What we’re going to do is to teach you how to run successful PPV advertising campaigns in Hooqy Media. We have already advised many advertisers using this method to generate very good conversion.
Step 1 – Choose your niches and your specific niche sites
Ok…Let’s start…You probably observe that I use the word “niches” and not “niche”. That’s, because it will be the best for you if you choose more than one niche to work with. Since your traffic will be extremely targeted, it is unlikely that a single niche will give you enough traffic.
The initial procedure might take you some more time, but believe me, the results are HIGHLY rewarding.
But how do you choose your niches? To start, let’s say that your niches must have TWO characteristics.
A) There must be a good amount of HIGH TRAFFIC sites in that niche. In the “men weight loss”, many sites receive a huge amount of visitors (menshealth.com, health.com, etc…)
These sites and many more have huge traffic that you can take advantage of later on when you’ll set up your PPV campaign.
How to find those sites with high volume of traffic? There are actually three ways I use the most.
1) Google….
Google is my best friend. Taking again the “men weight loss” as an example, it is very easy to make a list of high-targeted men weight loss sites. I’ll simply visit Google and search for “men weight loss tips”, “men healthy weight”,”men weight loss exercise” etc…
I imagine that you get the point. Within 10 minutes or so, you should be able to make a good list of high-targeted domains for your niches. The number of entries in the list can of course vary depending on the selected niches. It might be five or it might be 50.
Advice: Don’t hesitate to include sites that don’t “SEEM” popular to you.
The fact that YOU may not know or haven’t heard a lot about a certain site doesn’t mean that this site will not bring you traffic.
2) Alexa
What a great way to find high-traffic sites! Below, you can see a screenshot of Alexa’s main page.
Let’s say again, that I want to find some popular sites about men weight loss.
The procedure is simple. Continuing our example, I go to the categories>Health> Fitness, (there are even more specific sub-categories like Advice and Guides, etc; however the broad “fitness” category is just enough).
Now, look at the right side of the page. There, you can see the most popular sites of this category.
Therefore, the first thing I do is to copy these sites. Then, I click on “site info” for some or all of these sites. A new page will come up with specific information about the site(s). In our example, you can see the page about “menshealth.com”. If you click “related links”, located on the left menu, you will get a list of other popular related sites.
This will help you expand your list. If one of those sites has an ALEXA rank UNDER 100,000 it is usually a good idea to include it in your list.
Alexa.com has hundreds of categories and sometimes it is difficult to find appropriate categories for your niches. Therefore, to make things easier you can take a specific site associated with your niche and enter it as a search term into ALEXA.
Let’s again take the men weight loss niche as an example. Assume that I want to find the proper category in ALEXA. I will take a site that I know like “menshealth.com” and enter it as a search term in Alexa’s main Page.
Normally, a page with results will show up with the first result being the specific site you entered.
Now…If you click the “overview” link, you’ll come up with a page of information specific to that site. At the end of the page, you’ll find the Alexa category to which the site belongs.
3) Account Manager
When you sign up with a Hooqy Media, you will probably be assigned by our account manager. Our account manager is a person dedicated to answering your questions and approving your campaigns.
A very nice way of building up a successful URL list for your niche is to contact our account manager and ask them to send you a list of URLs that are popular in our system.
Our account manager will be more than happy to assist you with any inquiries.
Since you’ll be making your money from affiliate offers, you obviously need your sites to offer an affiliate program. We’ll come to that subject later on after we’ve explained more about setting your campaigns. There are actually some things relevant to affiliate programs in general that you need to be aware of.
At this stage, you should find the affiliate programs of the sites you gathered and sign-up with them.
However, I will elaborate on that later.
The sites that you gathered earlier must offer an affiliate program.
Since you’ll be making your money from affiliate offers, you obviously need your sites to offer an affiliate program. I’ll come to that subject later on after I’ve explained more about setting your campaigns. Generally speakly, there are actually some things relevant to affiliate programs that you need to be aware of.
At this stage, you should find the affiliate programs of the sites you gathered and sign-up with them.
Again, more on that later.
Hooqy Media also allows the advertisers to add the list of keywords. To create around finding good keywords, the advertisers need to analyze and search based on the following tools:
Alexa.
We know that Alexa publishes data on how much traffic a website receives. They rank web pages according to a scale were as a lower score a website has, the more traffic this website receives.
