I’m all about helping noobs out with their ppc campaigns, but there’s one thing that 90% of them have in common. They’re lazy. I don’t get it. Even if this is your first week at internet marketing, you should be able to tell which landing pages and ads look great and which look like garbage. Get ideas from the great ones. I hate reviewing someone’s campaign only to see that their website looks like it was whipped up in an hour with art contrived from mspaint. If you can’t make a good looking website yourself, pay someone to do it for you. You can find freelancers to do it for you on elance, getafreelancer or rentacoder. If you’re tight on cash there are also so many great free css templates and wordpress themes to choose from which can be found with a google search. I’d recommend using a free template then paying $15 for someone to make you a nice logo that fits well with you’re theme and niche.

Now that you have a nice looking site, make sure the content is equally stunning. Research your niche as much as you can along with using any of the slang terms associated with it. You don’t want to sound like you have no idea what you are talking about, nor do you want to sound like a robot spitting out facts. Visit some of your niche’s forums and read read read. Learn how they talk, what they want. Then give it to them.

Unfortunately, the laziness carries over into the setup of the ppc campaign. Google, Facebook, Myspace all offer great targeting. Use it. Get as granular as possible. The less you are targeting, the more it is hurting your roi. For example in google adwords: You are running a cash4gold offer. Why not spend the time using their geo-targeting to target 50 different cities? Odds are this offer will convert better in poor communities, but test it for a week and see what happens. Then after the week of testing simply cut or lower the bids on cities that don’t convert and up your daily spending on ones that do. Why spend money on people you can’t get a return from? There’s no reason not to spend the extra hour or two to make your ads laser targeted. Facebook and myspace also offer you to target by age, sexual orientation and interests. I have personally increased my roi 600% on one campaign last week from spending two hours tweaking my targeting.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being lazy, but it doesn’t keep consistent cash coming in. Know when to be lazy, don’t make it when you’re creating campaigns.

This is very easy and will take you under an hour of work total. The basic idea is to follow a bunch of people in the niche you are in, then the next day you unfollow everyone that isn’t following you back. Then rinse, repeat.

How do you do this? Easy. Use my free twitter tool FlashTweet.

So here’s the method:

Login to Flashtweet using your Twitter account (don’t worry I don’t store or look at your passwords). Now click on the Mass Follow link. This will allow you to follow other users friends 100 at a time. So find someone in your niche that has a lot of followers. For example “shoemoney” has 20,000 followers for the internet marketing niche. So you would put “shoemoney” in on the mass follow page. His friends will then be listed 100 at a time. You can than select all and follow them. Keep doing this until you are following 2000 people. 2000 is the max you can follow until you get 2000 following you, then its a free for all.

So once you are following 2000 people just wait a day. Many people will follow you back just for following them. For best results have a hot girls pic in your profile. By the next day you should have about 350-450 followers. K so the next day log back into flashtweet and choose the “Following Only” link. This will display all the people you are following that are not following you back. These people are in the way of you breaking your 2000 followers cap so they should be dumped. Check select all and mass unfollow all of them. You will have to do this page by page (100 at a time). Now go back to the mass follow link and mass add more people until you reach 2000 again. Rinse, Repeat.

Within 3 days I was able to get 1100 followers with my real account. Accounts with hot girls you will see better results.

Note: There are limitations to this tool. Twitter only allows 100 requests per hour per account. Each request grabs 100 friends/accounts. So if you have more than 10,000 friends (100 X 100) this tool will not work for you. But then again if you have even 7,000 followers you are in twitters top 1000 and you dont need this tools help.

Big shout out to my bud Mitch from MitchellTyler for doing a great job on the sweet graphics.

Here’s a little tool I’ve been working on the past week. What it does is simplify management of your twitter friends. With it you can see who you are following that is not following you back, along with who your mutual friends are. The best part is you can mass follow/unfollow up to 100 people at once. You can simply enter another twitter users account (preferably a known person in your niche) and grab his friends with a click of a button. I have personally used this tool to go from 0 to over 1000 friends in 3 days. Oh, and it’s free.

Visit FlashTweet now. Don’t hesistate to give it some digg love ;).

More than half the battle is being lucky enough to survive Facebook’s nonsensical approval process. Here’s a few tips I use both before and after evading the ban hammer.

Picking an Ad

In order to minimize your CPC you must maximize your CTR. To do this you obviously have to have great ad copy. What better place to look for good ads then on the place you are advertising. While perusing the pages of Facebook, take note of any ads that you would want to click on. I’m normally ad blind when it comes to surfing the web and I rarely click on any ads, so if I find one that interests me enough to want to click it then it is a candidate for a campaign.  Some people create multiple Facebook accounts, all with different demographics, to see a wider variety of ads. This is a great idea, but I’m far too lazy to do that type of grunt work and would rather milk the most I can from a couple campaigns. Now that you have some campaign ideas (even one is good) you have two options. Create a similar ad or be real filthy and straight up copy it.

Strategic Bidding

To ensure I get the highest CTR possible I bid high. This is only temporary until a high CTR is established so be prepared to lose money during this stage. After about a day or so I lower the bids drastically, in the above case from $0.55 to $0.10. You will now have a couple day period where you will receive the same flurry of traffic as if you were bidding high, but paying a fraction of the price. Over time when your CTR decreases make sure to gradually up your bids. Do this little by little until a steady balance is established.

You have to start your ad off with a bang or you will get stuck in the ad graveyard receiving only a handful of clicks a day while paying more than you should. The above example was a great money maker until it got banned after  about 3 days. Facebook ban avoidance methods is a post for another day.