Mark: Hey guys! I've got with me a couple of really special guests today. Meet Amit and Alec Single. Sorry, I can't remember your last name, Amit from PPC... M-e-h-t-a. From ppcclass2.com. And Amit, you've been making 2.4 million dollars per year from pay-per-click marketing. That's extraordinary. Can you just give us a bit of a background about yourself and how you got into this?

Amit: Yeah, absolutely. I was just like everyone else. Like many people, I was looking for another opportunity, another way of making money. I was a graduate student for a while and I kinda got burned out with the whole academic thing. I thought about becoming a professor for a while, so I said hey, there has to be, you know, better ways of making money out there, and so I started reading books about, you know, business opportunities. I knew there was a lot of excitement on the Internet. I had to get involved with something on the Internet because there is so much money in it. I just had no idea how to do it. Now, Mark just gave me an idea. I wasn't a programming whiz or anything when I started.

I couldn't make a simple page that said "Hello World". I knew nothing about web design. So when I first discovered affiliate marketing, I got very excited. I read somewhere like, oh, all you have to do is put these affiliate links on your web site and you can make up to $500 a month, and back then, remember, I was a grad student bringing in a whopping $1,600 a month, and that's before the taxman took about several hundred and left me with around $1,300. So basically having an extra $500 a month constituted a huge increase in my income. I was like, whoa, I can increase my income by 40% just by setting up a web site and putting some links on it. I was naive enough to think that it was going to be that easy, but several months later, I realized there was a little more to it. I was trying to get natural search engine traffic, and that didn't work out well, so I started looking for more opportunities, and I stumbled upon the idea of PPC plus affiliate marketing.

You know, I was reading some newsletters I'd randomly signed up for and you mentioned something about it, and it was the idea actually of direct linking and having something just like a Google ad that got to me, having your display and just sending the visitor directly to the merchant site by letting your affiliate link right to the ad, so no website's required. That's how I started. When I started, I had no website, and that was a good thing because I couldn't design a web site if my life depended on it, and I still can't actually.

And so I started doing that. I started, you know, launching Google campaigns, and at first, I thought, oh man, this is going to be easy money. I mean, this is simple. Of course, you know, 10 campaigns later and, well, your affiliates fail to show for it. I am like, okay maybe there is a little more to this than that, and I kept reading, you know, more and more information online, and you know, a lot of the information products that I had gotten my hands on, it turned out that they were kind of out of date, so the tactics that may have worked, you know, two or three years ago, I didn't realize that they didn't work anymore, and so I got really frustrated, but you know, I was persistent, Mark. You know, I said hey, you know, I see these other people on forums, and they seem to be doing well with it. They seem to be making a lot of money, actually, so I just kept telling myself, you know, what are these super affiliates doing that I am not doing? These people are making, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 even $50,000 a month, so I just started testing out different tactics and different techniques, and I started getting more involved in forums and learning as much as I could, and eventually I stumbled upon a system that, you know, started really working for me, a series of strategies and methods that I then developed. I can't say I really invented them because honestly, I'm not really a computer wizard or a marketing expert by any means, so I discovered these strategies and, you know, I had a lot of results with them, and I tried them in different market sites, and I started making more and more money.

In fact, within four months, I went from making nothing to making up to $10,000 a month by December, and that was in 2005, and then I fell back after that. You know, December is always a big jump. I did not know that. I was a new affiliate, but you know, I fell back to $3,000 a month in January. This is net profit by the way, and then at that point, I was just like, okay, this is incredible. I'm gonna make this work. I'm gonna figure it out, so then I started rebuilding from there, and by June of 2006, I was netting around 20k a month, and at that point, I quit my job. I walked away from a job I absolutely hated. By that time, I'd already graduated. I already got my PhD and I was working at MIT Lincoln Labs in Massachusetts here in the States, and it was the greatest day of my life. You know, for whatever it's worth and all the money I make now, the best part was really just quitting my job, and that meant more to me than anything else, just having the freedom and control of my life, and not having the boss breathing down my neck, telling me what to do everyday. That's what really meant a lot to me, and ever since then, I continued refining my system. I've actually helped a number of people develop financial independence as well using my same strategies and techniques, and life has never been better. It's pretty amazing actually, and I am not trying to top myself as some kind of guru or expert. I just basically found something that worked and ran with it.

Mark: Well, I guess you are an expert if you manage to earn 2.4 million a year just by doing it. Plus, you've helped other people get there as well. Also, I just want to point out to people out there, before we start really grilling Amit for his tactics and techniques and stuff, I just want to point out to people that Amit came into this without knowing he had to build a web page. He came with no knowledge of computers. I also want to mention my own father's case. He used to work for over 30 years for the government in New Zealand. He had no knowledge of how to build a web page or anything like that. I got him into pay-per-click marketing, and today, he earns more than he had ever earned for the government, and that is what he does now as a 60+-year-old. You know, it's pretty inspiring. You know, I just wanted throw in another story about someone who's done it. If these stories don't inspire you, you know, like Amit's story, I don't know what will, really, because at the end of the day, if somebody that had come in with relatively low knowledge has been able to do it, imagine what you can do if you happen to have a little bit of background. Even if you don't, it's obviously doable. I just want to get into asking you some questions here. We've got questions from a heck of a lot of people.

One of them is from Jake from Idaho, and he asks, "In order to better understand whether it is better to focus on a few markets or spreading really, really wide to a lot of different campaigns and markets, what proportion of your affiliate sales come from your top five markets, and how many markets would make up, say, 80% of your income?"

Amit: Well, that's actually a great question, Mark, because my strategy is very different than most super affiliates who generally spread themselves across, you know, maybe 30, 40 or 50 markets. I like to focus on just a handful of quality markets. Now I might go through a number, like in the beginning I went through a number of campaigns to find these niches where I could really build a huge campaign, expand it, and scale it to the point where it is generating, you know, four figures of profit a day or more, and those are the type of niches I like to focus on, and with that strategy, basically all my income is coming from three major niches. The 2.4 million I generated last year came from three niches.

Mark: Okay, yeah. Now that's really good advice to people out there listening. Actually that's...

Amit: And that's much more long-term. Sorry for interrupting, Mark. That's much more long term than building 50 sites because the way affiliate marketing is going now, Google is getting a lot stricter with site quality, so they are really looking for somebody who is building up a quality site versus just somebody who's, you know, throwing up a page just to make some quick money, so the ability to focus on a few quality niches and really build up is actually much more stable long-term than, you know, doing the 50-site approach.

Mark: Yeah, it makes total sense. In fact, I find that rings really true with some of my stuff when I do pay-per-click or even ACO marketing when I actually take a site to the nth degree and you take it past a certain point. All of a sudden that becomes a heck of a lot more profitable than, like, a whole bunch of other little sites put together.

Okay. Well, I've got another question. In fact, each of these questions, by the way, are not necessarily going to relate to each other because of the fact that they are coming in from different people, just to let you know. But I've got one here just recently posted by Joan Stalker from Pickering, Canada, and she asks, "How do I create landing pages that give me a high quality score with Google? I have created keyword-rich and highly relevant landing pages which match my ad content, but have still been given a low quality score, so much so that I've switched to Yahoo, which gave me a good score for the same ad and landing page."

Amit: That's a great question. So, it looks like she already has a landing page with highly relevant content on it. Actually one of the things that Google really looks for is having, you know, multiple pages on your site that are adding value-added information to the visitor, and one of the ways I recently developed making a site that has really high value ads, one that won't get hit or struck down as a bridge page and will get a good quality score, is using a review sales hybrid page where you're primarily promoting one offer and then somewhere within your page, you have a couple of boxes with check marks where you compare that offer with other offers and you have links for full reviews, so you can name your main offer and you're showing how it's superior to other offers. This is a little section in your page.

