Category Archives: Rants & Raves

Affiliate Jump (Off A Cliff)

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Kanga means business

There’s been a lot of talk going on in the industry lately about Affiliate Jump, a “CPA Network” from eBook slinger Mike Filsaime.  It’s a bunch of garbage.  If you’ve read a good review, it was by a paid Joint Venture partner.  If you’ve read a bad review, it’s from someone who has either tried it or knows how ridiculous it is.

Do not pay to join Affiliate Jump or any other CPA Network.  CPA Networks PAY YOU, not the other way around.  Don’t believe the hype about the “automated website builder”.  If you’ve ever used an automated website builder for anything (think Angelfire, TriPod, or GeoCities), then you know how sub-par the results are.  Would you buy something from a GeoCities site?  Nobody else would either.

The eBook bonuses are not worth the price of admission.  There is plenty of advice for free on blogs and forums and by talking to your Affiliate Manager at a real network.  That’s right, real CPA Networks have Affiliate Managers, somebody who is personally vested in your success.  Someone that will give you payout increases and tips on marketing your offers.  Someone that you can call on a Saturday when something goes wrong.

Long story short, don’t be a sucker.  There is less opportunity for you to make money at Affiliate Jump then selling garage sale junk on eBay.  Try joining a real affiliate network.

Be Original (Like Everybody Else)

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Late last week the word went out from Facebook that they were going to be loosening up on some of the types of offers that they allow to be advertised on Facebook Ads.  The offer types that were opened up included IQ Quiz and Business Opportunity offers.  The word spread like wildfire through the affiliate marketing world.  Late Friday night people were scrambling to get ads live and be the first to get the majority of the cheap clicks.

A couple of days later, I logged into my Facebook account and saw something very similar to the image on the right.  Not only were all 3 ads on the page for a Government Grant offer, but the images and ad copy were almost identical.  I figured this must be a fluke and refreshed the page.  To my surprise, another 3 Government Grant ads appeared, including 2 of the exact same ad, image and all.  This is the kind of thing that is giving affiliate marketing a bad name. You can’t even login to MySpace or view a story on MSNBC without being assaulted with the infamous “1 Simple Rule” ads for the fake Acai blogs (or flogs, as they have been recently named).

What was the end result?  Grant offers are now banned from Facebook, and the flogs are being monitored by the FTC.

Don’t get me wrong, initially these were excellent marketing tactics that worked just a little too well.  With the recent influx of new affiliates looking to cash in and the emergence of all the self-service ad platforms at social networks and authority sites, the barrier to entry to create fake blogs and throw an affiliate link or two on them has become much too small.

Flat Stomach FailMy point is this: if you are starting in affiliate marketing, you definitely should be looking around to see what is out there and see what is working, but don’t just copy and paste it into your campaigns.  Stealing landing pages is definitely frowned upon, but it’s becoming even more common to copy a landing page, changing just a couple of words in the ad text here and there to make it your own.  How did these flogs come along in the first place?  It was by people being creative.  There was nothing like it when the first Acai flog hit the market, and it absolutely crushed it.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars were made for a simple idea that someone had, and they actually followed through and tried it.

Don’t be lazy.  Don’t think that it is so simple to make money online that you can just copy & paste your way to retirement.  Affiliate marketing is work, and it can be hard work, but the rewards can be huge.  Treat it like a business, never give up, and you will succeed.

Stop Cheating Yourself Out Of Money

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Lately I have been seeing way too many affiliates getting shut down for fraud.  They are always finding new ways to exploit the system to make a quick buck, then praying that they don’t get caught by the affiliate network, the advertiser, the search engines, etc.

This is so stupid!  I know full well that to be the best affiliate marketer you can be, you constantly need to be testing the limits.  Pushing into the grey areas is often where we find the most profitable new techniques to market our wares.  The problem is, a lot of affiliates forget where the line is, and once crossed they never return.  There may be a rush of feeling like you’ve cheated the system and made money so easily that it should be illegal, and in most cases, it is!

What bothers me the most about this is that I have seen so many extremely talented programmers & marketers get paid absolutely nothing for their efforts, not to mention the risk of litigation and/or jail time.  I can’t help but think that if these individuals put their skills to work on the numerous legal and above-the-board marketing methods, they could be rolling in the dough right now.

If any of this is sounding familiar to you, do yourself a favor and cut out the crap.  It doesn’t take a genious to cloak Craigslist traffic and trick people into signing up for offers.  It also doesn’t take a genius to iframe an email submit box onto a page, obscuring everything but the submit button.  Even if you fool everyone on the front end, there is still the advertiser’s back end, which is where most of these schemes are hung out to dry.  It is very easy for an advertiser to tell who is sending junk traffic and who is not, and the second they alert your affiliate network, say goodbye to those commissions.

A side note to the scammers are the people that put so much time and energy into marketing online offers offline.  This is the most counter-intuitive thing I have ever heard of.  The internet presents the most flexible, trackable, and profitable means of marketing ever devised.  Why is it that so many new affiliates think it would be such a great idea to go back to the dark ages of using paper flyers or telesales to get people to their landing pages?  The printing press was invented in 1439.  Get over it.  Besides, you are killing trees with your stupid spam flyers.  There is no physical way possible to generate the amount of traffic to affiliate offers through these archaic methods as there is through search engines, email marketing, media buying, PPV, and all the other online methods.  You think you can hand out enough flyers on a college campus to drive 1,000 ringtones leads in one day?  Even if it were possible, what about the next day?  What about at 3 AM when you should be sleeping?  Are your flyers out there handing themselves out?  I didn’t think so.

