Danger Brown

So, personally I’ve been using Yahoo Search Marketing pretty heavily this last year and am anticipating the merger between MSN Adcenter and YSM with trepidation. In an attempt to boost my Adcenter skills I’ve been messing around with some campaigns on a few MSN accounts and increasing my skill level.

Being a fairly big fan of DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in my ads I was faced with the small challenge of having all my keywords show up in lowercase in my ads. MSN has an article about this subject where after the first paragraph, they mention that the quick and easy solution is to upload your keyword lists in all caps. That’s where I stopped reading.

I’ve been working with some fairly large keyword lists. My latest campaign had 48,000 keywords. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like doing this by hand. Also, being a cheap bastard, I’d rather avoid paying for a solution. So I wound up trying a few free tools. The first two failed in one way or another. But Keyword Pad got the job done quickly and effectively. It’s free and I’m not getting paid to blog this. I just wanted a break from my other stuff and felt like blogging something.

The steps to follow are:
1. Import your keyword list.
2. Click “Modify” and select “First Letters to Uppercase” from the drop down menu.
3. Buy me a beer next time you see me.

One small issue is that within keyword phrases, you may prefer not to capitalize some words like “to” “in” “of” etc. This Thing Will Capitalize All Of The Words In Every Keyword Phrase. I didn’t bother with this secondary problem and decided to move on to other things. Got a better solution, great! Let us know in the comments.

Here is a screenshot:

1. Liability. #1 You need to protect yourself from liability as much as possible. A LLC can protect your personal assets from lawsuits while allowing your business income to pass through to you. Having an LLC is only part of it. You need to use your LLC. Have your domains, CPA accounts, PPC accounts, bank accounts, everything used for your business, in the company name using the company tax id number. Note that an LLC will not protect you from criminal liability. Also note that I am not a lawyer and that laws vary one place to another.

2. Taxes – Several US states have no income tax. You can save some money on taxes with an LLC but to justify it for this reason alone, you probably need to be making $10K or more per month. You still need to pay federal taxes and if you live in a state with income tax you will generally still be paying taxes to your state for any salary or bonus you take.  If you are making big bucks, there can still be tax advantages but you should be talking to a tax planner to set it up right. If you don’t do things right, an LLC can be a tax liability putting you in the position of paying taxes twice. Be careful with this. But if you ARE making big bucks than it will be worth it to set yourself up properly. For example, if you are banking a $million per year, you can leave the assets in your company which may be taxed at a lower rate than you. The company can also do clever things like own your home and car or pay for your health insurance and have an “employee” retirement plan.

3. Stability – It’s a big temptation to spend your money in the good times and be broke in the bad times. Personally, I live on a fixed salary which I draw from my LLC. Anything over my salary stays in the company accounts and is building up to become a warchest I can use when it’s time to take things to the next level. My plan is to have my LLC own rental properties which will provide  hedges against inflation and loss of income.

4. Security – Got PPC accounts? CPA accounts? An Adsense account? Well if you have an LLC, it has it’s own tax id number and can have it’s own accounts separate from your own. If you lose a critical account of some sort, having an LLC in place can offer you a way to get your foot back in the door quickly. If you’re smart you’ll have backup accounts ready to go before you have a problem. Be careful here. Lots of people use this as a technique which may violate user agreements with some companies. For increased protection from loss of critical business accounts, you might want to use a registered agent service which gives you a different (forwarded) address for the business and further isolates it from you. This can give you access to credit cards with multiple addresses which you may enjoy.

5. Trust – If you live in certain countries you may find it more difficult to get approved for CPA accounts etc. If you have run into this problem and want to avoid it in the future you can set up a USA based LLC and legally it is as if the company is a US citizen. Your company lives here, pays taxes here, and can get in trouble with the law here. It can be sued or even fined for criminal offenses. The Limited Liability Company gives you a US presence. With a registered agent service, you have a USA based address which will forward all mail to you wherever you may be.

6. Estate planning – If you have kids like me and plan to be mega rich, you have to figure out how to set up your estate. My “Wyoming Close LLC” allows me to make my kids members of the company. The company can own assets like real estate. When they inherit the estate, the Wyoming Close LLC will reduce their tax liability by about 50%. It also provides a form of protection you’d never think of but which I like. Should one of my 5 kids get divorced after inheriting their membership in the company, their ex-spouse cannot touch or acquire any share of the company. It essentially functions as a bulletproof prenuptial agreement for all my kids.

THE ULTIMATE PROTECTION: If you are a big affiliate and are playing chicken with the FTC, or consider yourself at higher risk of lawsuits, you might want to consider having businesses set up overseas which in turn operate in the USA. I can’t provide any advice to this end. Remember, I’m not a lawyer. But if you have a foreign company structure like this, then if anybody wants to sue you or come after you, then they’ll have to pay for lawyers in the USA and in whatever country you’re based out of. Of course so would you but you’re rich right? Anyway, it is possible to have multiple jurisdictions like this which increase the barriers for legal actions against you. Personally, I’m not operating in a very high risk fashion at all and a USA LLC is good enough for me.

