So what I did was take advantage of this trend by simply creating a simple LP and putting an email offer behind it. The LP I decided to go with was a basic Poll Landing Page. It was a basic controversy question I posed and also decided to post a pic of the Jonas Brothers as well as create content for the LP. In essence this poll did fairly well.

Now how did I know that the Jonas Brothers Youtube account would get suspended and how was I able to react rapidly to it? Well there are a bunch of things that are opened on my monitors that I watch every so often, I am basically watching trends on the internet.

Now, I was able to take advantage of this surge of traffic by watching trends on my PC and seeing what is happening. You can say I almost can tell the future. But Saturday morning I was on Youtube to just see anything new and saw that the Jonas Brothers did a ‘Single Ladies Dance’, interesting. Literally mid day there was a rise in conversation about this video.

The thing about this is that people that are in a frenzy about this issue are willing to take a type of action because they want to see these guys account get re activated and ofcourse die hard fans. So take advantage of their emotions and bank off it.

The thing is this type of traffic is rapid, meaning the surge of traffic only happens at one point and then periodically dies. It doesn’t die in days but in minutes or even hours, so taking advantage of this is important as long as you can spot the trend of a niche, in this case Jonas Brothers.

Since I have a poll and these users are fast reacting, you need a simple offer that will be related and will convert. I usually use email submits on these and rotate. It makes it a fast response and easily gets the user in and out.

…hmm I think I started writing this backwards, wanted to talk about finding trends

Well how did I know Jonas Brothers was going to be a good traffic source to risk my time. Well celebrities are always being followed and always getting into some sort of trouble and if they do, there is a controversy online. From seeing the Single Ladies Jonas Brother Video version on the front page of Youtube, I figured it would be watch a bunch of times. But I don’t do any ‘Make Money Online from Youtube’ schemes. So I just let it be.

Then I saw a specific keyword that is so general you would skip it but it related to the Jonas Brothers. It was on the retweet radar, which you should be following for conversation trends. Then again appeared on TwitScoop. I was like damn this might be worth attacking.

Once it started to become viral, I saw another keyword which lite the sky and I knew I needed to some how take advantage of this. The lesson here is basically watch trends that are happening in real time, they are very valuable and for a short time only.

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You see them around on sites and even on Facebook. Will Kobe Bryan Punch Shaq? type questions. It requires an action on the users’ end. YES or NO. Some are more complicated and some are easy. The goal of these polls is to get someone to click over and then take action on the current offer, either submit type offers.

In the past I talked about how you can easily make $250 a day on email submits, using polls as a method of getting a good CTR. The problem I found was making polls and the complexity of creating them. There are several factors to consider: design, CTA, emotions, content for Adwords, end results, etc. Luckily I found a good program that will handle all this.

Poll Factory is a self hosted poll generator which does all of the above I stated. This system simplifies everything you do or when it comes to creating a poll. When you create a poll, it does get cumbersome especially if you are doing it all on your own.

With polls, you need to create tons of polls to find which topic does better than the other. Below is a snapshot of what a poll landing page may look like if you have never seen one before:

Above you can see its simplicity. A user would answer the question and you would get a good CTR (base on the questions and demographics). Now what happens when the end user clicks through? Well, that is when you send them to an offer.

With Poll Factory you get to chose what offer you can redirect them too. Poll Factory is more advance than the other poll systems out there because it has several features other do not have.

Here is a snapshot of the dashboard:

What I like about it is that it has live votes. So votes actually count and the end user gets to view the stats prior to being redirected. This incorporates user interaction, users voted and they want to know if their vote will count or not. Having this little feature definitely jumps starts conversions.

Content via RSS

There are also several features on here such as content generation base off RSS. This is great to get a good quality score with Adwords. You can search by keywords which is very helpful. For example if your poll includes a celebrities name, your keyword should be that celebrity’s name. With that said, you can chose the amount of stories to be listed. The stories will be posted below the question and images, giving your users the opportunity to check out stories prior to voting.

Create Important Footer Links

Another aspect I like is the ability to adjust the footer links. With Google footer link are important, you know those contact, policy links at the bottom of a website. With Poll Factory you can adjust this via the dashboard and enter the general content about your about page, contact page, and privacy page. I think this is great o have your own and unique one. This definitely helps giving you quick brandability and credibility.

Universal Code

The last best thing about this is the universal PHP code that is provided once you finish creating  a poll. You just copy a couple lines of code and put it in a php file and the whole thing is generated. This works on any domain and the best part there is no need to install any script on the domain.

This is great because you can have domains related to celebrities while another one related to dogs. You do not want to always install the script on each domain, just create the poll and copy the code and paste – done! This is why this system is called Poll Factory, create polls and make money!

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So first I figured people vote and get taken to an offer, I figured it would be simple 1 field submit offers. I doubt after voting and making their vote to count they wouldn’t want to fill out an insurance quote. It is a quick system to get quick conversion but how big is the ROI and how effective is it? Well I decided to do a case study on it and see how effective it really is.

