID=5999

Affiliate Manager
The person responsible for running the merchant’s affiliate program. This includes recruiting affiliates, establishing incentive programs, creating media for the affiliates, reporting on sales and paying affiliates.

Affiliate Program
Can also be called an Associate Program, Partner, Referral or Revenue sharing program. In such a program the merchant rewards the affiliate for web traffic, sales or leads on a pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, or pay-per-lead basis.

Affiliate Program Directory
A comprehensive listing of merchants’ affiliate programs. The directories are typically categorized by industry and include the typical payout or commission rates. Click here for a sample list of affiliate program directories.

Affiliate Software
A software program such as Affiliate Wiz for running and managing an affiliate program. This typically includes signing up affiliates, managing links, tracking impressions, clicks, sales, leads. This also includes paying affiliates, etc.

Affiliate Solution Provider
3rd party company that provides an affiliate tracking solution on a hosted basis. Typically an affiliate software solution is hosted by you with your web site. With an affiliate solution provider, they provide the hosting for you.

Affiliate Tracking
The process of tracking a link uniquely by affiliate using an Affiliate Link.

Cookie Expiration/Cookie Retention
When a cookie is planted on a web browser, a date when the cookie expires is defined. This date is important because affiliate sales can only be recorded before the cookie expiration date. This period will also determine if repeat sales will be recorded.

Conversion Rate
Percentage of clicks that result in a commissionable activity (sale or lead).

CPA (Cost Per Action)
The amount of cost for a conversion such as a sale or lead.

CPC (Cost Per Click)
Cost of an individual click when paying on a per click basis.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand)
The cost of 1000 banner impressions.

CPO (Cost Per Order)
Same as CPA but refers specifically to sales.

Customer Bounty
Pays the affiliate partner for every new customer that they direct to a merchant.

E-mail Link
An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.

EPC (Earnings Per click)
Average earnings per 100 clicks. A relative rating that describes the ability to turn clicks into commissions.

HTML code
Refers to the lines of code that an affiliate places on their web page(s) for linking to the merchant’s site. This HTML code contains the unique identifier that identifies the traffic as coming from the Affiliate’s web site.

Impression
How many times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed.

In-house
Alternative to using an affiliate solution provider; building and managing your own affiliate program internal to your company. Typically this is accomplished by purchasing a 3rd-party product such as Affiliate Wiz.

Manual Approval
Refers to the process of validating an affiliate application and then approving them after validation. This can also refer to the process of approving sales after they have been validated.

Merchant
The person selling the goods or service is referred to as the merchant. The merchant pays affiliates for sending traffic to the merchant’s web site after a product or service is purchased.

P3P Privacy Policy
Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). A protocol for sharing private information over the Internet from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A Web site’s privacy policy is defined by the Webmaster answering a standard set of multiple-choice questions, which result in tags embedded in the Web site’s home page. Users also define their privacy requirements in their P3P-enabled browsers; for example, whether they allow their names disclosed to third parties. If the Web site policy and user preferences are not the same, the browser alerts the user.

P3P also assists with online sales. It lets users decide what specific data they are willing to divulge automatically to the site, such as shipping address and credit card number. If the site requests more data, the browser alerts the user, who can then decide whether to share it or not. For more information, visit www.w3.org/P3P.

Pay-Per-Sale
An affiliate marketing program that rewards affiliates based on each conversion to a sale such as when purchasing a product or service from the merchant’s web site. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions but tend to have the lowest conversion rates.

Pay-Per-Lead
Affiliate program that rewards affiliates for conversions to leads. A lead might include a signup form, software download, survey, contest or sweepstakes entry, signup for a trial, etc. Pay-per-lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange to high conversion ratios.

Pay-Per-Click
Rewards an affiliate for each unique click to the merchant’s web site. This type of affiliate program is uncommon because of click fraud or fake clicks.

Performance-Based Marketing
Marketing in which the merchant only pays commissions for results such as conversions to sales or leads.

Recurring Commissions
The process of rewarding an affiliate on a recurring basis whenever the merchant charges a customer a recurring fee. For example, a web host that charges customers on a monthly basis might reward the affiliate a percentage of each month’s payment from the customer.

Auto-Approve
Affiliate application process whereby all application are immediately accepted/approved upon submittal by the affiliate. This term can also be used to describe the process of automatically accepting all sales recorded by affiliates.

Banner Ad
An electronic advertisement or billboard such as an animated GIF, Flash Movie, JPEG that advertisers a product, service, or web site.

Browser
A client program (software), such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera, that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

Charge Back
An invalid sale that results in the affiliate’s commission being forfeited.

Click-through
The action when a user clicks on a link and follows through to the merchant’s web site.

Click-Through Ratio (CTR)
Percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant’s web site.

Co-branding
Situation where affiliates are able include their own logo and branding on the pages to which they send visitors through affiliate links.

Commission
Income an affiliate earns for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant’s web site. Sometimes called a referral fee, a finder’s fee or a bounty.

Cookies
Small text files stored on the visitor’s computer, which record information that is of interest to the merchant site. In affiliate software cookies are utilized to track which affiliate the web visitor came from and which banner or link they clicked. They can also store the date/time of the click for purposes of tracking the time elapsed between a click and a conversion to a sale or lead.

Residual Earnings
Programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale a shopper form their sites makes, but all additional sales made at the merchant’s site over the life of the customer.

ROI
Stands for ‘Return on Investment’. This is what all marketing managers want to see from the money they spend on their marketing and advertising campaigns. The higher the sales, the large the number of shoppers and the greater the profit margin generated by sales – the better the ROI.

Spider Detection
The process of detecting and ignoring automated spiders or bots such as search engines like Google/Googlebot.

Super Affiliates
The highest performing affiliates. Typically less than 1% of affiliates are super affiliates yet that 1% typically will bring more than 90% of your sales.

Targeted Marketing
Offering the right offer to the right customer at the right time.

Tracking System
The way that a program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks. The most common are by using a unique web address (URL) for each affiliate, or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant’s software. Some programs also use cookies for tracking.

Tracking Code
Refers to the hidden 1X1 pixel tracking code that is placed on the confirmation page of your store for tracking sales conversions.

Two-tier
Affiliate marketing model that allows affiliates to sign up additional affiliates below themselves, so that when the second tier affiliates earn a commission, the affiliate above them also receives a commission. Two-tier affiliate marketing is also known as MLM (Multilevel Marketing).

Unique Click
The process of only counting unique clicks from each web visitor. Unique clicks are typically tracked by recording the IP address and browser header.

• “I know we’re losing money on PPC, but I’m under pressure to provide leads.”
• “Well, we’re not really sure if we’re making money on PPC or not.” (They weren’t.)
• “We experimented with PPC last Christmas . . . sure, we lost money, but we’ll probably try again this Christmas, too.”
• “You control the ad wording — you can change wording from minute to minute if you really want to.”
• “You can associate different ads with different keywords or keyword groups.”
• “You can specify exactly how keywords work — if you select shoes, will the ad appear if someone searches on shoe? What about shoes in denver?”
• “You can specify, to some degree, where the ad appears — will the ad appear if the person searching is in Denver? In Chicago? In California? In Germany”

The degree of control allows you to tweak your advertising campaign. You can track the effects of your ads — not only can you see how much each click costs and how many people click an ad, you can even see what people do when they come to your site. You can track how many of the people who click the ad actually buy, fill in an informationrequest form, or take some other kind of action. Some ad texts may work better than others. You can experiment by combining different keyword choices with different ads. This information allows you to optimize your advertising by pinpointing which keyword/ad pairs get you the best results.