PPC-Coach-Review.net

PPC Coach just recently released a new Month 1 method last month, and I’ve been having some really good success with it. I can’t say what it is specifically, but I’ve been averaging about $100/day with it regularly on the Google Content Network. Although it has taken me quite awhile to master the nuances of the content network, I’ve been slowly figuring out how to consistently get good traffic at a cheap price with it.

One of my secrets to my recent success is due to the tools found at Affportal. Affportal is a membership site that hosts a bunch of awesome tools. Most of these tools are completely unique and I’ve never seen anywhere else. Although the site hosts several cool PPV tools which are great in their own right, I wanted to share with you guys a couple of PPC tools on the site that I’ve been playing with.

The first PPC tool is called Deep and Wide keywords. For those not familiar with the terms, deep keywords are the keywords directly related to your term. So example deep keywords for the term “pay per click” might be “pay per click coaching”, and “pay per click tools”. Wide keywords are more losely related to your keyword, so for the same example, keywords like “affiliate marketing” and “google adwords” would be wide keywords. Usually, people use deep keywords with the pay per click campaigns, but I’m finding some really profitable keywords targeting these wide keywords. The bid prices are often less, yet the conversions are almost just as good. Plus, I’m getting more impressions because my keywords are targeting a wide variety of sites.

The second PPC tool I wanted to mention is the Keyword Mashup Generator. This tool is the ultimate keyword expander. Keyword Elite 2.0 has a similar feature where you can add prefixes and suffixes to each of your keywords, but this tool also does a lot more. For example, you can add states, cities, and other categories of words automatically to your keywords. The tool contains a ton of options, and I’ve been using this tool to quickly multiple my list of keywords. Adding the cities and states to your keywords is also a great way to do local campaigns. If you drill down far enough with your keywords, you can easily compete for highly competitive keywords (like car insurance) that you would have no chance with otherwise.

AffPortal was developed by Corey Bornmann. I think he is or was a PPC Coach member as well. Anyway, the site contains a ton of really cool tools, so I recommend that people take a look and check it out. I think they’ll make a big difference in your PPC (and PPV) campaigns.

I know I blew off WP Quick Polls in my last post, but Joe was nice enough to give out several review copies of WP Quick Polls on the PPC Coach Forums and I was able to get my hands on a copy. I had been sitting on it for a few weeks, but I finally got around to installing it this weekend. I haven’t really seen an in-depth WP Quick Polls review posted online anywhere yet, so below are my thoughts after playing around with the product. I will be comparing it to WP Easy Polls (WPEP) since that is currently my poll creation tool of choice.

For those who aren’t familiar with the product, WP Quick Polls is a Wordpress plugin for creating CPA polls. It costs $49.95, which places it between Poll Control and Poll Factory in terms of price. Installation of WP Quick Polls is relatively simple, although it is quite large (10MB) relative to other plugins I have installed. For some reason (slow connection?), it took about 10-15 minutes to upload everything to my server. It is nice to see some documentation and a quick start guide, which I skimmed through, but I am the type of person that likes to figure things out myself.

In a lot of ways, WP Quick Polls and WP Easy Polls offer similar results, using different approaches. WP Quick Polls gives you a lot more power by allowing you to micro-manage every aspect of your polls. Want to change the instruction text size and color? There’s a section for that. Want to customize the number of empty lines before your RSS feed? You can specify this too. You can customize everything including your themes within the WP Quick Polls control panel. However, for those new to polls, I think the amount of options can be overwhelming. Although WP Quick Polls does include a lot of helpful instruction text and inline help, I still found myself constantly confused at what a lot of options did. I can see this being a problem for new users.

WPEP on the other hand is much easier to setup and run out of the box. It only has one single poll creation page and the interface is much easier to get up and running right away. WP Quick Polls does include a Quick Create option which works nicely once you configure it the settings how you like it. However, this just brings it up to speed to WPEP’s default behavior.

One issue I ran into with my WP Quick Polls setup is that I could never get any of my poll images to show up. I ended up having to consult the documentation and it seems like this is a pretty common issue as it has a whole section which addresses this. I currently have WP Quick Polls installed on Hostgator, and othere happens to be an issue with Wordpress Fantastico installs. I worked through each of the suggestions like setting the permissions of my cache directory to 755 as well as disabling the cache and resize image options, to no avail. I’m no technical wiz, but I don’t quite understand why displaying an image from a url would require all this messing around. I know Hostgator is one of the most popular web hosts for PPC Coach members so I think this would be an important issue to get resolved.

Poll themes are one of most important aspects of any poll creation tool and WP Quick Polls does include several built-in themes. Based on my experience, it looks like the Plain themes would work the best. They are comparable to the Simple Theme from WPEP which I currently use and get good landing page click through rates with. I have my doubts at how well the other included themes convert as they don’t meet some of the best practices described on the PPC Coach forums. Don’t take my word for it though, as this is something you will want to test yourself. WP Quick Polls does allow you to edit themes from within the control panel. Some may like this, but I find it much easier to edit code in an external text editor.

Feature wise, both tools have the same basic features you want in a poll creation tool, namely offer rotation, and support for both the two popular tracking systems, PPC Coach Tracker and Tracking202. Both also give you the option to use double-metarefresh which is important because it allows you to cloak your referer and hide your poll page. One feature I like, that is unique to WP Quick Polls is the campaign feature, which allows you to group offers together and share them across polls. This might prove to be a nice timesaver. WP Quick Polls also includes several seeminly unnecessary features as well. For example, there are two options in the Settings page, “Show results after vote Javascript” and “Show results on interim page”. Next to each of these options is the text “not recommended” and “even more not recommended”. Why are they in there then? In my opinion, it only serves to clutter up the interface.

Overall, WP Quick Polls does a decent job, but I don’t think I can end up recommending it over WP Easy Polls. I just found the interface too clunky to navigate around and it just feels inundated with various options that I don’t feel I need. WP Quick Polls does have its nice points, but nothing that would warrant shelling out $50 for it when you can get the same functionality for free with WP Easy Polls. If you are a CPA Poll expert and like the ability to modify everything from within the control panel, you may want to give WP Quick Polls a look. However, for everyone else, I think using a free copy of WP Easy Polls is still the way to go.

I have been using Poll Control for quite some time now to create my polls. It’s pretty good for churning out polls, but it did cost me $20 to buy. I wanted to take my polls to the next level though and add in some things like offer rotation and double-meta-refresh to cloak my links. I also wanted to build a site around my polls to hopeefully avoid the dreaded Google slap.

After doing some research on the PPC Coach forums, I was able to find two alternatives that seemed like they would fit the bill – WP Quick Polls and WP Easy Polls. Both are wordpress plugins that enable you to add polls to your wordpress blog. WP Quick Polls seems like it has a lot of different options. However, it costs $49.95 and I am not sure I really want to shell out significant money for a poll creation tool.

WP Easy Polls is developed by my buddy Chris who I actually referred to PPC Coach more than a year ago. For some reason, he’s giving away this poll creation tool to PPC Coach members for free. I just tried it out, and this thing is awesome for launching polls. I’ve installed it on my poll site, and got it working with PPC Coach Tracker. It can handle offer rotations which makes things sooo much easier to test now. It is really simple to use and the built-in themes are really great. Anyway, check it out if you are making Polls. It’s really been making my life a lot easier.