Every once and awhile I see something big hit the news and I’ll rush to register a domain name to make a little coin off my currency. Two times over the past several months I registered a domain for the pure purpose of generating zip submit leads.

I first learned the concept of meshing these “current events” and zip submits from the owner of Copeac – Mike. The idea is to take advantage of a keyword that is likely getting a ton of searches with little competition. You filter this traffic to a landing page that is an online “poll”. Or at least it seems to be.

The landing page basically allows the user to vote on their “opinion” and win a fabulous prize such as a $500 Visa Gift card. No matter what they vote for they are taken to the exact same place – the affiliate offer. You landing page is designed to look exactly like the affiliate offer they are taken to and they feel comfortable to simply fill in their zip and keep clicking. Seamless integration should maximize your conversion rate and therefore profit.

A Working Example

Last week there was breaking news about OJ Simpson and his alledged “robbery” of sports collectible items in a Las Vegas hotel. I thought, “WOW this thing is going to EXPLODE and it was only announced an hour ago!” So I rushed to dotster to see what type of domain I could grab.

I considered a few dot coms but realize I spend way too much on useless domains and all I needed was keywords in the domain. So what did I choose?

Introducing www.OJSimpsonSteals.info – haha yeah I know pretty funny… but I thought it had some huge potential with the proper PPC campaign behind it. In the two screenshots below you’ll see my landing page and the actual affiliate page. I think I did a pretty darn good job keeping the pages next to identical.

My landing page:

Affiliate Offer:

I probably should have made that bottom stripe the same color with the gradient… oh well.  If you scroll down on my landing page you’ll see I posted the article that was on Yahoo… it’s way below the fold though so people don’t get distracted and actually do anything besides vote.

So I set up a PPC campaign with the following 4 main keywords:

oj
oj simpson
o.j.
o.j. simpson

In another column I made a list of all the other words I could possibly associate with the event. Things like: steal, robbery, las vegas, casino, sports memorabilia, heist, stolen, etc…  Then, using the tool, I created a list of every combination of the 4 main keywords and the describing words. I copy and pasted into adwords with an ad group for regular, quotes and brackets and let it rip!

Now zip submits are ALL about the math. Here is what I figured:

• Pay .05 per click for Adwords traffic
• Convert minimum of 10% of these
• Earn $1.50 for each zip submit

Going by these numbers, suppose we are able to generate 1,000 clicks over the course of a day and we’ve spent $50 for this traffic. If 10% of these visitors actually fill out the zip submit that’s 100 leads. At $1.50 a lead that’s $150 revenue. That means we’ve made $100 profit a day… NOT BAD!

Unfortunately, the math didn’t quite work out that way. I was playing with CPC amounts and instead of paying .05 per click I was paying .10 per click. By the time I realized this I had accrued 100 clicks for $10 and essentially broken even. I went back to change my CPC bids but the minimum had been raised to at LEAST 10 cents in some cases up to .50 cents and a dollar… I was simply priced out of a profit margin. The only way the campaign would be profitable would be to increase the conversion rate or decrease the CPC.

Increasing the conversion rate isn’t where the dough is here… the two pages match close enough. So how can I reduce my CPC? First of all my Quality Score probably sucks for a number of reasons. It’s a one page site – how about a privacy policy, terms & conditions, contact us and other bs pages to make it seem more official to google?  That would certainly do some good. What about finding cheaper sources of traffic… I haven’t even TRIED Adcenter, Yahoo Search marketing or even 3rd tier engines. Duh.

Hmmmm. It hadn’t taken me too long to get this campaign off the ground but I was dealing with a BRAND NEW domain that google absolutely did not trust with no incoming links very few pages and pretty much only hijacked content.  Then I got to thinking.

What if I had ONE site DEDICATED to zip submits and I added a couple new campaigns every week. Within one year I could potentially have 100+ zip submit campaigns running concurrently at mydomainname.com/keyword-title-here. I could put a list of every single offer in the footer along with a privacy policy and all that jazz to interlink the entire site and make it a little lovlier for the search engines. Who knows, maybe even add a blog in the folder doing RSS Autoposts to make it seem like new content gets added all the time. Whatever.

Alright Mr. Zip Submits… you’re going to have to take a back seat for a little while until I clear some of this other stuff off my plate. I’ve done 3 campaigns for zip submits and all 3 have broken even and paid for their domain. To take it to the next level I’m going to have to put in some solid work every week. But… I think this could be a winning concept. I just hope by the time I get back around to it zip submits haven’t become extinct. In the meantime, I’ll be searching for an adequate domain name!