Part 1 – Introduction to PPV Marketing

In this section of the book, you will learn exactly what PPV is and how it works. David introduces the various PPV networks including Traffic Vance and Media Traffic. He shows you what types of offers to promote using PPV and what CPA networks you should join to take advantage of these offers.

Part 2 – Setting Up Your PPV Campaign

Here, you’ll get the exact steps required to setup your PPV campaign successfully. David includes links to videos he’s created which show you exactly what you need to do. You’ll discover what URLs you should be bidding on, and how to pay cheap clicks ($0.01) for them as well. Then he goes into some free tools that will make your life easier, plus the AffPortal tools which are part of the PPV Playbook membership.

Part 3 – PPV Landing Pages

With PPV, you can direct link and create landing pages. Landing pages do work better in some situations, and David explains it all in this section. He shows how to use dynamic keyword insertion to customize your landing pages for each visitor. I’ve been using this technique myself, and I’ve seen it really improve my CTR and conversion rates. He also demonstrates how to use PPV marketing to collect emails and build a huge email list which you can market to for recurring profits. Finally, he walks you through how to use pre-pop to pre-populate forms for lead gen offers.

Part 4 – PPV Bidding, Budgets and Competition

To be successful with PPV, you need to be able to manage your bids and budget. This section is very important, and David gives some essential bidding strategies to make sure your PPV campaigns remain profitable. PPV is definitely a different beast than PPC, so you need to pay attention here.

Part 5 – PPV Tracking

So many affiliate marketers neglect tracking, but it is so important to succeeding with PPV. Getting your campaign profitable requires you to weed out any bad (non-converting) urls, and the only way to figure this out is by using tracking. This section is short, but very important as it shows you how to use Tracking202/Prosper202 to track your PPV campaigns.

Part 6 – PPV Niches

In the last section of the book, David shares some specific offers and urls to bid on. It’s a good way to get started, although it’s probably a little saturated at this point. Still, it shows you how to think outside of the box, and you’ll definitely want to apply the same principles to your own campaigns.

The PPV Playbook ebook is 22 pages to long, with no fluff content. It is easy to follow, and you should be able to go through it in one sitting. It also includes links to the various videos that David has put together, which is helpful for more visual learners. You can get pickup the PPV Playbook for $47, and it comes with a money back guarantee. PPV marketing is growing fast, so don’t miss learning about this important traffic source.

More about PPV Playbook

Such methods are still used for creating some of the best advertising campaigns in existence. A prime example is the catchy commercials that are aired on television during the Super Bowl. These advertising spots are sold to the highest bidders and can cost staggering millions of dollars to capture the viewing audience’s attention for around thirty seconds. The price, by comparison to the rewards advertisers receive in soared profits from these advertising spots is quite worth the expense of purchasing these commercial slots. Not only does the audience get fed a targeted advertising message that makes them want to go out and patronize the advertiser, but it is an audience that typically holds millions of watchers captive for the few moments but creates a lasting impression for quite some time.

In a realistic world where most companies cannot afford to spend millions of dollars on a 30-second spotlight commercial, the search for low cost quality advertising is often one that never ends. Many tread lightly due to the belief that if you don’t spend a fortune on your advertising, you get what you pay for. In some cases this is quite true because cheap supplies can produce a poor quality advertising product which takes away from an excellent campaign slogan or strategy.

One low cost advertising method that has continued to gain momentum since its introduction is pay per view marketing (PPV). Also recognized under other names such as cost per view advertising and similar to pay per click (PPC) advertising, PPV marketing continues to appeal to the Internet based marketing world because it is a very low cost method of advertising your business and the goods or services it offers. PPV marketing is one of the best ways to drive customers back to your website and get more of the lion’s share of the audience than your competition.

Because PPV marketing charges you only for the views of your website and does so at a very low cost, it is easy to generate thousands of views by ready to buy customers for pennies on the dollar or less. PPV marketing is not only low in cost but with the assistance of the right company, this type of advertising is easy to implement and can drive thousands of customers and visitors alike back to your website in no time at all.

Last week while I was procrastinating, surfing the web for a new sensation, I came across a post “How to Become a Millionaire in Three Years“. My initial reaction was “Sigh…let’s see what this guy is trying to sell.” But I was pleasantly surprised by the content. “Good stuff” my brain said. Basically it’s a list of general sound advice on how to become wealthy. Three years is just a number thrown out there, but it’s certainly achievable.

Anywho, whilst reading the list, I kept matching a lot of these points with my success in affiliate marketing. You can call me DJ Cut N’ Paste, here’s my affiliate remix to “How to Become an A Million in Three Years”:

“1. Surround yourself with smart people – Smart people whom are successful usually get there by doing the same and have an innate desire to help those do the same.”