Alexa’s way of ranking a page is that they rank websites with its proprietary system, where the highest score is 1. If a website has an Alexa ranking of 1, it means that the website is among the mostly visited website on the net.
We will use Alexa to find keywords that have a lot of traffic.
Alexa has, in fact, a feature where you can see what keywords that drive most traffic to the website they have analyzed.
See the following screenshot:
Google Keyword Tool.
We do not have to use this tool at all, because Alexa is telling us that this keyword has a lot of traffic.
You can use it if you want to, just to make sure that this keyword generates traffic.
When you use Google Keyword Tool, make sure that you use the “exact match” feature so you find the search volume for that keyword as is, and not as a part of a longer keyword phrase.
I will use GKT in my 3 case study, as evidence of traffic.
The Google’s keyword tool is not 100% adequate when it comes to how many searches for a keyword or keyword phrase.
Don’t hang yourself up in those numbers, because Alexa has already told us that those keywords are responsible for the majority of the traffic to the website, so we know that those keywords are generating traffic.
You can also use other keyword tools as “Wordtracker” and similar tools that give out search volume for specific keyword phrases instead of Google Keyword tool.
STEP2 – Visit your STEP 1 sites and gather the “registration/order” URLs
Ok…You’ve completed step 1.
You have chosen your niches and made a good list of sites for these niches. What’s next? You now have to make a list with the registration/order URLs of the sites you gathered in STEP 1.As a result,our traffic will be highly targeted.
Finding the Registration/Order URL
a) Sites containing Single registration/order URL
In the simplest case, the site you’re targeting has only one registration or order page in your interest. This can happen, for example, in men weight loss sites that have only one registration form, or sites that sell only one product. In such a case, you can find the URL you want by moving your mouse over the “register”, “signup”, “order”, etc. link or picture of the site and writing down the URL that appears at the bottom left of your browser.
Actually, this is what I’m doing in this acaipure-ultra.com example. See pictures below.
b) Site with multiple registration/order URLs
It is common for a site to have multiple register or order pages. That can happen when a site sells multiple products or offers different registration forms for people in different areas.
c) One order/signup URL, each containing a different Query part
You assumed that you had four very different order addresses. But most of the time it is NOT the case. Most of the time a site will use a single order/registration page with a “query part” that varies for each product.
Therefore, in “book” example when you visit the main page you will see three Harry potter books. The “order” URL of each book has the form of “www.nfsbooks.com/order.php?”
The key character here is the question mark (?). This character states that the target page after clicking the link is specific to the “query part”(the part after the “?”). You do not really have to know anything more than that….
When you mouse over the ‘Buy” link of each book, you’ll notice an address with that form.
The URL part BEFORE the “?” always remains the same, while the part AFTER the “?” changes for each book.
When you visit a site and find yourself in a situation like that, you MUST write down EACH single address again.
Special Case
Sometimes, the registration/order page changes for exactly the same offer.
If you check the registration URL now and then check it again later in your next browsing session the URL will be different. Why that happens doesn’t really matter. The important thing is what you will do in a case like that.
Usually, the part that changes comes at the very end of the registration URL and is a long alpharethmetic.
E.g “www.exampleurl.com/register.php?x=<14345EEDW4EW78OIUL653> “
The bold part is the part that changes.
If you ever see a long alphanumeric string like that in a URL, you probably have experienced the situation just mentioned. In such a case, the target URL you will have to write down is the URL part that comes BEFORE the “?”.
In your previous example, that would be:
http:/friendfinder.com/register.cgi.
A Special case within the special case:
Imagine that you go to the main page of a site and while there, you find two links:
“ www.exampleurl.co m/?x=registration&y =”
“www.exampleurl.com/?x=login&y=”
If you have read the previous sections carefully, you’ve noticed by now that the above examples are a combination of the “query part” case and your “alphanumeric string” special case.
In order to make the above example work you need a way to say, “I want my destination page to appear every time the users visits
“www.exampleurl.com”
Which;
1)”www.exampleurl.com” should be followed by a “?” part
and
2) The “?” part should contain “x=registration”.
Why you want that is,
A) Because you’re only interested in the registration page and not the login page.
B) The alphanumeric string part changes, so you can’t include it in your target URL.
In which case, you should write down the address part that comes BEFORE the “alphanumeric” part.That’s it;the address part before the “&” character.In the above example,the url parts you should write down are
“ www.exampleurl.com/?x=registration”
“www.exampleurl.com/?x=login”
Step 3 – Gathering your destination URLs
Ok…This is probably the most fascinating part of the whole process.
