Archive for category Pay Per Click (PPC)
Keyword Check Time - Try No Spaces
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tips, Pay Per Click (PPC) on March 9th, 2010
I was just thinking about something so I figured I would share it with you all.
Are you using keywords with no spaces?
Let’s face it, people type quickly and make mistakes. Also there are common typos which are not technically typos and various ways to spell the same words or phrases.
Here are some examples of words to bid on:
learnguitar | guitarlessons | homeschool music lessons (as opposed to home school music lessons)
learn piano athome | pianodvd lessons | paintinginstruction
While the volume may not be high, you might get a ton of cheap keywords that still convert with these.
Daily Conversion Statistics
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tools, Pay Per Click (PPC) on December 17th, 2009
Earlier today an affiliate emailed me to ask for our conversion data for each day, so I thought I should share it with all of you.
Here are our overall affiliate conversion rates by day of the week. Of course, depending on your site and how you refer visitors to us, your results may vary, but this should give you an idea of the day-by-day breakdown at least.
Sun 2.839%
Sat 2.759%
Fri 2.793%
Thurs 3.297%
Wed 2.754%
Tues 2.819%
Mon 3.110%
New Pay-Per-Click Rules
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Legacy News, Pay Per Click (PPC) on December 3rd, 2009
We are updating our Pay-Per-Click ad copy rules. One of the things that we have noticed here is that trademark searches are turning up results that are hurting overall sales and significantly hurting our brand. In the end, this helps no one and reduces affiliate sales. Here is a sampling of some of the ads that searchers find whose end result is hurting sales.

Beginning December 12, the following words will be prohibited from being used in your ad copy in conjunction with our trademarked brands or when bidding on our trademarked names. We will be monitoring this for the next few days and notifying individual affiliates as we find them.
| Suck(s) | Stink(s) | Scam(s) |
| Rip-Off / Rip Off | Don’t / Do Not Buy | Don’t/Do Not Purchase |
| Don’t / Do Not Trust | Official Site | Fraud |
| Sham(s) | Fake(s) | Are You Kidding Me |
Examples of Ads that will not be allowed with or without a question mark:
Learn and Master Sucks
Do Not Buy This Course (when bidding on our names)
Learn and Master Scam
Don’t Buy Learn and Master
Learn and Master Rip-Off
Don’t Trust Learn and Master
Learn and Master – Are You Kidding Me
This is not an exhaustive list of course but you get the idea. I am sure you may have questions about specific ads, so please do not hesitate to contact me if you want me to review your ads. I am more than happy to!
Please note that this only applies if you bid on keywords that involve our name, such as “Learn and Master,” “Legacy Learning,” instructor names etc. or if you include those names in your ad copy.
PPC Bidding: It’s about Profit, Not Pride
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Pay Per Click (PPC) on November 18th, 2009
Matt Siesing of ROI Revolution wrote a great post earlier this month about PPC bidding, entitled “Bid for Profitability, not Pride.”
So often, affiliates, merchants, well everyone lets their pride get in the way when doing PPC bidding. But sometimes you have to put your pride aside and focus on making a profit, not on seeing your ad #1.
I would share more but there is nothing I can add to this post other than to add their cool cartoon with you.
Also, check out our post in our AdWords for Newbies Series about Setting an AdWords Budget.
Creating a Landing Page: Questions to Ask
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Pay Per Click (PPC), Web Design on November 17th, 2009
Kim Rowley of Key Internet Marketing had a great guest post by Rado Parling about the 12 Questions to Ask While Creating a Landing Page.
So often affiliates and even large merchants get caught up in what looks pretty rather than asking the important questions when designing their landing pages.
They are definitely good questions to consider and offer a checklist for your landing page design.
One great question he poses is:
Whether the desired action you want your user to take after visiting your landing page is easy to complete?
Think about the desired result (hint: it is probably to buy something, sign-up for something, or to register for something) that you want for a visitor. What is that result? How easy is it for them to get there?
I think this extends far beyond call-to-action buttons. It has to do with your headline, text copy, images, sales funnel…everything on your site should lead them to the action you desire for them to take, and make it easy for them.
There are so many great questions, covering everything from content to page speed, the trust factor, and testing. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but certainly a good start or refresher. If you have a review site, be sure to read my Common Advice for Review Sites post.
Also check out: Optimizing PPC Landing Pages to Increase Conversions
Let the Testing Begin!
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tips, Legacy News, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design on October 23rd, 2009
We are getting ready for The December push, are you?
As I posted here (Biggest Months for Learn and Master Courses) December is our biggest month, but unlike most retail companies, the excitement for us continues into January, February, March, and even April. November is our 6th biggest month.
So this month and next, we will be doing a lot of testing and I wanted to both share the tests with you and encourage you to be testing significantly this month and next.
We will be testing pretty much everything, using A/B and multivariate testing. Here some previews of the various things we will be testing in the next week or two, with more tests coming later. Ultimately, our metric is revenue per visitor and every effort is focused on increasing that…and thus your commissions!
Our Calls to Action Order Buttons
This is small sampling of order buttons we are testing.



