Commercial Registrant – Internet Marketing & Domain Names

Archive for January, 2010

There has been some talk in the internet marketing circles lately about how advertising on Gmail through Adword’s platform can bring amazing ROIs with dirt low CPCs.

It’s true.

Through Gmail you can get unbelievably targeted traffic for very low cost per click. Now that sounds like a paradox right? Adsense coming from email sites is fairly untargeted right? Well, the truth is that if you use the technique I’m going to describe below you will get laser-beam targeted traffic at fractions of the usual adwords click cost with very high conversion rates. You could promote your product of course, but since most people do not have a product you can promote affiliate offers. It works quite as well.

Imagine this situation: You login to gmail and send an email to a friend and somewhere in that email you say “I need to find a way to make money”. And once you hit send, an adsense ad appears on the right hand side saying “Need to Find a Way to Make Money?” – This phrase might not fit in the adwords title but it’s an example and I hope you get the point.

Or, you write an email to a friend and say “I hate working out ” and then an adsense ad appears saying “Do You Hate Working Out?”

Do you see where I’m getting at? I bet that you would like to be in the advertiser’s shoes at that moment because showing an ad which reflects the exact same thoughts and concerns of a potential customer at the exact moment he is having them is the dream of any advertiser. To be able to pitch his product at the exact time a customer needs it! That is what I call targeted traffic. Can you imagine the CTR and conversion rate if you could pull off something like that?

Here is the newsflash for today. You can! And most importantly, it’s easy!

Here is what you need to do. First, you need to create a campaign to show ads only in gmail. You do that by creating a campaign for content network only (do not check search and search partners) and set it to show ads only on placements you select. You then go on to select mail.google.com . Not gmail.com! mail.google.com is the official domain(subdomain) for gmail. I could get in depth in this but some guy from the adwords team made it easy by creating a video with instructions on how to setup a gmail campaign. See the video below and then read on on how to perform the “miracle” I mention above.

So now you have to set your keywords so that your ads appear whenever someone sends or reads an email containing them. But here is where it gets confusing(no worries, it’s still easy). In order to be able to laser-target your ads and pay minimal CPCs, you first need to stop thinking about keywords. If you are promoting a home exercise program and bid on keywords like home exercise, gym, abs, hard abs, workout from home etc, your ads will be somewhat targeted but you will also be bidding on the same keywords that thousands of other people are bidding on and you will end up paying more than you want to for not-so-targeted ads. Plus, you will not be able to show ads that reflect the exact same thought that the potential customer made just a while ago when he was writing his email.

So what do we do?

You stop thinking “keywords” and start thinking “phrases”. Bid on phrase match (see last post on Matching options when I go in depth about that) and bid on phrases that you think that potential customers of your home exercise program would use. Like for example the aforementioned “I hate working out”. Bid on that term. Create an ad group with just this term or a few closely related terms and write an ad for this adgroup that looks something along the lines of “Do You Hate Working Out?” – and then write your pitch in the description. Do you see where I’m getting at? Then think of other phrases your customers might use in their emails, create a new adgroup and write a new targeted ad. You will be bidding on terms that have virtually zero competition, so that has the added advantage that the clicks will cost you close to nothing. How does that sound? Targeted traffic at the lowest possible cost? Then it’s just rinse and repeat.

The traffic will of course be low, but gmail has hundreds of millions of daily users and usual phrases are being used all the time, so you will get some traffic and considering the high conversion rate it is definitely something worth the try. There are hundreds of affiliate products out there that you can promote and it’s a matter of leverage. How many of these campaigns can you create? The more you create the more traffic you get, more traffic=more sales, more sales= more money.

p.s I’ve been aware of this technique for a while now. However, I am also aware that Ryan Deiss is currently selling a course on this subject that covers A LOT more information than I have covered in this post. You can consider this post as an introduction to gmail advertising.

Visit EmailMindTricks.com if you want to learn more about similar techniques.

The method below is for informational purposes only. Contact end users at your own risk. While in 99.9% of the cases this actions could only benefit you, there is a slight chance that contacting an end user will result in a reverse highjack attempt with the excuse that trying to sell them a domain shows bad faith on your behalf (trying to make profit on their trademark). There have been known cases where companies have an XYZ trademark and went after the owner of the domain XYZ.com to get it through legal venues.

Step 1:

Use zfbot.com to find a list of domains that start with your LLL combination. Get the list of the com/net/org domains that start with that letter combination.

Step 2:

Scan them using Domain Research Tool for Alexa Rank and check the sites of the domains that have at least some traffic (if a site has at least some traffic, it will have at least some Alexa rank). Besides the sites that get traffic, browse through the list and copy the domains that seem like they could belong to a company.

Step 3:

Find even more end users. Search for the LLL combination in all major search engines and copy the sites that you think could be interested in purchasing your domain name.

Check wikipedia and other abbreviation sites to see if your LLL combination stands for something, and then search for those keywords in all major search engines. In some cases, you can find many more end users who would be interested in your domain.

