I know there are a number of WordPress Themes and plugins that claim they are intended for use with PPC, but they are not going to solve dynamic keyword insertion, and that could have a massive effect on conversion rates & quality score.

Lets face it, the words on the page matter.

With SpeedPPC v3+ Jay came up with a unique WordPress plugin that allows you to use dynamic keyword insertion with your WordPress landing pages. That is real power rather than just fluff.

You can end up with thousands of uniquely targetted landing pages for your PPC campaigns in a matter of minutes.

If you wanted canonical URLs, it wouldn’t be too hard to set things up to use cookies for dynamic insertion along with 301 redirects, though you might need to think about bookmarking and return visits from an alternate machine – people email links to friends, significant other etc.

A technical headache is combining dynamic keyword insertion with something like Google Website Optimizer – it is possible to do it, and whilst I can’t provide a packaged solution yet, I would be happy to share methodology with anyone who picks up PPC Loophole through my affiliate link.
For me working out how to do it was a headsmacking moment, I just need to get a programmer to do some tinkering now.

We are now up to SpeedPPC v4 which Jay is including as part of his PPC Loophole training program.

Jay has been working with Allan Gardyne of AssociatePrograms.com for about as long as I can remember, and I have been on the Associate Programs mailing list for as long as I have been marketing online.

They have put together what I think is a remarkable offer for PPC Loophole, as some of the power is hard to realise from a sales page and a few demonstration videos. The demonstration videos however are well worth watching.

They are now offering a limited time $4.95 trial for 7 days, followed by 3 equal payments.

In the past as far as I remember you have always had to pay the full amount up front

7 days isn’t a huge amount of time to test things, but it is certainly enough to make a solid purchase decision – in addition you still have a solid 30 days guarantee from a company that has been around as long as Google (since 1998) with a reputation for phenominal support and honesty.

The biggest negative aspect of the whole product is that they are using an affiliate module in Amember, so I couldn’t work out a way to do any kind of specific conversion tracking at least short term.

Disclosure: Jay is one of my readers and I have admired his success for a number of years – he kindly provided me with a review sample and I have used affiliate links throughout this post.

I am not a copywriter, or a graphic designer

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IM Remarkable Offer Page “before”

I spent most of my time concentrating on the product – despite being just a free bonus for signing up to someone else’s promotion, I wanted it to have both value and longevity.

Whilst in the legal paperwork I placed emphasis on the “casual” nature of selection, I spent significant time on each niche rooting out great offers, uncovering a few pitfalls etc.
Even some of the Clickbank offers I highlighted had a gravity as low as “0″ nada, ziltch, but had great landing pages, credibility, sometimes even celebrity branding to help conversion rates.

IM Remarkable Bonus - Howie Schwartz - Old Version

IM Remarkable Offer Page “After”

IM Remarkable Bonus - Howie Schwartz - New Version Of Free Offer

The bonus offers system was experimental and early results suggested needed some tweaking

• More people signed up for Howie’s bonus than so far claimed mine (even though people already on Howie’s list who signed up through someone else any time in the past could get my bonus) – I expected some differences, but not to that extent.
• Some people filled out the form but didn’t provide enough of the email for the matching system – these I processed manually.
• Some people I could see on Howie’s affiliate back-end (downloading a CSV), signed up, but claimed the bonus without entering one of Howie’s emails – I deemed that enough justification to send them the download. The intent was there.
• A few people tried to spoof the bonus system – it isn’t infallible, but it isn’t stupid either.

Ultimately I decided I need to make things a little easier for those with honest intent, though it does provide a hint at what is happening, and removes part of the filtering.

Greater Emphasis On Value Proposition

Anyone who has been watching the free videos Stompernet have been publishing over the last week for their Formula 5 launch would know that if you invest more time in explaining the value and benefits of your offer to your prospects, you can charge more.

The same is true as an affiliate, though then it could be looked on as pre-selling

In a situation where you are offering a bonus as an affiliate, either for a sale, or just for a lead as in this case, you need to explain the value and benefits of both the target offer, and your additional bonus or bribe.

JV Opportunity?

There is a “latent” JV opportunity here, but until the landing page can be shown to boost opt-in rate compared to direct traffic, any JV would be a fool to send me traffic, even with the rebranding.
The traffic that is worth sending would be people who through segmentation are known to have opened an email, clicked through to Howie’s offer, and not converted into a lead.
I doubt there are many people segmenting their list to that extent.

