Uhm, I think you posted that, while I was making my post about the software.

I think, what you are asking is answered there. If you mean something else, say so, I will think of something more.

about yahoo - it's the 4th most visited site in the world. People say that yahoo is dead all the time, but what they are referring to is that they don't innovate and do fancy stuff any more. They are just a portal. They make boatloads of money through adserving, they got their own ad network and they serve search ads worth billions.

They are a billion dollar company. They just are not on top of innovationg any more.

Same as AOL. They are in content creation and portal type of thing now, not innovation. They make butloads of money.

Hell, I would love my company to make as much money as yahoo/aol when they are considered dead, lol

Don't worry. Tnx for explanation, it is very good...

What do you think is the most competitive advantage one must have to succeed in this business? I would assume ad design and target profiling...

Thanks for the reply really appreciate it, excellent info in this thread.

ad design is not something you should worry about. There are designers that specialize in that and automating software.

I couldn't draw a house when I was a kid. I can't draw like ****.

Target profiling is big, yes. You goota know what will work on certain demographics and how to appeal to them.

Despite not being able to draw pretty things, I know a good ad when I see one and I can describe it to the designer. He will not make it the first time, there will be a lot of revisions, but fnally i will get what I want.

Testing, testing, testing. This is huge. You will not be able to just get an add done, stick it on a website and profit. That's not how it works. You make a thousand variations of the ad, testing and replacing every single elements of it, see how they are doing, drop the losers, keep the winners. Optimize. Repeat. Same with landing pages. Then find other trafic sources. Scale. Repeat. Buy an island.

Having a general common sense, will get you far. It's not a nuclear science you know.

Engeneering thinking helps too. Like everything for me is a problem and I think of effective ways to solve it. There are a lot of ways to deal with things, but that is one of them.

Communicate with your peers. Always. Get what you can from them and feed them something, but the biggest secrets keep for yourself.

Attend conferences and such. There is leadscon, adtech x6, affiliate summit x3.

Analytical thinking is a very good quality to have too in this biz.

Branch out and deversify. Like if you have a giant pile of cash sitting out, you can scale a signle campaign up to a point. Start another, build you own websites, your own products and such.

See, the thing with media buyis is that it can be very, very lucartive. But once you buy the inventory, you get the conversion, and it is gone. You get paid, but you get paid once. A few bad campaigns + a few bad investements + an advertiser not paying/CPA network sinking and you went from millions to broke ass in just 3 three months.

Develop your own assets that you can use even if something goes south. Don't keep all your eggs in one basket. I see SEOs do all the time. They rank for a lucartive KW, google catches up, deindexes them and they panic. Well, deversify, build other sites, get on other traffic sources except google.

Same with media buying. One thing you can do is develop a landing page of your own and capture their email and names and input it in a CRM/database. That way you can mail them and develop a realtionship with them and have a really big asset. Although you don't have a website, you got this huge ass mailing list that trusts you. That is a very, very thing to do.

Another is build a websitesite around your lander and do SEO and stuff like that. Grow it, make articles, market the whole website. I hope you get the idea.

Maybe develop your own product. Like if you promote dating websites, get their email on a lander before you send them to eharmony and put them on an autoresponder sequence. A few articles on dating and such. Team up or just hire some pick up artist to do a video course/ebook for you and sell it to your list. Sell them seminars, feromones, weight loss for the female, bulking for the male, spanish flies, you name it. When you develop your own product, you can get other affiliates promoting it. When you have pushed it yourself, you know your numbers, that is very appealing to other affiliates/JV partners. Swap email lists with other people in your niche. Down sell, upsell, cross-sell, do adswaps.

That are some things that make a media buyer successful. The media buying process is not that difficult(despite what it might seems). It's not a breeze and somehing a kid could do, but once you get the basics you will do well. It's what you do with your money afterwards and if you get data too, instead of simply passing it to others. And how you monetize that data yourself.

