The Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Posts of 2010

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Josh Todd

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.

CPV Lab: Tested and Reviewed

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Josh Todd

CPV Lab came out a month or two back, and you couldn’t read a blog that had anything to do with PPV or CPV marketing without seeing an ad or a review for it. I read through a lot of them and they just went over the features that it had, but nobody had actually run any campaigns with it yet. I decided to hold off on my review until I used it as my main tracking solution for PPV campaigns for an entire month. So what’s the verdict? Read on…

The install process for CPV Lab was relatively painless. Just upload it to your server, enter your MySQL database into into the config file, and run the installer script. Pretty much the same process as Prosper202 or any web-based script. After logging in, I did get the overall feeling that CPV Lab was designed to be lightweight and quick on its feet. There is not a lot of flashy interface design here, it is just the important info that you need to see quickly and it loads fast. I like that about it.

The six different campaign types in CPV Lab

Setting up the first campaign with CPV Lab was a breeze. All you do is paste in your affiliate link and/or landing page URL, and tell it how you want to rotate things. I haven’t even been able to dive in deep and try all of the advanced campaign types that this thing allows, but the primary Direct Link / Landing Page campaign type works like a dream. You can just set up one direct link campaign, or rotate several. You can set up one landing page, or rotate several. But then, you can rotate multiple offers on the backend of each of those landing pages. And you can also split test the landing pages against the direct link offers (one or many), all at once. And you can choose the weight for each of these rotating factors. If you want to test one at 10% and one at 90% of the traffic, CPV Lab has you covered. Mind = blown.

The weighted offer & landing page rotator

Once you set up the campaign, you get your link and put it in your campaign at the PPV network and you are good to go. It has several pre-made variables set up for the dynamic keyword insertion tokens for each network, so that makes it easy to get the subid tracking working correctly. All of this went pretty much as I expected, although I was definitely impressed by the number of rotation options. But the true beauty of CPV Lab doesn’t reveal itself until you actually have traffic live and running.

In PPV campaigns, you have to change things a lot. This is a pain because you have to get your page re-approved by the PPV network with every change that you make. At least that’s how it used to be. The #1, awesome, truly amazing thing about CPV Lab is that once you create your campaign, the tracking URL never changes! You can add and remove offers & landing pages, change rotation weights, and make any changes you want to the campaign without ever having to get re-approved by the PPV network. This is a massive time saver, and worth the price of admission by itself.

After you’ve got enough traffic to start analyzing the stats, CPV Lab shines again with its built-in optimization features. It will automatically highlight winning and losing targets and keywords on your stats page, based on metrics that you set on the settings page. If you want to consider every keyword that has more than a 25% ROI a winner, you can do that. If you want to make everything that has received more than 100 reviews without a conversion a loser, you can do that. The options are limitless. This takes all the guesswork out of optimizing your campaigns and lets you focus on creating new ones. It will also show you Time & Day trends so you can set up day parting.

The time & day Trends chart

You can track conversion in real time with a pixel, and it fires much more consistently than the P202 pixel ever did for me. To get the actual cost data in there, you can upload the reports from your PPV network as often as you’d like. This allows you to calculate the proper cost per keyword, not just for the campaign overall. This was another thing that you couldn’t do with P202 for PPV campaigns. If you are paying $0.20 a view on one URL and $0.01 a view on all the other ones in your campaign, you better be dang sure that you know the difference when you are looking at your conversion stats and optimizing your campaign! CPV Lab does this beautifully.

Bottom line, if you run PPV traffic, you need to get CPV Lab. It will make you more productive, help you optimize your campaigns, and save you so much time doing it you will be dumbfounded. I know this review might come out sounding like a sales letter, but I have never been so impressed with a piece of software in this industry, ever. Not to mention there are new add-ons coming soon to work with Facebook, Plenty of Fish, etc.

