This is one of those posts that I’m hesitant to put live.  My gut instinct says it will come back to haunt me somewhere down the road, nevertheless I JUST HAVE to give this to you.  Enjoy:

You are about to learn a few simple tactics that you can utilize to demolish your competition.  I strongly suggest that you consult with a seasoned anti-trust attorney prior to putting anything you learn in this post into play.

When Competition Is Weak, Create More Competition (that you own)

CASE STUDY:  Lapel Pins & Badges Online

Any time people Google custom pins, badges, key-chains, or medallions, there’s a 99.99% chance that they’ll find one of my associate’s websites.  Each URL is setup as an exclusive entity, with a different template, address, number, price structure, and customer service rep fielding calls.  The only similarity is that all sites run from 2 separate call centers that are partitioned into different sections/businesses – hence each site has dedicated reps in order to avoid intermingling calls.

These sites are all owned by 1 operator:

www.LapelPinsRus.com
www.PinsRUs.com
www.WholeSalePins.com
www.PinMart.com
www.LapelPins.com
www.PinSource.com
www.StockPins.com

NOTE:  There’s around 20 other iterations that are ranked organically & running media.

When my associate launched these sites there were 1 or 2 soon-to-be fossil competitors lingering in the space.  After a pilot test of 1 lander he quickly realized this was a vertical that he could completely dominate.  Game on!

Over the next few years he built out site after site, launching them THE MOMENT they were completed.  His competitors DID NOTHING in response.  Perhaps they had gotten fat, lazy, and happy after years of auto-piloting their pin sites while cruising around the world or doing whatever it was they they were doing.  It’s all good until real competition enters your industry.  Just ask Ace Hardware about Home Depot or Circuit City about Best Buy

Big Things Happen While People Sleep

Indeed, the silence was deafening.  Over a period of 36 months the historic leaders in the lapel pin vertical COMPLETELY LOST their yield.  With no market yield, their entire business soon rested on repeat customers.  The historic customer base slowly dwindled away as the educated consumers “discovered” new, cost-effective alternatives to their historic supplier.

In the end my associate ended up buying out his top competitor while the rest of the competition went out of business/became irrelevant.  The Weak Are Killed and The Injured Are Eaten.

3 KEY TACTICS to monopolizing your vertical:

1.  Build Out 20-30 Unique Landers/E-Commerce Stores/Lead Gens

In order to capture the entire market, it’s important to create multiple roads back to your business.  There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all to marketing.

Some consumers like to buy off of simple landers with a telephone number, others prefer elaborate e-commerce sites.  Create dozens URLs, each with different color schemes, variations, feels, etc.   Utilize the entire spectrum of motifs, from austere to comical.  Take your time and build-out each site to perfection – don’t shortcut quality for quantity.

2.  Buy Up All Media

Take your top 4-10 sites (depending on your budget) and start buying all the media placements.  Auto-bid as high as possible, even if you are initially losing money.  It’s not anti-competitive, it’s ULTRA COMPETITIVE.  Your raising the bar in the industry that you’re about to own, right?

Make sure you setup each account from a separate IP address (ESPECIALLY on Google, Yahoo, and Bing) and use a separate name/credit card number. Do NOT use a proxy, sophisticated traffic sources will catch you.  You actually need to do it from mutually exclusive geographic locations.

If possible use a different computer to setup each account (digital fingerprinting), but if not possible, make sure you clear the cache on yours – there’s still a risk that you’ll get flagged.

VERY IMPORTANT:  Stay disciplined to NEVER open up your advertising account outside of the geographic location in which you opened it.  If you happen to slip up and open the account from a location where you are running another account, then you will likely get flagged and have your account shutdown.

3.  Create Price Differentials

Bait-the-hook to suit-the-fish.  Pricing psychology is key in markets.  Remember that there’s consumers who ALWAYS look to purchase the highest dollar items, while others are bargain shoppers.

I suggest setting up as many pricing models as possible: continuity, non-continuity, shopping carts, call-in orders only, long-term contracts, high-end, and low-end pricing.  Then test out multiple variations of each model and optimize to gain FULL MARKET YIELD!!!