I have a list of successful affiliates on my AIM and Skype that I bounce ideas off all the time. I’ve even got a few small mastermind groups that I’m part of. Forums and conferences are a perfect place to start. I would have never been this successful without these groups.

“2. Say no way more than you say yes - I bet almost every web entrepreneur has encountered this: You demo your product / explain what you’re doing and someone suggests that you do “X feature/idea”. X is a really good idea and maybe even fits in with what you’re doing, but it would take you SO FAR off the path you’re on. If you implemented X it would take a ton of time and morph what you’re doing. It’s also really really hard to say no when it comes from someone well respected like a VC or famous entrepreneur. I mean how the fuck could they be wrong? Hell, they might even write me a check if I do what they say!!!!! Don’t fall for that trap. Instead write the feedback down somewhere as one single data point to consider amongst others. If that same piece of feedback keeps coming up AND it fits within the guidelines of your vision, then you should consider it more seriously. Weight suggestions from paying customers a bit more, since their vote is weighted by dollars.”

Oh I love my affiliate managers I really do. They tend to get the beating stick more then they deserve. They present us with so many great converting offers. But, learn to say no. I’ve struggled to say no for a while. I’m still learning now, but I know that Mr Money lives in Focusland.

“3. Get as many distribution channels as possible - In general online business there is some weird sense that if you build something they will just come. That a few “like”+retweet buttons and emails to editor@techcrunch.com will make your traffic explode + grow consistently. It fucking won’t. Get as many distribution channels as possible. Each one by itself may not be large, but if you have many it starts to add up. It also diversifies your risk. If you’re a 100% SEO play, you’re playing a dangerous dangerous game. You’re fully dependent upon someone else’s rules. If Google bans you, you will be done. You could easily replace the SEO example with: App store, facebook, etc.”

I’m a firm believer in mastering a source of traffic. HOWEVER, if you do have a campaign that is burning hot on your traffic source, then allow an exception to scale with other channels.

“4. Go with your gut and do not care about fameballing – Go with what your gut says, regardless of how it might look to the rest of the world. Too often we (I) get lost in caring about what people think. It usually leads to a wrong decision. Don’t worry about becoming internet famous or appearing on teh maj0r blogz. Fame is fleeting in the traditional sense. Become famous with your customers. They’re the ones that truly matter. What they think matters and they will ultimately put their money where their mouth is.”

The top gurus have got this down to a fine art. They don’t care about the affiliate horde or bloggers that bash them. They care about the people making them money, their customers.

“5. Be an unrelenting machine- Brick walls are there to show you how bad you want something. Commit to your goals and do not waver from them a one bit regardless of what else is there. I took this approach to losing weight and fitness.  I have not missed a single 5k run in over a year. It did not matter if I had not slept for two days, traveling across the country, or whatever else. If your goal is to become a millionaire, you need to be an unrelenting machine that does not let emotions make you give up / stop. You either get it done with 100% commitment or you don’t. Be a machine.”

I believe that if you want something, you need to have 100% commitment mentally, not just physically. What I mean by this is that you don’t need to work for two days at a time, or stop yourself from traveling across the country. Just set targets. Hit them, work smart, and don’t let anything veer you off course.

“6. If you do focus on a dollar amount, focus on the first $10,000 - This usually means you’ve found some repeatable process / minimal traction. ie- if you’re selling a $100 product, you’ve already encountered 100 people who have paid you. From here you can scale up. It’s also a lot easier to take in when you’re looking at numbers. Making 1 million seems hard, but making $10,000 doesn’t seem so hard, right?”

Enough said.

“7. Get out and be social - Even if you’re an introvert, being around people will give you energy. I’m at my worst when I’m isolated from people and at my best when I’ve at least spent some time with close friends (usually who I don’t know from business).”

I play football around seven times a week. I go out 3-4 times a week. If I stay inside for long periods, I go nuts and start becoming “busy” and unproductive. Going out and being social also gives you a good chance to give yourself perspective on your business.

“8. Make waves, don’t ride them - There was a famous talk Jawed Karim gave from youtube. He described the factors that made youtube take off in terms of secondary/enabling technologies. I think they included (1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3- proliferation of digital cameras 4- cheap hosting 5- one click upload 6- ability to share embed). Find those small pieces and put them together to make the wave. That’s what youtube did imho. The other guys really just rode the wave they created (which is okay).”

Riding waves will allow you to be semi-comfortable, but pioneering campaigns is the way to hit the big time. I’ve written about this argument here.

“9. Market opportunity - A million dollars is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a lot if the market opportunity is not large enough.  Spend time on offers that have been around for a while and that appeals to a broad demographic. Forget about offers with caps. With traffic sources don’t spend all your time and effort optimizing a small demographic that you can’t possibly scale. Even if you put Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as founders in a new venture with a total market size of 10 million, there is no way they could become too wealthy without completely changing the business (ie- failing).”

