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Using Quizzes to Catch Web Surfers

I don’t spend a lot of time these days surfing traffic exchanges or the PTR sites, since I’m spending a lot of time at The Advisory Panel, and creating content for niche sites. But now and then I do to get a sense for what’s being promoted.

Normally they’re all the same, they show you an affiliate page, which is pretty much 0% effective at getting results (I really get tired of seeing that beach bum with his laptop). The more advanced people show you an opt-in page for an ecourse, and give you just enough information to make you want more, so you sign up.

But today I came across something that completely hooked me and kept me on that site for a good five minutes.

It was a quiz about Search Engine Optimization.

This was brilliant! A quiz is an immediate challenge to the surfer’s knowledge. If you can target the topic of the quiz to something the surfer feels they know, or feels they should know, then you’ve got their attention. And for anyone trying to make money online, search engine optimization is a natural topic.

All told, I went through 17 pages of quiz, answering various multiple choice questions. I went back later and looked at the ad I clicked to get to the page, and it mentioned a prize of $50,000 for one lucky person who took the survey. But that was only afterward, I normally don’t pay any attention to the ads, it’s the sites that I evaluate.

And at the end of the quiz? I had to enter my email to get my results. You’d better believe, that after wading through 17 pages of questions, I was darn well going to enter my email to get those results.

This is the first time I’ve seen this technique, and I have to admit I’m surprised. It worked so well, although that might just be because it was new. But if you’re sending people to a landing page and having trouble getting them to stick around, try putting the start of a quiz on that landing page.

You just might build a targeted list out of it. And the answers to the quiz questions can be a guide to what products the person might be willing to buy.

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Improving Your Adsense CPC

A couple of days ago I started hunting for information on improving the cost-per-click (CPC) you get with Adsense ads. I was a bit tired of losing visitors from my sites for an 11 cent click (that’s an extreme example, but it happens).

I know that the amount you make per click with Adsense is dependent on a number of factors that you don’t control directly, including your click-through-rate compared to other sites in your niche. But I knew that Adsense allows you to block specific websites from displaying ads, so I basically wanted to find somewhere that provided a list of low paying sites.

I ran across this post pretty quickly: How To Improve Google Adsense Revenue. The post covers the basics, and is a great tutorial if you’re new to Adsense. It didn’t cover what I was looking for, but it’s a quality post that’s worth a look.

I also found this post on Blocking Out Unwanted And Miserable CPC Sites. It talks about a database called Ads Black List that was exactly what I was looking for in the first place.

Ads Black List allows you to enter all the domains you run ads on, along with keywords for those domains. It’ll then search its database of MFA and low CPC sites and see which ones target those keywords. You get a list of those in a format suitable for copying and pasting into the Adsense competitive ads filter box.

Now ads from those sites won’t show up in your Adsense ads. This helps block those doing Adsense arbitrage, or just those who pay a really low CPC.

I’ve just used this for my sites, so don’t have anything to report on the results. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update: Since I wrote this, I’ve seen a bit of increase in CPC for my sites. I don’t have enough data yet to make a conclusion, but the initial increase seems to be very good.

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The Advisory Panel On The Move

To a new domain name, that is.

I’d originally hosted The Advisory Panel on a subdomain of this blog, because it was an easy and inexpensive way to host it. I figured I’d see what happened with the forum, and move it to its own domain name later.

Well, later came, and I just recently completed the move. It was a bit of a hassle, which reminded me I should have just started with its own domain name. After all, a domain name is only $9 these days, less if you use a coupon code.

One of the hassles that cropped up was the need to copy the actual forum files from one directory on my server to another. Now, I’m technical enough that I was able to log into the shell and use a single command to copy the entire directory structure to the right place. Lacking that knowledge, though, this would have been a pain.

After the copy, various config files had to be updated with the new location. There weren’t too many of these, because most of the forum doesn’t care about the actual directory it lives in. But it’s a pain to have to go back and touch these config files a second time, when you’ve already done it once setting up the forum.

Switching over to the new domain name was a bigger pain. There are numerous settings in vbulletin that use the domain name, and I had to track down each and every one of them and change it from ap.onlineopportunity.org to advisory-panel.org. I would only know that I missed one of them when I went to the forum and, for example, didn’t see the images of smilies I should have seen when composing a post.

Oh, and a note for anyone who tries to move a forum to a different domain…clear your browser’s cache after the move. I actually saw the smilies even though they weren’t really there because of them being in my browser’s cache. It was only when I logged in from a different computer that I realized something was wrong.

I still have a mildly annoying problem that I haven’t been able to figure out yet, involving the site navigation menu. It worked fine before the move to the new domain name, and doesn’t quite work right now.

