PPC Classroom Live – review

June 11, 2009 by affiliate starting line · Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Starting Line

PPC Classroom Live – Emil

Emil Paz is the creator of PPC Bully, a keyword research tool that gives you lots of competitive intelligence on campaigns running on the web. Emil told the story of his own experience (Adventurer/Crusader in Frank Kern terminology), leaving a secure job, losing $10,000 bidding in AdWords and then having an epiphany. He decided to see what the real winners were doing and and decided to copy them in order to make money online.

In order to see what they were doing, he had to see what keywords the winners were using, what kind of ads they were writing and how successful they truly were. With a couple of buddies he developed this tool and called it PPC bully. It will track a campaign and display keyword information, indexed over time, and show you how these keywords are converting to sales. He also showed how his tool can filter to find Ads that are profitable and making money for the campaign being researched.

His presentation was a very good demonstration of the importance of doing you research and due diligence before launching a Pay Per Click campaign and underscored the advantage you have with the information that shows what works and what does not work online. In short the real benefit is that you can avoid making mistakes by copying those who have already made them and now are running successful campaigns.

The idea is not to clone literally but to build and improve on the data you get from a tool like PPC Bully.

That is the long and short of his presentation. His official launch for his product was June 9 and I am sure it did achieve a pretty decent distribution. It is something that is a must if you are going to build a business online, and given the competitive landscape, it is one of the best products I’ve seen.

I use Google Cash Detective and am very satisfied with it. But I admit that if I were looking at buying a campaign intelligence tool I would look at PPC Bully as an option. I believe it is priced in the $1500 range. That is pretty much what these tools go for when you get serious about gathering real time data. They can save you much more money than they cost, if you take the time to learn how use them properly.

And that brings us to an important point.

None of these tools is a silver bullet that will bring instant wealth. They are the tools of the trade that help you make business decisions about what to promote and sell online. In fact, in some cases, like with Google Cash Detective, they are educational systems with video tutorials and regular live webinars to teach you how to develop your business. So they should not be looked at as one shot quick buys to a family fortune. Such is also the case with PPC Bully.

So there you have it.

Hope this was interesting.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

Tags: adwords, affilaite marketing for beginners, affiliate marketing, Keyword research, Pay per click

PPC Classroom Live – Greg

June 8, 2009 by affiliate starting line · Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing Reviews

: Image via CrunchBase

PPC Classroom Live Review

Greg Cesar was the second presenter of the first day and was very engaging and interesting. He is an Adwords expert, extemely successful and offered really concrete and clear lessons on how to set up your business online.

Greg’s basic approach is to keep things simple and not reinvent the wheel. The trick is to find a wheel that is rolling and works. That means find a market that is thriving, where affiliates are making money and then do lots of research.

Greg’s research begins with organic search results for a keyword he thinks he wants to bid on. For example he used “web design” as an example because his company offered that service to the small and large business community. He suggested looking at the same organic search results to monitor who showed up on the ads results at the top and right of the search page and keep a running score on the competition. Knowing who your competition is and learning how they price their offer is important and tells you how to proceed with your pricing and positioning. This process can take a couple of weeks and even longer depending on the market. If done right you will have the knowledge of how best to launch into the niche you are researching. In his case he literally prints out the SERP on a daily basis and looks at the trends.

Keyword research is the next step and the Google Adwords Keyword tool is the first step. Using the competitor url will tell you how Google sees your main competition and what keywords are being bid on. Wordtracker and freekeywords are also a couple of tools Greg uses to come up with releavant and competitive keywords. Bidding keywords is one approach, bidding domain names, book titles, celebrity names tied to the niche with spelling variations on these categories round out the keyword research process. There are other tools available and you will develop some of your own over time but for just starting out, the readily available tools he suggests can work fine.

Once you have done the market and keyword research it’s time to launch and test.

The trick in all this according to Greg, is to think out of the box and avoid ending up on the same path to the sale as everyone else. Look for different versions of a niche to sell to a product. Look to sell on Yahoo and MSN when it’s appropriate. You might even start with Yahoo and MSN to test and scale before going to Google. In other words, be original in your approach and in finding the path to your customers satisfaction and pocket book.

Greg’s process is to establish a relationship. educate your customer, provide value and then close the sale. You will want to make an attractive offer up front, even give away up front, in order to sell a bunch of offers back end. The different ways to build your business include creating yuor own product, building a lead generation process, building a list to which you can make multiple offers over time.

Over time he suggested offering your serives to small businesses, pricing setting up a Google adwords account for $2500 and charging $500 a month to maintain it. Then building that over time into a more sustained and higher priced retainer as the business profits grow

The key to success is to be able to answer Who, What, Where, Why and When of affiliate marketing.

Who are the customers?

What are they looking for?

Where are they looking for it?

When do they want it?

When do they need it?

If you you do you research right, you have the answeers to those basic questions , you will succeed in your campaign.

The only thing left to do with all of this information, is to take action. With action there is no business. So go for it!

That is gist of Greg’s presentation. For those interested you can look Greg up Online and check out his offers.

Hope this was helpful.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

Tags: affiliate marketing, Keyword research

PPC Classroom Live – Howie

June 3, 2009 by affiliate starting line · Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Starting Line

: Image via CrunchBase

PPC Classroom Live

Keyword Research and the Google Wonder Wheel

Howie Schwartz gave a really great presentation. No powerpoint, just pure Howie and live online demos of where to find great keyword ideas and research using Google free resources. He started by asking for a volunteer and a woman from Kansas who sells Geodeisic Dome Kits to build a dome home, steel and concrete, no composites, volunteered. She was great and discovered her website was in the number one position for her main keyword “dome home”. I think that was it. Anyway, Howie took her through organic search, suggested keywords at the bottom of the page and then to a new feature under the options tag on the upper left of the search page.

Under the options tag appear a number of tools you can select. One is called the Wonder Wheel. Select that and you get a return of all related keywords to the root keyword of the page. It is a great way to mine for ideas and is an indicator of what Google is telling you about your niche, your keywords and what you might do to optimize your site.

There were a number of those tools to go through and that is just what happened with two volunteers. The second volunteer had a RV lifestyle site.

Howie showed how you can harvest negative keywords to further target your campaign by going through the suggested keywords that were not relevant to your niche and building you list from that process. Checking videos on YouTube, reviews and relevant forums and blogs was part of the mix.

The main point of the exercise is to find a problem people want solved and then go about getting to the solution.

To test, you want to test 7-10 days using 300-500 keywords tracking exact match. A great way to find out what your customer wants is to have a survey that gives that customer the chance to tell you what they are looking for. Key is to give a test the time and getting enough data to determine if you have buyers not tire kickers.

Oh by the way, according to Howie, marketing online is like going to war. It is a war and there are no friends to be made when you are on the field. If it’s fun you want to have stay home and take up a hobby.

There is the long and short of it. If you want to find out more check Howie out, just google his name.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.