Background

While most of my experience has been in dealing with affiliates and partner programs, it should be painfully obvious to anyone who has ever been a part of managing that kind of program that it’s a ton of work and babysitting.

While there is absolutely some awesome profits and relationship building to be had in this arena, you can’t let your business live or die off of that kind of traffic.

The dark secret about affiliate programs is that the rush of traffic can stop just as suddenly as it appears, and often only offers a momentary rush and leaves you with an unsustainable business. Anyone who tells you otherwise is completely lying to you. Are affiliate programs an important part of running a large operation? Absolutely, but so is SEO, a good social & content strategy etc.

Essentially what I’m saying is that there is more to the puzzle than simple referral traffic, and the most scientific part of that is paid traffic through Pay Per Click (PPC) on sites that have a congruent audience to what you are offering. If you can make the math work with paid advertising then you have something that will make you smile day in and day out.

Since I have many friends who live and breath by PPC traffic I figured I would try my hand at it without their help and make this an awesome learning experience, and I thought I would pick a network that people almost never talk about (although, after this experience it’s likely because it’s their best kept secret).

The Buzz & The “Good Old Days”

These days it seems like everyone and their mother is talking about how amazing Facebook Ads are. While I am sure there are plenty of people who have done well with this platform (there are case studies abound), I have personally found them very frustrating.

Their advertising approval proces is entirely subjective, for instance I’ve uploaded the exact same campaign 3 times to see what happened and one campaign was entirely approved while the other two were denied.

This process not only is like shooting at a moving target but it generally takes forever to get any feedback on the status of your ads.

We also had the hay day of Google AdWords where PPC was like the wild west. Clicks were cheap, there wasn’t a quality score rating that tried to decide the relevance of your ad and landing page to the search query (which allowed you to target the audience you actually wanted vs what Google thought you should have) and sending to dedicated landing pages was actually encouraged.

However, being successful with AdWords is also getting more difficult than ever to accomplish, and the fact that big brands are looking to Google to add a significant portion to their bottom line means many of us are getting priced out of the market.

So where is the next frontier? The little engine that could, LinkedIn.

Doing Some Math

Before I set out to spend a ton of cash on advertising, I had to know what my budget was based on the profit per lead at the top of my funnel.

The specific “widget” I decided to promote was in-person events for a client, which has a general breakdown like this:

Free event (register to show up = lead), then a $3,000 event and finishing with a $15,000 event. I know these prices are steep, but people find value in it and you just need focus to create a similar funnel.

The breakdown of attendance and conversion is generally 50%, 13% and 35%. For this example let say we get 100 people registered for the free event.

50 people actually attend the free event
8 people attend the $3,000 event
3 people attend the $15,000 event

This would mean that for every 100 people we have register for free events, we would see $69,000 in revenue.

Or put another way, each FREE lead we get to register is worth $690 in revenue. That’s pretty impressive numbers to work with, so it’s a great candidate.

It’s important to setup whatever business funnel you have with high margin up-sells to greatly increase the value of each new lead.

Creating Some Ads

While I won’t be showing you the exact ads I used because I want to be compliant with the LinkedIn terms of service and protect my market, I will walk you through the guiding principles I used to create my ads.

I’ll also be showing you the real world performance of those ads and showing you how much each lead cost me to acquire.

Ad Title

The first text that your audience is going to read, the title has to give them pause to read the rest of your ad.

I have personally found non-comital and no b.s. headlines to convert the best. In this case, it was events so many of the best converting ads were something like “Free Event in (Location Name)”.

What a title like that does is tell the reader what they can expect from a click (event), what the price is (free) and where it is (location name).

By starting with something free at the top of your funnel you are going to have a much higher conversion rate which is step 1 to getting sustainable sales – building an initial audience.

Picture

This is the most important part of your advertisement, and changing this alone has done as much as triple my click through rate.

In some cases, I’ve had ads that LinkedIn wasn’t showing (based on an algorithm for click throughs) and a new picture turns it into the best performing campaign I’m running.

Pictures that seem to work the best have bright colors so they pop off the screen, and show something that the viewer can either identify with or that they want.

For location based events in particular, bright pictures of a sunset or well known landmarks earned the highest CTR’s (click through ratios).

Body Copy

While not quite as important as the picture or the title, the body is the meat that typically pulls the final decision of a user to click or not.

Make it concise and complimentary to your title.

For example, if your title was “Free Event in New York” your body might say the specific location and date of the event.