That way you can have a straight pre-sell landing page and also have the additional value, saying hey, here's the offer I am promoting, here are the benefits, bam! Bam! And here's this offer compared to other similar offers, and here is a link to full reviews. Another thing you can also do is add a box at the bottom of your landing page. It could be like, you know, a more useful information box with five links on it connecting to articles that will add value to the reader. This will do a couple of things. When Google spiders a page, they will see that hey, this is just more than a simple landing page, so it will get approved, and if a visitor goes to the page and they start clicking on these links which are designed to pre-sell them to the affiliate product anyway, Google counts the number of times the visitor is just basically clicking through on different pages in your site, and that kind of serve as your quality score, so that will be a big help. So that is one way specifically that she can improve her quality score.

Mark: That one is fantastic. I've heard other people also state that you can add things like a 'Privacy Policy' and 'Contact Us', but...

Amit: On each of the landing pages I want, I always have a privacy policy, a site map, a contact us and an about us at the bottom, and that shows that hey, any real web site would have these pages in there, and so you gotta make your site look like a real site and not just a page thrown up just to make money with search traffic. Does that make sense?

So Google is looking for a real site versus just a landing page. Any real site would have a contact us information page and even, like, have a link at the bottom for resources, going to a resource page that links to .org and .edu sites. Google loves that.

Mark: That's really good stuff there guys. A lot of people love to get that kind of thing by actually linking to other quality sites because that's what normal sites do. Uhm, okay. Well, I had another question. I'll just restate it though, reword it just a little bit from somebody who pretty much asks, like, "It's all well and good to set up these web sites that have got a few pages on them and with a good landing page, and a contact us, a privacy policy and a site map, but isn't that quite time consuming, like to do that for every market that you're testing, or do you direct link first and see if it is profitable before actually going ahead and creating these stall landing pages?

Amit: Yeah, I mean that's always a great possibility. There are a couple of things you can do. First of all, in my course, I detail a whole market research strategy where you really take time to investigate the offer before you decide to even test it out or promote it, but, you know, sometimes that isn't enough, and you actually want to test and shoot some traffic to it, and direct linking is a great way to do that. One caveat with direct linking is that if you want to touch direct linking, you have to bid sort of aggressively higher than you normally would if you had a landing page because you're competing with other affiliates who are also direct linking, and basically, the person with the highest ad rank, where ad rank is just your bid price times your quality score, is the only person that will appear for a given keyword if there are multiple affiliates direct linking. So that's a good way to bid high, go in there, shoot some direct traffic to the offer, and then within a few hours, you are going to know pretty quickly if you're getting sales or not and what type of conversion rates you're getting, and you can make a quick decision on that.

Mark: Do you tend to find that sometimes there are offers that don't convert quite well enough for you with a direct link but you find that they convert actually rather high if you create a really good pre-sell landing page?

Amit: Yeah. Yeah, that is often the case, which is why typically I do not usually test with direct linking. I usually do a lot of research. I'll talk to the affiliate manager. I'll do a lot of in-depth market research to see if other affiliates are promoting the offer, and you can even crack, you know, how long their ads are bidding on specific keywords and other methods to see if this offer is really viable, and then I'll go in and my team will build out a whole site for that offer, and go ahead and launch it. I've never personally... honestly Mark, I'll be honest.

I've never had success with direct linking. I have never really had much success with that. I had a little bit of success in the beginning, but it was way easier back in, you know, 2005 to do it, but nowadays, I highly recommend going with a landing page.

Mark: Yeah, that's what I usually find as well. It's pretty rare personally that I do well with direct linking. I actually have a few direct links set up on some vitamin sites, but apart from those which seems to convert well, I've struggled with direct linking so much that setting up landing pages seems to do a heck of a lot better for a lot of reasons, so yeah, I definitely agree with you on that. Hey, when you go ahead and talk to an affiliate manager, now that is not something that a heck of a lot of people do, in fact, personally it is not something that I regularly do and probably should do. What sort of questions do you ask them?

Amit: Hey, that's a great question Mark. One of the questions I love asking them straight out is, you know, how much money is your top affiliate making? Because one of the things you'll notice in the industry of affiliate marketing is that you can have an offer. You'd have an affiliate program where the top affiliate is making a $1,000 a month and you could have another affiliate program where the top affiliate is making $500,000 a month. Now, where would you spend your time, you know?

 

So that's a very important question because the biggest thing with a lot of newbie affiliates, when they are just starting out, they waste a lot of time on offers where they could have the best campaign in the world, but there's just not a lot of search volume for it. So I mean literally you can't grow in scale and grow, you know, a seven-figure income if the affiliate program you're promoting gets maxed out after you hit, you know, 20 sales a month, you know.

 

So that's the number one question I ask them and then I'll ask them stuff like, you know, are your affiliates doing paid search? Do you have any restrictions on paid search on PPC? And typically for most affiliate programs, one thing that I think you really should definitely know, with affiliate marketing, I think over 90% of affiliates make their money with PPC. So it is the most effective way of making money with affiliate marketing. And...go ahead Mark.

Oh yeah, so what I was saying is that that is probably the number one question I ask merchants, and then I will also ask them like hey, what type of research do you provide for affiliates? Do you allow them to put a tracking code on the thank you page which allows, you know, PPC affiliates to track conversions down to the keyword level? Do you provide any promotional material? Any starter keyword list, anything? The biggest thing I want to get a sense of is hey, how willing is this merchant to help affiliates? Because what I find is that the more pro-affiliate the merchant is, the more willing they are to help you and work with you, and the more likely you are to be successful on their program, you know. That's the bottom line.

Mark: Totally, because merchants that look after affiliates are also more likely to do what it takes to make sure that they convert and all sorts of other things...

Amit: Exactly, that their page converts with paid traffic, that the affiliates are getting all the resources they need, that their page does not have leaks like phone numbers and links that will lose the sale for the affiliate, and all these little things that ... You know what I'm saying.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me with phone numbers, I don't mind if they put a phone number in there, personally, if it helps my conversions, as in a phone number for asking questions, but when it's a phone number for taking the order, now that's a different thing.

Because then you have got to be pretty careful. Now I think that's fantastic advice. Well, I'm gonna get on to some more questions from people that have been submitting them here.

 I've got a question sent in last night from Simon from, I'm not sure if his last name is Naharu or that's where he is from. He says, "Hi, I started a pay-per-click campaign featuring weight loss products. The main product and its by-page were produced by people who have been doing incident marketing for years and are very good at it. And apparently some affiliates are converting it to 20% and even better. I just have one review stall landing page at the moment, and although I'm getting a good click-through right there and no conversions, I've edited the landing page several times to make it look better, but to no avail. Can you give me advice about making review stall landing pages that would work? Thanks."

Amit: Well, you know what, I'm thinking, in this case, I don't think the landing page is probably the problem. It's probably the keywords he is bidding on. They may be too general. They may not be targeted enough. He might be bidding on the most competitive keyword in the niche, in which case he is going to get...

Mark: What would you put in if you were promoting a weight loss product? Sorry... What sort of keywords would you bid on if you were promoting a weight loss product? What would you be researching?

Amit: Well for a review-type landing page, it depends on the type. First of all, what I would do is learn what type of weight loss product it is. I would start with those exact keywords. If you were promoting like, Hoodia or, you know, Jenny Craig or whatever the specific type of weight loss, that methodology, or maybe like a low-fat diet or a low-carb diet. I would focus on those keywords first and then I would branch out to more general stuff. Because I mean, bidding on weight loss is very generic. I mean because there's so many different types of weight loss and diet programs out there. You probably have to be way more specific.