In most niches it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get sued for what some deem as “anti-competitive” behavior unless you’re a behemoth like Microsoft.   Enjoy market dominance!

P.S.  There’s a lot more that I didn’t reveal, but the above is a good start.

Where barriers-to-entry are destroyed, and dreams are realized, the internet has given many of that “1 shot” we looked for in life.  Thank you Al Gore – HA!

The SEO landscape is changing by the day at the present, perhaps the only certainty to come out of recent developments is that social signals are now more important than ever. Social signals are really crucial because they should go hand in hand with your backlink campaign.

Look at it from Google’s point of view; a website is getting hundreds or thousands of new backlinks every day, yet no one seems to be talking about it on social media, looks pretty suspicious right? In order to make backlink campaigns look more natural it’s time to embrace social media and increase those social signals before it’s too late.

What kind of links can you get from social media?

You can get various backlinks from social media – obviously if someone tweets a link to your site or puts one in a Facebook status – that’s a backlink right there. One or two of these links isn’t going to shoot you to the top of the SERPS – in fact one thousand probably wouldn’t either. What these links do offer though is some evidence to Google that your site is being talked about. If Google sees hundreds of backlinks being built to your site as well as people chatting about your site on social media, things look much more natural to them.

The top social signals that you should be looking for are links in tweets, and obviously retweets. You should also be looking to have people post your link on Facebook statuses where possible – and you should also be aiming to get lots of +1s on various pages throughout your site. Facebook and Twitter are totally separate to Google – but remember the Google Plus network goes hand in hand with the search engine, so it’s fair to assume that a few +1s is going to help an awful lot with your SERPS.

It’s not just about links!

People posting links to your site on social media isn’t the only thing you should be focused on. Getting “Likes” and Google +1s on your page is also very important – these actions also offer social signals. Perhaps the best way to get bucket loads of “Likes” and +1s is to have the sharing buttons feature prominently on your website. Have them right where your users are looking – that way they will be more inclined to click them.

Building backlinks to your site is relatively easy thanks to the various pieces of automation software out there. Generating social signals on the other hand does require a bit more effort. You can always go out and buy a social media service, like X amount of “Likes” for $10 – but the fact is most of these profiles are dummy ones. Getting real social media signals is a bit of a challenge.

Next time you start a site, hold fire on building thousands of backlinks to it – think about your social media campaign first. The most important thing to do is to make your sharing buttons very prominent to encourage your users to do the hard work and share your site for you.

This post was written by Sté Kerwer, the guy behind Dukeo.com. He knows a lot about Making Money Online, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, SEO, Mindset For Success, Blogging, WordPress and many more. Make sure to visit his blog or subscribe to his rss.

Talking about implementing social buttons, Rich did it right there ↓

My good friend Zac Johnson just release a ROCK SOLID post on buildling links via guest posting.  This is in my opinion the SINGLE BEST way to build authoritative backlinks to a site.  Here’s the post, great work Zac!  Spot on bro!!!

There’s 2 important Google updates that are worth paying close heed to.   Check out these posts:

Over-Optimization Penalties Coming Down The Pipeline

Adwords Expanding Phrase and Exact Match Technology

One of the easiest ways to DOUBLE your ROI on a direct response campaign is to DOUBLE your CTR.

Simple Math:

$2.00 CPM
100,000 impressions
————————-
$200 Media Buy

If you get 200 clicks, and your conversion rate is 5%, then you earn 10 new conversions @ $20 Per Conversion.

If you get 400 clicks, and your conversions rate is 5%, then you earn 20 new conversions @ $10 Per Conversion.

Hence TEST out new creatives ALL the time, and go with the creative that has the highest CTR.  Make sure to rotate in fresh creatives to replace exhausted displays (people love new)!

The Direct Response 3 step process to high CTR Banners is as follows:

STEP 1:  The Mommy Test:  Creating Easy To Understand Stories

Every creative must tell a story that is clear and understandable in 2 seconds.

