Chances are you have never heard of this Mike Hill before. He is a volume media buyer, innovator, genius and a high-traffic-conversion specialist. Those who want to generate massive traffic using display advertising call on this traffic and conversions master.
In the CPA business for over 10 years, Mike has used his expertise with cost-per-action marketing to create CPA Tsunami, a program unlike anything else on the market, to build real businesses by creating CPA offers and having super-affiliates promote them.
MIKE HILL: There's an evolution that takes place when you start affiliate marketing, even if you're brand new to the marketing industry. I shouldn't say 'affiliate' marketing. You just start marketing. It's not really a necessary evolution, but it's still an evolution that many people go through. They start out with an affiliate program. Then after so much time elapses they realize, "I made this much money. You know how much more I would have made if I actually owned the offer?"
Then they go out and create the offer. There are some who circumvent the process by creating their offer first and they own their own offer, which is fantastic. However, for most people, it's not necessary to own the offer, no. You can start fine and make a ton of money just promoting other people's stuff.
RIC THOMPSON: That's fantastic. That's a lot easier, because when you have your own offer the level of complexity ramps way up. You have fulfillment. You have your own customer service and all of that.
MIKE HILL: Yes. That's what the CPA Tsunami course was that I released last year. It was all about how to create your own offer and the whole nine yards. Those folks who were lucky enough to get their hands on it were pretty pleased.
RIC THOMPSON: Of course, that's not what we're talking about today. Today, we're going to dive into what you're doing now, which is with banners.
MIKE HILL: Exactly. What I basically wanted to cover with you is how we got our start in banner traffic and how we do things differently. In the traditional guru space you hear a lot of people talk about something called a 'product launch'. Until meeting a lot of these guys in the last year-and-a-half-before this I wasn't involved in this guru role-I had no idea who was in the space. I dropped out of that world back in 2001.
When we really started focusing the core of our business on generating mass traffic through banners, we found that you can buy banners really cheaply in comparison to other traffic sources. If you're going to buy pay-per-click, it has a high cost associated with it because you're buying targeted traffic. If you're advertising with banners, you're able to buy almost the same quality of traffic.
It depends upon your niche and other things we'll talk about in a little while. You can pick up that same click, which would cost you $2.00 a click, and you can buy a banner for 10 cents to 50 cents. It just depends upon how many of the things we're going to end up talking about that you end up implementing. Does that make sense?
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, totally. There's something that comes to my mind with this, Mike. I haven't been online fulltime as long as you have. I started about seven years ago fulltime. At that time, banner advertising, at least from what I was hearing and seeing, was like junk traffic. "You don't want to do that. It's not worth anything. You're throwing money down a black hole."
MIKE HILL: That's the same cry that anybody who fails at anything will say: "That stuff sucks, and nobody can make any money with it."
RIC THOMPSON: The reality now is what you're saying. It's been one of those things that a lot of people have ignored for so long because of that. So many people couldn't make it work so we have a hidden gold mine here, basically.
MIKE HILL: Literally.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's talk about this. Tell me about banner traffic and how you use it and where we go from here.
MIKE HILL: Sure. Basically, banners are a bit different. You see folks like Google getting into the banner game with the content network and the ability to buy banners through the content network that are targeted through specific keywords that Google is using based on content of the webpage. This is not usually an eye-opener for a lot of people in the space who are already there now.
You can buy banners on Google. You can buy the banners for a specific niche. Let's say you're selling a diet product. I use diet because it's the one area that a lot of people have been trying to get into since 70% of the nation is overweight. If you're buying banners for a diet product, you can go into Google and type in the keywords that you want. You can pick up the banner inventory on either a CPM or CPC basis.
In a lot of cases, most people are finding that you have far more scale and far more profit and ROI in the content network than you even do in 'Search', because there are so many more impressions available. You're only paying for clicks to your site. If you're really good at creating the right banner, then you're paying less for the click than those who are paying only for the clicks of people who click on their banner.
What I mean by that is the better click-through ratio you get on your ad, the less you have to pay per click for your banner. There are two sides to the banner marketing equation: those who don't get it yet and create banners that don't generate enough click-through ratio, and those who do get it and generate enough click-through ratio and stop bidding on paper-per-click and only start bidding on CPM, or cost-per-thousand impressions.
If they pay 50 cents per 1,000 impressions and they generate five clicks, their cost is 10 cents per click; whereas, if they were bidding, they would be paying 50 cents per click or 30 cents per click. Do you follow me?
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, totally.
MIKE HILL: You'll be able to scale your campaign to huge numbers because you're able to lower your effective cost-per-click and open up your pools of traffic.