And the other thing is that with weight loss, the Google Content Network actually works really well for that niche. So I don't know if he is doing Search or Content Network, but Content Network would be a great strategy to use. And if you do Content Network, you can actually bid on all types of keywords because at that point you're targeting a demographic. You don't have to worry about the stringent Google quality score requirements of hey, this keyword has to match the content on your page so you can bid on health and fitness, and weight loss and nutrition, and all types of other topics related to weight loss, and you're going to find conversions. So my point here is that a lot of affiliates, they might say, oh well the problem must be on the page when the problem might, in fact, be their traffic source.

Mark: Yeah, I definitely agree with that as well. That often makes a huge difference. One other point that I'll just make is something that I noticed and you probably noticed, too. It also matters what country he is targeting, like, quite often you can get a lot of clicks from, say, India or something like that, or the Philippines for instance. There are a lot of English speakers in the Philippines who search for stuff, and yet, just for me, I just find that a lower proportion buy from there, so you might get a lot of clicks from the wrong places.

Amit: Yeah, yeah. Actually when I was starting out as an affiliate, I've made that mistake, and it is an interesting story, actually. I was promoting an offer, and actually the merchant helped me to bid on every country, and so I'm like okay, I'll bid on every country. So I did that and my conversions were horrible, and I was breaking even and conversions were horrible, and then I looked at my Google Analytics which is a program that allows you to track, you know, where all your traffic is coming from. I noticed that I had 2,000 clicks from India, and so I looked at my sales tabs and I had one sale from India. I said, oh okay, now I see what the problem is, and then I talked to my affiliate manager, and he's like oh, you gotta shut off all those countries, just bid on, you know, US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, you know, the first world English-speaking countries. I'm like, oh my God, and then the minute I did that, my ROI jumped to 1000%. I was able to increase my bids. I got from 20 sales a day to over 200...

Just by making that one small tweak. So yeah, targeting countries is extremely important. That's a very good point.

Mark: Another thing. Getting back to the Content Network, do you happen to find that you have better success with keyword-style content ads, like as in text ads, or do you find that you do better with, say, banner ads.

Amit: I personally haven't tested banner ads extensively, but I know people who have lots of success with them. Here is the trick from what I understand about banner ads. I'm not saying this from personal experience but from the experience of people that I have talked to. If you have a keyword text ad that is working really well, you can make a nice banner ad and put the text of your ad on the banner, and that would get a good click-through rate, you know, explicit benefit of the product, you know. Like if you're doing like, say, weight loss, let's go back to the weight loss example, if you had a banner that showed like a before and after picture and "See how to get it" type of deal, you know.

Mark: Yeah. People out there listening, you could even make an ad, if you wanted to, that looks kind of like a Google ad because at the end of the day, instead of having the equivalent of one spot, you could almost have the equivalent of three or four spots...

Amit: Yeah. And there's actually another way to do that Mark. If you were site targeting and you find sites where your Google ads get a high CTR, then you can bump up your CPM. Well, for those of you who don't know what CPM is, it's basically paying per impression. You can target specific sites on the Google Content Network and pan up per impression basis. And if you target sites that have high CTR, you can actually end up doing exactly what you said Mark, getting like one big Google ad with a couple of spots.

And since you're getting a high CTR, what's wild is that I just figured your CTR increases, so you end up paying the same or less for a bigger ad spot.

Mark: Yeah. Now, definitely that's really good advice. Okay, I've got another question, and it's coming in from another internet marketer that I know of, Mark Lindsay from the Gold Coast. He asks, "What steps would Amit follow today to replicate the success that he has had as a super affiliate like, if you would, he is basically put on bold today, and what is the single most important step that you've learned?" So he's pretty much saying, what would you do if you have to start right now from scratch to replicate your success, and what is the single most important step you've learned?

Amit: Well, the biggest thing I would do is, first of all, I would carefully research and find offers that have a high search volume, that has long-term viability, which means it is going to be there for a while, not just like a prepaid offer that hey, promotional offer for three months and its gone, and carefully research to make sure that hey, this is something that is on the up and up, that this has a strong conversion rate. It is not an offer with product life cycles that basically die out and it's not an offer where it's basically saturated on PPC. And then I would start hiring outsourcers to build sites to my exact specifications, using a Wordpress blog to build a site and having pages within that blog, having a subdirectory with my landing pages in there, then I would build a keyword list, a small keyword list at first, a couple of hundred words, send traffic to it, test it and then start optimizing testing different ad copy and testing different domains, and then I would, you know, as I saw results and start optimizing it, then I would do a very large keyword list for it, and then spend several months carefully optimizing the campaign until I achieve, you know, minimum four figures a day in profits. And I think it's hard to say what the most important step is, but here is the most important thing I learned about affiliate marketing: it is not the tactics that you use, but it's your strategy. You might know how to set up a landing page. You might know how to, you know, optimize your base, you might know how to, you know, set up an AdWords account that is properly structured, but if you don't execute all of these different techniques in the right order with the right mindset and the right thought process, then you're not going to get the same result. It is about strategy. Having that right strategy, having the system, knowing what to do, step A, step B, step C. Having that system is actually the most important part. There is no one secret. The secret is in your strategy. Does that make sense?

Mark: It makes total sense to me, and I hope it make sense to everyone out there listening. It's not all about every individual little tactic that you make. It's the overall idea with the right blueprint in front of you. And we will get to it later, but luckily Amit's put together a blueprint for you guys at ppcclass2.com...

Amit: Yeah, and one other thing that I emphasized in my blueprint, Mark, is that I talk a lot about the strategy. I say, hey don't just blindly copy what I'm showing you here. Understand why and how I'm doing each step. The "why" is still important. You need to understand the mindset behind each step, like why am I doing this, why does this work, why is this the best way of doing it. Because once you've learned those things, then you can develop your own strategy, you know.

It's not about blindly copying a blueprint. It's about really understanding the psychology behind it, you know.

Mark: Yeah. Like for instance, I've had people look at landing pages of mine and say hey, I copied your landing page. I did it the same, and then I'll look and say, well actually when you actually look at it closely, like I've made sure that the offer is inside the first fold of the landing page, and you've made it so that I have to scroll down a little bit to find the offer, so automatically I know that my page is slightly different from yours. That's a big difference.

You don't understand the reasons why things are the way they are. If you don't understand it, then you can easily copy things quite wrongly. It's very easy to miscopy something.

Amit: Exactly, exactly. And there are courses out there, I am not going to mention their names, that promote this type of methodology. Hey, you know, you don't have to think. You know, just copy these techniques I'm going to show you and boom! You're gonna start making money right away. Because hey, you know, we're all lazy, we all want to make money as fast as possible with as little effort as possible, but, you know, the bad news about my course is it will require people to, you know, put in a little bit of effort and a little bit of thought to really get things working for them. Now I've done everything I can to make that process as smooth as possible, but it will take a little bit of effort and a little bit of thought, and I'm just being completely honest because I'm not trying to promise somebody, you know, like a cookie-cutter system where boom! You're gonna start making money instantly because I know. I've been burned by that a number of times.

Mark: Yeah, and the thing is, like, when you think about it though, like people out there listening—and we will get on to more questions in just a moment—when you think about it, how many millionaires do you think are out there that don't know how to think for themselves? I mean, what do you think?

Amit: It's not work hard and grow rich. It's not sleep and grow rich. It's Think and Grow Rich.

Mark: Yeah, totally. Totally. So yeah that'll make a big difference to a lot of people. Anyway, I want to get back to asking you more questions. We've got a lot of questions here. I think what we'll do is I'll ask you more questions, but then at some point during this call, I might have a rapid fire section where I'd get you to give shorter answers to the questions...

