I’ve been doing PPC to EPN and CJ based store fronts for some time, and I would say I’ve been fairly successful over the years. Nothing to brag about, and something I would like to improve further. Recently, I’ve been wanting to start up a few campaigns and promote offers and leads. I personally think this is where the big dough is, and I want to get more and more diversified. I’ve had a few attempts with Neverblue Ads and CJ offers, with limited success, basically breaking even. I recently joined up with Hydra Network and I’m already impressed with their selection offers and quality of customer service.

I found a offer that looked good. It pays $5 per sign up (first page). There were a few things I wanted to see in the offer.I personally want it to be a ethical product or service. Something I feel that I can stand behind. I look at their lander and form submit. If it looks professional, I feel like I can promote it better. After selecting the offer, I wanted to create a landing page for it. I already have a ‘generic’ .info domain that I thought I would use. I like to use subdomains for managing offers to domains so I made one that works. I would check with TOS on the offer, some business (ie: eBay) will only allow names after the 3rd slash, so a subdomain with ebay in it would violate that.

I was going to outsource the landing page, but I wanted to get my feet wet first before throwing more cash at this offer. If this works, I might outsource additional landing pages. The reason I want to outsource is strictly to save time. I created a landing page that somewhat matches their theme on the form page. I don’t want to throw visitors off when they go from my lander to the form submit or destination site.

I looked into keyword tracking, mainly tracking 202, but decided to roll my own for now. I think I’ll look into that in the future, but for now, I just wanted to get something up. I wrote a simple function that would parse inbound keywords from Bing, AdWords or YSM and add it to the sid from Hydra on the redirect.

All that was left was crafting the ads. I decided to promote this in YSM initially since I’m most familiar with YSM Yahoo Search Marketing and already have other campaigns rolling there. The ad text used were basically provided by the offer company for emails. I figured they’ve been working on their ad text, so I would start with those. I made five ads. Keywords were then selected to match my offer and submitted. I initially bid the keywords at .40, but later up’d that amount to .60.

To date, I only have one conversion, but oddly, hardly any clicks for the keywords. I believe it is due to the high competition related to the offer. I’m currently working on more keywords and long-tail keywords to help my ad position.  PPC with offers is definitely different than with the storefronts. The next step will be to jack the keywords higher to see if clicks increase. I will also try to promote on Bing.

No matter what this is a great learning experience, and I’ll need to keep pushing forward. I’ll be sure to post any updates on my PPC to offer efforts. If you have any tips or suggestions, please feel free to comment!

Related posts:

1. Accepted to Hydra Network
2. NeverBlue Ads
3. How to use PPC with your eBay Affiliate store fronts

I’m super pleased to have been accepted to Hydra Network. Several affiliate marketers have recommended that I go with Hydra for better paying and converting offers.  They have a pretty thorough acceptance process. I first had to apply via their web application form. After filling out the form, I was told that I would receive a call from them with further questions and to verify the phone number they had on file. A week went by and never received the call, so I called them (people you should always be aggressive when trying to join a program).

I spoke with a Hydra associate and she asked various affiliate marketing questions. For example, how will I be promoting offers. If I had any affiliate marketing experience and how long. If I did PPC, how much did I spend, how long have I been doing it. What other networks am I member of, etc. Immediately, I felt the impression that they were just seeing if a) I had experience and b) if I was serious. I answered truthfully and honestly, letting them know what I’m very serious, but I am short of my goals and hoping that their offers might help me achieve my goals, etc.

Shortly after the phone call, I received a welcome letter stating that I was accepted to the Hydra Network! The next day I received another phone call from newly assigned affiliate manager. She seemed very nice and helpful on the phone. You need to mail, email or fax your W-9 form in to view any offers, but she already had some recommendations for me. I told what areas I was interested in and was able to hook me up with compatible offers right away.

I’m impressed with the hands on interaction with Hydra. Nothing like talking with a AM right away with suggestions. This week I’ll be promoting a few offers using YSM/PPC… so we’ll see if I can start getting in on the PPC to offer action. I’ve learned a lot since my past attempts, so let’s hope they’ll translate into earnings.

If you’d like to give Hydra Network a try, click here.

Related posts:

1. PPC to Offers and Leads
2. NeverBlue Ads
3. Diversification is the key to success