Do yourself a favor and buy it now. If you buy through my link, I would be more than happy to help you with any CPV Lab questions or troubleshooting that you need. I also am good friends with the creator, Robert Matthew, so if I can’t answer your question I’ll get it straight from him.

Bottom line: CPV Lab is amazing. You are losing money by not using it. I have used it personally on every PPV campaign for the last month, and I will not be going back. Ever.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Another Bevo Media Post

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Josh Todd

In case you haven’t seen all the posts lately (like this one and this one) about Bevo Media, it is now publicly launched and ready for action. It is a tracking platform for paid traffic, along the lines of Prosper202. It does have a lot of nifty features that 202 doesn’t have, and they are putting some serious marketing muscle behind this release to make it a major player in the PPC / PPV / Media Buy tracking & analytics field.

Bevo Media was designed by Ryan Bukevicz and a team of programmers, and the finished product is definitely quite polished. The interface is quite visually striking. But looks aside, there are several things that set it apart from 202 and other competitors. First of all, it has built-in support for the top CPA affiliate networks. You just enter your login details and it will automatically pull the stats for you. This is a massive time saver! It also has built-in API support for the big 3 PPC engines. This means that it will pull your click costs automatically as well. That means no more logging in to your networks and search engines 10 times a day. Bevo Media becomes your hub for everything.

Another cool feature that I’ve never seen before in a tracking system is the Classroom. It has different articles, videos, and tools to help the newbie affiliate get their feet wet and make some money. If you are already a successful affiliate, there’s probably nothing in here that will be new to you. But if you are just starting out it’s definitely worth a look.

They have both an online hosted version (like Tracking202.com), and they also have an open source self-hosted version (like Prosper202). They both look the same, and if you opt for the self-hosted version they have a very nifty tool that will automatically install and configure it on a Rackspace Cloud server for you. For people that have never installed anything on web server before, this is a godsend.

So is Bevo Media better than Prosper202? Ultimately that decision is going to be up to you. 202 has a lot of diehard fans, and it’s become the industry standard over the last couple of years. That being said, I think for people running PPC traffic from the big 3 search engines, this is going to give them a huge advantage over the standard Prosper202 installation. It’s more on par with Tracking 202 Pro, only it’s free. Definitely give it a shot if you’ve got some time to test it out, and let me know what you think of it in the comments!

AffExpert > AffPortal (A Review)

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Josh Todd

AffPortal was the first “PPV Tools” website on the block. It took a whole bunch of tasks that PPV marketers have to do on a regular basis, and made them faster and easier. Things like URL scraping, etc. Now that it’s been out for a while, a competitor has sprung up called AffExpert. At first I was skeptical, because I am a huge fan of AffPortal. But once I got the chance to dig in and use the tools during their free Beta period (which has expired), they won me over.

Most of the tools are self-explanatory by the title, but there are a couple of things that I really like about AffExpert’s system that make it unique:

When you are scraping URLs, it automatically shows you the Alexa, and Quantcast rankings for all of them. This is pretty cool because you can tell how much traffic a target is going to get before you even test it out on the PPV network.
There is a really cool Basket system that you can save all the URLs to that you want to keep, and then download them all at once in one nice file. This eliminates the all-too-common problem of duplicate URLs you get when you are scraping through other methods, and it will also give you the option to add or remove the final slash (/) at the end of the URLs. Since PPV networks like DirectCPV consider “domain.com” to be a different URL than “domain.com/”, this can be handy.

URL Scraper in action

Here are the PPV/CPV tools available:

Related Keywords
URL Scraper
Site Analytics (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast)
Domain Expander
Related Domains Finder
Top 1 Mil Domain Explorer
Domain Typos
URL Query Generator
YouTube Scraper
URL Follower

There are also some PPC tools:

Google Campaign Builder
Competition Spy
Adsense Finder
Keyword Grouper

There is also a self-hosted Weighted URL Rotator. You can install this on your own server so you don’t have to worry about the data being snatched by somebody else (unless they have access to your server, and then you are just a moron).

