Mobile Game Changer

I do not post often and when I do.

It is as rare and valuable as an extra day.

HAPPY LEAP DAY and Enjoy this nugget!

We all know about AdBeat, WRW, MixRank, PPCbully and Google Cash Detective.

We all know the money made using them.

We all know that mobile and table traffic is the next ‘BEAST of TRAFFIC’

Now, we have out our 1st public player in mobile ad spying!!!

Let the Games BEGIN!

MobileIntelSpy

[That's my 'hand grenade' tossed into the mobile-hype mix ]

note: After a week of use. I can say. It is not as great as I would like, BUT I have made enough that I am flying First Class and Staying 2 nights at the Hard Rock San Diego. I cant say you will get the same results. I can say something is better than nothing

Trust No One!

How to Succeed in Banner/CPV/PPV/PPC/TXTLINK/CONTEXTUAL/SOCIAL & MEDIA BUYS

OK,

So, today is the day that the Blog diverges. You will want to start checking the pages for information posted in each section.

Some will come on a daily bases. Others in clumps. It all depends on the current research and information out there.

More detailed information will be in the membership area. Which is growing information right now and when it is of sufficient size. I will open it up to the public.

It will NOT be cheap and it will NOT BE expensive.

It will be DETAIL’S of what works and what doesnt.

The exact names and numbers that I do not post here will be in there.

Why is it paid ?

Simple, I am spending money and time to test what works and then telling you. This is almost invaluable. I am also creating more competition for myself. This helps us all succeed.

I test what works and forge the unknown (what I love to do) and you get to sit back, take what works, avoid what doesn’t and make money.

Not only are you getting what doesnt work. So, you dont waste your money doing something that “sucks cash.”

You will also find out from me and others what does work and exactly how and when it stops !!!

Plus, we will have cutting edge information on all the ways to make money that people are just getting into or are under the radar. I was one of the 1st to do banner ads in 1994 and one of the 1st to explore mobile2mobile CPA offers.

So, the blog here will be daily posts with topic information on pages and links to the members site for the detail.

A win-win for all. You will still get useful information that will make you money and save you money here for FREE and for a little more each month then a coffee a day you will get detailed information on how to make money and not lose money.

That’s better than any other publication out there. What is general is free and what is detailed costs. That’s fair!

I look forward to you stopping by daily for what ever level you want. A birds eye-view or up-close and personal.

Lets make some money

IMV

Money Management & Internet Marketing

I have mentioned it before, but it is worth mentioning again.

I am bringing this up because I was talking to some new ad platforms today that  I am about to run some offers with.

The matter came around to scaling, my ROI and how large of a campaign did I run.

From that we talked about other affiliates and how so many had short careers and how their handling of testing budgets had alot to do with their short career.

It was very interesting to hear a number of ad networks tell me what I have mentioned before.

To many people blow their money with out planning what is resonable testing investment.

Forgetting that if you lose 50% of your money. It takes 100% profit just to get back to break even and then most offers run only a short time.

The ad networks agreed you have to budget for testing, recovery and then profit.

If you are really wise.

You also plan for research.

Few offers stay profitable forever.

Talked about it before and it was interesting to hear ad networks bring this up in our discussions today.

IMV

Diversify or Die!

Happy Fools Day…

NOW DONT BE ONE !!!

If you put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t be surprised if you lose the whole hen house.

It amazes me that people still gamble with fate with their lively hood.

Time and time again I find that  ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’ is not just gambling, but plain stupid!

In the movie “Days of Thunder” Nicole Kidman’s character chastised Tom Cruises character for taking “stupid risk.” Saying, “How arrogant men are to think they can control things that are far beyond their control.” As he lays in the bed broken after a horrific crash.

Hosting, offers, traffic, networks and methods. ALL of them can go down or change and usually WITHOUT NOTICE!

I just lost 2 days, because I gambled on the 100% uptime of a leading Hosting company and they failed and failed again.

Luckily, I have spread my business out over 3 different hosts and at different levels.

But, it just goes to show that paying top dollar and having guarantees does not make up for when things go wrong and money or data or time is lost. The last 2 are hard to get back.

So, before you send everything through that one host, offer, traffic source, etc.

Ask yourself, “What will happen if this goes down” and then have at least 2-3 workable alternatives.

Make research and prevention part of how you run your business. Not hindsight and emergency’s.