Let us use friendfinder.com as example again; you’ve already visited friendfinder.com and gathered the registration URL. You’ve also set that URL as one of your target URLs.
Now…Whenever someone visits that URL, your site will show up.
What exactly will be your page that will pop? Will it be a custom dating page or a direct affiliate page?
Answer: If you can, you want your destination page to be EXACTLY the same as your TARGET URL…The only difference will be that the page that pops- over will have your affiliate code in it.
Did you get lost? Hold on…
In our friendfinder.com example, when someone visits “http://friendfinder.com/p/register.cgi” you want THE exact same page to pop-over the original one. Therefore, the user will have two pages.
i) The “original” registration page
ii) A second IDENTICAL registration page they will POP OVER the original page.
Therefore, whenever a user clicks on “http://friendfinder.com/p/register.cgi” and your IDENTICAL affiliate URL pops-over, you have A VERY, VERY GOOD CHANCE to grab the affiliate commission.
How does that happen? Although I explained that in the early sections of the book, let me say it again.. Since the page that pops over is EXACTLY the same, most of the time the user will think that something goes wrong. (E.g., he doesn not click in the right place etc)
Now, since your destination URL appears OVER the target URL the user will probably re-click the registration URL, but now in your IDENTICAL affiliate destination page!
Therefore, as you’ve probably understood by now, the key elements in this little dirty method are two:
1) Your destination page “looks” identical to the target URL.
Although, in the user’s eyes the original page and your destination page look the same – your destination page with your affiliate code in it doesn’t have the same URL as the original one.
Therefore, if the URL of the original page is, for example, ”www. friendfinder.com/register”, the destination page might be “www.someaffiliatenetwork.com/someaffiliatecode” or anything like that….
2) Your destination URL Pop-overs: the target URL Pop-overs are usually distracting and annoying for the user. However, that happens because most of the time they are not relevant to what the user currently experiences while browsing. Since your traffic is so targeted, you want to catch the user’s attention as soon as possible. Imagine if you used a pop-under instead of a popover. 99% of the time the user would continue his browsing session without even noticing that your destination page popped. Your destination URL would be buried under all other browser windows.
Destination pages and Affiliate links
There are two main types of affiliate links.
a) Once you’ve signed up with them, some affiliate programs will provide you with a link or a simple affiliate code you can add to ANY of the pages for the site you promote.
Therefore, if for example, your nfsbooks.com site had an affiliate program and you wanted to send your visitor specifically to “www.nfsbooks.com/gwithorder.html” , then you could simply do that by adding a code like:
“http://someaffiliatecode.nfsbooks.com/gwithorder.html”
That is just an EXAMPLE; depending on the network the format of affiliate URLs may vary….
b) Distinct links
Most of the time, once you signup with an affiliate program, you’ll be given specific links for each page that the program ALLOWS you to send visitors to.
E.g., let’s say that a site has 10 different pages. The affiliate program may provide you affiliate links for only three of them.
More to the point, you cannot send the visitor DIRECTLY to some of the other pages and still get the commission if they register or buy something.
Where the problem lays?
Imagine our example “www.nfsbooks.com” site.
You have its main page index.html and two other category pages scifi.html and roman.html. The order buttons for the books of those two categories are NOT on the main page. For the first book, it’s on scifi.html and for the second on roman.html.
Hm….What if the affiliate program of that site gives a simple link that leads to the main page? (that’s an extreme example, but simple enough in order to understand this section) You’ll target the two order pages, set the affiliate link of the main page as your destination page and HOPE that when your page shows up the user repeats the same procedure in order to buy a book.
Let me expand on this example to make things more clear. Let’s say that you target the “http://www.nfsbooks.com/gwithorder.html” page and set the affiliate link of the main page as the destination URL… (e.g.) “http://someaffcode.nfsbooks.com”.
When a user clicks the link “http://www.nfsbooks.com/gwithorder.html “ , the main page with your affiliate code will pop-up. However, in order for the user to buy the book from your OWN affiliate page, they will not only have to re-click the “buy the book” link, but also have to go from the main page to the romance category page and then re-click the link.
That additional step greatly reduces your chances to grab the commission if the user decides to buy the book.
The problem becomes harder to manage for sites that offer many products on many different pages using many different registration/order URLs.