Great thread. Thanks again for the detailed answers. Interesting stuff

Great thread, thanks for taking time to write it. It's true that anyone looking to get into IM will learn more from reading through this thread a couple of times than spending time on the Warrior Forum. A few questions if you don't mind:

Do you have certain ad networks/other traffic sources that you find always perform better than the rest, regardless of offer?

How often do you test completely new traffic sources, and how do you go about searching for them and deciding if they are worthwhile?

When starting on a new offer/niche, what's your process for getting started creating banners/landers/copy, and how many of each would you test to begin with?

Do you worry about the market changing and being out of work? Do you see add networks instead of direct buying as the "easier" and "better" way in the buyers eyes?

I mostly go direct these days.

The thing is, different networks are strong in different verticals. Some are strong in a bunch, but there is non that will do good, no matter what you throw at it.

You just need to talk to the ad reps to tell you what is available. Make sure they know that everything is performance based and if their traffic converts, you have basically an unlimited budget.

What you would find after buying after a while is that, if you ask for it, the will give you a line of credit. That line of credit can extend to tens of millions of dollars/month. And you have to pay them 1-2 months after they have ran your traffic and that gives you plenty of time to get paid by your product/offer owner/payment processor/CPA network.

That gives huge scalability. That is what I love about running with big networks/big portals.

If you are starting out, I would recommend you go through RTBs(sitescout), that way you have access to some 80% of the available remnant inventory. Buying through ad network is a tough thing and you gotta know what sites they got with what demos. You can't do a RON(run of network) buy across their whole network and do great.

I am always in search of new traffic sources. I search placements through those RTBs. Like I just set a certain demo profile and see where my ads run and see where I get conversions from, then I just cut the network out and go direct.

What makes them worthwile? Covenrsions. If I get conversions, it is worth my while. Nothing else matters actually. Of course, they just gotta have enough traffic, if I can get 2 conversions in 10,000 impressions, that's great, but if they can sell me only 10k impressions/day, the time I will spend to set this up will cost me more than what I will gain.

Of course if you are just starting out 2 conversion/day will be great for you and will take you like 3 hours to set up, so you go for it.

Find placements also is very easy with some spy tools. You can actually see what ads are running on what sites and for how long. You can search certain advertisers, you can search by verticals and you can search what ads are running on a particular site.

Now, if a weight loss ad/advertiser is running on a certain site for 6 months, that's a pretty good indication that this site will do well for me.

I can jack his banners and landers up, but that's what peasants do, you will not get very far by doing this.

Basically it's a very good tool for seeing what are the current trends in banners and which sites are good for what. You can even deduct from current placements, what sites will do a good job for you, even if noone is using them yet. Also can give me a feel for other possible products to promote on those sites. Like if muscle pills are doing great there, I can safely assume that "truth about abs" or something simillar, or some supplements or some excercise equipement will run great there too.

There are various tools - mixrank.com is one of them. Another is adbeat.com

But what I use is whatrunswhere.com. Great guys, they just know their ****. Whenever I chat with them, they are awesome. It's great, IMO has a larger database, it's easier to use, they offer great support. It's an awesome product.

It costs 350/month, but it has a 14 day $1trial. If you want - go check it out, it is really awesome and you will get a feel of what runs where lol.

They have a webinar, explaining everything, if someone wants to watch it, I can dig the link.

nowadays, I just give the order and get my people working and throwing a bunch of variations at me. I just tell them what's good and they refine it and make me variations of it. Then I throw it at the traffic sources. See what works and what not. Get what's working changed. Like, if there is a pic of a car, I make them change the colour/model/brand of it and test it again. Same with all other factors.

For banners, 30 variations of 3-4 general ideas. Then when the tests are over 4-5 are left and we change the components of those and test them. Pick the best variations of those 4-5 and run them.

After that we start all over again, because in one week we gotta change them, because they have already burnt out.

