If you are an affiliate marketer, then you probably know that it can be a very profitable venture, especially if understand how to drive quality traffic to your advertiser’s website.
You may also know that one of the best ways to generate traffic is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google or Live.com.
Another thing you may know is that, when using PPC, you need to work hard on your landing pages and write quality content to avoid the infamous Google Slap: an adjustment made to AdWords that penalizes (slaps) advertisers who have landing pages and sites with little content.
When you get slapped by Google, your keywords get a Low Quality Score rating on AdWords, thus skyrocketing the costs for your clicks.

Ads Machine to the Rescue

A solution to this dreadful problem, and one thing you may not know yet, is Ads Machine. With Ads Machine you can generate relevant and High Quality Score landing pages for your website, starting from the keywords. This allows you to create a website that Google will love and, more importantly, lower your Cost per Click.

How it Works

The process is simple:

• Load your keyword list into Ads Machine – you can do this from a text file or by entering the keywords manually
• Customize the Landing Page template – personalize the general copy of the landing page and add special tokens in the copy that will get substituted in the generation process with the actual keywords. So, for example, you may want to use the tokens in the header and in the “buy-link”, so that for each keyword in your list, you would have a different page with a custom title and buy-link.
• Choose the “Generate Landing Pages” option
• Click on the “Generate Button”

That’s it.

Ads Machine will generate a folder containing a static HTML page for each keyword in your list, and will substitute every token in your template with the appropriate keywords or keyword-parts. Ads Machine will also generate the AdWords directives that will let Google know that each keyword points to a specific page.

As a result you will have a high quality score rating, low bid prices and an improved conversion rate!

A/B Testing, the most common form of multivariate testing, is an extremely powerful strategy for increasing the effectiveness of a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising effort.

As an introduction, if you are new to the concept, A/B Testing is a method of advertising testing in which you test two different ad text elements (ad variations) for the same keyword to see which performs better. Once you find out which one is most effective in increasing the Click-Through and Conversion Rate you run the test again with a new ad text that replaces the poorly performing one, and continue like so in a continuous cycle.

There are many strategies and techniques on how to actually apply this theory, for example a very helpful article on how to efficiently use A/B Testing is outlined in one of Garry’s excellent post: Simple A/B Testing for Pay Per Click Ad Text Elements.
In the post, Garry outlines a simple check-list you should keep in mind when you are testing your ad text elements:

He also suggests a few elements in you text ads that you should manipulate at each iteration of the A/B Test:

A/B Testing with Ads Machine

You hopefully understand how important continuous ad text testing is for a successful advertising campaign, that is why we, at Affinica, designed Ads Machine with A/B Testing in mind. In fact, when you create a new campaign using Ads Machine you have the ability of specifying two ad texts, viewing them side-by-side.
You can also load previously saved ad variation and make a few tweaks if you wish, or use the built in token replacement system to experiment with complex ad variations.

In the next post I will show you how to leverage the power of Ads Machine’s token replacement system to create ad variations with a higher Click-through and Conversion Rate.

When it comes to online advertisement and especially pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement, one of the most important elements for a successful campaign is creating and managing keyword lists. The list of keywords is the cornerstone of any successful PPC marketing campaign, so choosing the correct keywords and building the right lists can make or break your online marketing efforts. Today I would like to concentrate on some strategies to develop your initial PPC keyword list and how Ads Machine can help you in the process.

Broad vs. Deep Keyword Lists

Your choice of keywords will determine the quality and quantity of visitors that will see and eventually click on your paid advertisements. Unfortunately there is a very common mistake that stops a lot of marketers dead in their tracks: choosing a deep keyword list rather than a broad one.

This concept is explained brilliantly by Amit Mehta in his post Keyword Research: Go Deep or Going Wide First?, I’ll summarize it so you can follow along.

A broad keyword list is one that has lots of related and lateral keywords, and not just variations of one root keyword, while a deep keyword list is one that specializes from a few root keywords and tends to be too specific. Below are examples of both:

As you can see, the above terms are all specializations of root word ’spyware’. The main problem with the deep approach is that it makes market demand testing a lot harder. In fact, the excessive specialization allows only finding which keywords that derives from the root keyword(s) work well, but it leaves a whole spectrum of keywords untested. This leads to risky campaigns and, on the long run, lower Return on Investment (ROI).

On the other hand, if you start out with a broad approach you can test a lot more combinations simply because you are using less specific keywords with no particular root. This is excellent because it lets you assess the market and find out which keywords and search terms people are really using. After you have found the keywords that work for your market niche, you can go deep and specialize them into more detailed key phrases.

Using Ads Machine to Create and Manage Broad Keyword Lists

Now that we understand why broad keyword lists are better than deep keyword lists, let’s see how Ads Machine simplifies your life when you go about creating your list.