We are lucky with affiliate marketing that we can have our fingers in a lot of small cookie jars. However, it gets tedious and hard to manage. My advice…spend time in niches where if you hit it right, you can win big.

“10. Always keep your door/inbox open - You never know who is going to walk through your door + contact you. Serendipity is a beautiful thing. At one point Bill Gates was just a random college kid calling an Albuquerque computer company.”

We all get flooded with affiliate network offers and traffic opportunities, most absolute garbage. But there are always a few delicious crispy nuggets here and there that make skimming through the junk worth it.

“11. Give yourself every opportunity you can - I use this as a reason why starting a company in silicon valley when it comes to tech is a good idea. You can succeed anywhere in the world, but you certainly have a better chance in the valley. You should give yourself every opportunity possible, especially as an entrepreneur where every advantage counts.”

I live in a country where I only know two other affiliates who have been successful in this industry. I believe my path to success would have been easier if I was living  in San Fran or LA. This point I’ve failed at big time.

“12. Stick with it - Don’t give up too fast. Being broke and not making any money sucks + can often make you think nothing will ever work. Don’t quit when you’re down. If this was easy then everyone would be a millionaire and being a millionaire wouldn’t be anything special. Certainly learn from your mistakes + pivot, but don’t quit just because it didn’t work right away.”

Things were not easy for me at the start. I had a tough time making my way. Learn from every failure. Look at it as a positive step forward. People get into am with the idea of instant success. If it were easy, affiliates wouldn’t be around.

“13. Don’t Be Emotional – Emotions can let you make stupid decisions.  It can make you not walk away because you’re attached to something.  Most importantly it will lead to indecision and a loss of confidence.  Put your emotions into your product or save them for your lover, family, friends,etc.”

Have you ever burnt a ton of money on a test campaign because you got excited when one conversion came up very early on? Or tested a campaign so briefly, because you had little confidence in yourself that you could make it work? I used to be like that, but over time became very apathetic. To not be emotional is easier said than done, but it comes with experience. It definitely helps a lot to not let your judgment become clouded.

“14. Don’t Leave Things Up to Chance - People feel that things will just work out due to carpe diem.  They usually don’t  People can be unreliable, deals can fall through, and shit will always happen.  Prepare for multiple scenarios and contingencies.  You can mitigate this by working with smart AND reliable people.”

Work with solid offers, solid traffic sources, and solid affiliate networks. No point in doing anything risky, there are many great safe options around to pick from.

“15. Don’t Get Comfortable - You will probably get comfortable somewhere around 200k, maybe less or more, but it will certainly be before 1 million dollars.  If you get comfortable you start getting off balance and having the hunger to move forward.  Reward yourself a little bit, but live as frugally as possible.  I have friends who have made some okay money, but blow it all away on stupid shit because they got comfortable.”

This is a ‘that’s a bingo’! Another relevant point is that with your long term campaigns, it is close to impossible to have a fully optimized campaign…keep pushing yourself.

“16. Don’t Skimp on the Important Things - When it comes to things that need to be reliable such as infrastructure, delivery, or even your own personal tech equipment – don’t skimp out.  These are the tools that ensure reliability and your product being delivered.  You can skimp on the office space, the desks, coach airfare, budget motel in mountain view,etc.”

Invest in good web hosting, ad servers and tracking. Make sure you get the absolute best fit for your campaigns.  As soon as you have a dodgy web hosting provider, you add more guess work to your campaigns. Absolutely basic common sense.

“17. Keep The Momentum Going -  I’ve had projects where things were moving a million miles an hour, then BOOM, they just lost a lot of momentum.  That is the worst possible thing you can have happen.  Keep moving the ball everyday.”

We’ve all had campaigns where we’ve had this initial burst of enthusiasm, completed half the campaign, then just left it to rot because a hot new idea came up. Stick with an idea and run with it. Failure is better than no result at all.

Here are a couple of points I’ve written more focused at affiliate marketing.

• 18. NEVER Ask “Do You Think This Will Work?” – If you get an answer 90% of the time, it will be plucked out of thin air. Do you know who is the only person that knows the answer like that? The Mightly Super Captain Test-it.

• 19. There Is No Best Network – So you did well with one offer on a network and became emotionally attached. Don’t get blinded and only running offers on your ‘buddy buddy’ network.  Let ole pops tell you a wee story…last year I ran a test for offer X on my favoritest cutest network, “network X”. That test failed. “Woah is me!” I said. How could this be? I had experience with similar offers. It didn’t make sense to ole pops. So I tried running offer X on network Z. I jumped out of my slippers when I saw the ROI was 1:4. It ended up making mid $xx,xxx profit.

• 20 Learn How To Filter -I’ve written over 20,000 words on my blog.  Some of posts are even contradictions.  As soon as you start adding in other blogs and forums you will feel like you’re being pulled in a five million directions.  You then become indecisive.  Take in information, and then filter the good bits while synthesizing them to be a part of your overall plan.  What works for person A does not always work for person B.

