Over the past few weeks I have received quite a few emails for readers who are interested in attending my media buying workshop next month in Toronto.

I thought it would be best to conduct a webinar that introduced media buying to readers who were not familiar with this form of traffic and answer any questions that they may have about the workshop.

You can watch the webinar by clicking on the video below.

You can still reserve a seat at the webinar by Clicking Here

See you in Toronto next month!

Gauher Chaudhry

Over the last decade I have spent millions of dollars on paid advertising such as PPC and PPV, but I never spent that much when it came to display advertising.

I was always reluctant to get involved in media buying although I had a lot of affiliate managers and friends telling me that it was huge and massively profitable back in 2010.

The first thing that came to my mind was why all of the hoopla about media buying in 2010 since this is the oldest form of advertising online?

I mean that first form of advertising was banner ads and back in 1995, Yahoo was charging as much as $30 per thousands impressions for 468 x 60 banners.

I challenged any one of my affiliate managers to show me one affiliate who was massively successful with media buying without running fake blogs or fake articles.

These same people who were encouraging me to get into media buying suddenly went quiet.

Nada. Ziltch. Zippo. Not a word.

So all of a sudden media buying become a hot topic because it was easily scalable and tons of affiliates were making money by basically cheating consumers with fake blogs and articles.

That was until the FTC came in and started suing affiliate networks and affiliates.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am sure there were affiliates cashing in with legitimate display campaigns at the time, but they were the minority.

I didn’t think twice about media buying until a good friend of mine told me that he was making great money buying display ads to advertise his ebook product on Clickbank.

I found this very intriguing because it was a legitimate product being promoted via banners ads without any cheap tricks or shenanigans.

This is what started my interest in media buying the last few years and since then I have had many success and failures with media buying.

The most common myth is that you need thousands of dollars to get started, but that has changed a lot and there are networks that allow you to get started for as little as $10 such as BuySellAds.com.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB)

Real-time bidding using a media buying platform like Sitescout.com allows you to buy a bucket of 1,000 impressions at a dynamic bid price.

This allows you as a media buyer to basically buy impressions in real-time at your set price allowing you to value each individual traffic source.

Sitescout.com is an easy-to-use, web-based RTB platform that allows you to create and manage banner and mobile ad campaigns in real time.

Sitescout works as a middleman between dozens of premier ad networks and let’s you tap into hundreds of millions of available daily impressions.

I was surprised to learn that Sitescout headquarters were only a 25 minute drive from my house so I went down and met some of the co-founders who explained to me how the technology works.

Since then I have run some sample campaigns and attended some of their live events.  Below is a photo of the founder and CEO of Sitescout, Paul Mokbel on my left and the director of marketing, Ratko Vidakovic on my right.

If you are looking to test out media buying without having to commit thousands of dollars, yet still have access to a huge inventory of display advertising, Sitescout.com is a good place to start.

Comments?

Gauher Chaudhry

I have been writing a report on a concept that I believe is the only way to succeed online for the long-term.

When web properties like Google and Facebook first started, they didn’t depend on paid traffic or SEO to grow their traffic and followers.

They created something compelling enough that attracted followers to their tribe. These same followers spread the message of their services and they eventually become the chief of their own tribe.

And when you are the head honcho, generating traffic and making money online because much easier. 😉

Now the biggest complaint I get from people who are trying to generate money online is that they don’t have money for paid traffic or time for search engine optimization.

With paid traffic, there is no guarantee that you will make any money and you usually have to spend quite a bit in order gather data and determine what is converting and what is not.

With search engine optimization, there is no guarantee that the hundreds of hours you spend on optimizing your web site will get you a decent ranking and any traffic.

So then what?

If you follow my philosophy of tribe marketing, then these two methods of traffic become secondary issues because your followers grow your traffic.

So how do I plan on developing a following for a particular market without paid or SEO traffic?

I just started running an experiment with a brand new site that appeals to a very general audience.

I believe the content is compelling enough that it will be spread like a virus, but only if the right tools are placed to allow followers to do this.

Now putting everything into place requires a lot of time, which is something that most of us simply don’t have.

I am a heavy user of outsourcing and I find that you can find a lot of great talent on Fiverr.com. If you have never heard of Fiverr, then you need to download my free report that explains how it works.

Download My Free Report Here

I plan on using the best talent on Fiverr to quickly and cheaply help build my tribe to a point that I can monetize from this following.  There are many elements involved to make tribe marketing successful such as retweeting, facebook sharing, email collection, etc.  If you think about it, there are many tools at our disposal that makes it easy for our followers to grow our tribe.

I use an amazing tool called Gigscraper to find the best talent on Fiverr within seconds. A tool like this will save you time and money and I think the price is way to cheap for it.