IMV

Losing Money in Internet Marketing ? Maybe your Hosting!

Few mentions it, but monitor your CPU, MYsql and MEMORY load. Whenever, you start an offer or have heavy days.

If, your hosting can not handle the tracking and the serving of pages. You are losing money.

Your CPU load should  be below.5 and Memory usage below 10% a majority of the time.

Ask you hosting company what is optimum for CPU and MEMORY for what you are running and your most active times.

If, your tracking is showing one number the network another and your traffic a 3rd. That maybe the sign of an overworked server and you are missing visitors and you are paying for the traffic. A double waste!

Make sure they are seeing you ads!!!

If you can get a load balanced server and if you are doing enough bandwidth/traffic consider a CLOUD server. They are not only faster, but can be cheaper to run.

Their are add-ons in Firefox that allow you to use Amazon S3 easily. Search of Add-ons will show the most current.

I suggest having tracking on one server. Hosting your pages on another and Any program like LPGen on a 3rd.

Hosting can usually be done with a VPS.

NEVER GO SHARED! The cheap price is not worth the headaches.

Not if you are serious or if you do. Make sure you can painlessly move everything to a VPS and then a dedicated.

Tracking, serving of your ads and accuracy of your data are paramount to quick success and on going success.

“IF YOU CAN NOT TRACK ACCURATLEY. DONT DO IT”

IMV

How to test and scale properly

1. Have a campaign that is ALREADY showing conversions at 3+ per target/keyword.

2. Take only the most active converting keywords. Does not matter if ROI is + or -.

3. Test the same ad copy + split and core converting keywords/targets on other traffic source.

4. Give enough time (2weeks) or enough impressions or clicks (90% of payout.)

5. Continue this with each traffic source you want to test. At the end of the test period you will know what traffic source to run that campaign on and what ones not to.

6. Do not fight it.

Traffic has demographics and interest beyond what they tell you . Always let the $$$ and the offer conversions let you know if you have a winner or not for a traffic source.

7. If Direct linking. Split-test Landing pages with only a few variances. Unless, you are using tamaguchi testing.

8. No matter what they say. Adding MORE keywords to a failing campaign of testing converting keywords is NOT the answer. If your traffic source says that. Ask for another rep. or move on. All they care about is their dollars NOT yours.

(it can help to ask if their traffic is ROI or branding. Kontera was nice enough to tell me they are branding traffic NOT ROI. This saved me a lot of time and frustration.

Enjoy

IMV

The #1 Reason people fail in Internet Marketing

Touchy subject and it is something that I need to address, again.

I realized this morning while reading over more emails on some system or blueprint that someone has made to make money off those who dont know how to. A fundamental flaw that gets just about everyone.

In trading  it is called, “Keeping your powder dry”

This is part of the “not-mentioning-how-much-money-you-need-for-testing” that I find most leave out of all their materials or just gloss over.

The problem is that if you look closely and map out many of the programs and courses out there. They are assuming unlimited capital or do not talk about the “drawdown” and “recoup” phases of Marketing.

That is INSANE !!!

In business and any decent start-up you map out estimated costs and time frames for break-even and hopefully profit.

But, from what I am seeing are the same generalities of, “Just go test x amount and once you test enough you will make money” or even worse, ” Just follow my system and you will make money!”

Thats not real!

When you invest wisely or even gamble (and this is more of a gamble) You determine:

How much you have, how much you are willing to risk, how much you will scale if you win, when you will walk away if you are losing and when to walk away when you still have enough to come back and play again.

None of this risk management, money management, business planning & financial management and just plan common sense do I see being mentioned in 99% of the  free and paid course out there in detail that will actually save a persdon from their own financial self-destuction and if they do they gloss over it.

This is not rolling the dice with unlimited capital and I am afraid many people “elling the dream” are ignoring this piece or just dont think about it and it is very important.

You need to be realistic about what you are spending, how much you are willing to lose and what really are the ratio’s of return. I almost always go off of standard direct marketing statistics and love it when the results are better then expected and learn from it when worse.

.1%-3% are great base numbers for everything from CTR to CONV. If you cant get those at least. WTF ? and most would want a much higher CTR and CONV.

For impressions .1%-.3%. If one in thousand are not buying. I hope you have a really low cost media buying campaign. Otherwise you are bleeding cash.

