Pancake's Wild West Follow Along Contest ($1,000 day) (28)

Everyone knows credit reports with their high payouts and stability for having been around for quite awhile now. The question is to figure out what angles to promote the offer because, quite frankly, pushing credit reports on PPV is getting saturated. With that said, I'm pretty much outing my campaign because I've learned a lot from STM and I've noticed that not too many people are running PPC follow along's... So here's my attempt to give back to the STM community & participate in the Wild West contest.



[Campaign Overview]
Run PPC traffic (primarily Yahoo/Bing) to my landing page focused around the "Rent to Own Homes" market. For those unfamiliar, Rent to Own Homes give home buyers the opportunity to pay rent on a home that will go towards the home's purchase price.

[Campaign Details]
This particular campaign focuses on PPC running traffic to my opt-in landing page and funneling them to a credit report offer ($30 payout). On the backend, an autoresponder sends out an email with a Rent to Own offer ($30 payout). In total, a successful conversion from a single visitor should amount to $60 revenue.

[Goals]
Capture opt-in leads through my landing page and generate at least 30 credit report leads per day ($30 payout * 30 leads = $900 revenue/day).











[Landing Page Funnel Details]
As you can see in the screenshot for Step 1, I used an opt-in autoresponder to capture the visitor's email. I wanted to use a single opt-in form simply because I've found that many people don't know to confirm an email in a typical double opt-in form. I went with www.icontact.com... Check out their free trial to test the system.

In the autoresponder email, I've written a brief message telling them to go through 2 steps to get a list of Rent to Own Homes. Step #1 is to get a credit score (affiliate offer) and Step #2 is to get a list of homes from HomeOwnershipGroup (affiliate offer). They key is to use personalization in the email, so inserting the [fname] token will insert the visitor's first name in the email (e.g. Congratulations John, you're 1 step closer to owning your dream home!).



[PPC Details]
When setting up PPC campaigns, my strategy is to do 1 keyword per adgroup. Keeping it as granular as possible seems to keep QS scores at a 7 or higher, as long as you have a decent CTR.



Always be testing! Experiment with different ad copies at all times, and it's ideal to start off with 2 ad copies per ad group. Having numbers in the ad title tends to do fairly well as it captures attention, so doing that will keep your CTR healthy (and thus, your CPC costs lower). Another good idea is to geotarget the ad, note that in the 2nd ad copy, you'll see two instances of PA and Pennsylvania... Targeting the user's location.

More importantly, be sure to have Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us links at the footer of your landing page. Throw in a Blog for good measure, install Wordpress and write like 3 blog posts.



Well, that about wraps it up for the initial post... I've been running this campaign for about 3 weeks now, so stay tuned for actual profit figures when I gather all the data!

Thanks for reading and post feedback/comments.

Updates!


[Mouse Tracking]
This tool, www.mouseflow.com, helped me tremendously. It basically records every mouse movement and keystroke of your visitor and gives you key insights on how people interact with your lander. They offer 100 free tracks, but use coupon code: STATEOFSEARCH12 for 600 free recordings.



[Keyword Research]
I use SEMRush.com on a daily basis for keyword research. Many STM members recommend it and it can definitely increase your bottom-line. Give it a test drive with a 2-week free trial: https://flippa.com/deals/semrush (don't forget to cancel early if you don't need it).



[Landing Page Tweaks]
One of the most important things that helped increase my landing page conversions was geotargeting the visitor (e.g. Rent To Own Homes Available in New York!). Now I know there is the Maxmind script that you can insert into your website, but why would you rely on a third-party server that also limits your queries? If you're a server admin noob like me, hire someone off oDesk.com with a $100 credit coupon (https://flippa.com/deals/odesk) and tell your contractor to read this blog entry for installing GeoIP on your server.



[Prepopulating Offers]

This is a crude example on prepopulating affiliate offers. You'll notice that redirect.php tacks on the variables from the form. Note that you should contact your AM for the correct variables to use because some affiliate offers are different.

Form on landing page:

<form action="redirect.php" method="GET">
<input type="text" name="fname" size="30" />
<input type="text" name="lname" size="30" />
<input type="text" name="email" size="30" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

<?php
$fname = $_GET['fname'];
$lname = $_GET['lname'];
$email = $_GET['email'];
header("Location: http://affiliatelink.com/go.php?fname=$fname&lname=$lname&email=$email");
?>

Lots of people doing this. Tried it earlier this year and couldn't get the conversions stable enough to work. Hope it is working out for you!

Will keep an eye on this Move it to wild west contest.

Nice follow! A couple of questions.

"Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us links at the footer of your landing page. Throw in a Blog for good measure, install Wordpress and write like 3 blog posts."
Will this work on Google or do you need a little more content to avoid the slap? Also, I asume the SE are unable to view your Aff links as the user has to opt in before being presented with the first offer?

Cheers!

Originally Posted by izzy

Nice follow! A couple of questions.

"Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact Us links at the footer of your landing page. Throw in a Blog for good measure, install Wordpress and write like 3 blog posts."
Will this work on Google or do you need a little more content to avoid the slap? Also, I asume the SE are unable to view your Aff links as the user has to opt in before being presented with the first offer?

Cheers!

Mods: Please move this to the "PPC" category. Thanks

Amazing! This is gonna be good. Good luck pancakes

awesome brother!!!!

This will certainly be interesting man, looking forward to your updates! PPC is a ball game I never have really touched so looking forward to learning something here too! <3

nice one!!

moved to ppc as req.

Simple and well connected offers, I've tried a similar setup in a slightly different niche but even on Bing the CPC was just too high for the traffic keywords. Interested to see how this turned out.

Updates, see 2nd post.

Pancakes, sent you a PM with a few questions, would be nice if you could answer those

awesome stuff! what is the breakdown of rev between the credit report offer and the rent to own offer?

Thanks for sharing this campaign. Do you hide credit report part when campaign is under review or it's totally ok with google and bing/yahoo?

Originally Posted by thefalcon

awesome stuff! what is the breakdown of rev between the credit report offer and the rent to own offer?

Originally Posted by whisky

Thanks for sharing this campaign. Do you hide credit report part when campaign is under review or it's totally ok with google and bing/yahoo?

Serious Bro?

You annihilated this one, congratz on your campaign that is awesome!

what are you using to create the Net Profit Analysis spreadsheet in your results post? (great job btw)

Great info! Curious... What si you use to get that form to pre-populate the credit report?

Excellent job. Did you had any problems with "As Seen On" picture?

Originally Posted by larry88

Great info! Curious... What si you use to get that form to pre-populate the credit report?

<form action="redirect.php" method="GET">
<input type="text" name="fname" size="30" />
<input type="text" name="lname" size="30" />
<input type="text" name="email" size="30" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

<?php
$fname = $_GET['fname'];
$lname = $_GET['lname'];
$email = $_GET['email'];
header("Location: http://affiliatelink.com/go.php?fname=$fname&lname=$lname&email=$email");
?>

Originally Posted by godspeed

Excellent job. Did you had any problems with "As Seen On" picture?

Originally Posted by profitable

what are you using to create the Net Profit Analysis spreadsheet in your results post? (great job btw)

Wow nice write up man!

great thread pancakes ! what was your biggest challenge with Google ?

Nice write up. I almost ran similar offer but got into trouble with Google. I got evrythign except for the local geo. Will PM you sometime

great thread pancakes.

I am quite noob in making optin landing pages and having very little idea about it...can you show some example of such landing pages ?and do u use any wordpress plugin for this?
pardon me for my silly question.