Did I leave anything out?

———–

Summary for my A.D.H.D readers (15 words):

Focus.

Work hard.

Test.

Meet the right people.

Keep to large markets.

Don’t get lazy.

This is a guest post by Josh Todd. Josh has been an Affiliate Marketer for over two years. He is also an Affiliate Manager for GetAds. He recently released a 22-page guide called PPV 101: A Step-by-Step Campaign Walkthrough. You can download it for free from his blog at http://insideaffiliate.net.

When people ask me what my favorite method of promoting affiliate offers is, I have no hesitation telling them that it’s PPV. It’s been around since the dark ages of the internet, and yet it is still successful today, perhaps more now than ever. I love PPV because it’s easy. I love PPV because it’s cheap. I love PPV because it’s profitable.

Before you write me off as just a PPV fanboy, consider the facts:

• You can get PPV traffic for a penny per view
• You can direct link all you want
• There is no Quality Score issues
• There are over 30 billion web pages to target
• You can still run rebills (just use a good affiliate network!)

If that’s not enough to get your juices flowing, then you should just hang up your shoes now and forget about making money on the internet. I’ll even give you a personal example of mine. I campaign I just launched yesterday has cost me $3 and made me back $54. That’s an ROI of 1,700%. And that’s also only bidding on one URL. If you could make $54 for every $3 spent, how much would you spend? As much as humanly possible.

Is there competition on PPV? Of course there is. But competition is a good thing. That means that people are making money, and that’s where you want to be at. There’s no reason to re-invent the wheel when it comes to traffic. There are a few proven methods for getting traffic to your website or affiliate offer, and to succeed you must be able to master one (or all) of them.

The best thing that you can do for your online career is focus on one thing until you make it successful. There are so many different ways to make money on the internet that it’s easy to get distracted trying out each idea that comes along. The guys that are buying their first Benz before most people graduate college are the ones that took one approach and worked it until it worked for them. Giving up and moving to a new traffic source is not the way to create wealth.

There are a lot of resources and tools available for today’s PPV marketer that simple did not exist a couple years ago. Tools that make it even easier to make money with PPV. Don’t like scraping URLs by hand? There’s a tool for that. Don’t like creating search engine query strings manually? There’s a tool for that. There are also more and more offers being added to Affiliate Networks that accept PPV traffic. It’s not just “adware” traffic anymore; people have realized that you can drive quality leads with PPV, and a ton of them.

No more excuses. There’s no reason you can’t start testing out your first campaign by the end of the day. You’ll thank me once you’ve got a few offers on autopilot that are making you several hundred dollars a day.

Go grab a copy of the free PPV Handbook ]]> http://www.whatisppvmarketing.com/ppv-marketing/why-does-ppv-traffic-kill-it/feed/ 0 http://www.whatisppvmarketing.com/ppv-marketing/laser-targeting-your-ppv-marketing-campaigns/ http://www.whatisppvmarketing.com/ppv-marketing/laser-targeting-your-ppv-marketing-campaigns/#comments Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:00:29 +0000 admin http://www.whatisppvmarketing.com/?p=26 From FinchSells.com

Christ, I almost forgot about this place. About two weeks ago, I had a fetching list of topics to post about. So what happened?

Amsterdam happened.

An extended break in Holland has helped to relax my senses. Unfortunately to the point where I can’t remember much of what I wanted to say. Whenever I tell people that I’ve been to Amsterdam, I always feel the need to make it perfectly clear that “No, I didn’t.”

And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t remember, okay? Perhaps my single most striking memory of The Dam was being perched in a toilet, space caked out of my face, wondering what would happen if you whipped a pigeon. I swear to God, it seemed philosophical at the time.

Anyway, I believe the last post was about shock marketing tactics and how you could stun somebody in to clicking a creative if you pressed the right buttons.

This post swings to the other end of the scale. I want to look at how you could go about laser targeting – a favourite term of mine – with a traffic source as anonymous and faceless as PPV. It’s incredibly easy, but to do so, you will invariably need to sacrifice the one thing that keeps a super affiliate’s bed wet at night…volume.

Since I decided to start rambling about PPV again, I’ve been bombarded by contextual marketing virgins who would like to get a piece of the pie but just don’t know where to start. So I will say that this road is generally much easier and much cheaper than the methods outlined in my last post.

The best way to take a vice like grip over your PPV targeting is to only actually target one site. In some cases, even one page.

While providing a visual shock like the car crash scenario is often good for general targeting, you may find more success by designing your PPV creatives to be a working extension of the site that you’re targeting. You can’t go ripping the brand name and providing false endorsements, but you can use the user’s web location to your advantage.

