For those who read my last post High Converting Headlines Are Sitting On Women’s Coffee Tables This post is a little bit of a follow up. Previously I outed an awesome place to copy attention grabbing headlines. For this post I wanted to talk a little more about some of my personal methods to come up with niches, headlines, ad copy, images, ideas, etc. for dating ads. (this can be applied to other verticals too)
I’ll go ahead and out the source it’s one you already know Plenty Of Fish. Don’t read their blog? Shame on you.. POF Blog.
I see a lot of affiliates especially newbies have some trouble being creative and creating angles for their campaigns to make them unique and eye catching. This leads people to spend their time scraping ads on what ever traffic source they are running in an effort to find out what works and come up with some “new” ideas. This isnt a bad thing in fact I monitor other peoples ads a fair amount myself, but if you really want to boost your CTR’s and come up with some effective copy the answers aren’t hard to find in fact they are right under your nose.
The annoyingly over used phrase “The customer is always right” applies to affiliate marketing just as much as any other business. Some build campaigns and test ideas out of pure guess work hoping that they will stumble upon an idea that their potential customers will respond too. The point of this post is to show you that it doesn’t always have to be guess work in fact the customers will even tell you EXACTLY what they want. All you need to do is listen.
How can you do that? Read user profiles. This sounds like a simple solution and it really is. So close out your scraper for a bit log into one of your POF accounts (don’t have one? Make one). Lets say I have a broad demographic.
Males, Age:30-40, Single, Caucasian, USA
Now ask yourself “What do these guys want?” Obviously women, because they are on a dating site, but specifically what are they looking for? Pretend that you are a single female and enter your demo in the search criteria to start reading and viewing some profiles at random.
Read at least 10-15 and I guarantee you will start to see some patterns.
Things To Take Notes On:
- Interests/activities: Do they like the outdoors? Video Games? Sports? Working out? These are all potential niches to hit on once you see a few starting to take a trend that could be your next high volume angle for your ads.
- Profile Headline: These are VERY different between men and women, but you will always start to see patterns. These will give you an idea to the attitude of the users your targeting. Ask yourself do they sound timid or self conscious? Are they long or short? Do they try to be funny? Do they sound stupid?
- Profile Pics: Pretty self explanatory and I’m sure your split testing the crap out of images already, but take note of the poses people use, backgrounds, etc.
- Problems: After reading a lot of profiles I’ve found that both men and women use their POF profile sometimes as less of an ad about themselves and more of a soap box about their frustrations with life, dating, the opposite sex, and the world. They are telling you their problems so hit them with the animated .gif that will change their life.
- Wording!!! This one gets exclamation points, because its huge. People in marketing/advertising/affiliates have a very different thought process and way of thinking than other people do. People in New York City speak differently than people in Mobile Alabama. While your reading profiles take special care to note what types of words your potential customers are using to describe what they want. Marketers like to use words like “meet” “want” “find” they like to use words like “looking” “searching” “hoping” etc. I for example found that looking is a very overused term on profiles and you bet your ass I split tested “want yadayada girls?” .vs. “looking for yadayada girls”
I could go on and list more things to look out for, but you get the point. Listen to what people are asking for and GIVE IT TO THEM!
-Cheers
Strov