Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Posts of 2010

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Here are, in my sole opinion, the Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Posts of 2010. Check these out for sure if you haven’t read them, and let me know what your favorite posts were in the comments!

#1 – The Lifecycle of an Internet Marketer (MrGreen.am)

This is the best post I have read all year. Go read it now. Bottom line.

#2 – Plenty of Fish. Plenty of Money – Part 1 (MrGreen.am)

This post was responsible for turning a whole bunch of new affiliates onto the possibilities of advertising on POF. It also has possibly the greatest photo and caption of any blog post ever.

#3 – An Easy $100 a Day Campaign (PPVPlaybook.com)

This one is about an older traffic method, but one that still works to this day. It is the best place to start for affiliates that have no money to get going with paid traffic.

#4 – Photoshop Guide for Affiliates (MrGreen.am)

I have referred back to this post so many times, I’ve got it bookmarked. I know I’ve got 3 posts from Mr Green in here, but these are some of the most useful posts ever.

#5 – I Am a Failure (PPVPlaybook.com)

Mindset is one of the most important parts of this industry. This post tells you why. They say that Edison failed at inventing the incandescent light bulb over 1,000 times before he finally got it right. Sometimes it can feel that way in Affiliate Marketing as well.

#6 – Getting Traffic For Submit Offers Example (Convert2Media.com)

An extremely practical and insightful post to help you think outside the box when it comes to promoting offers that have been around for a long time. You can apply this strategy to lots of offers, not just Email Submits.

#7 – Too Many Fish In The Sea With PPV (FinchSells.com)

Finch has a lot of great posts, but this one in particular is great. He’s got some very unique things to say about PPV.

#8 -How To Really Build a List and Keep Them Engaged (JustinDupre.com)

This post definitely got me thinking about different possibilities with list building. His example is a great one because it shows that you can go outside of the typical niches and verticals that everyone else focuses on.

#9 – Affiliate Tradeshow Floor Tips (Oooff.com)

Going to trade shows is a rite of passage for the Affiliate Marketer. Once you’ve got the ticket & hotel booked however, read this post and make a game plan for what you will do when you are actually on the show floor.

#10 – Outing Bankable Websites Affiliates Should Buy – Being Sold On Flippa (StackThatMoney.com)

As you have been reading in my Case Study, this post impressed me so much I decided to go out and buy a website just so I could try my hand at something different. There is excellent advice here that could lead to a solid income that will survive no matter which campaigns come and go.

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit – Part 2

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It’s been about 12 days since I started this Case Study (check out Part 1 here), so I thought it was about time for an update. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on the site as I wanted to.

I really haven’t made many changes to the site itself at all, other than some small on-page SEO fixes. The main things that I have done are link building and social bookmarking. If you don’t have the time to do social bookmarking yourself (like me), I highly recommend Red_Virus’s $25 package. I have used Amit for several projects and he always does a great job. I’ve had a site get ranked just from these bookmarks alone.

Here’s what the traffic has looked like since I took over the site:

Case Study - Traffic Stats

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the site has a good amount of Pageviews and a decently low Bounce Rate. So the people that get to the site seem to be sticking around and browsing for a bit. I just need to continue increasing the traffic. The good news is the trend is definitely upward for overall visitors.

As far as monetization, the affiliate banner I put on it has failed so far. It gets barely any clicks and it has not generated a single lead. I’ll have to test out different banners or offers to optimize this. For AdSense, it’s averaging about $0.75 – $1.00 a day right now. So at this rate, if I leave it alone, it will pay back the money I spent on it in about 2 years. Obviously that’s no good, so more optimization will follow!

The next step is to start an email list so that I can capture addresses and send them relevant articles and affiliate offers on an ongoing basis. That’s all I’ve got to report for now!

5 Things I Hate About PPV

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1. When People Press “Make My Bid Highest” on TrafficVance

Like I said in another post, this is the absolute dumbest thing you could ever do. Every time you hit that button on TrafficVance, you are raising the bid price by 5x higher of an increment than is necessary. There’s nothing worse than logging in to check my targets and seeing that I have been outbid by $0.005, because I know exactly what caused it. Stop the madness now!

2. Waiting for Ads To Be Approved

It can be very frustrating waiting for your ads to be approved by the PPV network, especially with Lead Impact. At least with TrafficVance or DirectCPV, if you are very impatient you can hit up your rep and tell them to approve it. With Lead Impact though, you are stuck waiting for up to 72 hours or longer. That makes me pull out my hair.

3. A Great Converting Target with Barely Any Traffic

There are lots of little gems out there in the world of PPV targets. Great URLs and Keywords that convert like white hot fire, with an ROI of over 1,000%. The only problem is they only get one or two views a day. There is absolutely no way on earth to fix this, but they are always there tantalizing you with the promise of ridiculous profits.

4. PPV Networks Don’t Allow Download Offers

Before you start jumping down my throat, yes I know that some PPV networks somewhere do allow some download offers. But my favorite ones still like to deny my favorite kind of download offers: the very profitable ones. So that leaves me either trying to run some lame download offer that maybe might work, or running with a lesser PPV network that maybe might work. It’s not worth the hassle.

