Monthly Archives: July 2010

Demand Media Banks It Hard

Posted on by
31

If you’ve ever searched Google for the answer to a practical question (and who doesn’t?), you have probably seen the website eHow.com.  It seems to appear on the first page of results for literally thousands of unique terms.  What you may not know is that the company behind eHow.com, Demand Media, has created a cash machine so big that Wall Street and even Google itself has taken notice.

Demand Media Banks It Hard

Essentially, Demand Media is a massive content creation company.  But instead of using employees to do the work, they outsource it all to freelancers.  Authors get paid a set price per article, and they are encourage to crank out several at a time with strict deadlines.  If you like writing but don’t have the time to create your own blog, this actually could be a nice way for you to make a little extra cash on the side.

I can’t help but be impressed by Demand Media and what they’ve done.  They took a simple concept that’s been around for ages, Article Marketing, and scaled it to an unimaginable degree.  The company is rumored to be worth around $1.5 Billion.  It will most likely be acquired by a major public company or have an IPO of its own in the near future.

The reason I felt this was worth a post is to remind all of us of the power of the internet and the opportunity that we have each and every day to get a piece of it.  Don’t get discouraged because you got in the game too late, there is so much money to be made out there.  The world hasn’t even begun to realize the changes that the internet has brought into our daily lives, and the more it gets integrated, the more opportunity there is for us to make money.

You don’t have to create something completely unique and original to make millions of dollars.  Just ask Google.  They certainly didn’t create the search engine, they just built a better one.  All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open, and when you see something that could be done better or bigger or more profitable, do it!

Avoid Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder

Posted on by
7

One of the strengths of Affiliate Marketers is that they can move quickly.  When Michael Jackson died last year, it only took a matter of hours before affiliates were targeting people searching for news on the subject.  This ability to move quickly is what sets affiliates apart from big advertising agencies and old-school marketing firms.  However, it can also lead to a paralyzing condition that I like to call Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder.

Monkey set up offers. Monkey not make money.

Monkey set up offers. Monkey not make money.

Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder (AffHD for short) is when you have so many campaigns to test that you end up throwing them all up against the wall to see what sticks.  Unfortunately, what often happens is that none of them stick.  Then you are left thinking that you have exhausted all of your resources and have nothing to show for it.  You might think that, but you are wrong.

What actually happened is that you became a campaign creation robot.  When AffHD kicks in, your creativity center in the brain turns off.  You become a monkey copying and pasting links from one place into the other, and when all is said and done you really haven’t added to much value to the process.  No wonder those campaigns aren’t converting, there was no real effort put into their creation!

New affiliates are particularly susceptible to AffHD.  After they have received a couple of conversions the first thing they want to do is go set up 10 or 20 more campaigns.  If it worked once why not just duplicate it on a large scale?  The problem is, they don’t understand why the first campaign worked.  They haven’t taken the time to split test targets, keywords, landing pages, and creatives until they know beyond a shadow of a doubt why that campaign worked.  If they don’t do that, they are leaving money on the table.  If they don’t do that, they haven’t squeezed every last drop of ROI out of the campaign that they already have running.  This must be done before you move on to start something new.

You should be spending 70% of your time working on scaling your successful campaigns and only 30% of your time testing out new niches.  Think about any other business you could be in.  If you made all of your money selling blue widgets, you wouldn’t suddenly focus all of your attention on trying to push green widgets, would you?  Of course not!  You would spend most of your time trying to sell as many blue widgets as possible.  Then when you have a spare hour or two, you could figure out if people want green widgets.  Does that make sense?

The key to avoiding Affiliate Hyperactive Disorder is simple: focus.

Get Their Attention In 4 Seconds or Less

Posted on by
10

Another way to look at PPV marketing is interruption marketing.  That’s essentially what you are doing is interrupting them in the middle of their web surfing session and popping an ad in front of them.  What you have to say had better get your point across, and do it quickly.  Let me introduce you to the Golden Rule of PPV Marketing…

Get Their Attention In 4 Seconds or less.

That’s right, only 4 seconds.  That is the average amount of time it takes a user to mouse up and close the pop-up window or click “skip” on your interstitial ad.  Doesn’t sound like very much time?  It’s not.  That’s why you have to do everything in your power to keep them on the page and engage them before habit takes over, which is to close the window.  How do you get their attention?  Here are a few ways.