KEY:  2 seconds – if you’re audience cannot understand what the banner is in 2 seconds then the banner has failed!

i.e.  If you were selling burgers, you’d want a banner with a picture of a Big Mac and a strong call to action.

Notice the difference in the 2 banners below.  Your audience doesn’t give a shit about your ad, nor do they want to think about it.   The ad MUST TELL A CLEAR & UNDERSTANDABLE:

SUCCESS

FAIL

Always “mommy” test your ad.  Simply show the ad to your mom and your friends moms.  Give them 2 seconds to look at it, and then ask what they saw.  If they can explain what your ad is then you’ve won!  “It’s a burger coupon”  SUCCESS!!!

If not then you better get back to the drawing board

STEP 2:  Color Wheel:  Stand Out Amongst The Crowd

Dadgummit, use the daggum color wheel when choosing your colors.  Opposite color combinations work.

My 2 favorite:

Blue & Orange (colors for this blog)

Red & Yellow

STEP 3:  Clear and Relevant:  The Button That’s Worth Clicking

Selling coupons?  Then your call to action should say something like “Retrieve Coupon.”  In the McDonald’s banner above, I would have change “CLICK HERE” to “GET CARD.”

Make your call to action relevant to your add, and get specific with the wording.

EngageBDR, the #1 international display network, has historically had a SUPER-HIGH barrier to entry.  With no visibility into your placements, and a $25k min. buy-in, it was either feast or famine.  I personally know advertisers that lost their asses at EngageBDR.  I also know many advertisers/affiliates that have made millions of dollars at Engage simply arbitraging traffic.

The greatest challenge with Engage is that sheer volume of traffic that pours in when a media buy starts.  You literally have to be glued to your stats 24/7 during an initial launch.  It’s an unforgiving platform for the smaller advertiser that can’t afford to spend $300k optimizing. If your server goes down, site doesn’t convert, ads don’t garnish clicks, or the initial calculations of profitability are off…well, you’re pretty much phucked.  Why?  Once placements are lit up your offer gets barraged with traffic.

Traffic at Engage reminds me of the hurricane Forest Gump weathered on The Jenny.  Forest was 100% prepared to ride out (optimize) the storm, while his competitors were not.  The storm destroyed all of Forest’s competitors, and left him as the last man standing.  Thereafter we all know that The Jenny yielded all the shrimp and dominated the industry.

To level the playing field, Engage lowered the barrier-to-entry with their self-serve RTB platform – AKA “First Impression”.  With a min. spend of $500, and the ability to pause with the click-of-a-button, advertisers can access the best-of-the-best inventory without betting the farm.

I convinced Nick Lynch, one of the lead developers of First Impression, to provide us with a guest post.  Nick is border-line genius and is a really great person to work with.  Here’s his guest post:

“It’s been a little over a week now since we have announced the launch of our self serve platform First Impression. The excitement and demand for access has been amazing and I just wanted to let everyone know that we really appreciate all of the support and feedback we received while we were at Ad:Tech for the launch. We also appreciate the patience of over 3,000 people that have already signed up. We apologize for the delay in letting all of you on, but we want to make sure that the system can handle all of you. The amount of interest was a pleasant surprise. But while we are putting the finishing touches on First Impression, I wanted to share some more insight into what the platform will let you do.

Let’s first talk about mobile. Everyone seems to be looking for a mobile platform that gives them total control and transparency. Inside First Impression, you will find that we are completely transparent. We give you the ability target sites, carriers, devices, in-app or browser inventory, geos (continent down to lat/lon), demographics and content. Once your campaign is running, optimization and reporting is just as transparent and granular. This level of targeting and optimization comes with access to over 50 billion monthly impressions, globally. The goal of First Impression is to give you the tools to be successful and to give you access to large amounts of inventory, and I think we have delivered on that for mobile.

Performance is in our DNA and it’s what we have built our business on. The way we have organized online media buying through First Impression reflects this. Since we understand what goes into planning, building, executing and optimizing a campaign, we made sure to load our platform with lots of tools to help you easily build a successful campaign.

