SeoDave's Guide to Generating High Converting Zip/Email Submits

I've been meaning to put this together for a while, but I've been staying fairly busy. Well, with all the posts and questions I've seen lately in the STS, Aff. Marketing, and Newbie thread about zip/email submits, it's pretty obvious to me that it's high time that I put this out. Take note: this is not a definitive guide to EVERYTHING zip/email, but it is a method that I've used to generate a lot of zip/email leads. I'm not going to hide anything from you either - I'll give you the exact campaign that I ran that converted at over 300%.

Step 1: Pick a popular news topic (something big that will get a lot of searches is good)

Step 2: Scrape keywords from several of the top news stories online. When I've done this, I've actually grabbed quite a few news article titles as keywords.

Step 3: Setup a quick one page (multi page if you want to put up privacy/copyright/about pages) site. The key here is QUICK. Don't go complex. THis is easy. This website is truly a case of KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid). You should put this together in no more than 30 minutes. Use the keywords you scraped from the news article and run a poll based around the news topic. Try to make it a very easy yes/no question so that you don't confuse your audience and drive them away. Have the poll setup around 2 buttons (Yes or No, Now or Never, etc). Have both the buttons take the user to your zip/email submit.

Step 4: Setup an ad campaign in one of the search engines for this topic. Use your scraped keywords and set your bids as low as you can go. (I did $0.05 in Adcenter and Adwords and $0.10 in Yahoo). Point the ad to your poll landing page.

Step 5: Grab the most relavent zip/email you can to the demographic that you think will be most likely to be searching for this news article.

Step 6: Profit.

Ok, this may seem oversimplified, but it can really be that easy. To give you an example I'll be posting the exact campaign I used to do this. (see below)

Now for the actual example and the numbers. How did I come up with this idea? Well, I just quit my job about 2 months ago. While I still had this job, I was driving to work and listening to the radio. I live in Atlanta, and on that day the news broke that Michael Vick was being indicted on dogfighting charges. No matter what station I listened to it was on. AM or FM, people everywhere were talking about it. All I could think was, TONS of people will be searching for info on this online - HOW CAN I CAPITALIZE? It hit me that I could setup a website that could ask people whether or not they thought Michael Vick was actually guilty of the charges. So that day at work I set about setting up this site:
Mike Vick Survey - Michael Vick is the Atlanta Falcons Quarterback Dogfighting and Indicted for Running Dog Fights

I set it up in about 30 minutes. I scraped the content from a few news articles and filled out the meta with my keywords. I simply grabbed the keywords from large news articles online that were breaking the news that morning.

Atlanta falcons scandal
Bad Newz Kennels
Larry Woodward case
Larry Woodward dog fighting case
Larry Woodward dogfight
MV7 Inc
Michael Vick Indictment
Michael Vick dog fighting
Michael Vick indicted
Mike Vick Indicted for sponsoring dog fights
Mike Vick Indicted for sponsoring dogfighting
Mike Vick Indicted for sponsoring dogfights
Mike Vick K-9 Kennels
Mike Vick guilty
Mike Vick indicted
Mike Vick indictment
NFL dogfighting
VA dog fights
VA dogfighting
Vick Indicted
Vick indictment
Virginia dog fights
Virginia dogfighting
atlanta falcons quarterback indicted
atlanta falcons scandal
falcons dog fighting
falcons qb indicted
falcons qb indicted for dogfight
falcons vick indicted
falcons vick qb
falcons vick quarterback
is michael vick guilty
is mike vick guilty
michael vick
michael vick dog fight
michael vick dog fighting
michael vick dogfighting
michael vick dogfighting case
michael vick dogfighting raid
michael vick dogfights
michael vick indicted
michael vick running dogfights
michael vick survey
mike vick
mike vick dog fight
mike vick dog fighting
mike vick dogfight
mike vick dogfighting
mike vick dogfighting case
mike vick indicted
mike vick indicted for dogfighting
mike vick scandal
mike vick survey
news about michael vick
news about michael vick dogfighting
news about mike vick
news about mike vick dogfighting
nfl scandals
vick dog fighting
vick dogfight
vick dogfighting case
vick dogfights

Imagine my joy when I saw that NO ONE else was bidding on ANY of those keywords. (I got lucky). My campaign was live by 11:00 AM. I set up the following ad copy in Adwords:

Is Michael Vick Guilty?
You decide.
Vote to get a $500 gift card.