If the particular affiliate program gives you a way to encode with your affiliate code every URL then everything is fine.
Otherwise, just find another program to promote. There are hundreds of great affiliate programs that won’t give you a headache.
Target type setting
After you gathered the target keyword/URLs and destination URLs, you’ll have to decide the targeting type. For example, you have to decide if your destination pages will appear at a URL that CONTAINS your target URL or the keywords that the publisher page contains or both . The general rule is that you should find the setting that defines: “I want my page to appear whenever URL s or keywords that CONTAINS my search term (that is, your target URL)”
For others, you should just choose “keyword targeting”, where your keyword is your targeted URL.
If you’ve read the previous sections, then you may have realized that this particular setting will work for both normal and special cases covered.
Amount of traffic
First of all, as I have told you, when you gather your destination pages and set your campaign, you can’t really be sure how much traffic each page will get.
The amount of traffic you’re going to get depends on two things.
a) The popularity of the site and keywords to which the target URL belongs. Unfortunately, there is no certain way to say that site “A” or keyword “A” will bring me more traffic than site “B” or keyword “B”, or that if site “A” or keyword “A” brings me 5 unique hits per day, site “B” or keyword “B” should bring me 10. That’s why testing is of the most importance in the PPV business.
b) Other PPV marketers. When you choose how much to pay for each URL, you should know that the HIGHEST bidding user gets the MOST traffic. So, does it mean that you should always try to be the highest bidder? If possible, YES. However, most of the time, you’re not going to because:
i) Most users choose one or two big sites for each of their niches and that’s all.
For those big sites, there is a very good chance that you’ll get sufficient traffic even if you are the second or third highest bidder.
As a result, for the VAST majority of your target URLs or Keywords, you will have little to zero competition.
ii) Many people will (wrongly) choose SPECIFICALLY the main page of a site to target. For some reason they think, that “main page will give the most traffic, so that’s what I target”. That leaves room for all of us to bid on the more specific URLs.
How much to bid? What is the limit?
If your URL has no competition, which is very likely, you’re going to bid the default $0.002 per view. However, if your URL has some competition, but the affiliate payout is high you can still bid much highe and still make GREAT profit.
A quick example… Let’s say that a specific affiliate program pays $50U.S.D per/sale.
What will happen if you bid 10 times the default ($0.02 or 2 cents) and have a conversion rate of 10%? For every $2 you spend, you will get $50 in return…This is pretty GOOD.
Dividing your campaigns
Let’s say you did the work for three niches. How exactly should you set your campaigns? Should you put each niche on its own campaign or combine all three in one?
There are two things to consider:
a) Geo , Frequency capping and Daily spent limit.
Hooqy Media provides its own GEO targeting rules and frequency capping in the advertiser member interface. In GEO targeting rules, we allow the advertisers to select Country target or City target.
Let’s say that one of your affiliate offers is valid for US customers only and each unique US customer can see the destination page once daily. If you want to get the maximum out of those offers, obviously you are going to create two campaigns with different geo targeting and different frequency capping, one with US targeting with 1/24 hour frequency capping and one more with worldwide targeting with 2/24 hour frequency capping.
In addition, advertisers can enter the approximate amount to spend each day. If you don’t want to set a daily limit, please enter “0″.
b) Daily budget
The minimum deposit for advertiser account is $20. Advertisers can add daily budget to each campaign as low as $1. In addition, we have the low balance feature. When your campaigns are lower than one particular amount and you enter the amount to “transfer the following amount from my advertiser account” box, our system will automatically add funding to your campaign if your advertiser account has funding.
Tracking
Hooqy Media provides the ROI tracking code to advertisers who needs to track different offers and eliminate bad ones. And we recommend our advertisers to use (beginner) ROI tracking code. The ROI tracking is very important when your campaigns use keyword targeting.
If you don’t see any conversions after that particular thousand of views after optimizing your URLs and keywords, then you might want to delete that specific offer. Although, most of the time a bad campaign won’t cost you much, when your campaigns have 20-30 offers, it’s always a good idea to check and delete the non-productive ones.
You might ask, “What are the reasons behind why some offers I promote don’t convert although I use a super targeting method?” There are actually several reasons about the offers other than methodologies of promotions. For example, users may see that price of products or services from offers are much higher than that from local stores near users’ home, etc.
Therefore, be aware that some offers (very few from my experience) will do more harm than good to your pocket.