I haven’t personally used the PPC tools much, so I can’t report on how they work. That being said, it’s nice to get them for the one monthly fee, and if you are paying for another keyword tool that does the same thing, you can eliminate that extra expense and just use one tool set for everything.

All in all, I highly recommend AffExpert. I use it personally on every PPV campaign I do, and it is a major time saver. You can get a 7-day, fully functional trial for only $1, so what are you waiting for, give it a shot!

P.S. Use promo code “BETAUSER” to get a discounted membership for life.

10 Reasons That #ASW10 Was The Best One Yet

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Josh Todd

1. I finally got to meet the legendary Andrew Wee. Wee is my brother from an Asian mother. One of my favorite moments from the show was in the elevator at the Palms. It was me, Wee, and Boone, and some random dude gets into the elevator and starts screaming, “All I wanna know is, Who the F*** is Andrew Wee?!?”. It was hilarious.

2. The parties were off the hook. From PPC.bz & Nickycakes Paper Clique Jump Off to CX’s Billionaire Party, there were some awesome shindigs at this conference. There were affiliate nerd-core freestyle rap battles, a dance routine featuring a live python, and even some very tasty cheesecake desserts.

3. The check-in lines were super fast. Actually when Boone and I checked in there was no line. That was a big improvement from last year’s hour long lines.

4. The Meet Market was packed. There were 2 rooms this year, and there were bodies from end to end with tables somewhere in the middle. If you are a network or other exhibitor, the Meet Market is some of the best bang for your buck you can get. It’s only 6 hours long, but there is serious networking to be done at this part of the event.

5. The high-caliber affiliates were out in force. I’m sure that there are always ballers at ASW, but the sheer amount of them and time I was able to spend chatting & networking with affiliates at this conference was way above average. Definitely higher than at any of the shows I went to in 2009.

6. Time-wasters were at a bare minimum. With a couple of rare exceptions, the people that I talked to didn’t waste my time. I’m not sure if I was just better at spotting them from a distance and avoiding them this time or what, but usually I have an entire stack of cards to put in the “Do Not Follow Up” file when I get home. Not so this year.

7. Rooms were cheap and excellent this year. I paid way too much money for a really terrible crappy room for Ad-Tech NY last year, so my expectations were already pretty low. However, we stayed at the Gold Coast and it was awesome. Sure, the average age of the people in the casino was 55, and the place has not been a hot spot for years, but it was about $60 a night, and it was an ideal location because it is sandwiched right between the Rio (where the convention is) and the Palms (where most of the parties were at). No taxis needed, everything was within walking distance.

8. I didn’t have to stand at a booth all day long. Having a booth can be worth it sometimes, but also it is a major pain. You have to get up early, be at the convention all day for both days so your feet are killing you, and worst of all you have to talk to every single person that comes by your booth (i.e. time-wasters). Not having a booth this year was nice, since I got to cruise around and network more freely.

9. Meetup202 was EPIC. It would have been worth flying out to Vegas just for the Meetup202 event alone. It was that good. The attendance was huge (several hundred people), Wes & the Bloosky guys put on a great presentation, and the tips at the end from the individual Meetup202 organizers from various cities were really good. I am super proud of Wes, Steven, and the whole 202 gang for chasing their dreams and making them a reality, and super thankful for all of the hard work they have put into their software and the affiliate community as a whole.

10. The wrap-up post was easy to write. I usually avoid writing these posts after a show, but this one practically wrote itself. Affiliate Summit West is officially my favorite show of the year, and you are cheating yourself out of growing your business and having a great time doing it if you don’t go in 2011.

HasOffers: A Legit Review

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Josh Todd

Since HasOffers released their affiliate tracking platform, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the company and the product. Most of it has been stirred up either by DirectTrack competitors or people that use DirectTrack other platforms. I thought I would pitch in my 2 cents worth since I have been using HasOffers everyday for about 4 months now. This is not a paid post, and there are no affiliate links in this post.

