My First Attempt at E-mail/Zip Submits
January 27, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzA couple days I discovered a new traffic source that I decided to try. It offers both CPC and CPM bidding, but since I am most comfortable and experienced with CPC, I decided to run them on a CPC basis only.
I’ve tried running e-mail and zip submits offers several times in the past, such as on Facebook, but any attempts were short lived and never taken seriously. I also never made any money on them.
But this new traffic source, which I’m not going to name for obvious reasons (why give myself extra competition?) seems to be a fertile ground for submit offers. I started by running my bids at $0.02, slowly incrementing my way up to $0.06.
Right now I’m focusing 100% on testing the waters and seeing what converts and what doesn’t. I’m therefore running several dozen campaigns concurrently, and will probably be adding more tomorrow. Once I have about 300 clicks or so on each offer, I will make place a ‘final’ bid on them, just enough to still profit but also get some good volume.
Below is a 16-minute screencast where I go into detail on how my campaigns are doing. I even reveal more than half of the actual campaigns I’m running with my real data from the past 48 hours (how many other blogs do that!?). It’s catered to newbie and beginner affiliate marketers, and anyone curious. I can’t cater to anyone else because I’m still a newbie affiliate marketer myself 🙂
It will take me a few days to test the waters before I start to focus on profit, but I think that I’ll be able to make $100/day with this traffic source. That isn’t much, but it does add up, at $3k/month extra revenue. I’m hoping I can scale things higher, but this source has a really weird way in which is funnels traffic so I don’t know.
Anyhow, check out the screencast below if you’re so inclined:
If you’re reading this in an RSS viewer or via E-mail that you will probably not see the above video. In that case you will need to visit my blog via your browser in order to watch it: https://www.tylercruz.com.
Here’s a screenshot of my stats for those who wish to just have a quick glance:
Running Zip and E-mail submits is sure a fresh change from the per-sale offers I was running before. I can have a dozen offers completely tank and only be out a few bucks, whereas with the higher-paying offers I’d be out hundreds if not thousands.
I’ll keep you guys posted on how this turns out. There’s still a lot more testing to be done, but I hope to focus on profit soon.
Nice find Tyler! Looks like you have the potential for a nice money maker on your hands.
This looks very promising. I love following your affiliate marketing updates! Keep them up :).
Hey great vid and good luck with the affiliate marketing. I have tested the waters a little bit but have yet seen a positive ROI. Looking forward to some more posts on affiliate marketing.
Those email and zip submits are spams. I hate those.
Judging by the traffic levels at those click prices I reckon I ‘ve got half an idea what traffic source you’re using. 🙂
With what little I’ve done on PPC I’ve always found it better to source cheaper traffic that converts than trying to optimise higher paid traffic to convert “better”.
You’re off to a good start on them. I really thought Free Macbook Air – Choose Your Color would convert better than that 😛
Actually, I would assume that choosing a specific color would give a better conversion ratio. Making the reader pick a choice upfront seems like it is more confusing than it should be, perhaps.
I think Shoemoney did a great case study on the impact of pre-selected colors in affiliate marketing photographs.
Hey Tyler. What’s your favorite place to use when promoting ZIP submit offers?
Running a pay per click campaign is a useful tactic for promoting product as an affiliate! It depends much on the keyword research and research of which products are the best converting products or services.
Tip// Investigate which products or services have high search volume and high customer value! Focus on that!
That was inlightning. I would also ad: better converting products, for the most part, convert better.
So which campaigns are doing the best? ( Uh oh, here comes Paul!!!!!)
Don’t know what you mean?! 😉
just make a aweber account and collect the emails your self
Your getting shaved with a MACH 5 by the advertiser and the network
Seriously thou copy a landing page install your aweber code and you see what I mean 🙂
And then you email those people with similar offers
I do that on the bigger offers, but not submits… I should try it for submits though, you’re right…
Interesting theory…I may try this.
Hey, those are great, but beware of scrubbing…
You can get a good offer drop from 15% ctr to 3% within a few hours, and you will have to be on top of things and stop traffic to that offer (and stay clear of that advertiser on this network as well)
Also what ever you do
DO NOT sign up for PPC coach
its all just rehased blog posts
to all you noobs ready to drop the $50 dont just spend that on PPC and test stuff yourself
btw once you go on ppc coach and submit an email spam for life from the coach
Thanks for the tip.