One option may be to target the sport section of a national newspaper to crowbar in a PPV campaign along the lines of…

“Hey [Newspaper Title] Readers,

We’re offering online readers of [...] an EXCLUSIVE free ticket to [Whatever sports event]. Just click here and enter your zipcode to continue…

…And don’t forget to buy tomorrow’s edition of [...]“

Yes, it sounds pretty much identical to the recent banned Facebook ads citing the user’s age as a barrier to entry. And that’s true. But the secret is to make the reader feel as if they’ve stumbled across a mystery freebie while carefully avoiding any suggestion that you’re the actual owner of the target site. Sound a little shady? Yep, so is a large segment of the shit that actually works for affiliates in the CPA space.

Another favourite tactic of mine is to hijack the inferiority complex to make the user click-through to where I want them to be.

I’ll use Runescape as an example. Here is a game where you can register a character and engage with thousands of other users in a sprawling virtual world. I’m no market research wizard, but what can I say for sure about a lot of Runescape players? They’re a bunch of pansy dicks who don’t like to be made to feel inferior.

That said, I thought it’d be a good idea to design a PPV creative that would be specifically catered for Runescape users persuading them to register on the closest matching gaming offer I could find.

The general gist of the headline was…

“There’s A Reason The Top Runescape Players Are Flocking To [My Offer Name Here]”

…But I can’t tell you until you click through and see it for yourself”

I was hoping to spark an immediate reaction where firstly, the player doesn’t like being left in the dark or having it implied that he’s not good at Runescape. And secondly, there’s the inquisitive nature of wanting to know more about a new game that ranks well with the same crowd.

Given that so many of the Runescape crowd are young, retarded, and living in cloud cuckoo land, you can have a field day with your creatives until you’re driving a decent amount of clicks and conversions.

I’m using Runescape and the gaming niche as a convenient example – because I know it won’t make you much money if you rip it like several people did with the last post. But the real trick is to start thinking outside the box. Look at how you could apply the same logic to offers with higher payouts and higher traffic.

If you’re new to PPV, I would strongly recommend you learn to walk before you try to run. Just choose one target site. Maybe even one page within it.

Search for a suitable offer that can be wedged on to the back of your target for maximum relevancy. Nothing grabs the user’s attention like a creative that asks them whether they really want to do what they’re about to do, but maybe that’s a method for a whole new post…

As I’ve said all along, when you’re advertising with PPV, you need to understand the way that interruption marketing works. While the last post detailed a method of interrupting the user with something visually extravagant and attention catching, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Sometimes you can exploit interruption marketing by making sure the user doesn’t even know that there’s been an interruption. Blend in with your target source and produce creatives that sit well with the user’s natural navigation through the target site. I’m not going to go in to specifics, but when I’m planning my PPV campaigns, I like to ask myself three questions about the targets I’m adding.

1. Why is the user on this page?
2. Where is the user most likely to click next?
3. Where did the user come from?

If you can begin to paint a picture of the user’s browsing habits, you can design a creative that captures their attention so much more readily. Headline phrases like “Before you…” and “Now that you’ve…” play a key role in my PPV creatives and if you plug your brain in, you can probably put two and two together to see why. Happy hunting.

PPV is no doubt a huge, huge money maker. In fact, in a recent webinar I did with David and Corey, David (owner of PPVPlaybook Coaching Forum) showed how he had earned $27,287.50 in 8 DAYS! That’s over $3400 PER DAY!

Side note: To get that webinar, get my free affiliate marketing guide. On the guide page, I have recorded webinars for you to download.

Anyways, like I was saying, there is huge money in PPV. So… 5-6 months ago I set out to learn how to dominate PPV.

So, the first thing I did was install the software onto my computer. Yup, I installed adware right onto my main computer. Some people might call me crazy but it has taught me a crazy amount about PPV traffic and how it ACTUALLY works.

Being on the internet for hours and hours each day, I see a ton of PPV ads (8+ hours per day x a few months = a LOT of ads). The more ads I see, the more I realize how shady the top PPV ads are. You know, the ones that get the majority share of the traffic.

In fact, the ads that I see the most are always the ones that break the “rules”. So I wanted to break down a bit more about some of the REAL techniques I have seen these top guys using. Ok, I’m sure a lot of people are not going to be happy about this, but oh well.

Shady Technique Number 1:
Making it look like your PPV ad is actually a popup from the website. For example, “Hey Wells Fargo Customer! Check this special offer only for our members!”

When you make your landing page look exactly like the actual page, it’s a great way to increase the trust that your ad has. I’ve seen this method used to promote surveys, to promote rebill offers, to promote zip submits, and more.

Shady Technique Number 2:
Using sound and/or video. Now from what I thought, you were not allowed to use video or audio on your PPV landing pages. I could be wrong, and this could be only for certain ad networks but it seems like a majority of the top landing pages use either audio or video to capture your attention. And boy does it work!