Amit: By the way, if the question requires like one line to answer, I will answer it in one line, but if I need to, you know, map out my whole strategy, I will be happy to do that for your readers here.

Mark: Yeah, I think that's a good way of doing it. Okay, so I've got one from Mungo Lawrence from the Gold Coast, and he has asked, "When researching highly focused keywords, what minimum search volume per date do you consider viable to build a sales page and pursue the marketing of the product? Do you consider competition page numbers relevant?

Amit: I really don't do my keyword research that way. The way I do my keyword research is I don't focus on volume numbers and highly focused keywords, because here's what I found: as an affiliate, you're working on thinner margins and if you're going to market in, let's just say, dog training, which I always like to use as an example, you can pick dog training which has a huge amount of search volume, but that is the most competitive, highest cost per click keyword in that market. I'd rather pick a long tail of, you know, a couple of hundred keywords or eventually, you know, thousands that are very specific to that niche. Maybe like specific dog behavior problems like jumping, biting, gnawing, flatulence, you know, all of these different types of dog behavior problems, then maybe like some of the top dog breeds, and maybe the dog breeds people are looking up, and then have the dog breeds and then multiply your list of dog breeds by all the different behavior problems and start that as your keyword list instead of focusing on, you know, one narrow group of keywords that are maybe like, yeah sure they are getting a high time in the search volume, but as an affiliate, you don't want to target those. You want to target a long tail of highly specific keywords that'll convert a lot better and will have less competition and you'll get them for much less cost.

Mark: Okay. And for people out there, just another thing actually worth mentioning is that there are a lot of multipliers that you can come up with. Different things, like if you're promoting a car product, there's a lot of different makes and models. If you are promoting, for instance, marriage counseling, then you have, there is marriage counseling Boise, Idaho, there is marriage counseling, New York, New York, there is marriage counseling, Los Angeles. There's a lot of long tail as opposed to just a short tail. Just before I get on to the next question, do you have any, like, great multipliers that you just know of, off the top of your head? What are your favorite ones?

Amit: Well you just mentioned them. Geotargeting, cities, counties, states, doing like different lists, like specific lists in your market, for example, like music downloads, right? There's a lot of legal music download services like Rap City that have affiliate programs, and the best way to target them is to make a list of album names, artist names, song names, you know, download artist name, download insert song name, album name and then make huge lists of those, and you can do the same thing for movie downloads, dog training, marriage counseling. You can be, if you're promoting something in the mortgage or insurance market, you can also use geotargeting, because a lot of people look up, hey, you know, New Jersey car insurance or, you know, New York City car insurance or stuff like that.

So that is the best tactic and strategy. I love going into affiliate programs that have...one of the biggest questions I ask when I am applying for an affiliate program is, does it have a long tail that I can target? You know, does it have a long tail that I can target?

Mark: Yeah, and I guess you take a look at the keyword research tools as well to see if there are people searching for each of those things or are there other methods that you use for making sure that people are searching for the long tail?

Amit: Yeah, Google Keywords Tool. What's great about it now is it gives you search volume estimates, and I use that in combination with certain tools Keyword Spy, and there is a number of other competitive intelligence tools out there where you can basically take a sneak peak at what your competing websites are bidding on. Generally, if I see that competing websites are bidding on a long tail of keywords and I see a decent amount of search volume in Google Keywords Tool, and I see that hey, this affiliate program has a high network rating, and you know, affiliates are doing a lot of volume for maybe doing a number of research and talking to affiliate managers. I can quickly get a sense of hey, does this affiliate program have the type of volume that's worth targeting?

Mark: Yeah, totally. And one other thing, just for the people listening, and I don't want to talk about it for too long because we'll get into this at the end of the call, but I did notice that inside the members area of your products, you happen to have a number of keyword multipliers, like you had all the city names and you made it so that if someone wants to enter their keyword list, the software that you provided happens to automatically add the name of the city and that sort of thing. Like for instance, if people wanna target all the cities in Canada or all capitals of the world or all the cities in the United States.

Amit: Yeah, yeah. That's cool and we developed that list based on, you know, a lot of the strategies that I use. I said, hey, wouldn't it be great to have a tool for students so they can, you know, access this and quickly develop these highly targeted keyword list.

Mark: Yeah, oh yeah. Absolutely. That was really good. I am going to make good use of that myself. Okay we'll get on to the next question. We've got Mike Kern from Maui, Hawaii. He says that he has an author who has books listed on Amazon sold at Borders and Barnes & Noble also. How can he promote his book sales with pay-per-clicks/affiliates.

Amit: Oh, I would recommend turning his book into an e-book, hiring a copywriter to write a sales letter and then bumping up the price to $47.

You can't be profitable promoting, you know, a book maybe through Amazon where you are going to get a 5% commission. If you turn your written book into an e-book, hire a copywriter and a web designer to put a page up for you, and then start sending pay-per-click traffic to that page, then you could even, you know, have affiliates and partners promote your book. There are multiple methods you can get traffic in.

Mark: Yeah. I will just mention another thing, Mike, that you might want to do because I have heard some authors say, hey, won't they just notice that it's sold for $15 on Amazon and that kind of thing, and what I say to that is well, why don't you just add audio or something to it as well? Like read it out or get somebody to say $600 of Elance to read out the entire book as an audio and then it is actually different. They can download it through an iPod. It is a different value when you make audio.

Amit: Yeah. You can pump up the perceived value, exactly. You can really pump up value by adding some audio, you know.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. So yeah I hope that answers your question well, Mike. We have got our next question from Paul from Queenstown, New Zealand. He said, "Hi Mark, when I first began with AdWords, I probably made every mistake possible. Will a previous poor history of low quality scores affect my efforts to begin again in Google? Should I begin with a new account or would the existing one be okay?"

Amit: That's a great question. I would test out a new account and then a good way is just to split test it. When you campaign on your existing account and then pause it, and then run it on a new account, let it run for at least a couple of days on each one. Don't run them simultaneously by the way; that's against Google terms of service, and then see what type of traffic you get. There aren't minimum bids anymore, but you'll see what type of quality score and traffic you get after doing that, and then you'll see whether, you know, your account history and your account quality score has really hurt you and your existing account. Because the thing with a new account is that it takes at least four months to build up your account history, and this is just like Google actuarial calculation where they are saying that there is a certain amount of risk taking out a new advertiser, and then once you proved your ad has been over a period of four months, they actually give you a big break in terms that you pay much less per click. They'll inflate your click cost by up to 30% to 40% in those first four months when you start a new account, so be careful with that.

Mark: Yeah, now that's a pretty important lesson for people to learn. You might have struck a cord with a few people listening in on that. Hey, just to augment that question a little bit, one thing that I'm wondering is do you usually, like in order to get your historical click-through rise up higher, do you often bid higher? I'm just wondering if you do this. Do you bid higher to start with when you start promoting a product just in order to get your click-through rate up because you know Google is known to give you a few kickbacks when your click-through rate is higher? Do you want to explain that to people and I'm just interested if you actually do that?

Amit: Well you know what, that actually a couple of years ago and was a very smart thing to do. Nowadays, it is does not make as big of a difference because they have something called...now Google is taking account of what your click-through rate is. They are normalizing it. It's called acquisition normalization where they are normalizing your click-through rate with your ad position so you won't get any benefits for just bidding to the first position then artificially getting a high click-through rate as you would in the past. They have already taken that into account. But however, I found that their system isn't 100% perfect, so there is definitely a benefit to bidding a little bit higher in the beginning and getting a slightly higher click-through rate. But it's not like what it used to be.

Mark: Okay, but it's not better like in the past.