Honestly, I would prefer to learn all the PPC secrets myself rather than read something someone else has found. Because most of the time, once an influential blogger releases a new tip, everyone rushes to try it out and its impact is limited.
But I’ll admit, I did purchase an Adwords book when I first started out. That’s just a foundation for building your own tactics and techniques.
Hey Tyler, Ive got an off topic question. When you buy an expired domain name with traffic. Where is the best place to park it so I can earn some revenue? Thanks.
I haven’t parked many domains so I couldn’t really tell you… for simplicity’s sake though I’d just recommend using the registrar you bought it with… most have parking services these days. Alternatively I’d recommend GoDaddy.
I normally just use Sedo – simple as you like to setup and they pay quite well.
If the site is getting a reasonable amount of traffic it might be worth checking the backlinks. Sometimes it’s much better to either put a site up on an expired domain (Internet Archive can help :)) OR if you already have a domain in that niche use a 301 redirect to pass any link juice/traffic on.
I’ve used expired domains to break into a couple of very tight markets in the past.
Sedo is good if you plan on selling your domain, that way you can both monetize it and welcome offers on it at the same time. I just love the customer support of GoDaddy which is why I recommended them, plus I know their main SQL developer 😉
Thanks for the response Paul,Can you suggest a link on how to use internet archive for building minisites. I will also take your advice on using sedo, I have heard they pay well for international websites, they also seem like the best place to sell a domain right now for someone who wants to break into domain flipping, which even though the market has died down alot i would still like to try it .
The Euro tends to work better than USD for people outside the US. Don’t know of any guides as such but the general technique I use is to look up the domain using the Way Back Machine (archive) and see what content was originally on the site. This can either be used as a starting point for your new site or what I prefer to do is to then put up a wordpress blog that covers as many as the old URLs (found using archive) as I can. Register the site with Google Webmaster Tools and within a week or so you’ll see if there are any URL’s not found i.e. pages you’ve missed. Either create that content on your WordPress blog or use a redirect plugin to redirect those “not found” URLs to content you have put up. It takes very litle time to have a website setup that takes full advantage of what was previously there. Using this technique with expired domains I’ve found I’ve been setup several PR3-4 blogs in a matter of days.
Forgot to add, I’ve also found plenty of expired domains where hundreds of links turned out to be useless. It’s no sure fire way of making money, more of a lottery.
Sorry Tyler – this is all way of topic.
Tyler, hope your new zip submits system works out. I am new to affiliate marketing and ppc, but i have learned a hell of alot from your blog.
Any chance that you can explain what type of campaign you are running ?
Is it straight through clicks to the advertiser? Are you using landing pages? If so – how much time/cost to set these up – and have you factored in this cost to your profits?
Do you know if submits are more likely from Socaial networking sites as opposed to search engines?
Thanks….
Thanks for the valuable info. I’m new and can’t find any email/zip submit cpa offers. I tried to register with other networks like Neverblue, Azoogle, CPA Empire but they rejected me. 🙁 I’m looking for a network that accepts easily and with a lot of email.zip submit offers.
Till then,
Jean
Try PeerFly. That’s what I use, and they have a couple hundred zip/e-mail submits…
Thank you, I’ll definitely try that out.
Till then,
Jean
Thank you Tyler, I’ll definitely try that out as well.
I’ve never run a zip submit campaign without getting massively shaved. Any tips?
you can also try iphone unlock product though you need to create one for yourself but they are doing very good these days.
nice post Tyler.I wish I had the skill you have in blogging.
I enjoy the videos. One thing I’d like a little more of (to get an idea how to get started, since I’m a total noob here) is maybe an insight to the mechanics of setting up such a campaign. Or maybe share a tutorial or two that you used to learn how to get started? The video shows the results of your campaigns, but I wouldn’t know how to set one up.
Also, when you say new traffic source. Are you paying for traffic to hit your own domain where you pass people on to the offer? Or paying for traffic to go to the offer site, and the incoming link knows to give you credit for the action/referral? I understand not wanting to give away the source, but – I’d even like to know of *A* source example. Even ones that you find that don’t work.