5. Bid Prices Can Be Ludicrously High On Competitive Targets

It’s no secret that PPV isn’t the cheapest form of traffic on the planet. Even at the minimum bid of $0.01 per view on TrafficVance, you are still paying $10 CPM. That is a very high price in the world of display advertising. But when people start bidding $0.40 or more per view on a target, you are talking about a $400 CPM. That is insanity! That’s not to say that there aren’t some offers that could still be profitable at a bid of $0.40, it’s just that a lot of times these bids are driven up by people who are losing money hand over fist and have no idea what to do about it.

So there you have it! My list of 5 things I hate about PPV. Be sure to take these all with a grain of salt, because as I’m sure you know, I love PPV. It’s my favorite type of traffic and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But if I could have 5 wishes come true for Christmas, it would be to change these things.

An Affiliate’s Creed*

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Dean Alfange

Dr. Dean Alfange

I do not choose to be a common man.

It is my right to be uncommon—if I can.

I seek opportunity—not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me.

I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed.

I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia.

I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat.

It is my heritage to stand [tall], proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations and to face the world boldly and say, “This I have done.”

“An American Creed” by Dean Alfange – Originally published in This Week Magazine, later reprinted in The Reader’s Digest, October 1952

*This was not written by an affiliate or about affiliates, but I think it applies.

PPVSpy Takes The Industry By Storm

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The first PPV campaign spy tool has just hit the market. It’s call PPVSpy. That means that you can spy on the competition, see offers, landing pages, and targets. Whether you like it or not, this was bound to happen and Bevo Media is the first company to do it.

Go here and check it out.

Then we can have a large debate in the comments over whether this is a godsend or the end of PPV marketing as we know it.

PPVSpy

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit

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Last month Stackman did a really cool post about buying websites on Flippa and optimizing them for profit. I have created tons of websites from scratch, but I’ve never tried to buy one before. So I took his advice, went over to Flippa and started browsing around. Here’s what I found…

There’s a bunch of crappy websites for sale!

There are good ones as well but you have to really dig through a bunch of crap to find the good stuff. I don’t think I was prepared for all of the retarded sites for sale at outrageous prices, but I got used to it. I ended up bidding on two different sites that I thought had potential.

Flippa

If you haven't ever been to Flippa.com, you should check it out!

The first site ended up being highly competitive, and went for $3,200. I didn’t want to spend that much my first time out, so I let that one go. The problem was it was already too far developed and had affiliate income already set up on it. Honestly I’m not sure why the guy was selling it, unless it had just been sandboxed or something… Anyways, on to the next one.

The second site had about 15 bids on it as well as a Buy It Now price of $500. After doing some due-diligence and researching the niche and the site’s traffic, I decided to go ahead and buy it. I’m sure I could have gotten a better deal by waiting for the auction to finish, but I’m pretty impulsive when I get an idea into my head so I just bought it for the $500 BIN price.

The reason I liked the site was that it had a lot of content already generated. It has over 2,000 pages in it. That saves me a lot of work on the front end so I can focus on getting it traffic and monetizing it. It doesn’t have a blog, so I will probably add one of those shortly and put some more content on it. It also had quite a few backlinks already going to it. It has a PR of 0, but the groundwork is still there. It should be fairly easy to get it up to PR 2 or PR 3 in the next couple of months.

AdSense was the only type of monetization on the site, and there weren’t very many ads at all. I went ahead and placed a 468×60 banner for an affiliate offer in the header, and spruced up the AdSense locations. I will most likely build an email list as well so I can mail offers to my users.

That’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m excited about the project and hopefully it will be a good long-term source of income. It gets old doing the affiliate campaign grind after a while, so this has been a fresh breath of air.

TrafficVance Goes International (At Last!)

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According to my good friend Grayson Gold, TrafficVance is finally serving international pops as of now! That includes all the major english speaking countries: United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. They have been serving text links in these countries for a while now, but for those of us that are addicted to pops this is a massive announcement. Lead Impact had the edge internationally for a long time, but I guess all those GameVance installs you guys have been promoting have paid off.

trafficvance

Keep up the good work, and get those international campaigns up!

New Tracking202 Is Coming

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The news was dropped today by the legendary Nana Gilbert-Baffoe that a new version of Tracking202 / Prosper202 is on the horizon. I’ve been wondering when they would fire back with something new to answer all the new tracking systems released this year (primarily Bevo Media and CPV Lab). I don’t have any details about what new changes version 2.0 of 202 is going to include, but according to the beta signup website, it will be “a game-changing totally re-engineered version of Tracking202”.

New Tracking202

My interest is definitely piqued. Sign up for the beta here if you want to check it out before the general public gets to see it.

UPDATE

Once I confirmed my email for the beta they gave a couple more teasers about functionality:

  • Unparalleled Flexibility – Track everything in ways not yet available on any of the tracking systems in the market.
  • Lightning Fast Redirects – We all know slow redirects cost you money and conversions, so we’ve optimized the new Tracking202 to serve up redirects in the blink of an eye
  • Fully Open and Expandable – We built this from the ground up to allow you to modify and customize the software via the powerful API we expose
  • Enhanced Workflow – You shouldn’t have to spend hours setting up your links, and with our new enhanced workflow, you won’t have to. We’re talking bulk uploads and automation galore!
  • There’s more to share – Like the new robust offer rotator, impression pixels, path analysis, enhanced reporting, tons more data points tracked so you can slice and dice things just the way you like it, and the list goes on!