Not much time to post these days in between launching new campaigns and doing tutorials and posts on the stack that money forum.

Here’s a fast version of one of the videos i did today.

Shows you how to quickly rip ppv/cpv lading pages using bo.lt

You can get the music here:

http://soundcloud.com/mustard-pimp/deftones-youve-seen-the

If you have not heard about cpv:lab you must live in a cave. It blows Prosper202 out of the water for advanced campaign setups.

Dont believe me? Just check the buzz about this new tracking solution: Finchsells CPV Lab Review and ppc.bz cpvlab a week in review.

Here are the steps I went through to setup an iframed campaign on CPVLab.

Why iFramed?

Two reasons.

First of all, it allows me set the main offer in context of the Angle I am taking for the particular campaign.

Second, I find that some offers are slow to load due to multiple redirects. The iframe helps in making sure users dont click away before the offer is loaded.

Campaign Type

Landing Page Sequence

Campaign Setup

Campaign Config

Complete the campaign details. You should be familiar with most of the settings at the top, but two are worth talking about specifically.

• Stats CPV: With CPVLab you can upload your actual CPV Network cost for most major networks. This is a manual task, so for ongoing tracking of your campaigns use the Statistics & Trends options. In the Stats CPV field enter the average cost per view when you create your campaign. Update this as your campaign receives traffic to make sure your Stats give you an accurate view of your P/L.

Setup your Landing Pages

You need to setup the links and URLs in your landing pages to the relevant cpvlab URLs. So scroll to the bottom of your campaign setup screen, where CPVLab lists all the URLs you will need to use.

In your CPV Network Campaign, include the CPVLab Campaign URL. This is URL1 in the campaign flowchart above. This URL will looks something like this:

http://yourdomain.com/base.php?c=10&keyword={KeyWord}

In your first landing page, which will be the popup ad, link your Call To Action using the Offer URL. This is URL3 listed in the flowchart, and looks something like this:

http://yourdomain.com/base2.php

Finally, in your main Landing Page which includes the iframe, you need to include two URLs.

First the iframe src URL, enter the url (URL5) listed under auto redirect. This looks something like:

http://yourdomain.com/base3.php

For the exit popup script, use the Campaign URL of the separate campaign you have setup for that offer or Direct Link to the offer URL (URL7). I use the latter so I can track performance, something like the following:

http://yourdomain.com/base.php?c=10&keyword=exit-popup-c10

Setup your Levels

Because of the Landing Page Sequence I want to use, you will need 3 levels.

Level 1: Your CPV Popups (URL2)

Level 2: Your Main landing pages with the embedded iFrame (URL4)

Level 3: The Offers to load in your iFrame (URL6)For each level, name your URLs and add the URLs of the pages you want to splittest in each level.

I am hopefull that in a future update of cpvlab the Multiple Options setting will be available as part of a Landing Page Sequence. That way the main lander can link out to different split tested Offers and track performance within this campaign.

Until this is available, I link the exit popup of the second landing page to a separate Direct Link & Landing Page campaign with Stats CPV set to 0.

It looks more complicated than it is. Honest!

So have a go and enjoy cpvlab – its a pleasure to work with and I am sure that I have not seen half of what is or will be possible.

Feel free to ask questions about the above approach by commenting on this page? Or, if you have an innovative cpvlab setup, why note share it!

CpvLab Ideas?

Before I close off this post, here are some new features I would really like to see in cpvlab. Its already a great tool, and these features would make it exceptional!!

In addition to the above wishlist, here are some other minor enhancements:

What do you think of CPVLab? Let me know by commenting what you think of the suggested features above, and what you would like to see in CPV Lab.

Although I’ve been showing off some fancy PPV Landing Page secrets recently, I actually never checked for browser compatibility…

Can you imagine the shame….the embaresment…

Working for hours coding a fancy landing page, launching it online, and finding flippin no click throughs!

Why?


Internet Explorer 6 and its ability to handle compliant code. My Worst Nightmare.

In this post I will share with you some stats I collected to make sure my advanced ppv landingpages work when they pop up.

DONT WORRY THOUGHT – Only 5% use IE 6

Anyway, getting ahead of myself.

This is far from a statistically significant test, but better than nothing.

Have you ever tried to find this information about PPV users online?