Thanks for any insight…
Hey Tyler, I think the days where you could a make a fortune with email submits are long over. Not saying you cannot make a profit with it but these types of offers are the ones where scrubbing occurs the most. The worse thing is these networks can hardly do anything about it. A lot of affiliate companies like copeac, c2m and others have even started not accepting email sub companies as merchants..
But still anyways good luck and I’ll follow this campaign of yours
Those email and zip submits are spams. I hate those.
What an ironic comment. He copy & pastes someone else’s comment complaining about spam.
That’s to funny, spammers are getting lazier everyday.
Hmm, makes me think back on the time that I actually made some money on this. I used the poll strategy though.
Wrote a post about it back in 2008:
http://www.vikingblogger.com/2008/01/24/how-to-make-money-on-zip-submits
Do you make landing pages for the offers, or do you send the traffic directly to the offer Tyler?
I’m betting he is using landing pages.
Your work is appreciated , but it seems that I like the video more ;P
Wow, this is a great post, and thanks for sharing the information on this Zip and E-mail submits. It looks like your off to a great start, and really could grow this one to be huge. Best of luck with all that.
Thanks again!
Tyler- I like your approach. Too often I see someone trying to outbid the competition for major keywords and let out a guffaw when they realize their ad budget is spent within a day. (I know several people who have done this)
I’m a huge fan of finding $0.02 keywords such as yourself. Frugal PPC/SEO is the best kind unless you run a major corporation.
Good point. Most sites cannot profit by just outbidding the competition. You need high converting rates and decent CPM to do that. I made the mistake of doing this back when I tried doing PPC for my own sites. I spent thousands per month on adwords and was barely profitable.
I have never actually even heard of zip submits. If you can manage $100/day out of this traffic source, that is a great start. It’s more than you’d make working at mcdonalds anyway.
I am watching the videos right now . Thanks..
This looks very promising. I love following your affiliate marketing updates! Keep them up
Must have been under a rock, have never heard of going after Zip/Email submits from an affiliate point of view, but have certainly seen them. As Vikingblogger asked above, do you create your own landing page for these, or send them directly to the offer page?
I’m direct linking. God, it’s such a treat… I hate making landing pages. Takes me literally 20x longer to launch and test stuff…
Hey Tyler. What’s your favorite place to use when promoting ZIP submit offers?
PeerFly
Hello Program, PeerFly is a great affiliate network.
I did email submits a long time ago, I made quite a bit. Then the traffic just went down, so I stopped
I know of only 1 place that offers $0.02-0.08 clicks, but I don’t believe the traffic is of the same quality as other places. Maybe I’m wrong… I’m gonna keep my eye on this… 🙂
Running a pay per click campaign is a useful tactic for promoting product as an affiliate! It depends much on the keyword research and research of which products are the best converting products or services.
Tip// Investigate which products or services have high search volume and high customer value! Focus on that!
I’m loving this series, thanks man!
I’ve never been able to run a zip submit campaign without getting massively shaved (not sure if it was the advertiser or network – probably both). Any ideas on how to avoid this?
(sorry if this is a duplicate post, I tried submitting this comment before but I didn’t see it go through.)
Thanks.
I think you did really well for the first time. Just keep doing it and you will be making more and more
Hi great vid and good luck with the affiliate marketing. Running a pay per click campaign is a useful tactic for promoting product as an affiliate!
I think that the best thing of this is that you are trying new things and discovering new ways of earning money. From my point of view it is very important to stay always on the move. Who is standing still can start recessing without a notice.
Tyler, hope your new zip submits system works out. I am new to affiliate marketing and ppc, but i have learned a hell of alot from your blog.
Did you actually graduate high school?
I have a question that probably gets asked more times than not.
What is the best way to advertise zip and email submits?
Direct linking to the offer from the ad, or perhaps redirect from a domain, or a simple landing page?
And do you cloak your affiliate links in the ad?
Barry
I know of a few places that have clicks this slow (generally 2nd tier PPC networks), but I’m not sure about the quality of the traffic coming through. I ran a few offers with some of these PPC networks and just didn’t see many conversions. You really have to knuckle down on those types of networks, because the traffic comes in so quick that it can be difficult to pinpoint where the good traffic is rolling in from.
I did email submits a long time ago, I made quite a bit. 😉
Awebwer and getresponse are nice company to deal with. And i want to say that, I like your writing style.