PPC is like the GRE !!!

Let me explain exactly what I mean, and then I will show you how to use this fact to your advantage. First let me explain what the GRE is, for those of you who do not know it is the Graduate Record Examination . It is a placement test for people looking to go to Grad school. I was flipping through one of those “Beat the GRE” books when I noticed one of the biggest pieces of advice across the board was that the very first question is the most important.

The GRE test is taken on the computer and unlike other tests where questions get progressively harder, the GRE adjusts in difficulty based on weather you got the previous question right or wrong. Below I put together a chart explaining this. Both of the patterns are the same the only difference between the green and red is that the greet dots assume you got the first question right.

Please note that if you get the first question wrong it will be much tougher to climb back towards the top. Now you might say what does this have to do with PPC… the answer is EVERYTHING.

All you have to do is replace Question Difficulty with Quality Score and Question Number with Number of Clicks (QS x #Clicks). Just like the first question when you first launch the campaign the PPC engines assign an average score for you. Depending on how you do initially they adjust accordingly just like the GRE. If you have a bad start it will be very hard to climb back out of your whole, on the flip side if you do well to start to you can make a mistake and still rebound quite quickly.

This might not be anything new to some of you, but for the rest of you here are three ways to take this knowledge to SUPER CHARGE your PPC campaigns and give you the best fighting chance.

1.) Prime the Pump – Simply put click on your own ads, better yet get people to click on your ads. It sucks that you will burn some of your money, but it will put you in a good place when you are getting started and make things easier moving forward.

2.) Day Parting -  Launch the campaign during peak CTR hours not necessarily peak Conversion Hours. Lets face it CTR is still one of the most important elements in determining how your PPC campaign does.

3.) Outlier Method – This strategy is a little more advanced and was initially discovered on Facebook Social Ads. While creating a bunch of ads I messed up and instead of having an ad for each age, I created 100 of the same ad. They were all approved and launched at the same time. Something very interesting happened, some of the ads had INSANE CTR while others not even one click all with the same impressions. I thought how can this be? Then I remembered my Econ classes from college. Here is a graph illustrating Normal Distribution.

What had happened is out of those 100 same ads there were a few outliers in that 2.2% section. These outliers performed amazing, but slowly started to die down over time with more and more impressions they got closer to where they really belonged. By then I got a ton of cheap clicks making the campaign a success.

This can also be used on PPC engines like Google. When you launch 100 ads, even if they are the same one, some of them will perform very well. Quickly ax the ones that don’t then you can start the traditional split testing.

Anyway, hope this helps someone think bout PPC and GREs in a new light. Leave a comment if you like this post.

The following is a list of how affiliate marketing mirrors the poker industry.

Gurus Both affiliate marketing and gambling have their gurus. These are people who claim to be the best. Sometimes they really are good, but many times they had one success and because of their vocal nature get tons of publicity and ride the wave. Most of these guru’s don’t even practice what they preach, but make their money from selling “education” to n00bs and the like.

Heroes  These are the guys who aren’t selling anything, but are people you can look up to. In both affiliate marketing and gambling there are a few guys who trully are great at what they do. They serve as the driving force behind your own addiction with thoughts like … “If he can do it, why can’t I.”

Money Distribution Just like poker in affiliate marketing there are only a small number of super affiliates who can make large sums of money doing what they do. The rest of us are barely making ends meet and many end up loosing tons of money.

Adrenaline When you launch a new campaign your heart races same as when you throw in a stack of chips. The addreneline is the reason most of us do it and is why both industries are male dominated.

The more I stay in this industry the more I realize that affiliate marketing is just poker. You don’t know what cards your competitors are holding. At the end of the day someone is going to walk away with the pot while the rest of us will put our tail between our legs and come back the next day to try it all again.

At the end of the day no matter how much you know, strategies, techniques, tips, etc the only thing that can help is LADY LUCK. All you can do is give yourself the best chance of getting lucky.

We finally picked out our first dog, and since I never had a dog before I have been spending hours trying to learn as much as I can and buy all the right gear to be a good pet owner.

My girlfriend and I finally signed a new lease so we will be moving early October into our new place. It is a little more expensive and is slightly better than our apartment now, but the great thing is they allow dogs, and in the city its tough to find a place that does.

I decided to set a new goal with making money online. From talking to people it is obvious that having a specific goal, or income figure really helps your brain figure out the most optimal way to get there.

My new goal is to make 5k a month from risidual online income by 2009.

I have been really thinking about what is the quickest most effective way to do this and what I have realized is by creating the 30 sites that I did after leaving my full time employment I have the assets to make it happen, but it will be slightly different from what I hoped.

All of my sites are floating right now and the cream is slowly starting to rise to the top.  One of which has really picked up and generates about 250 dollars from ads and ebay affiliate. My goal now is to replace that income with some legit banner sponcors to total about $1,000 in consistent monthly revenue.

The other four will come from blowing out the rest of the sites that are getting fairly close to breaking through by building some links. And also leave some of my PPC campaigns that have slow trickle profit of about 20 bucks a day per campaign.

Hopefully this blog post will act as a reminder so I do not stray from what I know has to get done.