I did, and failed.

I looked high and low and found an excellent posts about PPV demographics by Mr Green. But nothing showing me what Operating System and Browser users were using, and whether they were Javascript Enabled.

So I spend $20 testing a couple of offers for a campaign on traffic vance. I used a simple landing page, and made sure I tied it into my Google Analytics account.

Here are the results of just under 986 visits to my landing page.

Operating System

TrafficVance serves its ads to users of GameVance which is a Microsoft Windows only application to play online games. So no Unix, iMacs, or other varieties. Most users are either on Windows 7, Vista or XP.

Internet Browser

Because its all Windows, most of the TrafficVance audience use Internet Explorer (97%) with 2% using Firefox, and a couple Google Chrome. Its mainly IE 8 as you can see from the table below:

Screen size & colours

95% of users have their systems set to 32-bit colour depth. For screen realestate, across the board, it is sufficiently large with 98% of users having screen resolutions exceeding 1024 x 768.

Javascript & Flash

99% of users have Javascript enabled and are on Flash version 10. So no issue for my JQuery landers

Network Speed

Lastly network speed – overall pretty decent:

So whats the Conclusion

The TrafficVance audience is reasonably uptodate with their IT hardware and software. So nothing should stop you to wow them with elaborate animations…

What do you Think?

Do these stats stack up? Or have you got conflicting data? Let me know by giving me a shout in the comment section.

Also – keep an eye out for my next PPV Landing Pages post. This one will be specially for those of you on high latency tracking servers (as in slow)….

Do you want to learn step by step how to build your own advanced landing pages?

As part of my soon to be released post on the excellent blog of ppv playbook on Jquery and PPV landing pages, I decided to re-publish my step by step process for building advanced landing pages. As I am getting going with PPV, its focussed on the 750 px by 550 px form best suited to most PPV networks.

Update 2 October 2010:
For a much more detailed explanation of PPV popup sizes, check out this excellent post from Josh Todd about PPV Landing Page Dimensions.

I’ve been messing around with coding Landingpages for a while to get to a generic template that I can reuse time and time again. One that will stand the test of time!

I also develop advanced landing pages on spec. If your skill is starting and testing new campaigns, I can take care of building or improving your LPs, splittesting, and boosting your CTR, Conversions and ROI.

Here’s the deal

Here is the step by step process I use to build and code an advanced landing page. I am sharing the actual code and steps so if you want you can follow along.

What I would like from you in return is…

…your feedback
…tips on the Ad text and creatives
…suggestion on how to get people to take action
etc etc.

Content

LESSON 1:

1. tools 
2. ingredients 
3. the concept 
4. page structure & layout 
5. design 

LESSON 2:

6. graphics
7. effects & animation
8. audio
9. browser testing
10. launch

1. Tools of the LP trade

Requirement: Free, multi platform and usable for the average web developer.

I am on a Mac, but Linux or Windows work just as well.

Web server:
Not required. My objective is to do all of this in html which can be run in your browser and does not need php, apache, etc.

Coding:
Aptana Studio 2 offers more then you need, and provides support, help and code completion for all major components of the Landing Page Code.

Graphics:
I use the simple online tool Pixlr (www.pixlr.com) to do most of my graphical editing – it offers all you need for this landing page. If you need offline editing try the Gimp

Images:
I get mine from google and bing.

Audio recording and editing:
Aviary has a great simple to use and free online audio recorder and editor. You can even do some fancy multi track stuff if you want to be really creative!

Reference materials:
Aptana includes all the reference manuals and code assistance that you need.

2. Ingredients

So what essential components does the LP need to include?

• Prequalification
• Big clearly visible headline
• Subhead
• Attention grabbing image
• Sales paragraph
• Bullets with benefits
• Testimonial
• Scarcity/urgency (countdown timer maybe?)
• Social proof (#facebook fans?)
• Authority / credibility logo’s
• Call to action button
• Disclaimer?

Design requirements

• Eyeflow from headline via benefit bullets to call to action button
• Grab attention (audio, animation, colour)
• Consistency with Offer landing page
• Fit most PPV sources so 750px by 550px with call to action at vertical 350px
• Compatible with main browsers
• Quick load time
• Two LP designs for split testing > 1) fancy pants design and a 2) ugly shocking design

This stage 3 things to do:

a) select an offer
b) research audience
c) concept design

To select the offer I went into EWA and looked at their emerging offers and selected one from the top 5.