Amit: Yeah you know, don't bid like $5 a click or anything. I'll generally bid a little higher in the beginning but what I'll do after a couple of days is I'll generally drop the bids on keywords that are in position 1, 2 or 3, just to improve my ROI and push up ads that are very low so that they get the proper exposure, and it's a technique called shifting where I am shifting all my ads to the center of the first page, and that really helps your ROI even if you're not tracking your keywords.

Mark: I have got another question now from Bill Grover from Rochester, NY, and he said, "Do you recycle domain names, or if there's a product that you are promoting and you had to create a domain name for it and it doesn't really count, do you just drop it and buy another domain name for the next product you're familiar with?"

Amit: Can you rephrase the question? I am kind of confused with recycle domain name.

Mark: I think basically he is saying like, let's say you set up weightlossjeanie.com and let's say that was promoting super weight loss secrets, say, and then let's say you didn't make much money promoting super weight loss secrets. Would you still use weightlossjeanie.com to promote another product instead, or would you set up a brand new domain name?

Amit: Well, if it's another weight loss product, yes, but if it is another product in a completely different niche, then you always want a targeted domain name. So, the best thing with domain names, Mark, is I kind of do something that not a lot of affiliates, even super affiliates are aware of, and it is that I carefully test multiple domain names per offer and I try to make sure my domain name has an explicit benefit of the offer. So, weight loss might be "lose ten in two weeks" or like "lose weight fast" or "slim down now," or something that has a definite benefit. I want to make the domain name a specific benefit, even a called action if I can, even a called action, and then I'll test multiple domains with my offer, and that is the first thing I test before I even test the ad copies. And a lot of times I'll see like huge differences, not only in the click-through rate, but also in the conversion rates.

So, yeah, you want to recycle your domain name, you want to be as targeted as possible for your offer. Don't use like, some affiliates have pages like "super nerds review" and then they put like a weightloss.dot domain. That may work okay if you have a subdomain, but I recommend getting the full domain for each offer that you can that is highly targeted to that offer.

Mark: Especially when you follow what you do and that is that you prefer to promote a few products and do them really, really well, then it's not going to get that expensive as opposed to if you are an affiliate that is looking to promote 50 different offers in maybe 50 domain names trying to get up there.

One thing I personally used to do was I used to have a separate domain name for each dog breed when it comes to dog training, like I had, like "stop german shepherd problems," "stop golden retriever problems." There is about 600 dog breeds, multiply that by some of the dog problems like aggression and digging. I had a heck of a lot of domain names and that worked really, really well like, I ended up getting about, at least, I can't remember how much, but it was like double the click-through rates, just so people know that this sort of stuff works. The only problem I had was that then Google broadened their quality score rules, which meant that I had to make sure that each of these websites that I was setting up was a bit more than just a single page and when you are looking at trying to set up, you know, over a thousand websites, and give them all unique content for most of the pages...

Amit: Yeah, I actually had the same issue (laughing). I actually did the same thing in other niches. I was in public records and I was doing like birthrecords.org and marriedrecords.org and criminalrecords.org, and all types of very targeted domain names just like you are in the dog training niche, and it worked like gangbusters. Once Google started tracking down, I had to just adapt one domain and then just went with that. That is, actually, part of what forced me to change my strategy, to just, you know, having like one, almost authority-type site.

Mark: Yeah, I think, for the people listening, though if you have got a campaign set up with, let's say, one domain name for all your ad groups but then you find one ad group who is making you $500 a week, let's say, that happens to be "stop dog aggression," say, for dog training, let's say that is making you $500 a week, then there is no reason why you shouldn't, at least, set up a separate domain name for that particular one because that ad group is worth it to you.

Amit: Yeah, absolutely. You can even insert alias domains for it and, you know, send it to the same page on you main site, and with the alias domain, it points to the same. It's almost like that you're original domain is basically like pointing to the same content, so that way you can get around the alias rule that Google has set up.

Mark: Oh, I didn't even know they allow that. That's great to know. I should start cranking up those domains again.

Amit: But there is a trade off to that. A lot of aliases can sometimes flop. They won't get the best quality score versus your main domain, but it's worth testing, you know, if you're getting one domain name with a huge amount of your profit, then yeah, you want to optimize it as much as you can, make it as targeted as possible. That is a rule of the psychology PPC. The more targeted, you know, your keyword is to your ad is to your domain, is to your landing page, the higher the conversion rate is gonna be.

Mark: Well, I have got another question from Amil this time, and he has just said "What is a good ratio of money to spend versus money earned in pay per click?"

Amit: 100%, and realistically, you won't always get 100% but you always want to shoot for 100%. That means, if you spend $1 in Google, you get $2 back in commissions.

Mark: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, what about though if it was a recurrent billing off? For how much would you...let's say, you are getting paid recurrent commissions, would you still say 100% up front or would you...

Amit: You could probably go down to 50% or less depending on...you have to talk to the merchant and ask, hey, what is the typical life cycle of a customer, like, how many times can I expect the typical customer re-billed? Maybe like anywhere from four to six months is pretty typical for most things. So, then you can calculate what you are going to get on the customer including the re-bills and then do 100% of that. So, the upfront is maybe $30 and maybe you get $60 after, you know, several months of re-bills. Then you can say "Okay, well I can basically break even with my PPC and I am still going to make 100%."

Mark: Okay, I have got another question here from MJ from Plano, Texas. "How do you track success if you are using an affiliate offer and you have no access to the Thank You Page?"

Amit: There are multiple tools out there now. There is a tool called XConversions that will allow you to do that. There is a tool called Optimize My Site and there is a number of tools out there, third-party tracking tools that will allow you to get statistics on what keywords are converting. So, if they do not allow you to actually track, you have to set up a third-party tracking software. Actually it is a pain in the butt if you have a really good offer that you're promoting and you know it's really good; you know it is going to do really well, then it is worth it.

Mark: Okay, I have got Dave from Melbourne just asking "Do you recommend .net and .info or similar domains instead of .com and is there any difference in ranking on Google/pay per click on using the different..."

Amit: I have seen a lot of affiliates use .net and other ones. If it is a really good domain name, I am saying yeah, go for .net or .name, or something weird, but you would really want to go for .com preferably first whenever possible, because that has always seemed to have more credibility.

Mark: Yeah. Just for people listening, I just want to add an idea that I came across and was taught to me by another guy who is using www- sometimes, like you might not be able to get weightloss.com, but you may be able to get www-weightloss.com, for instance, maybe that one is taken or maybe not, and it just looks credible because it looks like people just look at it and they just think it is www.weightloss.com will be likely to click that link.

Amit: Yeah, I have actually done that in the past. That works really well.

Mark: Cool. Oh, that's good to know, that you have done it as well.

Amit: There is a lot of success by the way, so yeah, that does work really well.

Mark: I've got Jamie from Tauranga, New Zealand, and he says that he's in New Zealand and really wants to get started in affiliate marketing. Oh, wait a minute. I had not actually read the whole question. He has asked if you have got a direct e-mail address, I think I will just have to say, Jamie, that if you contact me via my affillorama support, you know, I will be able to get back to you, okay, so just contact me via the support and all, and I will definitely reply. Okay. Phil Harris asked a question that you have already answered, so we will just answer it again really quickly. He said "Is it necessary to have a bona fide website or can you just have a hotlink?"

Well, Amit was saying before that he has had a heck of a lot of more success with having bona fide websites and not so much success with direct linking or hotlink. Okay, and if you didn't catch it earlier in the call, then I will be putting up a recorded version of this call later, probably in a couple of days, so you would be able to rewind and watch it then. For the people listening, I strongly recommend you stay on the live version as opposed to the recorded because I tend to notice that people tend to not go back and do things later. It's better to just do things now when you are in the moment. I think if you're gaining a lot of value right now then you're probably better off sticking to it. I have got Gordon from Singapore saying "Would you recommend someone who is short of cash to start with pay per click, or would you get them started with other forms of marketing first?"