Measuring Success

Luckily the reporting in LinkedIn is pretty straight forward and the conversion rates of our landing page was a nice round number.

We found that our event registration page, which was the same for all campaigns with a drop down selector for the specific location a person wanted to attend converted around 10% from LinkedIn.

Below you will see a snap shot of the 30 day spend, which didn’t saturate our 10k total budget but came relatively close.

I’ve blurred out the name of the campaigns as to protect the actual location and brand of the campaigns.

Those who are in the PPC world are probably freaking out at the high cost per click, but trust me, the quality of traffic from this “professional social network” far exceeds that of the networks you are used to.

So what exactly did we get for our ad spend?

With 3,094 clicks and a 10% conversion rate we had 309 people register for our events.

If you recall from our funnel conversion rates above, each registered attendee is worth $690 within the immediate funnel and worth much more over time. However, for this example let’s focus on the immediate funnel that accounts for no-shows.

With 309 registrants worth $690 each we added roughly $213,210 dollars of new revenue for the cost $8,602.29.

Not too shabby if I do say so myself. I realize not everyone is going to have a funnel as profitable as ours but the mechanics are important and can be used in almost any industry looking for extremely qualified leads.

Fun Numbers

Curious what the earnings per click were?

With a 10% landing page conversion and an average CPC of $2.78 we only spent $27.80 for every $690 in new revenue.

Or put differently we made $69 in revenue per click that cost us $2.78, an earning of $66.22 PER CLICK.

Finding this treasure trove is undoubtedly going to be short lived as more and more people catch on, but for now it looks like a new gold mine does exist for those willing to take the time to build a profitable funnel and lay down the cash to make it work.

All I Ask In Return

I hope you found these numbers helpful in setting up your own profitable LinkedIn campaign.

If you did find this post useful, I just ask that you share with someone who might appreciate it. An easy way to do that is through a tweet, like the one below:

A 10k experiment with LinkedIn Ads that made over $200k in 30 days. Tweet This

Either way, I’d love to hear your experience with ads on social networks in the comments or answer specific questions on campaigns you have in mind.

I’m loving my Klout perks lately, from free prescreens of popular movies to alcohol and flavored water they seem to have me covered. Some of it’s great, some of it sucks – but either way, here is a shout out to MetroMint for hooking me up this week!

You have built a stellar product, closed all the viral loops you can think of – yet here you are sitting with a beautiful product that just doesn’t pull the numbers to be your full time gig (unless of course you have already sold your last project for millions.)

What now?

Let’s not sugar coat it, are you even in a viable marketplace? There are so many ideas that have been built out there that boggle the mind in how the entrepreneur ever thought it would turn a profit or create a personal audience for something even bigger. Can your idea ever be at the level it needs to be for you to put 100% into it? If not it’s time to shoot the project in the head or pass it off to someone who can give it what it needs.

“I’m positive my idea can make the cut, it just needs more traction.”

For those who are so positive that their idea “works” it just needs to scale my first questions include things like “What does your conversion funnel look like?” , “What does your at scale cost analysis consist of? Have you been too conservative on your margins at scale?”. Most blindly optimistic entrepreneurs give a deer in headlights look at this point but that’s ok. Starting a new venture is more of a learning experience than anything.

Conversion Funnel: For each new user, how much money do you make? This is calculated both in immediate financial returns as well as the lifetime value of that lead/customer. Depending on your vertical this could be a long and slow release of value or could be figured out within the first 24 hours of someone hitting your site.

The Numbers Work! I just need more!

Assuming your numbers work and you have spent time split testing your traffic to make each lead as valuable as possible, there are a few ways to drive traffic that make sense for your business. Knowing your numbers here is especially useful because it gives you leverage. Knowing your numbers let’s you pay for access to audience you wouldn’t otherwise be have access to.

Many businesses with large audiences are constantly looking for new ways to monetize their traffic in the largest way possible. They will know their numbers like the back of their hands to be prepared for shark like mentality when approaching these individuals. They only care about to things:

1. What is the conversion rate of your visitors into paid members?
2. How much are they going to make from your service by promoting you.

If you can concretely answer these questions you have a prayer of getting their attention and bringing down your servers with the ridiculous amount of traffic the big players can bring your way

Hold the Presses

I terms of traditional buzz from members and blogs there is a few ways to drive traffic that pretty much breaks down into two legs.

Leg 1: give an amazing value to your users

No natter what your business, what the century, or what your skill set is one thing hold constant. Customers respond to value, and while the bar continually gets set higher and higher due to competition you are going to get people’s attention by giving them something amazing for free that solves a core problem they have.