Using Quantcast, Alexa, Google Ad Planner, and Compete I researched the demographic:

• Female
• 25-54
• African American
• Has young kids
• Income 30k+
• Some College
• English speaking

Here is the rough concept. I know – No fancy pants tools, just paper, pencil and my Sharpies 

Because ugly LPs work very well – I decided to do 2 versions.

Fancy Pants Version

Ugly Duck Version

Colour is also key. I use Kuler from Adobe to get the primary colours from the landing page image. Just take a screenshot of the offer LP, and upload to:http://kuler.adobe.com/#create/fromanimage

Finally – key features, messages, benefits from the offer landing page

• 10 Year Anniversary Sale
• Top 10 products Free & 80% off on others
• 42 free business card designs
• upload your own design and photo free
• Free rubber stamp
• 3 day rush delivery
• lowest price guarentee
• guarantee: full refund if not happy within 30 day
• urgency: Hurry, this offer ends 8/9/2010!

4. Page Structure & Layout

Ok. This is where I start to use html and css to set out the framework design for the landing page. Basically, what I have done, is divide the page up in logical squares.

Later on I will format these squares and put relevant content and images in each.
Ignore the colours and borders, these are there just so you can see the page structure.

I am not going to explain here the ins and outs of html and css. There are plenty of online resources for this. Here is a good introduction.

Here are the screenshots of the page for each concept. Click on the image to load the actual html in your browser. Right click to save, or View source to look at the html code.

Fancy pants

Ugly duck

5. Design

I am sure you will celebrate with me the fact that I am a CRAP designer. Hopefully when I add the graphics in in the next step, it will all look better. Maybe I did not need to create the Ugly Duck version, because the Fancy Pants one is ugly enough!!

ps. Watch out for dodgy copywriting as well 

The first thing I did was add to the html page, at the bottom, the color pallet from kuler (see step 3), and a screenshot of the offer landing page (now removed). I do this so that I can easily see in one screen what I am aiming for.

Consistency is important when your users moved from your landing page to the offer landing page. Thats why I use the same colours, key messages, and screenshot as examples.

You might also want to change a configuration setting in Aptana Studio to get the html code and wysiwyg version side by side. To do this go to the Aptana Settings/Preferences, and change to the following:

With this setting, as soon as you save (control-S on windows, or Cmd-s on a Mac), the wysiwyg version updates.

To make it easier for you to see the changes to the html file css, I have added in the design code separate to the layout code. Just look for the /* design */ line in the styles/css section.

Here they are again – just click on the links to open the html file in your browser. View source to see the coding.

Fancy pants

Ugly duck

Thats all for part 1.

What did you think? If you have any questions, or suggestions, give me a shout below!

I love to make myself redundant. Thats why I always look to automate before I outsource.

On my journey to Ditch my Dayjob, I am now making some good progress. Adsense, SEO, PPC and PoF revenue streams are in place.

So Whats Next…

…PPV (Pay Per View) or also known as CPV (Cost Per View).

In PPC its all about finding the keywords that convert. On PoF its about the Demographics. In PPV it seems….URL’s and Keywords are key.

So I am creating my own URL scraper.

“Not another scraper!!”

I know that many already exist, but most of them are limited.

They are limited to just scraping google, bing and yahoo for the main keyword.

I want to go beyond that and build something that finds the unique profitable URLs that no one else is targetting.

Phase 1

As a first component to this new scraper I want to be able to give a theme keyword, and get a list of related terms. I have build it in Yahoo Pipes and Dapper, and currently gets related keywords from Google, Bing, and Search.com.

Example: Make Money

Below are the first 20ish related terms for the keyword “make money”:

Here is the Yahoo Pipe for the scraper.

Phase 2: Get URLs

The next phase will be to use the related keywords and grab a bunch of URLs for these. It will do the expected (Google, Bing, Yahoo) but I also want it to do the unexpected

Phase 3: Turn it into an online tool

Following phase 2, no doubt you want access to it. So I will build a quick web front end that will spit out a nice table of URLs and a downloadable CSV file.

What would you like to see me implement in this tool?