Amit: That is a great question. It depends on how short of cash he is. You know what I'm saying? I was actually $20,000 in consumer debt when I started pay per click and so I basically had to cut down my peripheral spending and take whatever little money I have left at the end of the month and my daily budget was literally $5 or $10 when I started. I did not spend more than $5 to $10 a day.

Mark: Personally, I usually recommend people not to start and pay the click if they don't have money because I am usually worried what their strategy is, but if you have a good strategy and you're doing it properly and you know...

Amit: Yeah, you have to be really careful and, you know, keep your daily budget low. You know, budget certain amounts for each campaign and make sure that, you know, you might want to look at ways you can cut, you know, your personal expenses and, you know, save a few hundred dollars a month to put into pay per click, but yeah, if you're not in a financial straight, it's obviously much easier. I won't mind you doing pay per click.

Mark: I have had Tom from Manchester say "Is Google the be all and end all for pay per click marketing or have you other pay per click places that you use?"

Amit: Actually, I really like Yahoo and MSN as well, and I get anywhere from 20% to 50% of my sales from there, depending on, you know, the campaigns I am running at the time. I make a considerable amount of sales from Yahoo and MSN, so I highly recommend them as well on top of...

Mark: Which Yahoo do you use, because there is more than one of course?

Amit: The new one, the Panama, you know, the Yahoo search marketing, a new system...

Mark: No, what I mean is do you use...

Amit: Oh yeah, Oh I see what you're saying. Yeah, I use Yahoo US and Canada. I know there is Yahoo UK and there is Yahoo New Zealand, Australia. It is a real pain managing multiple yahoo accounts. It's not like Google where you can just turn it on right away, so I just focus on US and Canada.

Mark: I just want to let people know that, just per my findings, I don't certainly like, you know, don't take my word as gospel here because I am only one person here, but personally I find Yahoo USA, while I make more sales from Yahoo USA pay per click, I personally get a higher return on investment with Yahoo Australia and New Zealand and I get a higher return on investment with Yahoo UK, not quite as high as Australia and New Zealand and then Yahoo USA, and I think it is because people don't like the fact that they have to set up and know their yahoo account...

Amit: Yeah, yeah, there is a little competition...

Mark: Yeah, so they lead to competition. So, people out there listening, especially if you have got less money, maybe you might want to just go to Yahoo Australia or something like that because while you are getting less clicks and possibly less overall dollars, you will probably make more of a profit ratio, that you might make a $1.20 instead of $1 for every dollar that you spend, so it's worth looking at. Okay, so, I have got Mike Weber asking "What are the first five steps to super affiliate millions?"

Amit: That is too general a question.

Mark: It is quite a loaded question, isn't it? I think you have been hearing a lot of...

Amit: You have to have more specific questions.

Mark: Yeah, fair enough. Well, we'll say that, at least, step #1 is you want to have the right strategy and the right mindset, that is certainly something, and just to repeat before carrying on, ppcclass2.com, that is where you can find out all about Amit's full training course which is going to be launching very, very shortly, in fact, early next week, but we will get into the details on that at the end of the call. Alright, so I'll ask the next question. "What is the next best approach to earn online if you don't have capital for AdWords excluding paid surveys and that kind of thing?"

Alec: Oh, that's great. Actually Amit, who unfortunately had to take off, would have been the best person to answer that question. There are ways of generating viral traffic using social media, blogging, article marketing. There are other ways of doing it to get traffic to offers that don't require huge capital investments that work actually really well. I mean, it takes a little longer to build up and start making money with those methodologies, but it definitely can be done, and there are people who do very well with it.

Mark: Okay, well we've got...

Amit: Hold on. I'll be honest. That's not my expertise, so don't grill me on that please (laughing).

Mark: Yeah, that's fair enough. Yeah, now a definitely a fair point. Yeah, I mean, just for people listening, if you're low on cash, you can check out affilorama.com, my site, because I am launching it for free in a few weeks from now and that will teach you affiliate marketing for free. If you wanting to know right tactics such as how to, you know, rank well in the search engines and do it that way, because you certainly can do it that way. This pay per click is just like... while it costs you money and there is a little bit more risk, it can be a much faster method of getting going.

Okay, we have got Bill Grover from Rochester saying "If you lost everything and had only your experience in a computer, how would you start from scratch to make your first $100 profit?" In fact, we have already really answered that question just...

Amit: Yeah, I had really answered that question and it has gotten a little competitive.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. We'll carry on. All right, "What is the best hottest site to build from the type of business you do as a pay per click business?" This is from Ellen from Sydney, Australia. "Would you recommend a static site such as Dreamweaver or do you recommend like a blogging platform such as Wordpress and why?"

Amit: I recommend Wordpress because it is really easy to build up a site with lots of content on it and then my landing pages were usually static and I will usually put him in a directory within the Wordpress blog where I'll send all my money to pay traffic to. That is why I have really decided that I really want to keep that niche hard because I'll build a whole site for it in the Wordpress blog and I will have my team regularly add content to it and we'll go from there.

Mark: Cool, yes, it makes total sense. I'll try and skip past questions when I notice that we have already hit it. We have got somebody asking, I don't know if I can pronounce your name right, it's Owatandi Lagos from Nigeria, saying "How do you use backing sales to increase sales, like when your prospect arrives at your site and buys an affiliate product, do you use any mechanisms for getting repeat sales?"

Amit: Oh, I'm not collecting leads actually. It depends on the market. So the markets that I am in...it really does not make sense to collect leads. It has been tested and it is not the best strategy for the market I am in. If you're marketing information products or an E-book, then yes, that is a great strategy to use. Generally, I am not doing that as an affiliate.

Mark: Okay, well, if you do not that as an affiliate, what are you doing? Like for instance, do you spend more time promoting cost per acquisition market, say, through a Zoogle or a primary ad, would you spend more time on ClickBank products or do you do both, or what is the ratio of...

Amit: ClinkBank products I spend most of time in actually, although I'm not strictly working with ClickBank anymore. A lot of my merchants who are originally at ClickBank have moved to different vendors and different merchants and I have worked out a special deal with them, so they don't, you know, hold the 10% of the ClickBank jobs, so I have switched all my traffic over to other sources.

Mark: Oh, I got you.

Amit: But yeah. The thing with CPA offers, they are really great when you get started, but most CPA offers usually have a very short life cycle. Like, they will be hot for a couple of months and they will die out, and those aren't the offers I typically like targeting because of my strategy. I would like to target offers that will be there for years, you know. I mean, build a substantial site out of...

Mark: Yeah, like it is much better to promote, for instance, products on, say, how to learn Spanish today, because people are going to want to learn that 10 years from now whereas...

Amit: Yes exactly, and even if the affiliate offer isn't there a couple of years from now, you can switch over to another one.

Mark: Yeah, that will be multiple ones. Okay, I have got David from Kuala Lumpur. He has got a specific problem. He says that "I promote a ClickBank product and my commission is $34 and I found some good keywords that convert at 1%. My minimum AdWords cost for the first page of Google though, is 60 cents. Can you give any advice that I should use?"

Amit: That is kind of hard to say because it could be a landing page issue. You might want to be more targeted with your ad groups, maybe you need smaller ad groups plus keyword or maybe your ad needs to be more targeted to the offer. So, that is highly very vague. It is kind of hard to look at the...if I could sit down with him and look at his account and look at his Google account and his landing page, I could probably zoom in on what is the problem, and a lot of times, you know, I have stuff like that happen and I will be scratching my head. I won't know. What I would say in general if it isn't any of those things, is don't worry, don't focus on one keyword, bid on more keywords than on a broad-range keyword. The best, most stable way of making money as a PPC affiliate is to make sales from thousands of keywords, hundreds of keywords. You never want your campaign dependent on just a couple of keywords. Those keywords, Google can, you know, change the first page bids on them overnight. You can have increased competition come in and push your ad down. There are a lot of things that can happen. It is a very risky way of doing it. It is better to make yourselves some long tail of keywords versus just a few keywords that you might have stumbled upon.

