The secret to my success

I was thinkign about publishing an ebook about how to do this and making some money on the side, but I'm a lazy guy and figure someone else woudl just steal it and sell it for $2 less within a few days anyway.

I will give a hint at my sucess without giving out too much details, but I had a micro niche site that got great targeting, problem was there was only 2 advertisers that were bidding on the keyword that I made my site around, and both bid low, I got an advertiser account and outbid them, and went into a bidding war to raise prices, the bids were $0.10 and $0.15, I raised bid prices on the keyword to $1.25 and $1.30, then I pulled my campaign, and they kept their bids high. My revenue went up drastically, about a month ago I noticed RPC on that site went down so I started campaign up for a few days and got their bids up again. I dunno if this is completely 100% ethical, its not shill bidding cause I did pay for some clicks, its more like influencing the market.

Don't ask or PM me for what the site is or what the niche is I wont tell. Theres probably only a few sites targeted to my niche, which is why it pays high. And why the two advertisers pay high for the limited inventory, if word got out there would be more inventory and that means they would bid less.

If you try to do what I did, be smart about it, don't try to influence the market on web hosting, or flowers. Use a micro niche. You need a site where theres only a few advertisers, and very, very, very few webmasters.

 

God, Im glad I wasnt one of the advertisers thinking I was competing in legitimate competition.

I would not buy your book.

 

So you're purposely targetting small businesses for you to make a few more $$? Do you realise what damage you could do to the businesses that were advertising?

 

LOL thats actually not a bad idea though when you think about it.

 

you call that success?

thats a failure in the long run!

 

I agree. It can damage these small businesses alot.

It's not a bad idea, but it causes a lot of damage.

 

sounds like a good idea to me

 

What a shitty thing to do.

 

These are not small business's, these are huge companies, its just that they keyword they are targeting are not one that a lot of sites are targeted too and a lot of advertisers bid on.

These arent Google sized companies, but they are definately big enough to the point that they really wont miss an extra few thousand a month going on marketing. I'm getting targeted traffic to the sites so I feel no guilt over this, they are getting legitimate traffic, I don't ask or force anyone to click the ads. And if the companies felt as though the clicks were costing them too much they could always pull their campaign. As I noticed when they were pulling down their bids a few months ago, when I started my campaign again they both raised their bids, they were willing to pay more for the traffic.

This is not a mom and dad shop making $300/month, these are multi-million dollar companies, which is why I don't regret this.

As it has been mentioned doing this with small businesses is a bad idea, they may stop advertising if they have to invest more and don't get high enough ROI. Larger companies are more concerned with establishing a brand then actually getting a ROI, plus they do a lot of online marketing so the clicks on my site don't account for even 1% of their total online marketing budget.

 

However you try to justify it to yourself, it is unethical. You're only hurting yourself and other publishers in the long run, the more advertisers that read threads like this, the more advertisers will avoid running PPC campaigns and turn to other methods like CPA. Its hardly a viable longterm strategy, your just going to run the two advertisers budgets down quicker. It wouldent be so bad if it was 10 or 20 cents over, but you're inflating their bids up to $1 a click?

 

Markets can be influenced jsut as easily on any format. In CPA I can run a simialr campaign and offer more cash per lead, in CPM I can offer a higher rate.

I'm not the first guy to come up with this, this idea was given to me about a year ago by a friend of mine, he makes his entire living based on YPN revenue now, and he lives an affluent lifestyle.

The companies that are paying higher because of this are still paying for quality traffic, and are probably getting a descent ROI, they are merely targeting keywords that others havent thought of which is why theres less competition, for example one of my sites is based on the misspelling of a common product. The real product name has bids in $3 range, this misspelling had bids in $0.10 range. If I get people interested in teh product on that page and influenmce the market for the company to pay $1, they are still paying less then the correct spelling, and are gettin gquality hits.

Influencing the market to work for me is not unethical in my opinion, people do it all the time. I work a lot in the domain industry, in particular teh three letter domain industry, theres are only so many combinations of 3 letters which makes domains such as AFG.COM very valuable. Someone who has a large potfolio fo these domains can put them up for sale for a lot higher then the market price, everyone sees it for sale higher and decide if he can do it, they can do it too, so they raise their prices, this causes the market price to go up. The original seller influenced the market, but what he did was not unethical. When I start a campaign, I target the people to the site that relates to the ad, and I pay to do so, I make an investment.