Viral?

I doubt I will achieve enough critical mass for any hope of viral momentum, unless I “stack the cool” a little more on my free offer… yes affiliates can do that too.

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I spent the better part of a week and a few hundred dollars ($300-$400) on various WordPress sales letter and affiliate themes – I came to the conclusion that they weren’t something I would use.

• Some I would class as pretty but lacking substance (polite version of crap)
• Every single theme was designed around the concept that you run a single theme on your blog at a time
• They all suffered from what I regard as a horrible plague – theme option pages – if you need to set up lots of options after you have uploaded a theme, you have lost a sale, unless I can also import and export settings.
• The worst aspect of theme options pages is using them for the content that might appear on a page, because it is a nightmare to set up split testing, and when editing, you really want all the words on the page in front of you.

So I set about creating a solution for myself…

I started of with Thematic which I had already been playing around with for a good 8 months. Themeatic is an offshoot or branch of Sandbox of which I was also a fan, but built upon a grid system that hopefully I won’t totally destroy when I finally get around to theming on this site.

The first challenge was custom CSS for every page, and navigating my way through the maze of which functions initialized at which time within the WordPress core, such that the style sheet used is determined by the page selected in the default custom layout selector.

The end result is only 160 lines of code in functions.php, plus some in individual custom theme pages, and that may well get shorter as I optimize things, but the end result is something unique and useful.

I am a strong believer in doing things once

Once I have created a custom sales page theme for this system, though it is not limited to sales pages, it can be used without any setup overhead other than selecting it within a dropdown list and hitting save.

And of course, everything is created based upon a child theme of Thematic, thus when Thematic has one of its frequent updates, there will be very little if any pain in upgrading.

WordPress Split Testing With Google Website Optimizer

There are a number  of plugins that claim to provide support for Google Website Optimizer. Most only work with A/B split testing as the authors couldn’t figure out the best way to add tags to post content.

In addition often the GWO code was placed in the wrong place in the header, it needs to be after Doctype, but before the CSS to effectively fully replace the CSS – I realise CSS is meant to be cascading, and you can force your way through when it doesn’t quite work out, but sales pages are meant to load fast.

So our single CSS file by default no matter what style the page is gets wrapped with GWO selectors by default. The most important element on the page, the post title which most of the time is used as a headline also gets wrapped in selectors by default.

You don’t have to test them all the time, but they are there when you want them. 

I eventually selected one plugin solution, from an Italian company who do landing pages. I may end up tweaking things more, moving various thing from functions.php into the plugin, though many of the hooks I have used are specific to thematic, even the one I ended up using within the plugin to get the correct placement of the GWO code in the header.

Whilst I claim that this video would only be 5 minutes at the start, it is actually 8 minutes, but demonstrates the full process of setting up split testing with my current solution.

I am sure you are also curious about how it works, so here is the demo sales page from the video, with split testing currently enabled.

The reason I haven’t yet implemented shortcodes are 2-fold.

• I don’t need them
• Using PHP, it is quite easy to use most of the work I have done with any other split testing software, either javascript or PHP based, for those with tin-foil hats (most affiliates using Adwords extensively?)

The PHP plugin I discovered rocks – I tweeted about it a couple of weeks ago.

Implementation for other theme frameworks isn’t immediately planned, and code after some more tweaking will be made available in various ways (for the geeks whose shoulders I had to climb on to get this far), and I will probably package things in some way for those less technically inclined looking  for a “solution, along with modified versions of various themes I have rights for.

Last July SpeedPPC launched to huge critical acclaim and they even created this cool demonstration video of how it works.

There is a higher quality version of this on the SpeedPPC site

I know many of my readers spend 1000s on custom solutions for PPC management. SpeedPPC isn’t a tracking solution.

What it does is build highly optimized landing pages which can enhance your keyword level tracking.

I am sure some people already have custom solutions to do this as well, but not everyone can afford to pay a bunch of programmers to develop proprietary systems, plus you still have the problem of teaching a programmer what you are trying to achieve.

SpeedPPC is a battle tested system

One big caveat as I know this will affect a number of my readers. SpeedPPC uses .Net, thus is Windows only

I love mentioning products being launched by readers. In this case I have been reading Allan Gardyne’s newsletter for 3 years, and Jay Stockwell I know is one of those lurking readers.