So my advice for anyone who is thinking about starting a forum is to break down and spend the $9 to give the forum its own domain name from the very start. It’s far less hassle than trying to move it later!

If you’ve tried to get to The Advisory Panel lately through a bookmark into the forum itself, you’ll have to update those bookmarks. The old main address will automatically forward you to the new address, but no deep links to the old address will work.

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Picking A Subject For Your Best Selling Ebook

So you’re convinced that you need to make the switch to creating products rather than selling someone else’s products. And ebooks seem simple enough to create, so you decide to write an ebook and sell it. But how do you come up with the subject of your ebook?

Your first instinct will be to write an ebook about Internet Marketing.

This is natural. After all, you’re trying to make money online, and have been investing a huge amount of time (and probably money) trying to learn how to do that. So you’re steeped in Internet Marketing lore, and have probably started to realize that much of what people do doesn’t work well. So writing an ebook that tells people what does work for you seems like a natural choice.

The problem is that there is so much information out there about Internet Marketing that prospective buyers have no way of knowing if you’re giving them good information or not. And most people are giving away ebooks to build lists, so it’s hard for someone to justify spending money on yours unless you have a track record of success (or at least the perception of a track record of success).

So, if an Internet Marketing ebook would be a hard sell, what else is there?

Let’s face it, you may be really into making money online, but you also had a life before Internet Marketing. You had hobbies, you had things you were naturally good at, other things you weren’t so good at but really interested in, etc. You may not get to do all that as much now as before, but you have all that knowledge in you.

Pick your ebook subject out of that wealth of non-Internet Marketing knowledge. If you’re an avid golfer who had a lot of trouble correcting your slice, write an ebook sharing what worked for you. If you’re a rock climber who found lots of good places to climb in Ohio, write a guide book telling others where they were.

By venturing outside the Internet Marketing world, you’re improving your odds a bit. In the Internet Marketing world, every prospective customer is also a potential competitor who is trying to sell their own ebook. Outside of that world, the vast majority of your prospective customers would never think about writing an ebook and selling it. Plus, no matter how many people want to make money online, there are still a lot more involved in any of the major hobbies.

You’ll still have to market your ebook, of course, but that’s all part of the learning curve.

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Cash Crate Increases Commissions

Cash Crate, a popular get-paid-to (GPT) site has recently increased the amount of commissions you get from new members.

Their basic commission structure is still in place. You get 20% of what your first level referrals get, and 10% of what their first level referrals get. This can amount to quite a bit of money over time, as your referral base grows. You can boost those numbers by referring more active members from the United States. The majority of offers are good only for those members, so they increase your commission rate when you refer more of them. After referring 50 active U.S. members, you get 25% of what your first level referrals make instead of just 20%.

That basic commission structure is one of the best I’ve seen in these sorts of programs. The recent addition adds on another $3 to what you get from your first level referrals who earn their first $10 payout.

When one of your referrals makes their first $10 payout, you’ll have earned 20% of that, for $2. You get a bonus $3 for them making it to their payout, for a total of $5. That’s very generous!

Another thing I like about Cash Crate is that the payout amount is low enough anyone can make it. My Inbox Dollars post walked people through making their first $30 payout…using those same techniques, a Cash Crate member can easily breeze through their first $10 payout.

Click here to join Cash Crate.

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Blending Adsense Ads With Your Site

You’ve probably heard that it’s a good idea to blend Adsense ads in with your site, so they don’t stand out. The default Google palette for Adsense ads looks nice, but the blue color scheme really stands out too much if your site is all greens and yellows.

But actually blending the ads with your site’s colors can be a bit confusing, so here’s a tutorial. When you’re creating Adsense ads, you get to specify the colors for the border, title, background, text, and URL. But you can either choose from a set list of colors, or you can type in a strange mix of letters and numbers.

Choosing from the set of available colors is pretty much useless. You might get close to your site’s colors, but it probably won’t be an exact match. After all, there are only 55 set colors to choose from, and thousands of colors for site designers to choose from.

So that leaves you typing in numbers and letters.

Those numbers and letters are called the RGB value, which stands for Red, Green, and Blue. An RGB value is actually a series of three two-digit numbers. In this case, the digits are in a numbering system called hexadecimal, where the digits are 0 through 9 and A through F. So FF is a valid hexadecimal number.

The three components of an RGB value specify how much red is in the color, how much green, and how much blue. All zeros means that the color is black, all FFs means that the color is white.

How do you figure out what you need to type in? The easiest way is to use a color grabbing program that lets you pull the RGB value straight off your web site.