Search in all search engines for people advertising on your LLL combination or other keywords that the LLL combo might stand for. The advertisers who pay search engines to show ads to people who search for these keywords are very likely to be interested in purchasing your domain. Imporant note: If you are outside US and you want to sell an LLL.com domain, you would want to use a US proxy to access and search through google or any other SE. A good free proxy service is worldproxy202.com. Same stands if you are trying to sell an LLL.ccTLD. Try to search for keywords through a proxy of the country your ccTLD represents. This way you will get more prospects who are advertising on that terms.

Search for the LLL combo or the keywords that it might stand for using the inlink function in google. For example use this query to find websites that contain the combination XYZ in their URL:

inlink:XYZ – this will show you all sites that contain XYZ somewhere in their URL. e.g: http://www.comapnysite.com/products/XYZ

Using this method you might find a couple or end users more to add to your contact list.

Step 4:

Write an email with a sales pitch, price your domains right and personalize each email before you send it. Make sure that you send it to a decision maker, not to some support email. The support staff will most likely delete if without forwarding it to his manager. Find the decision maker by browsing around the site, very often companies have contact info on the managers in their about section. If you cannot find a contact on the site, get the email from the domain’s whois info. It is better to email there instead of support, chances are that the person administrating the domain names will be either a decision maker.

Step 5:

Rinse, repeat

I hope at least some of you found this post helpful. Your comments are always welcome.

Petros

I know there is too much confusion regarding match types and it took me a while to get it right. I have Stompernet to thank for this in detail information that I am presenting below.

Stompernet published this information in their 2nd issue of their montly Net Effect magazine to which I subscribe to. FYI, you can get a 30 day trial (= the first issue) and a DVD of the famous Stomping The Search Engines Course to your mail for just $1. It always contains top notch insider info on SEO and SEM.

Anyway, here is a table below that will hopefully help you put things in order with all the match types out there.

Edit: And don’t forget to read my latest post on how to use these match types right in your campaigns and save some cash in the process:) Click on the link to learn how to use the verious keyword match types to save some serious money and increase your ROI.

I decided to start off with a nice tip for all those who are into CPA advertising.

What I’m about to discuss below is not a very discussed tactic and there is not a lot of information out there about it. Posting this information is against my best interests and I’m doing this to prove to you that time spent on this blog, is time well spent.

Enough of that, let’s cut to the chase.

There is a small search engine, Clickriver.com, which provides the contextual ad feed for Amazon.com(the contextual ads that appear below the items list when you search for something). Clickriver belongs to Amazon.com.

People who visit Amazon.com are very engaged online shoppers and they only visit Amazon with either the intention to research a product that they wish to buy, or better yet, with the intention to buy it right away. There is no better place to target this audience than a site like Amazon.com.

There is one great thing about this service, and that is, the visitors that you will get through ClickRiver convert like crazy. They will convert at a 5-15% rate or even higher.

The negative side if this is the relatively low traffic that you will get from these ads (eventhough you might get a lot of impressions, the ad CTR will be low because the ads are placed on the bottom of the page), and the fact that you can only advertise Services using ClickRiver. Until a year ago, you would be able to advertise physical products as well, so you could easily find a great CPA or CPS offer and send traffic there. Since they changed it to just Services, you can now only forward users to CPA offers that advertise a service in one of the given categories you will see in your Clickriver account.

Automotive, Business, Tax, Electronics and Computer services, Education etc etc

I found it hard to find CPA offers that fitted these categories in the usual CPA networks (Hydra, neverblue, affiliate.com) because the majority of CPA offers are physical products, but if you join CJ.com or LinkShare.com, you will find a large variety of service related offers to choose from .

The other problem you might come across, is that they know which domain names(websites) host CPA offers and they restrict you by not allowing you to direct link to such sites (or display their domain name on the ad). However I got around this problem by using another domain(usually freshly regged) in the ad and then using Framed Redirect to forward the traffic to the CPA offer page. Their automated system is not sophisticated enough to figure out that the content shown is not hosted on the domain you enter.

And last, a small tip to increase your CTR on your ads:

Use domains that look like this www-domain.com

For example, if I am advertising Auto Repair services, obviously the best domain to increase CTR would be www.AutoRepair.com. If you register www-AutoRepair.com , it will appear as www.AutoRepair.com with those small ad letters (at least to those not observant enough). This trick will help boost your CTR at least a little bit.

I know a lot of guys wondering around here are domainers, but I thought that this info might interest at least some of the visitors

Petros

Hi guys, some of you might know me from the domain name industry, some of you might have never heard of me.

I’m starting this blog today to share some of my insights on domain names, affiliate marketing and traffic acquisition in general. I will be sharing good information, in some cases stuff others will not tell you about, information that some like to keep for themselves. It took me a long time to make the decision to start a blog, but I do feel that I have a lot to offer and I’ll give this thing a try. If I see that people are interested in what I have to say (and I’m sure most of you will) I will keep posting from time to time and I promise, I will make this worth your time.

And to those wondering what a “Commercial Registrant” is, it is a synonym to “Domain Owner” which (in my case) extends to “Domainer” or “Domain Name investor”- a person who owns, develops, monetizes and generally invests in domain names. I started off as a domainer in late 2003 and in my core, I will always be one.

Best,

Petros