For copy, it's usually 2-3 and you just twist them a bit for the testing.

For landers - we use a company that consult us on it. I have a pretty good idea on it, but they just specialize on it. Basically I test 4-5 landers at first and then reduce that to 1 and do controll tests on it a/b testing with 90%/10% rule. Then, I bring the consulting company(conversion voodoo - great guys, they know their ****) and see if they can do something for me.

When I was a one-man-show, all of the above, but I just did everything myself with automation software or hired freelancers/VAs t help me out.

Advertising has been around for more than a hundred years. Once upon a time print was the ****. Then radio came along. Then TV. Then internet.

If banner placements stop to be so profitable, there will be a next big thing. HINT: mobile advertising, or something else.

BUT i really don't see banner advertising go anywhere in the near future. You might find some articles saying "display advertising dead". It's basically dead for brand advertiser, for various of reason, but for direct response - HELL NO.

Advertising = sales. If the market changes, it will be because of some disaster. Like the recession hitting back and destroys everything. Or changing the economy model to something where we don't need money or something like that. Or a major war.

Even with the recent recession, I know personally people that made $x,xxx,xxx/year in the toughest years, when everyone was losing his job. And I know about people, making $xx,xxx,xxx in those years. And that's small time people, doing a one-man show or having a small, compact company.

I can see most CPA networks dying though. This model is just not sustainable IMO. The field will shift towards lead buyers and product owners doing an inhouse affiliate programs and working with traditional ad agencies who have a performance based arm(external or internal) and people like me making companies, specializing in lead generation.

See, with the current state, CPA networks have a lot of power and make money out of nothing. Basically they are banks, taking financial risk. Most of the CPA networks are brokering offers through niche CPA networks. Like clickbooth is brokering paydayloans from a certain paydaylon CPA network. I'm not telling which one, because that might arise some issues. So basically everyone is brokering **** and affiliates are often 4 or even 5 steps away from the person actually making money from the lead.

And that is very bad. As time goes by, I see that business people will shake the "affiliate=scam" mentality and will see the huge potential in performance base advertising and will press their ad agencies to do it for them. Or will go to lead generation companies. Which have only an internal team for media buys and maybe a few outsorced PPC affiliates and some mailers. And have say 10-20 sites across different verticals for the purpose of generating leads and not selling other ads(banners) on them at all.

But that model with 10s of thousands of affiliates within a network? That's not optimal for anyone. Few networks will remain. Those with strong internal teams. And they will transoform themselves into leadgeneration comapnies with closed doors to affiliates. Only serious people allowed. And the networks that are build around a niche. Like sellhealth.com or leadsmarket.com(payday loans only network. They run only their own offers and sell the info directly to lenders. Basiically they are offer owners who push their own offer and accept a few affiliates to bring in more volume).

Today's model is good, because it has a low barrier to entry. Anyone can enter. YOu can spam yahoo asnwers, youtube, facebook and forums and make money. How cool is that?


Also, on a side note, if affiliate marketing dries up, you got some serious marketing skills and you can do media buys for your own product. Actually a lot of my peers, stopped with aff marketing and started their own companies/product and buy media just for them. It's huge asset. You can drive traffic. Moreover, you can drive traffic effectively. No matter what you do, you will succeed if you can do that. No matter if you are an SEO, media buyer, ppc specialist, or mailer. Money follows eyeballs.

Very good question actually, thank you for it.

Easier - yes.

Better - hell no.

It is easier, because you don't have to hunt individual sites. You just talk to your rep and he says what works where and he does the buys for you. He even optimize the buys for you, he sees where you get clicks, trims the fat down, seeks new placements. You just worry about creative and landing pages and paying the bill.

That explains why it's not better - those conveniences come at a price - you pay way more than what you would pay if you went direct to those exact sites. And you have to obey the rules of the network. You can get away with way more in your ads if you go direct. I hope that makes sense for you.

