So, you’ve heard over and over that you should be split testing your ads.  That if you’re not you could be losing out on a lot of money!  However, the question most affiliate have after they figure out what exactly split testing ads means, is what do I split test in my ads?

Below you’ll find 5 different things that you should be testing when you start to split test your ads!

• Capitalization - What is the best way to capitalize your words in your ads?  Should You Capitalize The First Letter of Each Word?  Should you only capitalize the first word of each sentance?  The first letter of Important Words?  How about your display URL?  Should any part of that be capitalized?  This is something that is very important and by simply capitalizing your words a certain way could change your CTR% by crazy amounts!  Unfourtenly, you must test each of these things as it changes depending on the niche!

• Use of Numbers - Should you use an average number when you’re mention numbers or statistics?  For example if the cost is $49.99 for your service or product should you put $50 instead?  Studies have shown that using exact numbers is typically the best approach as it helps to make your ad stand out from all the other competition thats out there!  However, again this isn’t alwasy the case!  You’ll need to test this yourself for each niche you enter!

• Display URLS - Display URLS can be very important and are often ignored as part of your ad writing process!  Most affiliates feel they have 3 lines to work with when it comes to creating ads, however, if you count your display URL, you actually have 4 lines!  Should you capitalize certain letters?  Should you only use the base URL or add a /keyword to it? Should you include the “www” or not?  Again, the key to figuring this out is to test each way until you find the display URL that gives you the greatest conversions and CTR%.

• Ask a Question - A simple way to increase your CTR% normally is to simply ask an inticing question in your ad.  This will cause searchers to think and if they feel their answer will be met on your site, they’ll typically click through.  So make sure you test several different types of questions and also try not having a question.  You’ll never know which way will work best for any given niche unless you test it!

• Write Specific Ads for Each Keyword Group - As most of you have probably heard your adgroups should be tightly grouped by using base keywords.  Naturally and Simple Enough, your ads should be different for each of these adgroups and include teh keywords for each adgroup in the ad!  You should never ever write generic ads and just throw the same ads into each adgroup and expect the results to be good.

There you have it!  5 things to test when you’re split testing your ads.  By testing these 5 different things you can easily take an ad that is getting a CTR% of 2% and increase it to 8%, 12%, or even 20% depending on the niche and amount of competition you have!

So quit your crying and get to work before I pass you up in the niche you’re working on!

Popularity: 15% [?]

There are several traits a person needs in my opinion in order to become a successful affiliate marketer.  These traits can determine if you will succeed or not in affiliate marketing and also can allow you to realize if affiliate marketing is even right for you!

I know you read all over the place that affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and there are tons of ebooks, paid forums, etc out there that try to tell you that anyone can do it!  However, that’s simply not the case!

Don’t get me wrong!  I do believe that anyone can make money online and quit their day job, however, that doesn’t mean you should be making your money online by doing affiliate marketing.  So, take a look at the traits and mindsets below and decide for yourself if affiliate marketing is the make money online niche that is right for you, because, only you can decide!

Analytical Person - In order to be in this field it is extremely important that you are a very analytical person.  You must be able to read numbers, do math, and like it!  You’ll be crunching numbers from day one.  Also, it helps if you have a passion to where you constantly want to split test things like your ads, or landing pages in order to increase your conversions or ROI.  A very analytical person is going to be able to constantly work on their numbers and increase things like their CTR, Quality Score, etc.  Being an analytical person will definitely help you in affiliate marketing!

Persistent Person - You must be a very persistent person when it comes to affiliate marketing.  This is especially true when you are first starting out!  You’ll fail…it’s inevitable!  However, if you’re willing to learn from the mistakes you made and push forward trying again you’ll definitely make it to the top!  A persistent person will constantly want to persevere and try again and doesn’t give up!  Is that you?

I’ll be honest with you…  Affiliate marketing is not for the faint of heart!  It takes a lot of sweat and tears to build up your business and if you’re not persistent, you might as well not even start!

