PPC on CPA networks question

[Chunkles]

The only real AM success I've had has been with product sites utilizing SEO (mainly EPN stuff and a few CJ products). I've done PPC using polls with some email/zip offers from the CPA networks that I'm affiliated with and found them to be a big pain in the ass with few winners.

I'd like to use PPC more (SEO takes so long to generate income and I have some capital available - and I''ve been using Adwords and YSM for awhile now). My question is: How do people promote CPA offers via PPC when so many of the campaigns are for gift cards, free stuff, etc... without using polls? I guess I'm having a mental block trying to figure out what type of keywords I'd be looking for when trying to promote these kinds of offers. I mean, people aren't actually searching for "$150 gift card to WalMart," right? I've never tried placement targeted ads before, is this a good way to go?

Thanks for any feedback ... (and let the flaming begin! Although I posted this in the Newbie section in hopes of reducing the dickroll-to-helpful posts quotient)

 

[PPC Coach]

Not all cpa is zip and email submits and polls are not the only way. (Polls still work even though it's a very old method). Take a free credit report offer. Build a landing site using your seo skills, (on page and off page seo stuff), then link right to a highly optimized page on the site offering the free credit report.

Your costs will be lower if your quality score is higher and quality score is 20% based on the landing page, (the other 80% is click through rate). But every little bit helps in reducing your costs and putting more money in your pocket.

Another tip, don't use just one credit report offer, rotate 3 to 5 on your landing page.

 

[smaxor]

There's tons of ideas you can stick in front of an email submit that could help it convert better. People often just fall into traps of doing what everyone else does and doing the same ol' thing.

A good question to ask yourself from a psychological perspective is why do polls work better then direct linking the offer?

One of the reasons you could abstract out of that is you're warming up the user to take action answering something he/she might be very passionate about or have something to prove. Another might be if you ask rhetorical questions then if you ask something and the obvious answer is yes like "Would you like to make an extra 200$ a month?" And they take some sort of action they're starting the sales process in their heads, actually selling the product or service to themselves. There's a rule as a sales person that says get lots of small commitments or small "yes's" first. And the big yes is much easier.

So with that abstracted idea what's some other verticals that take advantage of getting the user to take action then wanting to know what they answer is so they're motivated to take the action to do so.

IQ offers?
Crush Offers?
Carrier Pages for ringtone offers

This is just a couple of the main stream ones that have taken off. But I'm sure if you sit back and think you'll come up with some ideas that no one is doing yet.

You can even move away from polls if you want and move to some sort of action oriented response for some sort of other offer. A bunch of the pages being released in diet, bizopp and resv are starting to ask little quiz warm up type questions. One for resv might be, if you could how many years would you like to lengthen your life?