Imagine watching netflix instant queue and then BAM, “HEY NETFLIX CUSTOMER!!! You’ve WON!!!” Haha. The first time it happened, my wife was in the other room but hear it because I had my speakers up loud. After that played, she came into the room excited, “What did we win?!” It was cute.

I see video mostly used on pages that capture email addresses and audio primarily on sites that want you to act right away like surveys, zip submits, etc.

Shady Technique Number 3:
Using Javascript Alert Messages. You know those alert messages you get when you try to close a webpage? “Are you SURE you want to leave this webpage? Hit OK to stay on the page, Hit Cancel to leave…”

Think about using one of those BEFORE your PPV ad loads. That’s right, an onPageLoad action.

The way it looks with the PPV ads is simply brilliant and beautiful. I’m sure it causes the user to convert like crazy too. Mix this with method 1 or 2 and you’ve got a gold mine.

Now, I jacked this graph from a Google image search, and it’s satire rather than actual data. But it’s pretty much true, right? People find it hard not to pay attention to scenes that jump out of their mundane lives and slap them in the face.

Since moving in to PPV advertising, I’ve tried several different approaches to varying degrees of success. I’ve tried informational adverts, humour to capture attention, and the subject of this post – shock marketing. While it’s not suitable for all offers, shock marketing is something that naturally integrates very well with PPV. When you’re dealing with interruption marketing, or springing pop-ups on a user who is otherwise engaged, you really need to have an ace up your sleeve to tear them away from whatever they’re expecting to see on the page they’ve clicked through to.

Many people fail to drive a sufficient CTR with their PPV creatives simply because they try to be too cute. They’ve been raised with conventional marketing wisdom that says that if you explain the right benefits to the right user, you’ll enjoy eventual success. While that’s true to an extent, the nature of pop-up and pop-under display adverts is intrusive.

You could be slinging Vodka to an alcoholic and there’s still a good chance that he’ll give you the cold shoulder. Maybe ten years ago you’d enjoy an easier ride. Unfortunately people are naturally inclined to turn a blind eye to advertisements these days. That’s unless they see something so outrageous or so targeted to their needs that they can find the reason to put aside whatever they were doing before.

When I approach my PPV campaigns, I always do so with the same mindset: “How can I make the user stop and stare?”

Research shows, from a number of sources I truly can’t be bothered to dig out, that you have a matter of split seconds to grab the user’s attention. Miss the boat and you’ve paid to be forgotten.

Picture your target audience. Can you honestly see these users pissing themselves in excitement at the thought of what the next 750×550 might bring?

Well, the way I see it, if you want people to catch a message on a highway billboard, you’re going to have more luck if a car has just been trashed in to the support beams. People will stop and stare.

One of the offers I wanted to test out was an auto insurance quote form. There are some great insurance lead gen opportunities, and PPV is a brilliant way of making your living with them.

The problems with auto insurance offers are pretty well documented. Most affiliates are priced out of the PPC space due to advertisers with budgets the size of Texas. The cost efficient platforms to market these offers are PPV and social media networks like Facebook. But it’s not easy to get the average floating surfer to pay attention to an auto insurance offer.

Unless you’re extremely targeted or extremely relevant, it’s going to be hard to interest people with a subject like insurance. I would personally enjoy crunching my balls against my desk more than I would being distracted from my Facebook photo creeping by a loose promise of cheaper car insurance. That’s just me.

I decided to use PPV to target several Chevrolet related websites. I was looking for users who were actively looking to buy a new or used Chevrolet. I can’t remember why I chose this brand. It was something to do with it being the most crashed vehicle in a certain state for three years running. I can’t remember.

As most PPV experts will tell you, you’re going to enjoy a lot more success if you target your traffic source and then try to match it to an offer that fits the demographics. By settling on this Chevrolet crowd, I already had an excellent idea of what my target audience was hoping to see.

It would be very easy to put together a basic creative with a few bullet points and a strapline like “Best Insurance Offer For Your New Chevrolet” or whatever. This will often be successful, but it wasn’t shocking enough – in my eyes – to draw the number of clicks that would be necessary to keep the campaign profitable.

Instead I ventured back to Google Image Search and retrieved a pretty horrific image of a crushed Chevrolet, the result of a high speed car crash. When you have eye-catching provocative imagery, it becomes so much easier to pull the user’s attention off the page. I split tested several different titles and while I’m not going to out my own techniques for driving an image like this home, it goes without saying that bolder is better.

If the aim of your campaign translates in to shocking the user, there are no shortage of directions you can take to get the job done.

How about dating? It struck me just how many advertisements choose to depict stunning women and the guarantee that you could date one of them. But what is the shocking opposite? Well let’s just say the search term “unhappy middle aged man with fat ass ugly beach whale” might have taken a Googling last month.