First thing I did was blasted selected networks to provide me with a list of their 1 field submits in the United Stated and on 1st page convert. Market Leverage and NeverBlueAds responded and I started to rotate offers between these networks. The reason why I didn’t chose one network is because of payout and type of offers. I wanted to be very general and not assume anything with this case study.

Below is the screen shot of what my traffic looked like and the earnings that I received. This is about 4 days of stats.

So I received 477 CTR from the poll to the offer. From the screen shot above, I am using Prosper202. I also kinda messed up with the settings, as you can see forgot to add in the CPC. Ehh, I learned my mistake and created a new poll with using the right settings and stuff.

But you will see all the offers I got from the networks (2 offers are blackedn out because they were not part of the poll case study). So I decided to just take a bunch of 1 field submit offers and rotate them among the poll and see what converts and what doesn’t. Even though not a lot converted I can take the data given and concentrate on the offers that did convert. Soon I will be filtering through the offers that I have chosen and just rotate the offers among each other, the ones that converted.

So these stats tell me a couple things:

1. Majority of the offers that converted were email submits
2. Conversion average is about the 5% mark
3. Free Money or Gift Cards didn’t converted (IMO – I thought it would do much better, more generic)
4. Baby stuff converted better and rewards – guess everyone gets pregnant around this time of year.

That is just a quick glance of the stats. What do you see? But with so many clicks on the LP and click through to the offer, I thought it would convert better. My poll was very generic too and it is getting a good amount of traffic. It is a simple “Who Will Be the Next President?” It has both their pictures and their names, when they ‘vote’ an overlay popups saying in order for their vote to count they must complete the offer.

It seems people do not just enter their information, it has to interest them. So the traffic isn’t bad traffic, because I assume the end user is interested in the offer and completes it. The reason why more specific 1 field submits did better than the generic ones, email submits and not zip submit. So users were willing to provide their email address because they were interested in the offer and not just submitting their zip code.

So now I will filter the offers out and only put in the ones that converted , have it more concentrated on the offers that converted, still rotating but filtered. I will leave it up the poll until the election is over, which is another week or so which should give me good data to test again. Hmmmm might have to write an updated version for the poll study.

Do you use polls to gather and convert traffic in affilaite marketing?

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Lime Survey is very user friendly but it takes a while to get use to. So to me it was ‘ehh’ user friendly and I found myself taking the whole day to just mess around with the system. There are images and the interface is a bit bulky but straight to the point. There are multiple ways to create and edit surveys, the only thing that bothered me was creating the survey.

Creating the survey was fairly easy until I was given the option of choosing, text, check box, options, drop downs etc. The options kinda of go into a more bigger range, for example radio buttons but there are like 3 other categories for radio buttons. Why can not I chose radio buttons and just keep adding radio buttons and its’ choices? It was a bit complicated, I still have sometimes a hard time deciding what is what. It is a good thing they have a really good documentation otherwise I would have to download something else.

But back on topic: Surveying your customers or audience is important since you want to know what they want. I tend to have a survey 4-7 days down the road after someone purchases a product from me. The reason for this is I want to know multiple factors, ease of payment, ease of download, errors, opinions, would they purchase again, etc

There are many questions you can ask and many that you shouldn’t ask. Also, throwing a survey to your users does not mean they will all participate. You will also notice some trends with different group of people. For example I sent out a survey to the users who downloaded the BANS Themes for free and a small amount of them participated. While the buyers, a higher percentage of them participate and said they would buy a similar product again. This tells a lot about your audience freeloaders vs buyers and what they want.

I also have a poll on my front page for users and my readers to create interaction but it is a purpose for me to see what readers are doing or want. There are even sites out there where users create surveys and are publicly shared so others can see what people are looking for. While some are for fun and some are serious, you really can not tell unless you have a good audience. For example freeloaders vs buyers are 2 different people. Buyers are more serious while freeloaders are just ‘ehh whatever’.

What I use surveys and Polls for:

• End user Experience and Opinions of a Purchase Product
  I think this is very important. Getting a response from your buyers is crucial because it will help you determine what you are doing right and wrong. Remember each buyer is different from noobiness to expertise. Each has their own experience and vision of your product being better or perfection. Take each response seriously but not too serious. You want to find a common situation which will make you focus more on that wider range than each individual. Grabbing user experiences’ several days after they purchase is important as well, give them time to play around with your product before asking them to survey your product/service.
• Case Study on the Market
  This is important because you want to know what the general audience feels on your niche. I have a poll on my front page of my blog and its a general study. I usually post results of what my audience is saying and I give my output on what I think the stats are telling me. Case Study surveys are important prior to a product launch as well. Research and Research is repeated throughout marketing, so every piece of data is important. Grabbing these sources from users can help you determine what your next product you should make or promote next.

If you would like to download a great survey/poll system I recommend grabbing Lime Survey. This program has a lot of functionalities that you can do and it is easy to use once you get use to it’s interface. You can test and view the demo version to get a first hand experience with it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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