If you have an advanced graphics editing program, it probably has a color grabbing tool in it (it usually looks like an eye dropper). You’ll have to use the Print Screen button to take a screen capture of your web site, then paste that into your graphics editing program to be able to grab colors from it.

If you don’t have a graphics editing program that will give you RGB values when you grab a color, then you can download a free color grabbing program. This one is pretty popular, although I’ve also used this one.

However you do it, what you’ll end up with is a way of pointing to a specific part of your site, and getting the RGB value for the color at that point.

Adsense Color Palette Here’s how you’re able to edit the colors Google will use for an Adsense ad. What we want to do it match each of these colors to the colors on your site.

Now that we have a way to grab a color from the screen, we can pretty easily do that. You’ll copy and paste RGB values you grab from your web site into the edit boxes for the ad colors.

Adsense Sample Here’s an Adsense sample ad, with the various colors shown. Note that whatever color you choose for the border is also used for the area around the “Ads by Google” disclaimer.

The hardest part of this entire process, for me at least, is figuring out what colors on my site need to go into which areas of the ad. Here’s the process I run through.

I first pick the spot on my site where I want the ads to appear. That may be in a sidebar, at the bottom of posts, or wherever. That spot will have a background color already defined in my site’s theme. I use the color grabber to get the RGB value for a spot in the background where I want the ads to go, and copy and paste that into the Background field in the ad palette. The background color will generally be white (FFFFFF) if you’re putting ads in posts, but it depends entirely on your site’s theme.

The next bit I work with is the border. Again, I look at my site, around the area where I want to put the ads, and see if any of the theme’s elements are surrounded by borders. I’ll use the color grabber to get the RGB value for those borders and use that as the ad’s Border color. If there are no borders, then I use the same color as the background.

The title color should be the same color that all other hyperlinks are on your site. Normally the default in Adsense is fine, but if your site’s theme has changed the color of hyperlinks, you’ll want to grab that color and use it as the ad’s Title color.

Same with text color, use whatever color text is in the spot where you want to put the ad. In posts that’s normally black (000000), but again your site’s theme might change that.

The URL color is pretty much just up to your own personal preference. You general don’t want it to appear as a clickable link, even though they can click it. Google’s default colors tend to understate the URL, so I usually go with a color a bit grayer than the normal text color. The default works well on a lot of color schemes.

By the time you finish this process, you should have an Adsense ad block that looks like it was custom designed for your site. And if you click on the “Save as new palette” link, you’ll be able to choose this same color scheme for future ads without going through the entire process again.

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How To Know What Your Readers Want

I’ve been running a fun little plugin lately called Psychic Search.

Psychic Search is a free plugin that records searches using your WordPress search widget. There’s a wealth of information in those searches about what your readers want. For example, I know that a topic some of my readers want to know about is how to import sql. I can only imagine that they’re trying to figure out how to restore a backup of a blog, perhaps. I have a variety of technical tutorials, but haven’t done one on importing sql yet.

I also know that Ann Seig’s Renegade Network Marketer book is still pretty hot, judging from the number of searches done on it. I’m also getting some insight into how people like to search for things. For example, a common search for Ann’s book is “Renegade Marketer”, even though that’s not the title. So it pays to have a bit of variety in your posts so that you can hit all the common ways someone will search for topics.

Psychic Search gives you two separate listings of searches. The first listing are those searches that returned no results. These are topics you may want to create a post on, if enough people are searching for that information on your blog. The second listing is all the searches, where you can see how many results were returned. This gives you an idea of what information is most in demand on your blog.

Click here for the Psychic Search page.

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Landing Pages Bridge The Gap

I talked a bit about the Adwords quality score yesterday, and the importance of landing pages.

Let’s expand on landing pages today, because they’re important for more than just boosting your Adwords quality score. Basically, what’s good for your quality score is good for your campaign.

So what’s the purpose of a landing page outside of quality score issues?

Think about marketing a particular product through an affiliate link. You aren’t the only one marketing that product, and the chances are good that all the best keywords already have players with money to toss around. Breaking into those keywords would be expensive. So we target long-tail keywords. How do we come up with the long-tail keywords to target?

We brainstorm unique reasons why someone might want to buy the product.

Let me use the product from the first advertising exercise over at The Advisory Panel as an example. The product was the Liar Card, a calling card that can tell you if the person you’re talking to on the phone is lying. Advisory Panel members brainstormed that people might want to use this if they don’t trust their car mechanic, if they think their spouse is lying to them, if they think their children are lying to them, etc. There are lots of reasons why someone might want to use this card.

