On August 3rd, I made a post about doing an “Ask Derek” column, just like David Lithman’s. I am pleasently suprised with the results because I received enough questions for the “first edition” in less than 24 hours. So without further ado, here they are:

Q1: Internet Marketing For Total Beginners

Desty asks “What would you suggest a total newbie do to start in and learn internet marketing?”

Internet marketing is really a very broad field. When getting started, however, you are probably going to want to learn the ropes in a low risk environment. Here is a great article about getting started marking money online. I agree with a lot of what that article has to say.

It really all depends on what you are interested in though. Blogging is extremely easy to get started with and allows you to become familiar with different traffic generation methods and advertising networks. I see that you have been blogging at least since May of this year, so that’s a good start.

If you are asking about direct response internet marketing, I would say that affiliate marketing is a good place to start. PPC arbitrage was easy but has gotten much harder. Product development requires that you invest a good amount of time and/or money. Affiliate marketing lets you jump right in and promote basically anything you can think of within minutes.

To learn more about affiliate marketing, I would suggest reading some of my articles, SuperAffiliateMindset, AffiliateStuff, CPA-Affiliates, DigitalPoint Marketing Forums, WMW Affiliate Program Forums, and ABestWeb Affiliate Forums to name a few. eMonetized also has a nice list of affiliate marketing forums where you can learn even more.

Beginners might also want to check out Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge. I followed it the past two years when it was about niche product development and got some good information out of it. I’m not sure what the exact focus is this year because I’m not really following along, but I do know that he is trying to teach people how to make their first dollars online (through a business, not through labor) without spending any money.

Q2: Building A Keyword List For Pay-Per-Click

Dave asks “Can you outline the process you use, starting from scratch, to build a huge keyword list for a niche you want to promote via PPC?”

Sure. I don’t start out with a huge keyword list though. I usually go to WordTracker (where I have a membership) and type in some general keywords related to my niche. I then go through the results and pick out the top 10%, or so, keywords by volume and export them to a spread sheet.

From within the spread sheet, I will divide the keywords up into very tight groups so that they can be imported into my PPC accounts as ad groups. At this point, there could be anywhere from 5 to 50 different ad groups in the campaign, each with 3 to 30 keywords (I always use broad, “phrase” and [exact] match).

The reason I don’t get huge keyword lists from the start is that it takes too much time and I’m not always sure if I want to spend a lot of time on a campaign. Once I do determine that it’s worth my time, I will start maxing out each of those ad groups using permutations from keyword transformer. This leaves me with 1500-2000 keywords per ad group.

Next, you are going to want to get creative with your keywords. Start to use your own mind to brainstorm base keywords and keyword modifiers. Then, mix and match them all to create combinations. There is no limit to the amount of keywords you can think of on your own, just try to get as many as you can.

I wrote an article about properly structuring your PPC campaigns that has some keyword information in it and Amit Mehta wrote a great article about getting creative to come up with keywords like a super affiliate.

Q3: Increasing PPC Traffic & Landing Page Conversion Rates

Chino asks “I have just started to get into ppc and affiliate marketing. To start, I have been using Microsoft AdCenter to drive traffic to my site. I began 2 weeks ago testing long tail search terms but it seems as though I am getting small amounts of traffic (about 20 clicks a day at around 5-10 cents) and getting around 70-80% conversion to click on my AdSense. My question is what are some ways to get more traffic through ppc and how can I better my landing page to get conversions on my affiliate programs?”

I just wrote an article about this very topic on July 26th; it is called “17 Ways to Expand Your Affiliate Campaigns & Increase Your Profits.” But as for directly answering your question, I don’t use AdCenter that much because it doesn’t provide enough volume. I think the best way for you to get more volume would be to use more PPC networks, especially AdWords.

Also, it sounds like you are doing PPC arbitrage, buying pay-per-click traffic to get paid per click. If that is the case, be careful using AdSense because many arbitragers have had their accounts banned. For more volume though, just bid on tons of keywords with AdWords and make sure you include the content network. You may also want to test out some third tier PPC engines like LookSmart, Miva, 7Search, or SearchFeed.

If I missed the point of your question, and didn’t answer it as you had hoped, feel free to send me another message with more details or with your IM contact details.

Q4: Deciding When To Delete A Test Campaign

LurksterAz asks “How long do you test an offer that hasn’t converted before shutting it down or revising using PPC advertising?”

First of all, I know you asked more questions, but I am saving the others for another edition so that this post doesn’t become too long.

Now, to answer this question, it all depends on a number of factors. One thing that determines how long you should let it run is how much tolerance you have for losing money

In general though, what I have heard from a lot of people, and what I follow myself, is about 2 times the commission or 200-300 clicks. This is still dependent on what your are promoting and how much you are paying per click. If I was promoting ringtones, for example, at $0.60 per click, there is no way I would let one offer run for 300 clicks ($180) when I was only expecting to earn a commission of $14.

One thing to keep in mind is that if during that testing period, you do not get any sales, you can probably just terminate the campaign. If however, you get one or more sales, but still lose money, there might be some things you can do to turn a profit. You could test keyword groups, test individual keywords, test different landing pages, test different ad text, test different but similar offers, test different merchants or ad networks, etc.

Let Me Answer Your Questions

I hope you all enjoyed this first question/answer post. I would like to get more questions from more readers, so please send them to me via my contact form. Let me know if you would like a link back to your website, and include your URL if you would. If not, that is fine, just use any name you want to be published and include as much, or as little information as you like.

Thanks again to everyone who submitted questions for this edition and I hope to have another posted soon!