RIC THOMPSON: Very cool. I have a couple questions in my mind. The first one goes back to what we talked about. These are banner ads for anything: for an affiliate offer or for your own product.
MIKE HILL: Anything. It doesn't really matter. The big thing is that it depends on who you're advertising with. Let's use Google as an example. It's one that many people are very familiar with. If you're advertising on the content network in banners on Google and you're running an affiliate program, most of the time they'll leave you alone and you can do just fine.
Recently, Google has been giving people a little bit of a hard time with affiliate offers, but mostly focused around the 'Search' area. They're not as tough on the content network and banner traffic as they are on 'Search'. A lot of people who had been putting all of their eggs in the 'Search' basket are not happy right now. They're diversifying as much as they can.
They're saying, "Oh, my gosh. If I just switched to banners I'm actually increasing profits." In fact, I've had a lot of people tell me that they've moved over to banners, usually Google folks, in the content network, and they're seeing a tremendous increase in their profitability versus before. As you know, Ric, every time a complication arises there's an opportunity that also arises.
RIC THOMPSON: Absolutely. To be transparent with everybody, I have one little site, one little product and one little niche where I've been doing some banners, but nothing like Google or the networks. I found a couple of spare sites that were high traffic in my niche. I bought banner ads directly. I'm driving a couple thousand dollars in sales to one product.
MIKE HILL: It's for your banner relationship that you did directly with the website?
RIC THOMPSON: Yes. The problem is that I'm really limited, Mike. It's a niche product. I found these two sites. The rest of the sites were either overpriced or very few in this niche, so I have a real traffic problem. One of the big things that comes to my mind-and I think it comes to mind for everybody even looking at this-is what kind of traffic are we looking at? How much scale can we really get doing banners?
MIKE HILL: That depends upon the niche. If you're talking about something ulta-targeted-and this is with all due respect-I have a hard time believing that in your space there are only two websites that can end up working for you.
RIC THOMPSON: I have a really niche product.
MIKE HILL: There are only two websites in the entire Internet for your specific niche?
RIC THOMPSON: That I found that are reasonably priced, yes. Let's put it that way. It's a very small niche. By putting those banners up, it's a couple thousand dollars a month passive. I'm not complaining. Obviously, I'm looking for scale, and I think everybody is.
MIKE HILL: Let me explain a scenario to you that I think a lot of people who are listening to this call would really jive on. You said two key things, and we're going to use yours as an example for others. You're in such a tight niche that the cost prevents it from being effective for you to advertise in other areas. To me, that says two things. Number one, you probably haven't fully explored other banner options.
One of the things that you can do, rather than buying a full-sized display advertisement on that person's website, is to buy a small 88 x 31 banner ad that would be there for you to establish what we'll call a 'site presence'. Let's say you go to-and I'm just using this as an example to give it a name-www.Toyota.com. Here the advertising is $50 per 1,000 impressions.
You could never afford that. However, you'll tell them, "Will you just put this little banner up there. Instead of the $50 per thousand impressions, I'll give you $1.00. This tiny thing will take up no space on there, but at least I can tell the powers-that-be inside my company that I'm actually on XYZ website." You'll find in a lot of cases they'll make those exceptions.
They'll say, "Okay, fine. We'll just put this little banner up for you." If you do that, you can use something called 'banner re-targeting'. If you do it properly, you can place the pixel when the person sees that banner and you can actually end up buying all of those people back who were on that website at a cheaper rate that you can now afford. Are you following me?
RIC THOMPSON: Explain banner re-targeting to me. I have a small graphic on the site.
MIKE HILL: Depending upon how you're serving it-and you would like to serve it yourself through either an agency or using some sort of ad-serving software-whenever that banner loads, it also loads this cookie. You end up 'cookie-ing' those people who are on that website. Then you can end up purchasing those folks again through a banner re-targeting company and buy them at a cheaper rate, one that you can afford.
Here's the deal. Let me explain this in a different way. Those ads you have up on the web pages right now, let's look at the two that you have. Those two web pages that you're advertising with, what's your click-through ratio on your banners with now, roughly?
RIC THOMPSON: You know, I have no idea.
MIKE HILL: Let's be super generous. Let's say it's a 1% click-through rate. If you're getting a 1% click-through rate and you display 1,000 banners today, you would have 10 clicks. With those 10 clicks there are now 990 people who didn't click on the ad. Wouldn't it be nice to get those other 990 people to see your ad for awhile on all the other sites they checked out?
RIC THOMPSON: Right.
MIKE HILL: That's where banner re-targeting comes in. It used to be a game where you would just do what you're doing which is, "Let's just buy what we can and hope that we can end up converting people." Even in a niche like yours, you can now say, "Great! I've identified these hyper-active people who are specifically in my niche because it's so niched." Great.