Mark: Yeah, and you might want to listen back, I mean, you would have heard from earlier in the call where you were stating about setting up good landing pages and also looking at the country targeting, make sure that you target the right countries because that might have been pushing things up as well as you want it to be higher, yeah.

Amit: Yeah exactly. Yeah.

Mark: Well, moving on quickly, because we will try and see if we can wrap through the rest of these. We have got a question from Remco from the Netherlands. He has asked a few questions, I think it is better that I just give you one of them, just so we can get through with a few more people. "Do you use dynamic landing pages or do you use static landing pages and why?"

Amit: I use static landing pages. I will usually, like, break up on the niche. I usually take the niche and I'll break it up into maybe, like, 10 different sub-niches, and have my team make that specific landing page for each one, although there are specific situations where it really does not make sense using a dynamic landing page. Let me go back to the music download offer I was talking about. The music downloads actually make sense. You can get a data feed from the merchant which basically has a list of all the albums, songs and artist names, and you could extract that information and make dynamic pages for every single artist, like one for Madonna, one for U2, you know, one for Rolling Stones, etc., etc., and those actually tend to convert much better than just sending traffic to a generic page. In that case, we are talking about hundreds of artists, so you really do want a dynamic page.

Mark: Alright, got you. Okay, just to check with you, how much time have you got? I have got about 15 questions left here on this list.

Amit: Sure I can give you another 15 minutes. I would be happy to, you know, answer as many questions as I can. I have got to run around 9:30.

Mark: Yeah, sure. Well, we will try and say, max it out until, let say, 10 or 11 minutes from now and then we'll try and just find out a lot more about your course before you leave. Does that sound right?

Amit: Sure!

Mark: So, we have got Michelle, I'm not sure if she is from Medford or if her last name is Medford, but she says "With the economy changing, people will be cutting down on what they buy. Do you see a change on what is being purchased more and what niches would you suggest that would still be profitable and how can a person research what is being purchased and what is not still being purchased." This is something that actually I didn't think about.

Amit: That is a tough question. I will try to do my best to answer that. The biggest thing I can tell you is any type of high-end luxury goods, they are particularly seeing a hit, so I would not recommend selling anything high-end, high-end clothing, jewelry or diamonds or anything like that, and so most affiliate programs really do not market extremely high-end products, so that is really not an issue. From my experience, as far as what I see is my affiliate profits are actually starting to go up even if the economy is tanking worldwide, and I talked to a number of my super affiliate buddies and I have asked them, "Hey, are you seeing any type of serious downturn in your affiliate sales?" and like "No." It's weird. So, I mean, I don't think it's a major concern unless, you know, even if there is a recession, I don't think...you know...realistically, the affiliate sales probably would have been stronger had there not been an economic downturn, but it is going really, really well surprisingly.

Mark: Yeah. It is definitely a hard one to tell, but if it does wind up affecting things, it doesn't seem to be yet. It's gonna affect a lot of people like, you know, it is not something you can really plan for, some of these catastrophes.

Amit: Yeah, exactly, and if you're targeting a product that most people need, then you should be okay. You might see a dip in sales a little bit, if things get really bad, but you will still have a healthy business, you know.

But if you're marketing, you know, very high-end stuff, then those things you can expect to see a large drop.

Mark: I have got Dave from Melbourne saying, actually he has asked a few questions but "What do you think of pay per click optimization companies that tell you that they can get you on the front page of Google and that sort of thing? Have you ever tried that solution for pay per click?"

Amit: Oh yeah, they will get you in the front page of Google but how much are you going to pay for that, you know? You know what I'm saying? It doesn't make sense to always be in the first position. In fact, as an affiliate, you usually do not want to be in the first position for most keywords. You can get a lot of tire-tickers, we like to call them tire-tickers, you know, because they are just clicking in the first thing they see when they type it in, which is very untargeted traffic. For most keywords, you do not want to be in the first position, so I wouldn't go for that at all.

Mark: Okay, we have got Kate from Idaho just asking "How profitable are misspells to you and what proportion of your sales come from there?"

Amit: Really, I am not tracking what percentage of my sales come from misspells. Here is what I can tell you. Misspellings are great because even though they get low search volume, generally you have very little competition so you get very high CTR and a very high conversion rate.

Mark: Do you find you have good quality scores using that?

Amit: Sorry. What I was going to say is that there is a great tool in Microsoft adLab adCenter. It think it's adlab.microsoft.com, and you can type in a word and will give you all the misspellings that people are typing in the actual MSN Live search engine, based on real actual results that people are typing in. It's a great way to find misspellings and throw them in when you are making a keyword list.

Mark: I did happen to notice personally when I was in the area for your actual products that you happen to have a misspelled generator and I looked at it and I noticed, heck, you've eventually done that quite scientifically like when there is a misspell, you've put all the variations around that...

Yeah, someone is going to press A, you've got the letter Q instead and then you have also got the letter S instead and then you have another variation with the letter Z instead because that is just right next to that letter.

Yeah, if you're interested in misspells, then that tool would be really handy as well, the ones that you've got in your members area.

Amit: Yeah, that one could generate a huge list for you of misspellings very quickly.

Mark: Yeah. We've got another question, "What are some niches that you personally highly recommend?"

Amit: I think I actually mentioned a bunch of them right on the call, you know.

Mark: I think you have mentioned quite a few. I think you have mentioned like weight loss and how to, and that kind of thing.

Amit: Yeah, public record, I think I mentioned music and movie downloads, public record look ups, that's it. That are several niches that I know. Some of the niches I mentioned I make quite a bit of money in.

Mark:

Yeah, and people out there, just remember that Amit likes to take a niche and earn thousands of dollars out of a single niche. He is not one of those affiliates that goes ahead and promotes seventy different niches to make his income. A large proportion of it comes from his top, what, five or so niches, you are saying.

Amit: Yes.

Mark: This is another question. "What are the top three affiliates/CPA networks that you recommend?"

Amit: I recommend ClickBank, Commission Junction and Azoogle. I would recommend those three more than anything else. There is a bunch of other smaller ones. Those are great to get started with. The drawback with CJ is that it's hard to get in touch with the merchants and they are kind of like, you know...and then you need a site and some of them...you have to get manual approval from some of the merchants and stuff. ClickBank is great because you can promote anything on there. You just sign up, which takes five minutes, zoom! You can promote anything on there. CPA networks like Azoogle are also very good because they have a lot of support for new affiliates, so I highly recommend that as well. So, as far as the top three, I would recommend those three.

Mark: Okay, to people out there listening, I'm going to just say these are the last three questions because, well, we've got quite a few here and quite a few coming in and Amit is gonna head away and, you know, I think you have provided some incredibly valuable information here. So, we will get on to the next question, and then Amit is also going to tell you a lot of information about his course as well. He has got a full course that teaches you the step-by-step, everything that he knows about making money online; how to go from absolutely nothing to making $2.4 million a year, and it is probably likely to grow in the future from pay per click, so anyway, the next question, I will try and make sure it is one that has not been asked before. It is slightly similar to the ones that were asked before but not quite the same, now we have got a couple of people asking this, anyway, we have got Jude from Houston, Texas and Caroline from Alabama, and we have got a couple of other people that are actually asking about this, asking about blogging, like they're saying "How do you write blogging as a marketing tool, and do you actually do your own post yourself or do you actually pay people to do most aspects of it for you, because I think that people heard you mentioned that you use Wordpress as opposed to, say, Dreamweaver for setting up your...