Willingness to Adapt - You must be willing to adapt to changes that happen.  Affiliate marketing changes constantly!  Search engines improve their algorithms, offers get pulled, new restrictions get placed on offers, etc.  If you’re not willing to adapt to this field, then affiliate marketing is not for you!

I’ve seen so many people lose their affiliate business because they were too stubborn or full of pride and wouldn’t change the way they did things when they quit working!  If what you’re doing isn’t working anymore, then you either need to change (adapt) what you are doing or get out of this field!  No single business model works forever!  This is especially true when you’re talking about Internet businesses!

Sociable - Another very important thing that can make or break your affiliate business is contacts!  Who do you know?  Are you a very outgoing, social person?  Or are you a person that likes to hide in the background and try not to get noticed?  While this works for some people, most people will fail if they don’t network with others!

I’ve seen numerous “super affiliates” mention on their blogs that networking has allowed them to grow, start, and expand their business and if it wasn’t for these contacts, they wouldn’t of been able to!  This has been especially true for me, which is why I believe it to be so important!  Get yourself to a couple conferences, talk to people on instant message or twitter!  Do it now!  I’m not saying to let it get in the way of your work, but instead allow it to help your business!

Willingness to Take Risks - A person who is willing to take risks is a person who is sometimes considered stupid, but other times is considered a genius!  You must be willing to take risks in this business.  Try new things to see if they work or not in order to get on the next big thing before everyone else does!  If you’re not willing to take risks, then you’ll never become huge in this field.  This reminds me of a quote I’m sure 95% of you have heard sometime in your life!

The Greater The Risk, The Greater The Reward

This is especially true in affiliate marketing…Yeah you may lose sometimes, in fact, a lot of times.  But that one time you take the risk and it pays off will probably be the same time you make it big and have your best month in affiliate marketing ever!

Motivation - This in my opinion is one of the most important traits a person needs in order to make a full time income by using the Internet.  You will have the freedom to work whenever you want, take time off when you need it, etc.

However, this can be a huge problem for most people!  The fact is, most people need someone breathing down their necks (a boss) in order to get their jobs done.  If not, they would never get anything done!  Most people will start in this business and fail because they start making good money and decide that they no longer need to work as much.  Then before they realize it, their income slowly dwindles until there’s nothing left!

Motivation will keep you focused, make you work even when you don’t want to, and allow you to push yourself in order to grow!  Without it, I doubt you’ll last very long in this field!

Conclusion

I’d love to hear what you guys think and if you feel that you have these traits or not!  In fact, if you can think of any other traits you might need in order to succeed in affiliate marketing let me know in the comments!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Researching keywords for your affiliate campaign can be a pain in the… butt… In fact, most new affiliates find that this is the step they have the most problems with when setting up a new campaign in a new niche. Does keyword research have to be hard? Does it have to suck the very life out of you every time you load up Wordtracker or Wordze? Of course not! This post is going to guide you through the steps to creating a well thought out and well planned keyword list!

Step One: Researching Your Niche!

One of the most common mistakes I see affiliates make is researching keywords for a niche when they know nothing about the niche they are gathering keywords for! Understanding your niche is an important step to creating a keyword list that will help you rise to the top in any given niche. Each niche has their own lingo, slang, or sayings that are specific to that niche. Without researching your niche, you’re not going to type in these words in whatever keyword tool you’re using!

Before you even start researching your keywords, you need to make sure that you understand all the terminology for that niche, understand what different sayings mean, etc. Without this knowledge, you will most likely fail!!!

Step Two: Understand How Most Affiliates Research Keywords!

The next thing you need to realize before you even start building your keyword list is the fact that most affiliates, I’d say about 90%, open up a keyword tool and start typing in generic keyword phrases for their niche in order to build their keyword list. If you do this as well you’ll end up bidding on the same exact keywords that 90% of other affiliates are bidding on!
Be creative, think of other ways people might be searching for your product or service! Are there terms you discovered in step one? If so, use those terms instead of the generic keywords that every other affiliate is using! Is there another type of audience closely related to your niche that you can target? Think Outside of The Box!

Step Three: Start On Paper!