Video or No Video
How does the video on our product pages effect conversions? We will find out. Add it, subtract it, move it, smaller, larger…
Adding Other Courses to Each Product Page
Graphics in our side white space for each product will show images such as this. We will be testing different versions of them.

More tests to come!
What are YOU testing this month and next?
Slapped by Google, Now what?
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tips, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on October 21st, 2009
Earlier today I got an email about another Google Slap. This was one of many emails or instant messages that I have received in the past month asking the same question…what do I do?
Most of the tips I have shared have been virtually the same, so I thought I would go ahead and share them with you here. This is really not much of a list of recovering from or surviving a Google Slap, but more a list of best practices for your web site and SEO efforts and Pay-Per-Click campaigns. If you have been slapped for poor quality sites, had your PPC campaigns shut down or SEO efforts derailed by being removed from the Google listings, these tips should help.
- Make sure your contact page has the necessary components: phone number, email address, physical address, etc. Read my article in Issue 7 of FeedFront for more.
- Reduce the number of outgoing links by about 1/3 or so.
- Add more internal links. If needed, create more internal content pages and link to them. This reduces the percentage of outgoing links.
- Slowly get more links to your site. I realize this is easier said than done, but most importantly use different anchor texts than you have been using and vary them greatly.
- Submit your sitemap XML to Google Sitemaps.
- Update your site. Move content, change words, especially header text and bold text.
- Use nofollow for all affiliate links in your robots.txt file.
Don’t treat your site like an affiliate site. Treat it like a help site and make sure that you would trust your own site to offer informative content and recommended products.
What are your favorite tips?
Negative Keyword Lists Added to Tools Section
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Pay Per Click (PPC) on September 25th, 2009
We have added a good starter list of negative keywords for use in your PPC campaigns to our affiliate tools section.
We posted in our AdWords for Newbies Series earlier this and answered the question, What is a negative keyword?
I hope they help!
Have a great weekend
Facebook Ads for Newbies
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Pay Per Click (PPC), Viral Marketing/Social Media on September 23rd, 2009
I have said it many times (here and here at least) that Facebook is a great place to market our stuff. It’s a great place to market in general.
But there are some nuances to marketing on the networking site.
All Facebook recently posted an article entitled “The 4 Types of Branded Facebook Campaigns” that is a great introduction and primer on Facebook advertising. These are examples of how Facebook is truly more unique any form of PPC out there today.
I definitely recommend read this article to learn a little more and get some good ideas.
Among the types of campaigns addressed are: Engagement Ads (Polls, Videos, Branded Gift Ads, Event Engagement ads, Fan Pages), News Feed Advertisements, Facebook Pages, and Facebook Applications.
Common Advice for Affiliate Review Sites
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design on September 2nd, 2009
As you might expect, about two times each week, I get requests for help with designing affiliate sites. Usually I am able to offer at least 2-3 tips that should improve their conversions to our site and make the affiliate more money. Sometimes, I may have 10+ suggestions.
I thought that I would share some of the more generic ones I have offered, of course, without mentioning any specific things about particular web sites. They are pretty basic, but if you just starting your site or looking to improve your site, these could be some useful tips. They are in no particular order.
- Let’s cover the basics of web design first. Here are a few great articles and posts that address general PPC and Web Design practices for affiliates:
- Use Calls to Action but don’t forget that you are review site. A large “Buy Now” button may just scare customers away. Try “Visit Site” or “Order Now” or both.
- Link often. Often review copy gets long, as it should, but then the visitor can spend 10 minutes reading and not see a link to buy. Give them some in-paragraph links to click on and link all images to your affiliate link. Always include a link at the top and bottom of the copy as well as after each section.
- Use our product shots and screenshots. You can find these in your account. Link to your affiliate link on each of these and make sure to use alt tags on each for extra SEO benefit.
- Of course, check your copy for typos and grammar.
- Mention all the features we offer, even the little ones like the Jam-Along CDs and Online Support Forum. Tell a little about each.
- Don’t have more than one paragraph of copy at a time without some sort of break (see #3 and #4). Aside of images, you can list things in bullet points, numbered lists, etc. to break up the monotony of endless text.
- Use customer testimonials! Testimonials are without a doubt the best way to convince someone to buy. You can find them here:
- Use videos. If you need our videos, just email me and I will get them to you.
- In the text of the review, mention the award we have won such as:
- 008 Acoustic Guitar Magazine Players’ Choice Awards
- Two Telly Awards
- AEGIS Award for Excellence in Education
I hope these basic suggestions help you better design your review site!
Google Moves AdWords Ads
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on August 21st, 2009
| Did anyone else notice that Google recently moved the AdWords ads to the left?
Big deal, right? Sure, until you consider that it seems to have increased their click through rate (CTR)10%…which translates into millions upon millions of dollars for big G, and more clicks for you PPC affiliates. |
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Here is a look at the changes. Where there used to be a huge white space, now there are ads. Much closer to the natural listings and much more likely to be clicked.