Can you tell us another good reason for having an LLC or do you have experience with foreign entities? Please let us know in the comments.

This is exactly how I took a single campaign from making me $200/day net to $500/day net almost instantly.

First, you must be tracking your conversions. It can be with Google Conversion Tracking or something else. I use Adwords Conversion Tracking or I use reports in Prosper 202 (free). Prosper or Tracking202 will work for the big 3 search engines so you can do this with Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Adcenter too. But if you aren’t already tracking which keywords are converting, that needs to be your priority.

Here it is, the big secret to finding super profitable keywords that maybe nobody else has…..

Part 1 – search PPC campaigns

You have probably been running some broad or phrase match keywords in your campaigns. In Yahoo, there is no such thing as exact match, so if you have a campaign there, this will always work.

In Adwords:

1. Run a Search Query Report for the campaign or adgroup you want to improve. This will tell you exactly what people actually searched for.

2. Sort out the column for keywords which actually converted for you.

3. Take these keywords and make them into phrase and/or exact match keywords to add to your campaign. You can also see how many times it was searched for and may be able to get an idea of what to bid on these words. Hint, you can usually bid more for these words safely. Remember, these keywords are all proven winners.

4. You owe me a beer. Or sign up under one of my referral links.

If you are doing this with YSM or Adcenter, they probably have similar tools for reporting on the websites. I never use them because I do it using Prosper202 on my own server.

In Prosper, you may need to import your subids. They have excellent tutorials on this. Then:

1 Go to Analyze

2 Select Keywords

3 Select your date range, “show converted clicks” and hit “set preferences

4 Download to excel if you have enough to warrant it, sort and add these keywords as phrase and/or exact match keywords to your adgroup.

Now, you may see some keywords that are so ridiculously long tail that they may never come back again. It won’t hurt to add them to your campaigns, but you may want to look for a phrase match term you can take out of there. Example:

If you see that you got a conversion from “super awesome michael jackson ringtones that my mom won’t hate”

shorten it to “super awesome michael jackson ringtones” and/or  “super awesome ringtones” or “awesome michael jackson ringtones”. You get the idea right?

Part 2 – Content network campaigns

OK, now we’re only talking adwords, but you can do things like this with lots of other platforms. I don’t have time to get into it all because I should be working instead of telling you how to compete with me. By now, you’re getting the idea anyway.

1. Run a Placement Performance Report

2. Add the converting websites as placements within a content network adgroup.

3. Some websites won’t be available for placement targeting. You could contact them directly to place an ad on their site. Or contact them directly to suggest they ad their site for placement targeting. You may have to tell them how to do this.

4. You will be able to modify your bids for each placement according to it’s value.

5. Now you really owe me a shot of cheap whiskey or maybe a whole case of Black Velvet, you decide.

Um, I guess that’s about it. Title covers it all. Unless you don’t know what that means…..

For me it means that aps like Tweetdeck and Seesmic will perform better. Things like Twitter Karma will perform much better. Twitter Karma will now be able to work for accounts up to 15000 followers instead of just 10000.

If you use the web interface only. It means nothing to you. Don’t worry about it.

I just bought this software. Now I expect a couple of you to do the same thing. They have an excellent affiliate program, so I’ll get 50% of your purchase fee. I have 4 kids with no college funds so at least half your money will go to a good place.

Seriously though. I really did just pay $188 for the unlimited version. I plan to take over the Twitter universe in a truly nefarious and megalomaniacal way. I don’t want some cracked version which won’t be updated.

If you are thinking Hummingbird is the way, today it is broken. Check it out in the forums. Humming bird is fine for a few accounts (assuming they fix it) but not for buying Ferraris.

This thing has the power to kill. Along with an account creator tool and  a few good proxies, it could be really, really dangerous.  I may be ‘pleading the 5th’ and not confessing all I plan to do with the thing. You may also need some e-mail accounts. Think 1000 Twitter accounts each following 400 per day all with links back to your affiliate stuff. Make sure you send a few referral commissions my way. C’mon, you know you weren’t going to actually do this until I inspired you.

Note that Twitter is getting smarter. You should not create more than 5 accounts per IP per day. Follow no more than say 400 per day per account. Create tweet logs that will not just spam affiliate links, but will provide some value just like a real person. Keep your link tweets below 1 in 5 at least. If most of your tweets are ‘real’. You’ll be much better off.

Um……did I just post all this? Disclaimer: This is all a big joke. You should only use this tool in a way which is fully compliant with Twitter’s terms of service. You should never buy e-mail accounts, use proxies or make $10,000′s by spamming social networks.

Here is a list of features from the website:

Hey, my RSS feed is working! C’mon, join up. I made a road sign for you to find it. I’ll even attempt to make most of my posts more valuable than this one. Got an idea for something you’d like to see in the feed? Let me know in the comments. I browse through all of them.

Google sets is not too well known but can be a fast and easy way to come up with ideas.