I don't think this is unethical, it is unorthodox, maybe its not nice, but its definately not hurting anyone. If anything as with the example of the misspelled word it helps the company because I am sending them high quality targeted traffic, by raising the prices it gives me a motive to get targeted traffic to the companies, without the high bids I would not develop sites to target the people to them, and they might loose out on potential customers.

 

More trouble than it is worth. jmho

 

just curious. when targetting your ypn page, are you targetting for the misspelled keyword or for the properly spelled keyword? i imagine, based on what you are saying, that you are targetting for the misspelled keyword. if there are only a few advertisers for your misspelled word, how are your ad blocks being filled in? for example, you mentioned 2 advertisers. most ad blocks use a minimum 3 advertisers. are they repeating? are you only getting the 2? are you getting other contextual targetted kws? more over, if you know there are only 2 advertisers and those advertisers are on your page, you know what they are paying to be on the content network for those kws and how much you are getting for them on your page. how are the ypn splits with these bids? how much is ypn taking in terms of percentage?

 

The adsense system works in a way that as soon as you removed your high bid, the other advertisers CPC would immediately drop back to normal. I smell something funny.

 

Not if the other bids were right below his.

 

But like I said in my last post, if they are bidding $1 for the misspelled word and $3 for the correctly spelled word, then they are still spending less money then the other keywords for targeting to the same site.

The campaigns are runnign from the first day of the month to last day of the month so I'm guessing they don't set monthly budget caps, and as far as adveritsing dollars go, they are definately spending only a fraction of a percent of their budget on the misspeleld keyword, which means if they pay more for it its probably not alterign their ROI by much, thus they have no reason to stop marketing. I have been doing this for 13 months with Yahoo now, and did it for over 2 years with Google Adsense. I consider that a long term, and over the course of this time my plan has never gone back to bite me.

 

I'm targeting for the misspelled keyword.

Also I mostly use banners, vertical banners, and small rectangles, but if I use a leaderboard or large ractangle the other result is usually not related and doesent attract clicks, I havent seen the same two advertisers int eh same unit, but I definately have the same ads on different units, for example an ad in a banner in my header can also appear in a vertical banner on teh left hand side of the page. There are other advertisers but they are usually generic advertisers, I don't block them because I know people wont click on them, liek I said I have highly targeted traffic, they come to the site to purchase a product and they get it on the site that one of the advertisers runs, the other ads usually advertise some unrelated product or service so I'm not worried about them.

As far as YPN percentages go I found that it actually varies, its not a flat rate it ranges from 20% - 60%, but I can't be 100% sure because there is the possibility that someone clicked an ad that wasent from one of the two advertisers.

 

First of all this is YPN not Adsense, but I do same thing in Adsense.

Lets say that bids are $0.10, and $0.15. I bid $0.25, one guy raises bid to $0.25, adn the other to $0.30. I raise my bid and they raise theirs, etc.

When I get it to a point that I feel I might be in danger of loosing one of the advertisers, I bascially compare to what they are paying for the correct spelling, I level off the bids.

One guy bids $1.30, other $1.25, I lower my bid from $1.30 to $1.20. I still keep my campaign there, but I get almost no clicks.

Also since I'm really not looking to market a product I don't make my ad very attractive to click. Although I have a bid of $1.20, even if I appear on an ad or search result, I will appear right beside the two advertisers who bid ahead of me, and the description of my ad is unattractive compared to others.

In the long run I invest back about 1% of my earnings from the sites.

 

In my opinion as long as something is legal, each person himself is the judge of it's etic. If you think it is etical, it is, otherwise it isn't.

What URL the user would be sent when they clicked your ad?

Edit: I just rememberd something, it is acutally iligal like in stuck market when a company buys it's own share to rise the price. Furtunately nobody sues a small business for these things. - but don't get me wrong, I personaly don't see anything wrong here. -

 

As I said I would not give out any URL's but if someone clicked the ad they would be sent back to my site, that way theres a chance they woudl select one of the advertisers.