I know one thing for sure – if I ever decide to drive traffic to this blog using PPC, it will be to specially designed and optimized landing pages. With the right offer it is possible to exponentially increase opt-in rates.

This isn’t blog tipping as such, because:-

1. I am being paid to do it
2. It is not the start of the month

That doesn’t however mean that the blog I am referring my readers to isn’t any good. In fact I have over the last few days spent a fair amount of time reading the content before writing this review, because I wanted to be sure that I was pointing you in the direction of quality information.

Shimon Sandler is a SEO Consultant – I am not his customer thus it is impossible for me to state whether he is a good SEO consultant or a bad one, other than reading his blog.

What impresses me is that he spells out exactly what he does, provides a detailed list of the things he looks to improve, which is certainly comprehensive, and he publishes his rates which based on my limited knowledge of the SEO Consultancy industry, seem to be very competitive indeed.

He has built up a fairly solid readership of over 600 readers subscribed to his RSS feed, though I have a feeling adding email subscriptions would have taken that to over 800.

You will see on his about page that he has worked with some fairly high profile clients in the past, so I expect he would be capable of handling most jobs, big or small.

The other thing I like about Shimon’s blog is that it seems to be pure information, rather than chatter about the next conference he might be attending or speaking at, or content intended to be linkbait without much substance.

You don’t need to buy a book on SEO, you could just start in Shimon’s archives and work your way through his content.

I think he probably needs to do a little more work on his SEO Basics category, or maybe move more content into it.
Actually to get the most from Shimon’s blog, you need to dig deep into his SEO category.

Shimon definitely knows a thing or two about link building, and also covers things like landing pages.

Whilst he isn’t advertising this as a service, I am sure he would be a good candidate to do a series of articles discussing ways to maximise the return from social media traffic.
There is currently a huge amount of information on how to game sites like Digg, and linkbaiting, but very little on how to convert that traffic in other ways, such as converting it to subscribers.

I would also like to see more articles, and longer articles, maybe using a related posts plugin to guide me (and the search engines) deeper into his content.

From what I have seen on his blog, Shimon has very broad knowledge of many aspects of online marketing, and depth where it counts.

Can I start using “generous genius” when I point to your site?

Mike:- only if you think this idea is genius ;)

Purpose of Linking

Linking in blogging is quite often conversational, so you would link using a permalink, and sometimes it is just mentioning someone’s name in passing, so you would link to their root domain name. Obviously people are looking for traffic, and quite probably defensible traffic such as… subscribers.

The Feedburner Squeeze page

It isn’t actually that bad for a squeeze page. There is content mainly below the fold depending on screen resolution and number of toolbars

Feedburner Firefox Bug

There seems to be a bug in displaying Clear Feed with Firefox 2.0 – I noticed I had it a while ago, with the feeds not displaying full content on the subscription page, and a quite horrible default subscription option. I did think I was stuck with it until I went to subscribe to DoshDosh (some great content btw)
It hit me, what is Dosh Dosh doing that I am not to have feeds display nicely in Firefox? So I played around.

It seems to be something to do with Smartfeed. By deactivating Smartfeed, and then reactivating it, my feed started displaying how it should do.
Most likely it is because I haven’t played around with my feed settings for quite some time, and removing and then adding the feature reset the variables to the new default.

So What New Linking Tactic?

First of all let me state that this is untested. In fact this is the first post I am testing this with.

If you check the links above, for Mike and DoshDosh I have linked to their feed page rather than to their site. I know that Mikes page has got this broken Feedburner page, but knowing Mike he will read this post and fix his feed quicker than it took me to write this post.

It is my belief that the Feedburner landing page might be strong enough, with enough quality content to achieve the number one goal, a new subscriber and defensible traffic.
It isn’t a page that can be extensively customised, but then most blogs don’t optimise the subscription process very well anyway.

This is a very common problem, so I hope a few people see this and take action to fix it.

What is annoying is that it is almost impossible to test these things in isolation, even if you owned both of the blogs. Those are the tracking statistics I would like from Feedburner, and a thank you page among other things.

Does this Detract from SEO

Partially without a doubt.

Everything on the web is swings and round-a-bouts, but you never break new ground unless you test things. The Feedburner page is not a closed loop, in fact most of the pagerank you pass to the page will flow back.

The aim of the exercise is to have multiple chances of gaining defensible traffic… subscribers.