Honestly, I did not even notice it until someone pointed it out to me, but apparently at least 10% of the people noticed it enough to be more likely to click on them. On our ads, we noticed as much as a 30% higher click through rate on some campaigns, which is amazing.
What have you found with your campaigns?
Follow-Up to Don’t Copy - Be Original
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tips, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design on July 29th, 2009
Yesterday I posted an article entitled “Don’t Copy - Be Original” and in less than 15 hours, the comments have been rolling in.
In one comment Vinny O’Hare made an excellent point about how to protect yourself from being copied. He says to set up a Google Alert for specific phrases of unique content that likely can only be found on your site.
So let’s say you have a sentence on your home page that reads: “Have you dreamed for years about learning the guitar?” This is not likely to be an exact phrase that someone else would think up on their own and if someone else is using that exact phrase, you will receive a Google Alert about it. You can then check out their site and see if they are copying you. Perhaps they just happened to think of that phrase themselves and are not copying you, but perhaps they are.
I will be writing more about how to protect yourself from copycats in the coming days and also what actions you can take.
Thanks Vinny for the great suggestion!
Don’t Copy - Be Original
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Tips, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Design on July 28th, 2009
This should probably go without saying, but one of the absolute worst things you can do as an affiliate is to copy someone else’s site.
Recently, I had to terminate an affiliate for doing just this. In fact, this affiliate was so blatant, his site even used the original site’s name in the copy and the about us page said he was the other person. Utterly blatant stealing!
It is this simple…we do not tolerate affiliates blatantly copying what other affiliates (or merchants) are doing.
There are a myriad of reasons why you should not do this. Among them:
1. It is unethical…need I continue? OK I will.
2. Your site will be punished. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but before too long, your site will be banned by Google and other search engines for duplicate content. This will apply to both Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization.
3. Your commissions will probably be reversed and you will be kicked out of any program managed by a reputable affiliate manager.
4. You might get sued. In fact, count on this.
Seriously, how would you feel if you devoted days of your life to designing a site, writing the copy, and then some nitwit copies everything you do, spending maybe one hour and trying to steal your hard work?
Be original. Design your own graphics or use some stock art at the very least. Write your own copy.
It is fine to observe what others are doing and get some ideas from them, but copying their text word for word and literally stealing their images is a big no-no.
Bing to Power Yahoo Search
Posted by Matt McWilliams in Affiliate Marketing News, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on July 27th, 2009
| Will Bing soon be powering Yahoo Search and allowing the two to finally close the gap with the almight Google?
Adage is reporting that the two companies may be close to a deal that would have Bing paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Yahoo for the right to power their natural and paid search. Microsoft says they are willing to spend a ton of money on search and Yahoo is probably fearing they cannot keep up with the $5+ billion that Microsoft is willing to spend on search. |
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The effect that this might have on affiliates doing PPC is yet to be determined, if it even happens.
But it should be very interesting to see. Stay tuned!






















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