Turning $10 Into $100 – CPA Email & Zip Submits – $8

Everyone that has tried affiliate marketing has been enticed by them, and yet only a select few actually manage to turn a profit using them.   What could seem so simple and yet be so hard to make money off of?   The infamous zip and email submit offers – drawing us with their simpleness, but frustrating us with their turnouts.   Well, I am about to walk you through an ingenious technique that will make zip/email submit offers your new best friend, and make you a successful affiliate marketer.

High Converting Zip & Email Submits

Turning $10 Into $100 Each Day

Everyone that has tried affiliate marketing has been enticed by them, and yet only a select few actually manage to turn a profit using them.   What could seem so simple and yet be so hard to make money off of?   The infamous zip and email submit offers – drawing us with their simpleness, but frustrating us with their turnouts.   Well, I am about to walk you through an ingenious technique that will make zip/email submit offers your new best friend, and make you a successful affiliate marketer.

So what exactly am I talking about? How are we going to put a new spin on these types of offers?   The technique is simple, yet very effective.   In brief, we are going to pick a new, controversial news topic, create a prize-oriented PPC campaign around it, and direct traffic towards our single-page site that asks for the user’s opinion concerning the topic and offering a free reward for doing so.

Now that may not have made things exactly clear for you, so let me demonstrate first with an example that I did.   Remember a few months ago when Senator Larry Craig was caught in a public restroom making advances on another man, and then the huge controversy of whether or not he should resign happened?   As soon as the news broke, I gathered a bunch of keywords surrounding Larry Craig and the scandal and created an Adwords and MSN Adcenter campaign using these keywords, which pointed to a site that I threw up in 30 minutes.   The site had one paragraph of content – a blurb from the news story – a picture of the Senator, and a poll asking whether or not he should resign.   The user would vote “yes” or “no” and then be directed to my affiliate offer page that would be ask them for their zip code in return for a free* $500 Starbucks Gift card.

My Example
Here is my example of my ad:

Should Sen. Craig Resign?
You decide.   Vote now and
receive a $500 Starbucks gift card.
www.mysite.com/offer/larry-craig.html

And here is the landing page that I used:

Why It Works
You may be thinking that this has no chance of working, that the cost of getting enough visitors to your site and following through with the offer will be greater than the small $1 payouts of the zip and email submit offers.   Let me explain to you why this technique works: you’re on the leading edge, so you have very little competition. When creating PPC campaigns, competition leads to higher and higher bids, which on such a small paying offer would mean losing money.   However, when you can get away with bidding $0.05 maximum, this is when you’re able to turn a profit.   You see, you are only aiming for the newest stories to come out.   You catch a good one, be the first one to create a PPC campaign around it – which means that you are the only one bidding on those keywords, and so you can pay as little as the system will let you – in the next couple of days the story blows up and gets hugely popular, you generate a ton of traffic to your site for minimal cost, profit from your affiliate marketing, and in a couple of weeks when the competition gets to be too much and your price per bid has to raise, you move on to a different story.   Pretty smart, eh?

Now that you know what exactly I am talking about and how it works, I will show you exactly how to go about doing it for yourself.

Step 1: Picking A Topic
This is the most important step, so take your time and do it carefully.   The topic that you choose will dictate the success of your campaign – pick something that is already too popular, and you will not be able to get your bids low enough to make a profit.   Pick something that won’t ever get popular and you will not be able to generate enough traffic.   Part of this is a guessing game, but don’t worry – you’ll quickly get good at it.   Maybe your first couple of campaigns won’t particular be successful, but pretty soon you’ll see how effective this technique can be.   So, how does one go about picking a topic to create this campaign around?

Browse News Stories
This is probably the easiest and best way to find good topics.   Go to the top Google News Stories, since they aggregate topics from over 4000 news sites.   Now just browse through the headlines until you find something that sticks out to you. Again, this takes a trained eye, but it is something that you will develop quickly.   This way is simple and quick, and you’re bound to get at least a few possible topic choices.

Wordtracker Surge Report
If you are not already signed up for the bi-daily Wordtracker keyword report, do so immediately.   They will send you a report every 48 hours that has the top 200 keyword surge report – i.e. the most popular keywords in the last 2 days.   This is a great way to see what new search phrases are becoming real popular.   Browse through these lists to see what people are currently interested in.

Google Hot Trends
Another great way to see what currently is the most popular search phrases is to look on Google Hot Trends.   They display the most recent 100 popular searches, and it is updated several times an hour.   Definitely a must to check out.

Yahoo! Buzz
Similar to Google Hot Trends, Yahoo Buzz displays the top new searches of the
day and the top leaders for the week.   Also, they have a blog that offers some useful insight into the search market.
Compile a list of possible keywords/searches that are new and you think would make a good topic to create this campaign around.   Keep in mind these things, then move on to step 2:

Topics should be able to be worded into a poll question – i.e. having a “yes/no” or “agree/disagree” element to them.   If you can’t create a poll around it, then forget about it.