You would be a perfect candidate for setting up a banner re-targeting campaign. Now you'll follow those people around everywhere they go. The minute that they leave Toyota they're going to see your banner everywhere they go.
RIC THOMPSON: Whoa!
MIKE HILL: Now, you're not limited to just Toyota anymore. You have that person and not just an ad on that website.
RIC THOMPSON: How do you do this?
MIKE HILL: You do this through advanced technology called 'banner re-targeting'.
RIC THOMPSON: Banner-retargeting, all right.
MIKE HILL: You have to have relationships with networks that will allow you to buy just that individual user. In the past, it used to be that you could sign an insertion order with the website. When I say the past, I mean now and in the past. The future is changing from here forward. It used to be, and still is for a lot of people, why so many folks find it impossible to compete in banner ad space.
They place a buy with Toyota and say, "It's just not bringing in a return." It's not bringing in a return because you didn't think about future marketing. It's like getting somebody to opt in to your email list and then never again sending them an email. That would be stupid. No one would ever consider that. That's the way things are moving now with banner advertising.
Now you can actually hand-pick just the people you've 'cookied' and only advertise to just that select group of people; people who have either seen your banner if they're in a specific niche or, more so, people who have clicked on your banner; or even more so, people who land on your landing page but didn't give you their email address. Even the best-converting landing page has maybe a 50% conversion ration to opt in, if you're a god.
Even if that's the case, there is 50% of people who you should be marketing to who came to your site and would like to know more about you. They just don't completely trust you yet. My theory is that most people don't interact with your website solely out of a matter of trust. They just don't trust in you enough. Do you understand the theme I'm going toward?
RIC THOMPSON: Yes. You have no relationship. They don't know who you are. Yet, as they travel around the rest of the web and browse around, your banner keeps popping up in front of them as if you're everywhere.
MIKE HILL: Exactly. Now you're starting to build a relationship with me. Here's another example. You're thinking about purchasing a new vehicle. You don't realize until you make that mental decision to look at vehicles how many other vehicles just like that vehicle are out on the road. It's like my FJ Cruiser. I went to buy an FJ Cruiser. I didn't realize how many FJ Cruisers were out there until I decided I wanted to get one. Then they were everywhere.
What did that do to my level of affinity for the FJ Cruiser? I like it even more. "That one's really nice. That one looks really good." As you have that almost one-sided relationship with the individual user, then you can end up increasing, basically, the sales awareness of that consumer to get them to come back and purchase from you. This can be applied at a macro-level or at a micro-level. You can either do this for a very targeted niche like yours, or you can do it on a mass market niche like 'diet', if that were your industry.
RIC THOMPSON: They could see your diet ad no matter where they went, whether it was www.Toyota.com, the Discovery Channel, AOL, or wherever. You're banner could be popping up in front of them.
MIKE HILL: That's exactly right. The key thing is to have the penetration into the networks. That's something that not everyone can do. I have a network and an agency. In fact, Google is even allowing this service available now in their network to everyone. I think everyone has this available in their Google account right now. They don't give you the advanced abilities like a network will, but they'll at least help you get started.
You can use other services that we'll talk about later on and that we're going to set up for your people. This is just the beginning of the peering-down-the-rabbit-hole, if you will, for banner re-targeting. This is why many people end up in a banner space and say, "I just couldn't get it to work. Why couldn't I get it to work?" How much did you pay? Let's say you're paying 50 cents per 1,000 views.
How much can you afford to pay now, Ric, when you're buying just that one user? How much more valuable is that user worth to you? He's no longer worth 50 cents anymore. Now he's probably worth $2.00 or $3.00 per thousand impressions. Why? Because he's the exact user you want. Do you follow me?
RIC THOMPSON: Totally. No matter where he is on the Internet, he or she has already been marked as somebody who is the perfect person because they've already seen my stuff. They've already been to my site. I know they have some level of interest.
MIKE HILL: Exactly. Now take that and extrapolate it one step further. You said they've been marked, which is perfect wording. They have been marked as someone who has a higher affinity for purchasing your product, service or whatever it is that you're marketing. I hope I'm not going too fast for you. The next evolution of this is what happens when I can get pre-marked people.
What if I don't have to do the marketing? What if someone else can do the marketing for me, so that I don't have to have them necessarily come to a website? That is something that is evolving now, which is called 'cookie matching'. I can actually now buy behavioral targeted or psychographic targeted or any other cookie-matching methodology that I want so that I can increase my likelihood of ROI. Here's an example…
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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