In planning a campaign, it’s important to know what sites to run your campaign on. We integrated several partners that allow us to give insight into where other like-advertisers are running their campaigns. We also have partners like Quantcast, who will be piping in data about the demographic makeup of a site so that you can better select sites that fit your target audience.

When optimizing a performance campaign, we wanted to make sure that you had the ability to be as granular as possible. In First Impression, we allow you to optimize the creative down to the placement. No other platform allows this level of granular control. This way, you no longer have to create a new campaign; just optimize each creative’s placements within a campaign.

Lastly, let’s discuss the inventory and how inventory is used based on the life cycle of a campaign. There are several different phases of a performance campaign. First phase tends to be where a performance advertiser is looking for data on their campaign. Advertisers are looking for the fastest and most inexpensive way to collect this data. Second phase is usually when an advertiser has their data, they look to test it at scale. The third phase is the complete scaling of a performing campaign. Each phase requires a different set of inventory in order to perform at expectations. What we have done is aggregated inventory that complements each phase.

We have made inventory partnerships with the exchanges and yield management SSP’s to deliver what we call tier 3 inventory. Tier 3 inventory will allow a performance marketer to test their campaigns on lower priced, remnant and exchange traffic, which will allow them to acquire data fast and economically. Our tier 2 inventory consists of premium inventory partnerships that supply above the fold, 1-3^rd impression inventory that will allow an advertiser to test their campaigns at scale. Engage:BDR will be providing the tier 1 inventory which is our direct from the publisher, above the fold, first impression inventory. This layer of inventory will allow an advertiser to select from our large collection of international and domestic sites. Since these are direct relationships, we have complete control over scalability.

In building First Impression, we consistently put ourselves in the performance advertisers’ seat to make sure that we were building a platform that would make achieving positive ROI easier. There are many great platforms out there but what we feel makes us different is our roots. We are not a technology company building direct response tools, we are a direct response company that has consistently built technology to help us and our clients achieve success. That is the difference that will make First Impression stand alone in the self serve space.

Plus what other platform gives you direct access to the boss? Please email me with any comments, questions, feedback, anything. I am eager and excited to hear what you have to say. Since my early days with MyAds, I learned quickly that a platform cannot progress without constant communication and feedback from its users. Let’s make sure we continue the conversation as First Impression grows.

Need a feature? Need something to change? Let me know.

Thanks again for your patience. We will be opening up the platform very soon to the public.”

Nick Lynch
VP, Platforms
engage:BDR
9000 sunset blvd.
suite 500
west hollywood ca 90069
(310) 954-0751 x 730 office
(310) 861-5396 fax
nick@engagebdr.com
engageBDR.com

172 mm Monthly Uniques per Quantcast!

Check out pics from our events this year at Ad:Tech SF, ASE East, LeadsCon East, Ad:Tech London and Ad:Tech NYC here!

#1 display network in AU

http://www.quantcast.com/p-5cQi-4FIIkxXo?country=au

#1 display network in CA

http://www.quantcast.com/p-5cQi-4FIIkxXo?country=CA

#1 display network in UK

http://www.quantcast.com/p-5cQi-4FIIkxXo?country=gb

#2 display network in Brazil

http://www.quantcast.com/p-5cQi-4FIIkxXo?country=br

Want to know how to make the BEST First Impression with your audience?

Step 1

Identifying Your Audience…

How?

Leverage media buyers that have targeted your exact audience for your competitors.  Afterall, your competitors have spent millions of dollars finding the sweet spots, so when you leverage their media buyers you essentially shortcut your way into profitability.

Stay tuned for a direct intro to the RTB platform that your top competitors likely utilize….

Remember the 1 Trick To A Tiny Belly ads that garnished national attention and caused a lot of marketers to get the shit sued out of them?  Well, as many of you know, the simple copy and eye-catching caricature on those ads garnished a super-high CTR.

Decided to split test a few ads with the same type of theme, and wouldn’t you know, A SUPER HIGH CTR!!!  WOOT!

My partner at Direct Response Agency, Ron Gamble, did a bad-ass job, eh!