Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Azoogle is having at big contest, the winners get a trip to the Playboy Mansion.  You can get more details here.  I honestly believe this is the best contest any affiliate network has offered to date.

Generally speaking, when a network has a contest, the prizes they give away are usually items I would have bought already I wanted it.  Therefore, I either already have or I am not interested in it, making me not motivated to participate in the contest.  Which is exactly what Azoogle is not doing.  The 25 winners get a free trip to LA and get to party at the playboy mansion.  Odds are, you would not ordinarily be able to do this and haven’t done it already

To make things better, their rules actually benefit newer affiliates and affiliates that are new to their network, more than it is large affiliates.  The winners are determined based on incremental revneue for February, March, and April, over the 3 previous months.  So if you never sent them a lead in the previous 3 months, you chances are better than say, Jonathan Volk, who sends them 6 figures each month.

If you’re a new affiliate, now is the time to step your game up, you can win this contest.  The great thing about Affiliate Marketing, is that any affiliate can really blow up and become a super affiliate overnight.  If you haven’t signed up with Azoogle you’re missing out.  You can sign up here, and ask for Maggie as your AM because she is awesome!

It has been awhile since I posted, so I thought I would post something useful.  I may not do the biggest volume on an offer, but one thing I try to pride myself on is being extremely efficient with the traffic I am getting.   There are several small tweaks and tricks I have used, some I will share, some I won’t, that help to effectively monetize my traffic better than others.  Here are a few of them.

Non-Cookied Users

Splitting out traffic for non-cookie enabled users.  I have received a couple questions from people asking me to elaborate on this so I will.  Many networks use a platform called directrack (Copeac, MarketLeverage, etc..), this platform uses cookies to track sales. If a user does not have cookies enabled, their sales will not be counted.  A competitor to Directack, a platform called Hitpath, does not use cookies to track.  Currently Eads uses this, and Ads4Dough and started the transition over to this network.  What I do is use a php script to check to see if a user has cookies enabled, then I send the traffic to my primary network of choice for that offer, if the user does not have cookies I sent the user to the offer at Eads or Ads4Dough.  I normally see about 10-15% of my leads come through as non cookied users.

Exit Pops

Exit pops are starting to become increasingly popular.  Basically, if your bounce rate is 60%, then you are not monetizing 60% of your traffic.  What many people have started to do is use javascript to pop up a window when a user tries to close the window or go back, that directs them to another page, which is usually straight to the offer.  Most people report seeing a lift of 10-20% when doing this.  I use it on some pages but not all.  One thing to remember is that many PPC platforms do not like this and can penalize pages.  I typically will not run this on a page that im running paid search.

Landing Page Margins & Font Sizes

When tweaking a landing page, one of the most important metrics is the CTR from the landing page to the offer.  You want to get it as high as possible, while still properly selling the user on the product/service.  One of the biggest ways to increase CTR is to bring the affiliate link/button above the fold for the user, usually the higher the better.  One thing I noticed when I started running blog style pages, especially with wordpress, is that many themes put most of the links below the fold for users.  Most wordpress themes lose a lot of valuable real estate to excessive margins, padding, line spacing, and font size.  When I was running blog style Acai landing pages last year, one of the biggest things that helped me was to edit my wordpress theme.  I decreased line spacing between unordered lists and header tags.  I reduced paddings and font sizes, just a little bit.  It effectively made my headers a little smaller, the pages a little wider, and most importantly, it brought my pictures and links above the fold.  I saw huge CTR jumps after implementing these changes.