Got a work from home offer? Pick the ugliest face you can physically stand to look at. Paint it with the tagline “This man needed an excuse to work from home…” Maybe you can see what I’m getting at here. Sometimes being all cute with the benefits of the product simply isn’t good enough for distracting a user. Forget your marketing degree – if you’re one of the 0.06% of readers to actually have one – so much PPV success hinges on being calculating, nasty, and very aggressive. Any attention is good attention. The worst thing that can happen is for somebody to ignore your ad.

It’s possible to get away with shock marketing tactics using traffic sources like Facebook too. But everybody knows that a Facebook intern has the kind of threshold to provocative imagery that a baby has to it’s first tooth. You’re not gonna get very far before some bitch is crying about it. I use PPV for my most aggressive marketing campaigns, simply because there’s not much you can’t get away with.

I would recommend taking a look at your offer and working backwards. Often the best way to come up with an ad creative is to take the single biggest lure of the offer and dump it on it’s head.

Want To Meet Hot Single Girls?
Or how about…
Want To Be Scouting For Beach Whales At Fifty? (Well, you better join now then….)

Want Cheaper Life Insurance?
Or how about…
Want Little Baby Jack To Give Up His Dreams Because You Died And Left Him Nothing?

The push is often greater than the pull.

You’re probably beginning to see why I resent the industry I work in, but that’s just the way it goes. You’ve gotta take advantage of fears and dreams. Shock your audience in to taking action and stop being so nice.

So you’ve scraped several hundred urls, you have launched the campaign on at least one PPV network, and you have traffic coming in.  What now?  Well, chances are you are not going to be profitable right off the bat.  If you are then, great!  But there is still optimization that can be done.  If you are just under the line, even about -50% ROI, you can probably pull it up into the black with a little adjustment.

A lot of times you will find that out of those several hundred urls that you scraped, only one or two will give you the majority of the traffic right off the bat.  If it’s a site like google.com or facebook.com that slipped in there by accident, then you should just pause those.  But if it’s a site that is related to your niche that gets a ton of traffic, then it is time to break down your PPV campaign.

Here’s what I mean by that: take out that #1 url, the one that is getting the most traffic, and make a new campaign just for that url.  Then, you want to create a landing page that is specifically targeted towards users of that page.  You want to match the style of it and the colors as well as you can, so that it feels like a natural extension of the site they are visiting instead of an intrusive popup.

If you can achieve this, you are bound to see a large increase in your click-throughs and hopefully conversions as well.  There are still no guarantees, but this method is one of the best ways to optimize your campaign and either get it profitable or squeeze even more profit out of it.

Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!

Posted by Ty · www.ppvdomination.com

What is PPV or Pay Per View Marketing?  I was first introduced to this form of traffic by Gauher Chaudhry and his product, Pay Per View Formula. He made an excellent argument about the pitfalls and shortcomings of affiliate marketing through Google’s PPC(pay per click) and talked about the wonderful benefits of this new method described as Pay Per View. As a long time PPC Marketer, I knew exactly what he was talking about regarding PPC. Being a long term customer of Gauher’s Pay Per Click Formula, when he decided to launch PPVF, I jumped at it.

PPV in a nutshell is Adware. Although we all associate this term with something bad, most of the PPV Networks are eTRUST verified. Users agree to be shown ads in exchange for something free such as screensavers, games, toolbars, etc. This is not harmful to the users computer and simply displays ads fairly infrequently as to not interfere with the users overall browsing experience.

How PPV Works…

Generally, an affiliate advertiser or advertising agency signs up with a PPV Network such as TrafficVance, and from here it works in much the same way as PPC. You can bid on keywords and when a user searches with that keyword, a popup window with your ad will display over the current window they are browsing. Better yet, you can bid directly on urls. This will cause your ad to appear as a popup over the current window whenever that url appears in the users address bar. Let’s say you are promoting an Auto Insurance Offer. You open an account with a PPV Network and bid on the url geico.com. Now when a user with the adware installed types www.geico.com into the their address bar, your ad will appear on top of www.geico.com.

The Benefits…

Besides the obvious ability to laser target your ads is the fact that keywords and urls are much cheaper to bid on compared to PPC Ads. There are many advantages to this form of traffic once you learn how to utilize it.

The Downfalls…

Several Affiliate Marketing companies spefically ban the use of PPV Traffic in their Terms of Service. Although many ban this traffic source, several will allow you to use it if you contact them and sign an addendum.

While I can type all day regarding the advantages of PPV Traffic such as the reduced bid costs in proportion to PPC Marketing and ability to laser target your ads, the KEY to succeeding is finding the right information. While Pay Per View Formula was a great introductory course, and I don’t regret purchasing it for one second, it was just that… an introductory course. The methods described are rather general and if you were to follow the herd, you would find yourself spending alot of money with very little results. To date, there are absolutely no PPV Informational products offering anything more than rehashed information from Pay Per View Formula. Believe me when I tell you that there are only a handful of us who actually know how to make a fortune with PPV Traffic and none of us are using these rehashed methods and tools. With PPV, more so than any other form of traffic, you need to be able to think outside the box. It’s the little things that make a huge difference.