This method has most often been used in prelaunch scenarios in things like “refer 5 friends and get a free download of my marketing software.” The value needs to be tangible and relevant but I’m sure you either have something your users want or you can build something for less than the cost of a reasonable AdWords spend.

Leg 2: piss off someone deemed important (Jason Calacanis method)

This one is the classic move, “all press is good press”. Just how millions and millions of people have heard that horrendous Jessica Black song called ‘Friday’, we were still talking about it and now she has a massive audience that is worth real cash.

Jason Calacanis uses this method almost daily, and while not really creating crappy content he will stir up the pot simply for attention and to build his audience. You see, Jason knows that every time he lies, looks incredibly stupid or just down right like an asshole – he gets press. He has been especially successful in pissing off Mike Arrington of TechCrunch which has garnered him multiple posts on one of the most trafficked blog in his space. Not to mention the hundred of comments debating the topic.

You see humans are funny, because we love a good cat fight more than we love getting shit done. It draws our attention and focus repeatedly. This ultimately turns into an audience, eyeballs and cold hard greenbacks.

With all the fanfare surrounding Hulu after it’s launch (especially in the College scene) as a free LEGAL way to watch premium TV shows (movies are available too, but have traditionally been lackluster). As Netflix got serious about their “Watch Instantly” offerings, many people found themselves signing up for the $9.99/month because it brought many students armed with their existing xbox 360 to get quality content onto their TV’s in a way that wouldn’t have the schools IT department knocking on their door and/or turning off their bandwidth.

So what is Hulu’s response to the higher resolution Netflix offerings? Hulu has notoriously been a completely free offering which was monetized through targeted advertisements, so it was only natural that Hulu would try to have more users (or at least more active) by offering higher quality resolution video across more devices (read: iDevices), and that service came under the name of Hulu +. “Great!” you may be thinking, and at a price of $10/month for recent episodes presented in High Definition it sounds fair.. until you realize that they STILL HAVE ADS.

Hulu has proven more than once that they are driven completely by the content owners (read: taken by the balls), so much in fact that the content owners are arrogant enough to think that with the age of the internet, we as consumers are stupid enough to pay for ad laden content. Hulu is even on record for pleading with ABC to NOT launch their free application on the iPad that gives users access to recent, quality content without an added fee.

Recently, according to ComScore, Netflix has edged out Hulu in traffic across their domain. While ComScore is not a greatly reliable source for accurate information, their trending data is a great gauge for how consumers are voting with their dollars. Why isn’t Hulu absolutely CRUSHING IT with a freemium model right now? Hulu could easily be syndicating their Advertisement laden content across as many devices as possible at standard definition, with an upsell of advertisement free and higher resolution content. In the Internet age, customers are voting that with ads the content should be free, and with a fee it should be high quality and delivered without advertisements.

Freemium is an amazing way to drive user base, upsell opportunities and other revenue generating procedures that continue to drive value for the consumers in exchange for their usage and/or their dollars.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Tony’s Pizza. All opinions are 100% mine.

One of the Hallmarks of being a college student, and especially being one who is driving as many dollars into their start-up as possible is that sometimes we have to make the hard choice of where that last $5 of ours is going to go.. shampoo or deodorant (btw, pick the deodorant, we will all thank you later). But what about filling your tank so that you can still focus in class during the day and put in the hustle for your business at night? Top Ramen can only go so far, and at roughly $1 per package it is a pretty tempting offer. However, it really doesn’t take that long to get sick of all the salt (5000% daily sodium anyone?) and want something with a little better substance to it to keep you going.

I rarely take any sponsored opportunities, but when Tony’s pizza offered for me to try some of their new crisp crust pizzas which retail for UNDER $2 I knew that you guys would want to know about it. Seriously, when you get to the end of the month with your pockets feeling a little thin but you are still craving some cheese smothered goodness, what is a good college student to do? Luckily Tony’s now has you covered with something that doesn’t taste like cheap cardboard as many other budget frozen pizzas do.

For a little variety, check out their 3 flavors:

• Pepperoni
• Cheese
• Supreme

My personal favorite was the supreme (because I dig all the goodies… and it is the same price). So check em out and tell me what you think, worth the few bucks? And if you really are a broke college student (hey.. we have all been there. No shame in it at all). Then make sure to follow me on Twitter where I will be sending one lucky follower a few coupons to try them out for free!

Tony’s Pizza