I always look for higher numbers. But, if you cant get these at least. You got to stop and look.  Granted you need enough samples for measurement that means anything and again you need to figure the cost of that into you overall money management plan or you are flying blind and hoping on a dream and a pray.

And as J.F.K. said…

“HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY! WE NEED STRATEGIES THAT WORK NOT WISHFUL THINKING THAT MAKES US FEEL GOOD”

Good Day,

IMV

Mad minds think alike or enough with the sheeple!

LOL,

WOW! I just got done reading 3 blogs. Where each one of them was more scathing than the last about ‘gurus’ and ‘sheeple’ and the’ sheering’ going on.

Once more hats off to the out-spoken and out-landish PPC.bz.

Nice to know I am on the right track with reporting what works vs. what is hype B.S.

So, the tip for the day.

Things are seldom what they seem.

Take bidding in CPV.

You see a high bid of $0.20 and you assume that 3rd place is  $0.17.  So, you place it and low and behold you are at rank  10.

OK, so you figure you will move your bid to $0.18.

OK, now you are at rank #5.

Uh ?

You say f*-it and place a bid of $0.21 and now you are 1st place.

What happened with all the other places. Why didn’t it just move up $0.01 per rank ?

The ugly secret ?

On some CPV networks, if someone is bidding higher and they have their freq cap or week parting set to the future IE its mon and their ad wont run tell thur. Their bid is STILL COUNTED towards all bids!

So, even though they may not run on thur (they could pause it or kill it.) Their bid is STILL affecting you on Monday.

Betcha the networks didnt tell you that one !

I will talk later on how to combat this sneaky-sneaky when used against you.

Enjoy.

IMV

Tracking Your Tracking

OK, so enough of the “I told you so”

Until some new level of idiocy occurs we are going to get into the pieces that make the difference.

One of those is tracking your tracking.

OK, you say. I have head of tracking, but tracking your tracking? What do you mean?

What I mean is noting when you start a campaign and add new ads or keywords/targets is just as important as the ROI.

I recommend using an excel spread sheet to note: start date, day of the week, traffic source, country, cost, aff network, offer and payout. Then going laterally add new dates when ever you add keywords or make a change.

I would also recommend a Project Management Software. Use MS-Project only because I was an MS trainer and used to it and their GANNT charts etc.

However you want to. Keep track of when you start and change your campaigns and this timeline of your offers will reveal some interesting patterns over time. More about that later on optimization and making money.

Thats all today. Enjoy!

IMV

Internet Marketing Launch Satellite View

OK,

Since, I am not a blogger per-say. You will def. want to get an RSS feed to this blog. My postings will be fast, accurate and sporadic, but always constant (yes, I just did that linguist violation… get used to it. I am a thinker and doer and admit my grammar and punctuation stink)

What you will find is bullets and factoids here and there under each Page which are also the Categorizes. Facts and info that are not everywhere else and actually work most the time if not ALL the time.

These ‘nuggets’ of information will be what was, what is and what will be in Internet marketing and as you will see in time all marketing and commerce. What works.

Lets start small…

To get a great top down view of the industry and all the types of people in it. The best suggestion is a home town boys website.  A little gem called www.affbuzz.com

Here you will get a real taste of all the people and angles on the Internet marketing field. At least at our level.

Spend  a weekend getting sucked into all the different posts forums and opinions. You may get overwhelmed, but that’s OK we are just exposing your brain to the world that is and could be.  No harm in knowing who you are playing with.

Download the ‘free’ info they all have. That will give you a better idea of what is of value and what is accessible. Don’t spent any money or time setting things up or buying things. There IS a method to the madness. Make sure you use a ‘dumby’ email at hotmail, gmail, yahoo. You get the idea.  I would have 3 . Your personal you don’t let out at all. Your affilate for business and one for all the things you will get subscribed to and want to check out.

Avoid getting sucked into the forums, dramas and illegal downloads. Remember, if you are reading and posting you are not doing and it’s all about the doing (and some learning) but mainly alot of doing.

Anyone who is successful knows this and it is good to reminder to all of us. Edison was a GREAT internet marketer. 1% inspiration & 99% perspiration (we will talk about auto-mation too)

OK, so thats the first nugget. If you know it great. If you dont. There you are.

My posts will generally be short, since I have many projects to build, track, optimize and scale AND I will still take the time to get the VERITAS out.

Thank You,

IMV