PPV, or pay per view, simply means that you only pay when a potential customer actually views your ad. This is also known as CPV or cost per view. When we refer to ppv we are talking solely about the companies which use adware to display ppv ads. Adware is a downloadable software which is usually installed by the user in exchange for something such as screensavers, online games, toolbars, etc. This downloadable software will then display ads in the form of popups or popunders whenever a user is online browsing.

Considering that we are only referring to PPV Networks which are utilizing adware, these will be the only companies that we rank. We will list some of the other PPV traffic sources but will not go into an in depth review.

We will list our top PPV Networks in order of profitibility from our experience. We weigh things such as amount of ppv traffic available, amount of competition which correlates directly with the actual cost per view, quality of traffic, conversion ratio, and overall ROI. Keep in mind that these are our opinions and others may experience varying results. We have listed the top PPV Networks below beginning with our most recommended and ending with our least favorite.

1. Traffic Vance – No surprise here. However, we are finding it more and more difficult to return an acceptable ROI with TrafficVance.  This is mainly due to the competition. They are by far the most popular of the PPV traffic sources and it definately shows in the bid prices.

Pros: Excellent traffic volume & excellent user base. There traffic converts better than any other PPV network in our opinion. This has a lot to do with the fact that Traffic Vance owns their user base and is not out buying traffic from other networks which can sometimes be viewed as junk traffic. Best user interface in our opinion.

Cons: $1,000 minimum deposit. This is both good and bad in my opinion. It’s tough on some that may not have the money to invest but it also keeps the rifraf out and the newbies that have no idea what they are doing other than driving up bid prices.  High competition thus higher bid pricing.

You may remember that we made a post regarding Traffic Vance now adding International traffic. This is in our opinion will put Traffic Vance leaps and bounds ahead of everyone.

2. Lead Impact – formerly Zango

Pros: The second most traffic behind Traffic Vance. Bid prices are relatively cheap compared to TrafficVance. Traffic converts relatively well, could be better but the amount of ppv traffic and the bid prices makes up for the inferior conversion rate. Our second highest ROI.

Cons: It is tough to get your ads reviewed at times. It can sometimes be days before ppv ads are reviewed if you don’t email them every time you set up a new campaign. As stated above, the traffic does not convert nearly as well as some of the other PPV Networks.

3. AdOn Network - Keep in mind that with AdOn Network your ads are being shown in a popunder window rather than a popup.

Pros: PPV traffic is very cheap compared to Traffic Vance.  Traffic converts relatively well. PPV targets start at just $.005.

Cons: Low traffic compared to some of the other networks. They do have a tendency to send some junk traffic from time to time.  You can check for junk traffic by running a report and looking for Partner ID 111211. You need to message your Rep. for approval every time you create new campaigns or else they will be pending for days.

4. Media Traffic

Pros: New PPV campaigns are quickly reviewed for approval. Traffic converts better than AdOn Network & Lead Impact.

Cons: Well, they didn’t get the nickname Media “NO” Traffic for nothing. Bid prices can also get quite high especially in relation to the amount of traffic that MediaTraffic has.

5. Linksador

Pros: PPV traffic converts very well. Not alot of competition at the moment. Quick ppv campaign approvals.

Cons: Very low amount of ppv traffic. User Interface is not the friendliest.

6.  Direct CPV

Pros: Well, they are #6 for a reason… we currently don’t have too many pros for DirectCPV. Keep in mind though that they are new and experiencing growing pains. They do have a decent amount of ppv traffic but we just haven’t found much to convert yet. Their user interface is much better now that they have re-done it so we will be spending a lot more time testing them. I just couldn’t stand the old cumbersome interface and refused to spend very much time with it.

Cons: Conversions seem to be lower than the others. New ppv campaigns can be pending for days if you don’t message your Rep. Our referrer stats are showing that they have been sending junk traffic from time to time.

7. Adoori – We don’t have much too report on them right now. Adoori is a new network in which we are just beginning our tests. We will report back with our findings once we have some history behind us.

You will notice that we did not rank Clicksor, AdBrite, MegaClick, or CPVMarketplace. This is intentional as we do not view them as true PPV Networks or PPV Traffic Sources.  These companies serve ads based on the publisher’s website content rather than a software app. being installed on the users computer. Targeting for these 4 companies is far inferior to the PPV Networks in which we have ranked above.

I wrote this up rather quickly and will be adding to it in the near future. Most importantly though, the rankings are based on our experience and our ROI, so it is a good baseline for most to base their ppv marketing decisions.