They need to be new – like hot off the press new. Anything more than a couple of days old won’t be worth it, as you will have missed the true opportunity by then.

They need to be something that people will actually be interested in. The Michael Vick dog fighting incident is a perfect example, where a political scandal in a foreign country probably won’t hold much interest with US surfers.

Step 2: Checking Competition
Now that you have narrowed done your list of possible topics to just a couple, it is time to check the competition around them and make sure that it will be worth your time to go through with this.   As always, there is a number of good ways to go about
doing this.

Perform A Search
The first thing that you should do is naturally to perform a regular search on the topic and analyze what kind of results come back.   Keep in mind to look at the search ads too, not just the results.   These can be a good indicator to see if someone has already beaten you to the punch.   If after doing this your topic looks relatively unsaturated, move on to the next technique.

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator
If you don’t already have a Google Adwords account, this would be a good time to set one up.   Not only will you be needing it to set up your actual campaign (although you could just stick to Yahoo Publisher and MSN Adcenter if you wanted to), Adwords also offers many very useful tools to their publishers.   Login to your account and go to Tools -> Traffic Estimator, then enter in a couple of keywords to do with your topic.   Fill in options 2 and 3 as you wish, or just leave them blank.   I usually put in $10 for the Max CPC just how I can see all possible values that the tool comes up with, and leave my daily budget blank.   Select your countries/regions appropriately and hit “continue”.

What we will be looking at is “Search Volume” – right now you don’t need that to be too high, as the point is to get in while it is not yet a popular search term.   Play around with the “Maximum CPC” setting and see what kind of “Estimated Avg. CPC”, “Estimated Ad Positions”, and “Estimated Clicks / Day” you get.   Obviously, you are looking for a lower average cpc, low ad position, and high clicks per day.   Keep in mind again that because this search term is not popular yet, your estimated clicks per day may be really low.   Like I said above, what we are most interested in is just to scope things out and make sure nothing seems out of place.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Another very useful Adwords tool is the keyword tool. Go to in and enter in some keywords for your topic, and click “Get Keyword Ideas”.   Google will add more similar keywords to the list, which is very handy.   Browse through the results – you are
looking for keywords that have a low advertiser competition and at least a little bit of average search volume.   Again, remember that the search volume probably hasn’t started increasing yet, which is what you want – to create your campaign right before the searches start to surge.   As you come across keywords that meet that criteria, add them to your list, how you can create your campaign around them later.   Look at my example to see what I mean:

If everything checks out in this step – i.e the competition doesn’t look bad – then it’s time to move on!

Step 3: Scraping Keywords
This is a quick step, because you have basically already completed it.   Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and enter a couple of terms on your topic and click “Get Keyword Ideas”.   Like I said above, you are looking for the keywords with low
competition but some search volume. You might have already compiled this list, if you took my advice in the last step.   If not, compile it now, then you can either save it in Adwords or download it as a text file for later use.   That’s it!

Step 4: Picking An Offer
Now before you actually create your site, you need to choose what affiliate offer you will be pushing and what company you will use.   My two suggestions – the ones that seem to have the best zip and email submit offers – are Copeac and AzoogleAds (aff. links).   Browse around their offers, looking for the zip submit and email submit ones.   Once you have found those you need to consider carefully which one you will be pushing.   Their payout shouldn’t really be a factor – they should all range from $1.00 to $1.50 per lead at the most.   What we are looking for here is the best offer for your target audience.   Think about what sort of demographics will be clicking your ad:

Age – If you are targeting older people, they probably are not interested in winning a free Xbox 360.   However, they might be interested in winning a free vacation to the Bahamas.

Gender – If you are targeting females, again, they are probably not interested in winning a free Xbox 360.

Location – this one may not seem as obvious but it is still worth considering.   Is what you are offering useful in their location?
Once you have chosen an offer that you think will most interest your target audience, it is time to actually create your website.

Step 5: Create Your 1-Page Website
This part is not as hard as it seems.   You only need a very rudimentary knowledge of HTML to create your webpage, and not much creativity.   Look back at the image I put of my example website.   It’s nothing special, but it serves its purpose well.

Basically there are going to be four parts to your website:

1.  Header / Attention Getter – this should just be a couple words that serves as your header and also the question for your poll.   Examples:

• Is Michael Vick Guilty?
• Should Sen. Larry Craig Resign?

2.  Poll Buttons – these are pretty self-explanatory.   You should create big, bold “Yes” and “No” or “Agree” and “Disagree” buttons, and have each of them linked to the URL of your affiliate offer, how when your visitors vote either way they get redirected to the offer page.

3.  Statement Of Prize - I usually put this right under the voting buttons. It is just a     simple statement of what the user gets for voting.   For example, “Vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ then enter your zip code to receive a free $500 Visa gift card.”