Click To Download Gigscraper

Anyhow I have just started the experiment and will share with you my results over the next few weeks. The goal is to generate a ton of traffic without paid or SEO traffic. Success or fail, I will let you know how it works out!

Please leave your thoughts below.

Gauher Chaudhry

I recently got involved with email marketing and specifically the promotion of CPA offers to see if I could make a decent amount of money while building a targeted list.  One of the places that I decided to buy ezine ad space was at Arcamax.com.  The basically offer four different categories of advertising:

1. Email newsletter sponsorships
2. Solo email list rental
3. Website display
4. Co-registration

I decided to try their “email newsletter sponsorship” for the top sponsor position in their Freesites newsletter.  The newsletter goes out to 890,000 readers, but I wanted to only test half the list so they charged me $450 USD instead of the usual $825.  I was promoting a free coupon toolbar offer and the payout was $4.00 for every qualified install.

The ad specs allowed me up to 10  limes and 60 characters per line.  Since Arcamax gave me A/B split testing, I submitted the following two ads:

Ad #1

“Print Free Coupons Right From Your Computer!”

Save big on everything from groceries to gadgets with
new coupons every day. Get promo codes for instant
online savings, plus lots of other freebies!

Click Here To Start…

Ad #2

“Print Free Coupons Right From Your Computer!”

Discover how you can save big on everything from groceries
to gadgets with new coupons every day. You get promo codes
for instant online savings, plus lots of other freebies.

Just download the Coupon toolbar directly to your computer
and start saving. No registration is required and it is
completely free.

Click Here To Download Your Coupon Toolbar

I did not send the traffic directly to the CPA offer. I sent it to the following squeeze page:

The results were:

1,524 clicks

463 optins

72 leads @ $4 = $288 revenue

So I took a front-end loss on the ad of $162.

Here is a list of where I could have improved this ad campaign.

1. Negotiate the $450 cost down to at least $375 – If you don’t ask, you will never get. It is common to negotiate rates on ezine advertisements according to some friends I had spoken to after the ad ran.  I am sure that if I has just asked I would not have paid the full $450 price for a mailing to half the list.

2. Split test the squeeze page – This is a no-brainer. For some reason I had assumed that I had set up the split-test, but soon realized that I hadn’t created a variation to test against the control squeeze page.  If I had been monitoring this test when it was running, I could have improved the conversions and probably generated over 500 opt-ins.

Generating a higher opt-in rate was absolutely crucial because the prospects did not see the download toolbar offer until after they had opted into the list.

The end goal of any paid list-building exercise should be to at least breakeven on the front-end.  If you can achieve this, then you are basically building a list for free.

The important thing to remember when building a list from various sources of traffic is to track where the traffic came from.  All 463 opt-ins were marked with the tracking code “arca”, so I will now be able to track any future revenues from future promotions back to this original promo.  With 463 targeted opt-ins, I don’t think it will take long to make up the $162 shortfall. 🙂

Please share your comments or questions on this test!

Cheers

Gauher

Did you ever wonder how some marketers seem to command an enormous amount of traffic online, yet they don’t buy any online ads or do any search engine optimization?

In fact, they don’t do any of their own traffic generation.

Looking back at my own Internet marketing career, this is probably the biggest mistake I’ve made and that is not establishing a long-term affiliate program for continued promotion of my products and services.

I have done a few product launches in the past, but once the launch was over, only a trickle of sales came from affiliates.

One marketer I admire for developing a highly successful in-house affiliate program is Marlon Sanders.  Marlon Sander is one of the first Internet marketing gurus online and is considered a legend.  He graciously allowed me to pick his brain about running a successful affiliate program so that you can learn about getting more leads, sales and profit.

His advice is something to be closely followed because he has attracted over 30,000 affiliates to his affiliate program and has the process down to an art.

We spent a good hour on a call and he spilled the beans to his success with his affiliate program and how he keeps his affiliates motivated to continually promote his products and services.

I have included a recorded version of the call and included a meaty PDF file that can help you start your own affiliate program.  If you sell a product or service online, you need to have an affiliate program  to dramatically increase your sales.

The PDF shows you how EASY it is to set up an affiliate program and if you sell digital goods, you can literally be set up in just a few hours.

No fluff and straight content.

You can access this quality content by joining my charity marketing web site IMStealth for only $10 a month.  A portion of your membership cost goes towards a charitable cause every single month.  You can cancel any time.

Join IMStealth Today

You don’t want to miss this call as Marlon talks about affiliate management, game theory, dictatorships and more!

Thanks and I would love for you to post your feedback on the call below.

Best wishes,

Gauher Chaudhry

P.S. – Close to the end of the call, Marlon slightly went off on a tangent and revealed how a mutual friend is banking close to $1,000 a day on auto-pilot.  Marlon actually names that service on the call and you can literally hear the excitement in my voice about the possibilities.