Some network don't allow "system messages" type of ads. Like if it is a window from your OS type of thing. You can do that direct. That was just an illustration.

Also, you can buy remnant traffic(cheap traffic) almost exclusively only on networks. They make it really easy to buy across various channels.


Also you can get a line of credit only with networks/really big portals. This is a very important thing. You can't buy ads worth 1,000,000 on credit if you are running direct on 2+2. But you can, if you run with valueclick(the network that has it's inventory).

Can you break this down in a simple form?

I have a website and did some advertising through Google AdWords, Facebook, and AdSense (also some smaller ones that I dont even remember).

I paid "per click" and not "per impression" because I noticed that I would get 100,000 impressions with no clicks and run through those very quickly.

What you do... how does it differ?

I guess I know the answer but I didnt use any banner ads and only used search engine ads. I guess actual ads are a different world that I never entered.

Know anything about lead gen for real estate? I rely mainly on seo and ppc search text ads like adwords. Haven't ventured into display yet.

im not native english, so it makes me much harder to read all this tings

what i couldnt find out is

Why u posting here ? sorry i dont mean it bad, i mean what is in your mind, what + gives it to you.

are you searching for new banner ads or only want to inform guys and help them ?

thanks

I'm not a native speaker either. Hope everything is clear. I don't thing everything is grammatically proven, but I try to make sesne lol.

what i couldnt find out is

I post this here, because this is a subforum where people meet to discuss busineses and ventures. I have seen that there are people in the online biz world, and I thought that what I have to say might appeal to them. So far, they have proven me right.

I always seek new placements,but don't really seek banner placement on 2+2 at the moment. And even if I need one, I wouldn't open this thread to get it. I mean.. there's no corellation between getting traffic and writing in this thread. I can always get placement here, I just have to pay for it. There's no other way.

Actually, I think that it might cost me less if I buy all the impressions on that side banner for a month, than what the time to write this stuff costs me.

Don't get me wrong. I opened the thread because I wanted, and I have comitted, so for the rest of the week I am answering questions every day.

The truth is that I took this week off and am helping people on various places. And I have learned a lot about poker from people posting free advice here, so why wouldn't I post advice in what i'm good at too?

After all, that is the purpose of this forum - people good in one filed or other, giving advice to other people, interested in their field. I have learned a lot of things in this forum, now I am just giving back a bit.

Another thing that I am getting is people contacting me, for various stuff and I actually made a very valuable contact which can help me with some stuff that I don't understand, because I can help you with some stuff that he doesn't.

hope that makes sense for you.

PS: It is a good thing to ask yourself - why is someone giving you information. One reason is to pitch you on something(that happens very often in my world) - I will not pitch anyone with anything. At the end of the week, I will post various resources I will highlight the ones that I use in my day-to-day routine, but please don't get that as a pitch, there are just a lot of tools and services(as you might figure from a picture I posted, lol) and orientating is a bit dificult and if I post that I am using something, then, you might safely asume that is one of the better tools out there.

Truth be told, I must admit, that most of the tools, I use are created by friends of mine (well, "business friends"), so I might be biased, but I will not tell you that something is good, if it's not.

Well, there are 2 sides of the real estate biz - sellers and buyers.

I have seen lead fields for seller's info.

But truth be told, not every vertical is suitable for display. You can't actually buy ad space on yahoo for this type of thing. People don't see a banner and go "hey, let's sell our house".

For this type of thing, what you are doing is a lot more suitable - search ppc and organic traffic.

MAYBE you can find some sites in your niche, where you can get ad placements, but I think your money will be better spent on sponsored articles and fileds, not a banner.

MAYBE try to buytextlinks/banners on GDN cotextual with very tight targeting. But that's really small buys, because I imagine there are not many real estate blogs/sites out there, so the inventory is limtted. So it will not be very scary to just do it and find out.

Also, look into yahoo/bing search ads. It has 30% of the search and a lot of nontech savvy people use it, which I think, kinda fits your demo. Might be wrong though.