1. Audio

You can only use audio on your landing pages on two of the major PPV networks: Traffic Vance and Lead Impact.  Traffic Vance doesn’t have too many restrictions on audio, they are quite lenient.  However, Lead Impact requires that there be clearly visible controls to pause or stop the audio.  This is simple to do if you have the right software on your landing page.  The audio player I see being used the most often is Nifty Player.  It is lightweight, fast-loading, and you can have the controls on the page or keep them invisible if you choose.

2. Flashing Graphics

Take some cues from the animated flashing .gif banners that you see used on many of the blogs in this industry (like this one!).  It is super easy to make a 2-5 frame flashing .gif banner using Photoshop, but that’s a topic for another post.  There’s a great tutorial you can read here.  You can use this tactic to make flashing headers, blinking call to action buttons, and moving arrows to get the attention of the user quickly.

3. Use Opposing Colors

One way to catch the eye is to use opposing colors.  Using this color wheel you can easily pick colors on the opposite end of the spectrum, which makes pages much more eye-catching.  You probably don’t want to do anything too abrasive, like use one color for the background and then another for the text, that would just be annoying.  What you can do is use them for different buttons, arrows, or calls to action on the page.  Or when you make your animated .gif files you can use opposite colors and flash between them for maximum effect.

Using one or all of these tactics is a great way to get the user’s attention in 4 seconds or less.  Try these out, and you will definitely see a difference in your conversions.  Just put yourself in the mind of your user and ask yourself, “Would I close this window in 4 seconds?”

Were MMORPGs The First Social Media Platform?

Posted on by
6

For the uninitiated, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs for short) are a type of computer game that is played over the Internet with a large number of fellow players who take on character roles in a fantasy or science-fiction based universe.  The most well-known and commonly referenced MMORPG is Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, which has roughly 11.5 million players worldwide at last count. Each one of those players is paying $14.95 per month to Blizzard for the pleasure of continuing to play the game. Talk about the ultimate rebill, how would you like to have approximately $171,925,000.00 coming in to your company’s bank account each and every month? Granted, that is just revenue, not profit. Even so, revenue of over $2 billion per year is enough to make even Warren Buffett stand up and take notice. But I digress…

World of Warcraft vs FacebookEarlier today I was talking to an affiliate friend of mine and World of Warcraft came up. Being a recovering WoW addict myself, it got me thinking about the concept of why these games are so popular. The gameplay isn’t entirely original, they use the same basic mechanics of the Role Playing Games that have been a video gaming staple ever since the original Nintendo Entertainment System was released. It’s also not that they are the latest and greatest games out there. In fact, most of these games (including WoW) have been around for many years. It is certainly not the allure of the best graphics and technological breakthroughs that makes these games so addicting. So what is the secret sauce?

The social interaction.

It’s not the endless quests or the epic boss battles or even the pursuit of better and more powerful gear. The ability to spend time online engaging and interacting with your peers is what keeps people coming back. In fact, the effect of the social interaction in these games is what keeps people so glued to them that they forget to eat, sleep, or go to work. It’s not just a set of computer-manufactured goals that are in play, you are constantly seeking the approval of your fellow players. Since there are so many people playing online at the same time, there is no pause button. You can’t just walk away when the phone rings or when the pizza guy comes to the door, if you do that then your character will simply stand still in the online world and most likely will be killed and/or cause the deaths of everyone in your group.

My point is this: even though the world at large is just waking up to the wonders of “social media” and how much it transforms the lives of everyone that uses it, gamers have been experiencing and subscribing to the very same thing for years and years now. The first MMORPG was called Ultima Online, and it was released on September 25, 1997. The creator of Ultima Online, Richard Garriot, even coined the term MMORPG himself. The most amazing part about this pioneering game is that it is still active and running online today, almost 13 years later. I’m not sure how many of you remember the internet circa 1997, but there was no MySpace, no Facebook, and definitely no Twitter.

The funny thing about all this to me is that today we are seeing social media heading right back to where it started, with games. Just look at the success of Farmville and the other games being created and pushed on Facebook and beyond by companies like Zynga. You can’t even get a Slurpee at 7-Eleven right now without being bombarded with advertising for social games, and now that Google has invested some major capital into Zynga, we are only going to see these games evolving further and further into the mainstream.