Go try it now. For instance enter “diet, weight loss, lose weight” into 3 of the fields. Hit the “Large Set” button and check out the results. This can give you ideas for niches or adgroups that you might not otherwise have considered.

Have you ever used this tool before? What valuable uses can you think of for it? Your comments are welcome.

Have a nice day!

Danger

This script really is pretty crappy. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t real nice. People hit cancel instead of reading it and when they do, it sends them to your offer. For the crappy little cherry on top, I put my own affiliate link in there. If you don’t change it, I’ll be making the money instead of you.

The below script will send people wherever you want if they hit cancel. It will let them close the window or navigate away if they hit OK. It should be placed right before the </head> tag. This is really for langing pages only. You should use ‘open in new window’ on your links on this page, because otherwise this script will fire no matter what they click.

If you have a better one, feel free to post it in the comments or e-mail it to me and I’ll include it here.

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”>
var areYouReallySure = false;
var internalLink = false;
function areYouSure() {
if (!areYouReallySure && !internalLink) {
areYouReallySure = true;
location.href=”http://www.healthbuy.com/?aid=314867”
return “*****************************************************\n\nWait! \n\nPut your own sales text here, I’m not doing everything for you.\n\nThis product outperformed all other products.\n\nIf you want to have it all, this product can make that happen.\n\nClick cancel to visit our top recommended product’s site\n\n*****************************************************”;
}
}
window.onbeforeunload = areYouSure;
</script>

I was just making a single character change to my best money making ad in my best campaign. I thought I was creating a new ad, but accidentally edited the old one.If you edit an ad at all, it deletes the ad and replaces it with the edited version. This new edited ad has lost all it’s account history which is part of the Adwords auction quality score and has an impact on how that ad will be served in the future.  If it was a real winner, you may really notice the difference in CPC, ad position, or targeting if using conversion optimizer. Deleting an Adwords ad is irreversible if you are using the web interface.

If you have accidentally deleted a productive ad you may think all hope is lost and that you have to start over with an exact replica. Not so my young padawan.  Open up Adwords Editor and:
1. Get Recent changes (top left button) basic is fine
2. Click on the folder for the campaign and subfolder for the adgroup in question. (on the left)
3. Click on the tab that says “text ads”
4. Sort by clicking ‘status’ at the top of that column (optional)
5. Find your deleted ad and click anywhere on the horizontal row. The text will have a line through it.
6. Look at the bottom section and make sure you have the right ad selected.
7. At the bottom right change the status dropdown from ‘deleted’ to ‘active’.
8. At the top click on ‘Post changes’

9. That’s it! You can check your web interface, and your ad will be there in all it’s glory with all of it’s important history intact. Feel free to buy me a beer next time you see me.

EDIT: Here is a screenshot.

Why to run your affiliate links through a redirect:
1. You can place tracking code on it and know how often it’s clicked on. You can see if this number matches what your affiliate network is showing.
2. If you have many links to your offer on your landing page, and the offer gets pulled, or you want to test other offers with the same landing page you only have to change the link once (on your redirect).
3. It can help to hide the affiliate link from your visitors.

How to make a redirect:
There are many ways to make a redirect. The meta-refresh is about the most reliable/easiest redirect to implement. Here is the easy way you should probably do it:

1. Build a page for your website and name it something like “link-to-offer.htm” with a title like “Visit the (affiliate offer) site!”

2. Go to the html view for the page and replace everything there with this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Visit the (offer) website</title>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://www.youraffiliatelinkgoeshere.com“></HEAD>
<BODY>
(delete this and paste your Google analytics or whatever tracking code here. You can also put readable text here, but don’t. The next line is optional and only needed if your redirect fails. Delete it or replace the link between the quotes with your own.)
<p>Please follow <a href=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com>link</a>!</p>
</BODY>
</HTML>
3. Link to this page anywhere you would normally place an affiliate link.
4. The parts in red need to be either deleted or changed.
5. Save this page in your favorites if you expect to do this more than once.

Where it says content=”0 the number 0 instructs the browser to redirect after 0 seconds. If you wanted to display a message, you could change the number to say 5 which would display the page for 5 seconds and you could place text or an image or whatever in the body of the html. If you do this, and people hit the back button, they will be re-redirected, but if you leave it at 0 and they hit the back button, they will come back to your website. The redirect will not be kept in browser history. The meta-refresh must stay in the “head” section of the html file if you decide to change things around. The link in the body might be a good idea if you are worried someone’s browser won’t support the metarefresh. I leave it out of mine, because I want a white screen. Lots of folks won’t even realize they’ve been redirected. I prefer to keep it that way.

A meta-refresh, isn’t perfect, and some would say java is better, but not all browsers will have java enabled. Remember “K.I.S.S.” Keep It Simple Stupid.

Here are a couple other types of redirects:

Java:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
location.replace(‘http://youraffiliatelink.com’);
</script>
(Using location.replace removes the redirect from the browser history,
 allowing the back button to work.)

Http refresh:

HTTP/1.1 200 ok
Refresh: 0; url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com
Content-type: text/html
Content-length: 78
Please follow <a href="http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/">link</a>!