As an example, we will try to recreate the previous list, but first we have to dissect it and understand its parts. If you look closely, you can see that the deep keyword list can be made by combining two shorter lists: the first is a list of verbs, the send a list of nouns. This is a key principle that you should always keep in mind when working with keyword lists. In fact, most of the time you will reuse one of the lists for multiple campaigns (for example you could create a list with all the ways of saying “Buy”).

Let’s look at how this works in Ads Machine.

1. The first thing you have to do is create a new Ads Machine Campaign by clicking on the “NEW” button.
2. Now click on the “Keywords” tab located just below the Ads Machine logo. Don’t worry about filling up the “Campaign” tab; you won’t need it if you just want to work on your keywords.
3. Type (or paste) in the “First List” text area the following list:

1. In the “Second List” text area we will insert the following words:

1. You can swap the position of the lists, save them for later reuse or load new ones. The lists are saved as simple text files, so you can edit them in your favorite word processor (I like to use Notepad).
2. Now, when you generate the campaign, Ads Machine will combine the two lists to create the same exact list that is shown above.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, Ads Machine allows you to manage complex lists easily and, more importantly, lets your reuse lists of keywords that you commonly use.

In the next post I will show you how to use Ads Machine to continuously improve your ads Click Through and Conversion Rate with the “A/B Split Testing” technique.

In March, here at Affinica, we start to design the Ads Machine “product” trying to answer questions like:

• What features would people like to have?
• What are people looking for?
• How much would they like to pay for all of this?
• What are missing features in competitors’ products?
• …

After a lot of brainstorming sessions, we are landed to the final product draft. I want tell you something about Ads Machine features and pricing model, the two areas where we worked on more deeply.

Ads Machine features

It’s not useful spend lots of words about what Ads Machine is or isn’t, let’s go to point. In only one software you can have:

• Built-in keyword lists.
• Misspellings generation using 3 different algorithms.
• Advertisements automatic generation starting from 3 different keyword lists.
• Generated advertisements ready for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.
• Landing Pages automatic generation using built-in or your own templates.

There are some other characteristics that we have “hard-coded” inside of Ads Machine:

• Simple and easy to use.
• Useful for newbie and experts.
• Multiplatform, it’s able to be ran on Windows or Macintosh, thanks to Adobe® AIR™.

And now the most interesting thing: our freemium on-demand pricing model.

On demand, starting from free (I mean, 0.00 $)

In order to be able to provide this type of pricing model, we have chosen some point around which you tuned user profiles and plans.

Free

Nothing other has to be said, the name speaks clear. This plan allows you to taste the Ads Machine abilities, excluding the most wanted features, such as the Misspellings generator and the Landing Pages automatic generator. This is intended for large audiences of people who want try the experience to get money with Internet Marketing. The motto is “Get it and use it for free!”

Black & White

For a bunch of bucks, the Black & White plan let you generate advertisements and High Quality score landing pages starting from built-in or your own keyword lists. You can repeat the process 20 times, than you will be downgrade to the free plan. I think it’s very useful for who want get experience into the Internet Marketing for 30 days. Perhaps during a challenge.

Technicolor

This plan is the evolution of the previous one and gives you the ability to get real money with the Internet Marketing. It allows 50 advertisements and landing pages generations, giving you the possibility to try and test your advertisements and re-generate them a lot more times.

High Definition

This is the Top edition of our software. For less than US $250 you will have a completely featured license with unlimited advertisements and landing pages generations. It’s very useful for people with high experience and confidence with Internet Marketing, or for people want learn and test what they are able to do.

That’s all. Ads Machine is waiting for you!

We are pleased to announce that Ads Machine is released. We are waiting for the ClickBank product approval and then we will publish the executables and it will be available for download right away for both Mac and PC users.

Just so you know, Ads Machine is a powerful tool that lets you generate complex and profitable PPC advertisement campaigns (and thousands of landing pages if you wish) in a matter of minutes. We offer it using a freemium model, so you can use it for free just by visiting the download page, or find out more about the Key Features and Benefits that make Ads Machine unique.

Stay tuned for more posts on how to use Ads Machine and also a few “behind the scenes” posts that led us, Affinica, to develop this software.

Here in Affinica we are [quite] ready to launch our brand new project, Ads Machine.

Ads Machine is a desktop software for Mac & PC that aids in the automated generation of advertisement campaigns for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter; in addition, it’s able to generate thousands of templated landing pages (using our pre-made templates or you own). It’s a must-have for people who want earn money with Internet Marketing in a simple and effective way.

In a couple of day (July 24th) we will officially launch the first version. Hope to see you!