But, if you send someone who doesn’t trust their mechanic to the Liar Card landing page, you’re relying on that person to put two and two together and realize they can use the card to double check what their mechanic is saying. Most people won’t do that.

A landing page is your opportunity to get between your Adwords ad and the product sales page, and explain how your visitor’s need and the product match up. A landing page for people who don’t trust their mechanic would walk them through the process of getting a Liar Card, calling their mechanic, and would suggest specific questions to ask the mechanic. Take as much independent thought out of the process as possible, and you’ll have higher conversions.

So while a nicely targeted landing page will increase your Adwords quality score and make it cheaper to get clicks, the real purpose is to bridge the gap between the problem your visitor has and the solution you’re offering.

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Making Adwords Quality Score Work For You

Smack in the middle
Creative Commons License
photo credit: ogimogi

I haven’t made nearly the progress I had planned to make going through the Adwords training. What I have gone through, though, shows me that I understood more than I thought I did about how it all works. I’m still missing the trial and error practice that goes into getting good at it, but that’ll come in time.

One of the things that I realized I already know lately is something I see a lot of people on forums ignoring, and that’s the importance of the Adwords quality score.

The quality score for an ad is used to calculate the amount you’ll pay per click for a given ad position (or even if your ad will appear at all). The lower your quality score, the more you’ll have to pay to have your ad even show, let alone be in a high position. Gone are the days when it was a simple bidding war to get the top position. Now, the top position may be paying less than you are for position 10, depending on the quality scores of the ads.

So how is the quality score for an ad calculated?

Google uses some historical data for the keywords you’re targeting. That’s the same for everyone. They’ll also use the overall click through rate (CTR) of all your past campaigns (this is what bites me all the time, since I started using Adwords without knowing what I was doing, so my average CTR is very low).

Also important is the relevance of your ad text and keyword to the search query the user typed in. For example, if your ad is targeting the keyword “blue shoes”, and the ad text is relevant to buying blue shoes, and someone types in “Elvis blue suede shoes”, your ad isn’t particularly relevant. So it’ll show in a lower rank for that search query than if someone had typed in “buy blue shoes”.

The meat of the quality score, and what you have the most control over, is how relevant your destination page is to the keyword and ad text you’re using. This is really what kills most people.

Let’s say that you link to a merchant page listing all the shoes they sell, and you bid on the keyword “new work shoes”, thinking that anyone typing that in is prime for buying a nice pair of new shoes. But the merchant’s shoe page doesn’t have the term “work shoes” anywhere, so it isn’t particularly relevant for the keyword or the ad text. So you’ll have to bid higher to get your ad to show and rank well.

This is the reason that linking to merchant sites directly isn’t such a great idea. Instead, link to a landing page that you create that is highly relevant to the keyword and ad text you are using. That way your bids will be lower.

Single page landing pages are not enough, though. Google looks for the quality of the site itself, not just the landing page. You’ll need to create a full mini-site, complete with privacy policy, contact form, navigation menus, etc. That will boost the quality score for your ads, too, further lowering your cost per click and raising your ad rank. Basically, create a mini-site the same way you would a regular web site, and optimize it for your ad keywords in the same way that you would optimize it for those keywords in SEO terms.

So with all this extra work, how do you make the quality score work for you? Well, if you put in the extra work, all of a sudden you can bid less to maintain your ad’s rank, which means more profit for you.

As I experiment with mini-sites, I’ll report on the results and include any tips I come up with for optimizing them.

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This Week At The Advisory Panel

A quick highlight of some of the goings on at The Advisory Panel this week.

In the Site Critiques section, we pick a blog each week and do some critiques of it in various areas, such as the adherence to the niche, the quality of the content, the way it’s monetized, etc. We’re just starting talking about John Chow dot com today, so head on over and chime in with your opinions.

Niche selection is ongoing in the sponsored blog. That’s a blog written by a group of member volunteers. I pay for the blog’s hosting and provide the technical support, and the volunteers share in the proceeds from the blog. This is all happening in one of the private sections of the forum, available to members only.

In the Shameless Self Promotion section, we’ve heard recently from Rosa, who won the 2007 People’s Media Award, and from Lori, who will be having a guest post published in a very high profile blog. Click through to read the details and congratulate both of them.

I’m also looking for PPC experts to run the advertising exercises. Those are the ones where members brainstorm unique ways to market a particular product, and we then run PPC campaigns to test out the ideas. Profits are shared among all the participants. If you regularly run profitable PPC campaigns, and are a mentoring sort of person, contact me for more details on getting involved.

Those are some of the highlights. Feel free to click through and read the public sections. When you register and confirm your email, you’ll get access to the private sections as well.

Click here for the Advisory Panel.