4.  Brief Content - For my content I usually place an image relating to the topic (see my example) and then a one-paragraph blurb of what it is about. Like I said, this isn’t very complicated to do, but if you wish you can visit my example site and just copy-paste my source code, then use that template to fill in your own content with.

The link is http://www.bakemedia.net/larry-craig/larry-craig-survey-3.html

Don’t forget to change the affiliate links!

Don’t limit yourself to just one page design. Certain designs may just not convert well for you, even if they convert well for other people.   Once you have optimized your ad campaign (as detailed below), work on trying out different templates and seeing which one works the best.

Also, you need someplace to host this.   You probably already have hosting, in which case you can just put this on a subdomain of your main account, since we don’t care about SEO purposes and nobody will be directly typing in the URL to your landing page.   If you want you can usually find a domain registrar that is having a deal on .info domains for $0.99.   Do whatever you like, like I said the URL is not very important. Play around with your site until it is up and working, and then we can move on to create the ad campaign.   One thing to remember: follow the KISS philosophy – Keep It Simple Stupid.

Step 6: Setting Up Your Ad Campaign
This process should also be pretty easy because you have done most all of the work for it already. Get your keyword list handy and go into Google Adwords, then create a new campaign.   If you are not familiar with setting up Adwords campaigns, refer to their help tutorials.   Otherwise, create your ad groups kinda like my sample ad that I showed you.   The title should be too-the-point and grabbing.   An example of a good title would be “Is Sen. Craig Gay?” because it is controversial or “Should Sen. Craig Resign?”, while an example of a bad title is “Sen. Craig Scandal” – that title is boring and does not grab your attention.

After you have created a good title, the descriptive text should be short, sweet, and also to-the-point.   For example, if your title was “Is Sen. Craig Gay?”, you might use “You decide.   Vote now and get a free Xbox 360!” as your descriptive text.   Your link obviously points to your landing page.

Once you have your ads created (you can create more than one ad if you want, how you can test different combinations out and see what works best), submit all of your keywords that you had saved and set a maximum bid for all of them – it shouldn’t be over $0.10, or you will hurt your chances on making a good profit.   Play around with the campaign settings as you see fit, like targeting only US traffic (since most of these affiliate offers only accept US traffic) and setting a daily budget.   You will undoubtedly be coming back in a day or two to tweak things around once your campaign goes live.

This is also the time to be doing the same thing on MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Publisher if you want to run your campaign through them too.   I don’t have much experience with Yahoo, but I find with MSN I can get many keywords for $0.05 max CPC.

Some points to remember:

• Creating multiple ad groups can be very helpful, as it will show you what title/text combinations are working the best.
• Set a daily budget – you don’t want to check your stats in the morning after going to sleep that night and see that you just spent $100 without being able to optimize/tweak your settings to get the maximum return on investment.
• Make your ad explicit – you want to make sure that people know they are going to your site to vote on this issue and then enter in their chance to win some sort of a prize.   If you are not explicit enough, you will end up just wasting money on traffic that had the wrong idea when coming to your site and leave as soon as they get there.
• Tweak and try, over and over – this sort of thing is all about testing something out for a day, seeing how it works, tweaking it, and repeating.

You’re pretty much done now!   However, there is one more step to keep in mind.

Step 7: Tweaking & Optimizing
Your work does not stop once you have created your first site and group of ads. Once your campaign goes live you should be constantly monitoring it for the first couple of days – you don’t want to be wasting money on keywords that are too broad or on a landing page that fails to convert.   Try out different ad combinations and test different site designs.   It may take a little bit of time to find what works best for your campaign, but trust me, it is worth it.   An effective landing page and targeted ad campaign is the difference between barely breaking even and making 10x of what you spend.   Remember, you can learn the most from your failures!   Don’t be disappointed or discouraged if for the first couple of days you don’t make a profit, or if you even lose some money.   That is natural and happens to most of us.   Just keep tweaking things around and experimenting, and soon you will find that perfect design that gives you an amazing CTR and earns you money.

Closing Thoughts

I hope that you have found this eBook useful!   I know if you follow my advice and have a little dedication and time you will find that this technique can be very profitable.   Plus, there will always be big news items to leech off of, so you’ll never run out of ideas.   One thing to keep in mind is that after running your campaign for a couple of weeks, the competition will probably start to get to be too fierce and start driving up your CPC to a point where it is not profitable to run your campaign anymore. Once you have to spend more than 15 cents max per click, it’s probably not worth running the campaign anymore.   Once this time comes you just deactivate your campaign and start on a new one – you’ll find that after the first two or three times you can pump out this whole process in less than an hour.

Good luck and happy money making!

Tagged with: CPA Marketing • Email Submit • Zip Submit

Filed under: Methods

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!