PPC-Coach-Review.net

Premium WordPress Themes That Rock

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:02:20 +0000

I’ve talked to many folks who would never pay for a premium wordpress theme. And why should they? There are literally thousands upon thousands of free wordpress themes out there. But if you have built enough sites like I have, you will learn to appreciate the power of different premium WordPress themes.

For one, many of them look really nice and polished. For some types of sites, this is a must. You want to have a professional looking site, and many of the best wordpress themes were designed by expert designers. So you get the benefit of their design and typography skills to ensure the best possible looking site.

Many premium wordpress themes can’t even be considered standalone themes. Instead, I would call them wordpress theme frameworks because they are so customizable. Basically, you can essentially use these frameworks to create any sort of design you desire. For some themes, this might require a little bit of coding. For others, all customization can be done within the theme’s control panel. It really is amazing to see what you can do with these premium themes these days.

On the PPC side of things, I’m looking for wordpress themes that make it easy to create sales pages, landing pages and squeeze pages. There are quite a few premium wordpress themes that fit the bill for this.

OptimizePress – This theme by James Dyson is one of my favorite wordpress themes for PPC marketers. OptimizePress makes it extremely simple to setup great looking landing pages and squeeze pages. It comes with some great looking graphics and templates, and you can build pages that look exactly like the typical guru product launch pages. You can set a template for each page you create, and you insert various elements like headers, bullets, testimonials and more using the special OptimizePress shortcodes. Once you get used to how it works, it is really quite simple to use.

Affiliate Theme – This theme has been out for awhile now, but it’s decent theme for create affiliate pages really quickly. If you wanted to create your own Ringtone theme for example, Affiliate Theme has a decent looking template for that. Most of the customizations for this theme can be done through it’s extensive control panel of theme options.

Thesis Theme – This is one of the cooler theme frameworks out there. Unlike OptimizePress, which is more suited for a certain set of sites, Thesis is more general purpose premium wordpress theme. Sure, you can create landing pages with it if you like, but you can also use it for many different blog designs as well. It’s highly customizable, and SEO ready out of the box. You do have to get your hands dirty if you want to do more complicated designs, but once you master the Thesis hooks concept, it really isn’t too difficult.

These are three of the best wordpress themes around that I’ve tried. Let me know what your favorite wordpress themes are in the comments below.

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How I Find Profitable Niches

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:12:28 +0000

One of the keys to pay per click marketing, and SEO is learning how to find a niche. This is the foundation for any campaign you start up, so you need to make sure you do a good job with this. If you don’t, you might find yourself quitting in the middle, either because you’re not passionate enough about it, or there’s too much competition and you can’t make any money from it.

The first thing I look for in any niche is whether I have a passion for it. For PPC, this is important because you can more easily design landing pages that connect with your visitors, if the niche you’ve chosen is something you are familiar with. It will be easier to understand what your target demographic is looking for, which will lead to higher converting landing pages.

Being passionate is also important for SEO as well. Since you need to write a lot of content around your niche, if your chosen niche doesn’t appeal to you, then you won’t be as motivated to write content for it. And lack of motivation is normally a killer for most projects.

However, passion isn’t the only factor when finding a niche market. We’re here to make money right? So when choosing a niche, it needs to have buyers in that market, and it can’t be so competitive that we can’t enter the market ourselves.

To find out if a market has buyers, I like to look at Clickbank. By typing in your niche topic in the Clickbank Marketplace search, you should be able to see how many products people have created for that niche. If you see several high gravity products for your niche, you can be sure that the market has lots of buyers.

Finding competition, is a little less scientific. You can always just do a Google search and see how many competing pages there are for your chosen term. Although, this will give you a rough estimate, the number you get back doesn’t really tell the whole story. Instead, I like to use two tools. The first is Niche Finder by Brad Callen. It gives me a specific difficulty ranking for each keywords that it finds for my niche. The second tool is Market Samurai. By using the SEO competition module, I what the competition is like on the first page of Google for my term.

Finding a niche market is very important, so don’t ignore this important aspect of your business.

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Some Cool New PPC Tools on AffPortal

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:17:41 +0000

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.

Raise your impressions for a campaign

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WP Quick Polls Review – How Does It Measure Up?

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:20:26 +0000

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.

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Best Poll Creation Tools

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:01:54 +0000

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.

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This is why I dislike Polls…

Douglas — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:20:00 +0000

As I do more polls with ppc, I begin to hate it. For the following reasons, I have moved on and off of polls. However, I have made money with them, and I have actually learned a lot from them. They are definitely the best for learning.

Polls always get slapped
CPA Networks scrubs polls
CPA Networks do not like polls in general
They require a lot of campaigns before finding a “winner”
They aren’t consistant
They can trigger a domain slap, then you would have to buy a new domain

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TAKE IT SLOW!

Douglas — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:41:10 +0000

My strategy is to set a bid at a certain amount and lower it by a very small amount, but only like twice a day. I went ahead and pushed it by lowering it by $0.08 cents, and then now I am getting crap impressions. GREAT! Now I have to start over and have anyother losing campaign day. So learn from my mistake, do not lower the bid costs in a dramactic amount. Slow and easy will win the race.

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Raise your impressions for a campaign

Douglas — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:30:20 +0000

Sometimes, when I see some of my campaigns dying, in terms of impressions. A good strategy for you to bring those impressions back up, or just add on more impressions, is to add more keywords. However, that also means you would need tweak those new keywords. PPC campaigns will always require somewhat of a maintenance.

I applied this method to one of my campaigns already, and I’ll post up some results after tomorrow.

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A way to increase profit margin

Douglas — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:27:02 +0000

I know this is a small scampaign, but I just wanted to use it as an example. However, this can also work and you will see a lot more of a noticable difference with a larger campaign. So the day before yesterday, I spent ~$3.59 with average CPC of $0.13 in adwords. I tweaked the campaign by lowering my bids by $0.02 and then it dropped my average CPC to $0.10. I spent less money on adwords, but I still got the a similar amount of impressions, so I ended up profitting more. I was able to maintain the same conversion percentage, but I spent less for advertising and kept more to myself.

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Couldn’t save my campaign

Douglas — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:00:32 +0000

After my last post about my campaign dying, I couldn’t save it. Well, I think I could of, it’s just that my tracker liked to not work for some reason, so I had to ask coach for help with it. Hopefully he can find out why my tracker isn’t working properly. The good side is, I have a very small campaign running that’s making a $1 profit- LOL. It’s profit! I should try to tweak it a bit.

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