So were MMORPGs the first social media platform? In my opinion the answer is clear.

The Shoe Has Spoken

Posted on by
4

I wanted to give a shout out to Shoemoney for letting me guest post on his blog.  It was a lot of fun and I hope I will be able to do it again in the future. It’s amazing how many new readers have discovered my humble little blog from the post!

I wanted to return the favor as much as possible,  and turn some of my readers on to what Jeremy has been working on recently.  His new and updated Version 2.0 of the Shoemoney System is looking even better than the first one so far.  Just watching the free intro video he gives out some pretty good tips.  If you’ve got a spare 30 minutes to check it out, I told him I’d let you guys know about it.

You can watch the video here.

Shoemoney's Swimming in Pool

Shoemoney's pool is freaking epic.

If you ever get the chance to meet Shoemoney at a conference or industry event, you definitely should take the time to introduce yourself.  He’s not a big ego type of guy, even though he has every right to be.  It’s always fun to chat with him since he is so down to earth and really passionate about internet marketing.

On that note, if anybody is going to Affiliate Summit East this year, be sure to get in touch with me so we can meet up.

Clean Up Those URLs

Posted on by
5

If you are running PPV, you are most likely scraping URLs. If you are scraping URLs, then you have probably wasted money on bad targets.  I certainly have.  Here’s a money-saving tip that will keep you from blowing through your testing budget bidding on google.com or answers.yahoo.com:

Go through your scraped URLs before you launch the campaign!

Scrubbing Bubbles

Nobody has cleaner URLs than this dude...

Yes, I understand that if you are targeting thousands of URLs, it can be time consuming to go through them one-by-one.  But here’s the trick: you don’t have to!  If you have your list loaded up in Excel, just press Ctrl + F to open up the Find menu, and then search for the usual culprits:

google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, wikipedia.org, etc.

Alternatively, if you are using AffExpert, you can filter these domains during the scraping process.  Just click the “Show/Hide Domain Filter” button on the URL Scraper tool, and it will open up a second box where you can put in the URLs you want to filter out.  Done and done.

So there you go, a simple tip that can easily save you $20 a campaign or more.

Affiliate AIM Etiquette

Posted on by
10

AIM is a staple of life when you live and work on the internet.  There are quite a few different IM services out there, but AIM is the most widely used.  It’s gotten to the point where a good 90% of the conversations that I have with people in the industry are through AIM.  It’s quicker than picking up the phone, and for the most part it is less intrusive.  If they are in the middle of something they can get back to me when they are available.  It’s also nice to see your buddies login every morning, letting you know that you aren’t alone in what can be a very isolated industry.

That being said, there are some AIM users that tick me off. I made a tweet about this yesterday and it got a lot of responses, so I know I’m not the only one that feels this way.  It was about one of my pet peeves, when somebody comes on AIM and just types, “Hey,” and then says nothing else.

To be fair, I am sure that I have done this before and I am guilty of it too, because you want to see if the person is there before you go into typing a long discussion.  Saying, “Hey,” in itself is not what annoys me, it’s what comes next, which 9 times out of 10 is… Nothing!  They say, “Hey,” and I say it back, and then that’s it.  They never respond or say anything else.  What’s the point of that?  Just to make sure that I am there in case you actually do need to ask me a question?  Annoying.

emoteThe other thing.

That’s annoying.

Is when people.

Type fragments.

Of a sentence.

And hit return.

After each one.

So that you get.

16 different beeps.

One for.

Each line.

That they type.

If I’m in a conversation with you, I’m already paying attention.  You don’t need to get every single line out there for me to read before it’s a fully formed and logical sentence.  Take your time, form your sentence, and then hit return when you are ready to say it.  Now that wasn’t so hard was it?

If you are reading this article, then you are probably either nodding your head in agreement with me, or one of the offending parties and you will never AIM me again.  Don’t do that.  I love AIM.  I use it for at least 10 hours every single day.  Just follow some conversational etiquette just like you would if we were talking in person.  Can you imagine coming up to someone in person, saying, “Hey,” then just walking away?  In essence that is what you are doing online when you don’t respond.

That’s the end of my rant for today!