When I first start thinking of keywords for a niche, I don’t just open up a keyword tool and start punching them in as I think of them. I first brainstorm my keyword ideas on paper or in a notebook. The reason I do this is so I’m able to look at my sheet of paper and know exactly which search terms I have already used.

This also allows me to focus on making sure my list contains a ton of various keywords and keep my searches as broad as possible allowing me to cover all the bases. Keyword tools are there to help you, but they can’t replace your brain! USE IT!

Step Four: Take Your Time!

Instead of timing yourself and seeing how quickly you can get done gathering your list of keywords, I challenge you to see how long you can gather keywords before you get so tired of doing it that you swear you’ll never use one again!

Again, keyword tools are made to help you get your job done faster, however, if you move too fast you’ll miss out on a ton of keywords because you’re in a rush! Slow down and think while you’re building your keyword list! Think about each keyword you type in and see the results the keyword tool gives you, don’t just add them to your list and go.

By giving yourself a minute and looking through the list as you go, you’ll most likely see a keyword phrase or two that will pop out and make you think of another keyword phrase. By doing this, you’ll turn a list of 10,000 keywords into 50,000 keywords!

Step Five: Make Sure You Actually Use Analytics!

So, you’re proud of yourself because you did everything you were told to do including installing analytics on your site. However, have you actually ever logged into it and taken a look at more than just how many visitors you had for the day or month? Most analytic tools will allow you to see what keywords people are typing to find your site organically in the search results!

By checking this out, you’ll find keywords to put into your keyword tool to expand and grow your campaign even more! Make sure you use this tool to it’s full advantage or you’ll miss out on some great keywords you could be bidding on!

Conclusion:

Keyword research doesn’t have to be a hard and difficult task. However, it shouldn’t take you a couple hours to build your keyword list! Make sure you take your time and do it right the first time and use the tips above and you’ll come out on top with a keyword list that 90% of affiliates aren’t using!

Do you have any other suggestions for keyword researching? Anything to avoid? Let me know in the comments!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Don’t forget to enter my contest to win a creative vado so you can start recording your own video posts on your blog!

You have an offer that is doing really well in the United States or you’re looking at an offer that you think would do really well and you’re able to promote this offer to basically anyone in the world… Naturally you turn on every single country you can, expecting to do tremendously well.

Naturally, you wake up in the morning only to find your campaign that was doing so well when it was targeted only in the United States has went south…way south… What happened? Well, you didn’t target the right Countries! Even though an offer may be able to be promoted World-Wide, doesn’t mean you should!!!

Picking which countries you should select when you’re promoting a world-wide offer can be very time consuming and costly, however, I’m going to share with you the top 5 countries you should be running if you’re trying out a world-wide offer.

United States, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are the five countries that you should be targeting your offers for that are considered world-wide offers. Of course, if you’re anything like me, your next question is… Why?

Honestly, I can’t really give you a 100% reason why these countries do better and convert better than others. A couple important factors that I can tell you however are…

• Most of these countries have tons of residents that speak English, whereas if you just turn on every single country out there, you’re going to have a ton of countries that will not understand your language.
• If you read my post about Canada and the UK and about why targeting other countries is good, you’ll see that most of these countries have a lot of internet users and most of those are broadband users.

These are the two main factors which I contribute to the above five countries working the best with the whole English thing being the number one reason. This is all from personal experience and from testing this stuff out on my own by spending a ton of money on Google Adwords. While I can’t explain all the reasons 100%, I can say that with all the worldwide offers I’ve run, this has always remained true for me.

I’d love to hear if you guys have had any good experiences with other countries besides the five I listed above. Also, I’d love to hear your experiences on the five countries above if you have ran offers targeting any of the the five countries I listed!

To Your Success!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Hey guys, first off, let me apolize for the amount of time it took me to post this video up. I had some problems with Youtube as my video is over 10 minutes and I wasn’t sure of another good video hosting place to use. In the end I choose viddler so let me know what you guys think in the comments about them. Thanks!

Also, don’t forget to enter my contest to Win a Creative Vado!

Popularity: 16% [?]