By 3:00 PM I had the ads setup in Yahoo and MSN as well (remember, I did all this while at WORK). I chose the Foot Locker Email submit offered by Copeac. It paid out at $1.50/lead. I later changed to a $500 Visa gift card zip submit that paid the same and changed my copy to say:

Is Michael Vick Guilty?
Vote now and receive a
free $500 Visa Gift Card

I found that the zip submit converted at a higher rate than email submits (this may vary depending on your niche/traffic). I chose the first offer to target the male sport audience that I expected to be searching this topic. It worked very well. The only thing was I wanted to try a zip submit and they didn't have a similar one. I even tried the iPhone email submit with the following copy:

Is Michael Vick Guilty?
You decide.
Vote now and get a free iphone

It didn't do poorly, but the others did even better. With the $500 Visa Gift card I began to convert about 20% of my traffic with bids of 5-10 cents. That means for every 5 people, one would convert. I'd pay 25-50 cents for those 5 visitors, but got paid out at $1.50. So, what's the end of the story? Well, I have to give props to PETA. They got a campaign going on quite a few of my keywords within 2 days in Google. They were the only advertiser competing with me for about 3 weeks though. After that, competition in Google increased for these keyterms as newspapers and magazines started covering the Michael Vick issue more and more. I shut down the campaign in google as the keywords went inactive for search and needed bid of $1+ to get active (obviously that woudn't work). I kept Yahoo and MSN going up until about 2 weeks ago. At that point the offers started converting kind of poorly, and I shut them down. Here's my stats on the Visa Gift card zip from Copeac:

Visa Gift Card for Best Buy - $500 ^ Zip Submit 2,450 0 337 0 0% 0% 0 $0.00 N/A $1.50/lead $505.50

I know the conversions here show about 13%, but it was closer to 35% when the campaign started. It evened out at about 25% before the conversions went to hell. This just goes to show, when you are paying for traffic you need to keep an eye on campaigns and kill them if they go negative (which this did after a litle over a month and a half). I could have switched out offers and tried some other one to see if it would work, but I was bored with this and had higher paying offers to spend my time/money on. I've tried this method several times, but this was one campaign that it really worked on for quite a while (I assume most of these will die out closer to 1-3 weeks). If you have half a brain you can follow my process though and figure out how to make it work for you.

Will you get rich off this? Probably not. Maybe... it depends on how many niches you hit. There are several things I can think of that could increase conversions even more. You could spend more time on your landing pages and match the color/look/feel to the zip/email submit that you are promoting so that it looks like the visitor never left your site. You could tweak your ad copy, add more keywords, add more ppc engines, etc. You could also forego PPC and try using blackhat to get your page to the top results in the engines for your keywords and try getting some organic traffic like that. All in all though, this campaign took less than 4 hours of real work to setup, and gave me a 300% conversion rate for over a month. You can start with a small budget (as low as $5/day, but for best results be ready to set a budget of like $50/day to maximize on traffic - which will be highest right after the story breaks).

Ok, I'm ready for questions. Tear me a new one...

I did not do any social bookmarking, although I actually later found some people had stumbled my site on their own. ;-) That's the great thing about building a poll around a popular news event. Another idea that I had, but didn't implement was to make the poll real, and actually track the results and then display them. An even better idea would be to do what productionhead suggested and track the voting, but instead of displaying it for free make people opt-in to your list to send them the results. Then you make a mailing list + get 1.50/lead. If the ideas keep flowing in and making it better I might just hit this campaign again. =) Keep up the feedback and feel free to ask any questions if I didn't clarify something.