Like I said, it’s not that hard to figure out how to do this the right way, and the other opportunities that present themselves simply by being good at what you do are limitless.  There is no telling what is on the horizon in this industry, and companies are always looking for marketers on the cutting edge.  Just make sure it’s the right edge.

Is Affiliate Marketing Recession-Proof?

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The economic meltdown has garnered a ton of press & blog time as of late.  There is a lingering question in the industry about how we will fare during a nationwide recession.  There are the naysayers that cry that consumers will sit on their wallets in a crisis, and when no one is spending money then it is hard for companies to justify their ad spend.  Would online marketing budgets be the first on the chopping block?  Given the nationwide decline of newspapers and their ability to drive revenues, I highly doubt it.

We are in a unique position among most workers in the United States, because when something threatens our position and our viability in the marketplace, we can actually do something about it.  If consumers are behaving differently than they do in an upward market, we can adjust our campaigns accordingly.

What types of offers could do well in a situation like this?  Well let’s think about it…  Consumers are worried because times are tight… They need money.  How about Cash Advance?  Maybe Foreclosure Avoidance?  What about Credit Repair?  These are all verticals that are going to be in high demand during this time.  You just have to be creative, and think about new ways to appeal to consumers.  If they can’t afford to buy a vacation, perhaps they would be more likely to enter an Email Submit offer where they could get a trip for free, or a $1,000 Gas card.  There are a ton of these types of offers on most affiliate networks out there.

In essence, there might be less money to throw away on a Shamwow or the latest diet product, but people always are going to have a need for something or have a problem to solve.  Your goal as an affiliate marketer is to be the solution to that problem.

These hard economic times aren’t going to last forever, just yesterday we had the highest single-day rally in the stock market since the 1930’s.  If you build a solid foundation to your business by diversifying your campaigns, you will be ready to capitalize when the economy comes back.  Look on the bright side, you know you aren’t going to go in to work on Monday morning to hear that you have been laid off!

So forget the noise, it is a great time to be an affiliate marketer.

Just Do Something!

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I’ve been reading blogs all day about what you should do to start making money online. There is a lot of info out there. Some of it is legit, and most of it is complete crap. The one piece of advice that sticks in my mind is this: stop reading about it and get out there and do it!

It doesn’t matter what your niche is if you never create your site.  It doesn’t matter what your keywords are if you never create an AdWords campaign.  It doesn’t matter which banner you use if you never place it on your website.  There are a million and one different ways to market things on the internet.  What separates the men from the boys is action.

As you know, I am an Affiliate Manager for CPA Empire, one of the largest Affiliate Networks in the world.  We have hundreds of new affiliates apply for our network every single day, and a lot of them get approved and assigned an AM (like myself).  The thing that never ceases to amaze me is how quickly today’s excited new affiliate turns into tomorrow’s $0.00 affiliate.  I would say that, on average, 80% of my new affiliates never respond to the first email that I send them.

Don’t worry, this is not a post dedicated to ranting and raving about the ins and outs of being an AM.  It is meant to be an encouragement.  When people get into this industry, they are so full of hope and wonderment.  The idea of making money from their computer at home is so foreign to them that it’s almost hypnotizing.  Just like with anything new, they dive into forums, subsribe to newsletters, maybe even spring for a conference or two.  But, again, it all adds up to hollow effort if you aren’t practicing what you learn.

I’m sure that most of us know how to ride a bike, so you can relate to this.  When my dad tried to teach me how to ride a bike, he explained everything that he could about the mechanics of the bike and what kept it upright.  All that knowledge could not prepare me for what it felt like to get on the seat and try to pedal away from him that first time.  What did help was him running beside me and holding the bike up while I got a feel for the balancing act of riding.

You can use resources like forums, newsletters and conferences to keep you on track, but you have to start pedaling before you’re going to go anywhere.  Even if you suck at it, you will be ahead of 90% of the people that populate those forums.  In case you haven’t noticed, even the experts are still learning.  We are in one of the fastest growing and fastest changing industries in the history of mankind, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

So strap in, sit down, get an energy drink or some coffee, and do some actual internet marketing.  It might do you some good!

Are ringtones dead?

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether we  have seen the peak in the ringtones market.  I personally don’t think that ringtones are dead just yet.  However, they are a lot harder to get in to if you are a new affiliate.  The keywords on the big 3 search engines are getting to be quite expensive, and without the higher payouts that the top affiliates are getting from their networks, it is almost impossible to be competitive.  There are, of course, other ways to promote ringtones besides search, but it’s not exactly going to be like the glory days when bids were low and conversions were high, and the ads could say “Free Ringtones!” without mentioning the $9.99 that would mysteriously end up on their phone bill the next month.

These changes are bittersweet, because although they have made it a tougher industry to compete in, they have also legitimized it to the point where now the carriers are trying to figure out how they can get a bigger piece of the action.  The lingering question is, once the carriers (T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, etc.) decide to take control of the ringtones game, would they need affiliate marketers anymore?  Obviously we all know the value that we bring to the advertisers, more so than than even they do, I’m sure.  But the carriers hold the power, they control the medium, and if they decide to flip the killswitch, it’s game over.

One bright spot amidst all these rumors of war & doomsday predictions is the International Ringtones market.  Countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK are nowhere near the saturation level that we are experiencing here in the United States.  The point of this article is not to get into a heated debate about specific offers and how they are converting in what countries, it’s just to gain a high-level perspective of where the market is going.  For those that keep their ear to the ground and jump into new countries and markets at the right time, the rewards could be great.