Amit: Yeah, yeah, well that's a great question. As far as my affiliate sites go, I have a team that writes all the posts. Now, I also have a personal blog as well where I write the posts, but as far as my affiliate sites go, I have a staff of writers from the Philippines, actually, that write all the posts. They put a couple of posts on each one.

Mark: Oh, that's really good.

Amit: I mean, what I meant to say is they put a couple of post on each of my site blogs a week.

Mark: I am noticing, just going through these questions, I have actually had an awful lot of people ask the same question here, just to let you know, so you might want to cover it when you talk about your actual course. I have actually had an awful lot of people say "What is the quickest and least time-consuming way to get set up as an affiliate? How do I get started in affiliate marketing? What is your advice to a newbie to get started in internet marketing?" Actually I have had dozens of people ask that kind of question and I think maybe, it might be actually a good time just to start now and just tell people all about your course, because your course pretty much takes people from scratch, including just letting people know. It includes a lot of software as well that helps you out with a lot of things, with your keyword research and all that...

Amit: Yeah, exactly. I will give you a little bit of the sneak peak on the course which we haven't even announced to the general public yet, but the way that the system is set up is based on an e-learning system that took Alec and I 1.5 years to develop, based on experience on what's the most effective way to teach people these strategies, and to teach people in general, and we have also incorporated lots of tools that we have talked about throughout this call that will help you build highly targeted large keyword lists to get going right away, and there is also even a tool that will help you quickly write effective Google ads, like really, you know, high CTR Google ads right after that, and we are also going to have some really, really high-impact bonuses, one of them is I'll leak to you, which we haven't announced to anyone, our custom templates designed by my personal web designer, who I trained and he is a landing page conversion expert, like all the landing pages producing incredible conversion rate and he does all of my personal stuff. So, all of that, plus a detailed, highly refined system that I spent literally more on. I spent $2 million on Google AdWords and not including what I spent in Yahoo and MSN perfecting this system and has everything I know in there, in a simple step-by-step manner, so that anyone, even if you know nothing about affiliate marketing, even if you were like me and can't even put up a simple web page, I'll walk you through exactly what you need to do to get started and get up and running and start making your first sale as an affiliate, and launch your first profitable campaign.

Mark: I just want people to know just before you carry on and tell them more about it, the web address to go to is ppcclass2.com and you can find out; there are actually some videos up there that you can check out right now if you want to. If you want to watch more videos and get more free advice right now from Amit, then it's alright. There you can see him talking with Alec Single on video right there. There is also a great free report there as well for you. So, I'll let you tell the people more about what is inside.

Amit: Oh, you want me to...okay, I can walk you through a lot of the content I have given you on the call. It is just some of what you will see inside the course. I mean, we do it step by step. We start by talking about market research; that is the first module. Then we go on to some, you know, really advanced keyword strategies that I had personally developed. Then I talk a little bit about, you know, the pros and cons of direct linking, when to do it versus actually making a landing page. And then, in the fourth module, I'd go through step by step, and by the way, each module also has videos as well, supplementing the content of the module where I will go through a lot of the content of the module in a video format, just to clarify some more complicated points. So, going back to module four, we talk exactly how to set up a campaign, exactly how I do it, and I have a very, very unique method of doing it that I personally developed, which is I can virtually guarantee, you have never seen before, that will dramatically speed up putting your campaign together. No, I do not recommend an expensive tool like SpeedPPC or something like that. It is completely different, and actually, honestly, it is more versatile. The fifth module is all about landing pages. I get into depth proven strategies in developing a high-converting landing page, and I also go through case studies with my very own sites. The sixth module goes all into the ins and outs of Google quality score which is, you know, for a lot of newbies; it is pretty intimidating. If learning pay-per-click is hard enough, but then having to deal with Google quality score, and it has gotten so complex over the years, so I would go through the ins and outs of that and make it basically very simple for everyone to understand. Module seven, I talked about all the possible scenarios you will have when you first launch a campaign and how to be like a Sherlock Holmes and see if your launched campaign is not successful, to find out what's wrong with your campaign, and this is based on my years of experience, and to quickly identify the problem and solve it or, you know, if the campaign is, in fact, a dud, to quickly identify that and to move on. Module eight talks about really how to carefully test and track your results, a lot of split testing, how to do split testing properly and a lot of major mistakes, a lot of major pitfalls that affiliates make when split testing and how it is really hurting their business. Module nine, I talk about a very, very powerful simple scalable optimization strategy that I had personally developed, and I have heard students say that they have had break-even campaigns and with this optimization strategy, they are finally able to make it profitable. So, and then, that is just what you will get in the initial course, and then we have a continuing education program where every month, I will be releasing more and more of my, you know, advanced strategies, so I will be adding a new chapter of the course every month.

Mark: That's fantastic, and also I noticed that there were heck of a lot of software tools in there as well, people, and yeah, I was actually really, really impressed with it and if I find something that I find myself using, such as those software tools, then I know that it is something that other people are going to find huge value in as well because I get so many things personally thrown at me everyday. It's not that often that I find something that I actually feel like carry on using, you know. This market is...there is only so many hours in a day, so you know, stuff that....

Amit: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and our goal, Mark, was to have a one-stop shop, so everything you need to get your affiliate marketing business up and running will be contained in this program. You won't be going anywhere else. We provide all the tools for you, and we try to put it together in a simple streamlined manner so that no matter what level you are at, you can start learning the stuff and start applying it right away.

Mark: Yes, fantastic, and just to reiterate the URL, it's ppcclass2.com and the other thing is on launch day, which is early next week, if you happen to be on my mailing list at affilorama.com, I am personally going to be adding some extra bonuses of my own, so if you do happen to buy then you might want to buy through my link because you will get some extra added stuff that you won't get anywhere else that you'll probably find to be extremely valuable. The other thing as well that you might want to know is that Amit and Alec also have got some other bonuses that are going in on top of this. This is on everything, as much as it sounds like, there is so much value here, there is actually some more bonuses that I am not allowed to mention because they are unadvertised at this stage, but there are some other bonuses as well going in on launch day, so just to let you know that it's going to be a pretty awesome product here, and I strongly recommend that you watch the other videos that Amit is in on at ppcclass2.com and see if it is right for you. Either way, I am going to put up a recorded version of this call, so you can go back through it and take notes because, thanks a lot, Amit, you have honestly released a heck of a lot of great information here for people to learn from one way or another.

Amit: Hey, Mark, it was a pleasure being on the call and thank you very much for inviting me. I hope some of the information I have released to you, whether they, you know, decide to invest in the program or not, would benefit them and help their PPC campaigns.

Mark: Thanks very much, Amit. I really appreciate you being on the line, and for everyone else out there listening to ppcclass2.com, what time is it's launch, Amit?

Amit: It is going to be at 2 p.m.

Mark: 2 p.m. on Tuesday, is it?

Amit: Yes, 2 p.m. on Tuesday, October 14. That's 2 p.m., US time, sorry, so I am not sure what that would be in New Zealand time in that part of the world.

Mark: Yeah. New Zealand time is minus seven hours from there so, that will be about 7 a.m. I think, so it's not too bad. But, yeah, I mean, people all over the world, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, look up a world clock on the internet, and you will find the exact time for you. Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this call. I will be putting up the recorded version on affiliorama.com/blog in the next, hopefully today, if not by tomorrow. Thanks again, Amit.

Amit: Thank you very much, Mark. Bye bye.

Mark: Bye for now, everybody.