If you are referring to the buyer's side - well, you can buy media for a brokering site, but that's more of a branding thing, and I am no brander. It's an entirely different beast.

One thing, that you might consider(I just thought of this now) is go to mailersforum.com and see if you can get those guys interested in mailing your offer.

Mailing is a really hard thing to do, they don't mail their subscribers, they buy coreg data and stuff like that and mail to them. They are CANSPAM compliant, so you don't have to worry about the law, may you will get some complaints and a dew people pissed at you, but if you keep everything in order, you shouldn't have any problems.

The reason why I think it might work is that, I know a few mailers, that used to mail goldbuying leadgen offers. Like, you mail(physical mail) your gold, that you don't need and they mail you a check. See, people are not looking to sell their gold either, but i know for a fact, that those mailers killed it back then. So if you make use of people selling lots and properties they don't really need(heritage, etc.) you might find that pretty lucrative venture.

I really don't know if that will work, it is a total speculation, and you have to really know your numbers before going there, because mailers are not the forgiving type lol. They are even more tough nuts than media buyers. That is because there are very few people that can do their job, despite it being extemely high margin.

What you want to do is reach to some people and do a test run. Just be easy to work with and laid back, don't lie and that's pretty much it. But you gotta know the **** at your end, because they work only with those kind of people. If you are not a complete professional, they will probably ban you from the forum, lol. It's just that way. I, myself am guilty of having this behaviour. You see me here, doing lengthy posts, but when I am doing work, I just don't deal with newbs. That's just the way. It might be an uber sweet offer that has huge potential, but if he isn't super professional about it, I just hit ignore. And most all media buyers I know are like me, and mailers are even tougher.

Hope that helped you a bit, I'm sorry, I'm just not really into that field and, just can't relate too much.

Adwords and adsense are two sides of one coin. Awords is the buyer's end. It's a huge thing. You can buy with it anything from search ads, to ads on youtube to ACTUAL ADS ON TV, no matter how ****ed up that sounds.

Andsense is the coutner part that you see on some smaller sites that have a box, with few links in it and some headlines bellow them. I imagine you have seen them all over the internetz.

See, you bought text links on the google display network through adwords. You buy them on a CPC(cost per click) basis.

I buy(through various networks, might be even GDN, thorugh adwords too) a banner spot on a particular site. When a certain page is loaded by a visitor, he sees my ad - a banner. I am charged on a thousand impressions(views) of my ad, rather than on click basis.

When you buy on CPM basis, you might not get even one click on your ads in millions of impressions. When you buy on CPC basis you pay only for clicks.

See, the catch is if you make your banners well and you do your homework, you will get clicks on those thousand impressions. A typical click, in a typical vertical costs around $1(prob. your did too, yes/no?). For 1$ I can get 1000 impressions for my ads. My job is to get as many clicks on those thousand impressions, as possible. That is a challenging task, you might read about some problems I face in my previous posts.

Buying ads on CPC basis is a safer thing to do, but as every safe thing to do, it's not so lucrative.

The people who do the same thing as me, but do CPC ads, freak out when they hit 300% ROI and throw a party. If I have 300% ROI on a camapign and I can't optimize it more, I will drop it and not run it, because my time and money are spent better elsewhere.


You can buy banners on CPC basis too on some places, it's just not something you want to do.

Your ads got 100,000 of impressions and very few clicks, because they are just text ads. They do not appeal to people. My banners are designed to get people clicking on it.

Search engine ads are very real too The search engine ad business is actually a pretty bigger business than display advertising right now. It's just that the most money is made by google and if you buy search ads through them you can get mediocore returns.

That being said, some things do way better on search. See, when you advertise on search, you already are reaching to an audiance that is interested in you. Conversions are easy there. They already want what you have.

With display advertising, you are disrupting their routine and you have to summon intent in them and make them want something.

Hope that makes sense for you.