Campaign Setup

A lot of a network’s time is spent setting up campaigns. Besides checking Stats, it’s the one activity that I do on a very regular basis, often daily. Since I’ve started using HasOffers they have updated the Campaign Setup a couple of times and added new features, but it is still very clean and to the point. You put in the name, description, tracking link, set your prices, geo-targeting, etc. and you are good to go. There are some unique features such as browser targeting (even including mobile browsers), Campaign Groups for geo-targeting multiple offers, and allowing campaigns to convert multiple times. Most of the time I don’t use these features but it is nice to have the option. Once you have it set up and hit submit, it takes you to the pixel where you can copy & paste it to send to the advertiser, or you can just click once and have it emailed to them automatically, which is very cool. Also, it creates a test link for you which saves a lot of time.

Tracking

Tracking is probably the most important aspect of a network platform. Does it track? In a word, yes. HasOffers is very accurate in tracking conversions. The default pixel type is an iFrame pixel, which seems to work better than the Script pixels that most other platforms use. It supports 3rd party pixels for Affiliates, and on my network I have it setup so that affiliates can place these themselves with automatic approval. Also, you can choose whether you want HasOffers to track All Clicks that come through an affiliate link, or just Unique Clicks. I have mine set to All, since affiliates always complain that their clicks aren’t tracking otherwise.

Creatives

The File Manager is where you upload creatives for your offers. It runs on a CDN server, and they host all your creatives so you don’t need to have a gallery somewhere else. It supports Image Banners, HTML Creatives, Flash Banners, and Offer Thumbnails (so that a picture appears next to the offer name in the interface, similar to LinkTrust). I particularly like the Flash Banner setup, it is super simple. All you need to do is upload your SWF file, tell it what the height and width are, and it does the rest. I’ve used some other setups that are a royal pain for Flash.

Reporting

I really, really like the reporting in HasOffers. First of all, it’s fast. I can tell it exactly what information I want to see, and it displays it quickly. Coming off of using DirectTrack, the difference is night and day. I used to spend a good hour or two a day just waiting for DirectTrack to load reports. I like it better than LinkTrust’s reporting as well, which I’ve always found a bit cumbersome to use. On the affiliate side, the reporting allows them to pass a “source” variable (such as Google or Yahoo) as well as 5 separate sub id variables if they choose, and they actually work. The #1 reason that affiliates login to a network is to check their stats, and this is one area that HasOffers really shines.

Affiliate Interface

HasOffers looks and feels very different than LinkTrust or DirectTrack. Both of those systems have been around for a while, and they are starting to show their age. On the contrary, HasOffers has a decidedly Web 2.0 feel to it, with soft edges and animated bar graphs for revenue and total leads generated right on the home page when affiliates log in. It looks great right out of the box, but network owners can use their own custom CSS & logos to give it their own look. Also, a new feature was added recently to select from a variety of different Themes to change up the look with one click. I have received quite a few compliments from affiliates who are logging in for the first time, it just looks a lot fresher than the other platforms.

Last Word

I think that a lot of the venom that has been spewed at HasOffers is due to the fact that they are offering their entry-level product for free. This means that the barrier of entry to creating a network has been lowered to almost nothing. I think there is some truth to this as well as some exaggeration. A network is based on trust and relationships above all else. It doesn’t matter what software they are using. Anybody who spends a lot of time and money promoting offers from an affiliate network that just popped up yesterday and has no reputation in the industry is just asking to get ripped off. Do your homework, run with people that you trust and you will have much less risk of things going wrong.

You may have heard that HasOffers’ parent company, Adapp Solutions, is owned by the owners of Tatto Media affiliate network. This is true. Does it mean that Tatto is going to steal all of your data? If you are using any 3rd party tracking platform at all, the security of your data is a concern, but the fact is that a large part of the networks in the industry are powered by them. These service providers all put a lot of work into making sure that your data is secure, and HasOffers is no exception.

I have used both DirectTrack and LinkTrust extensively, and I like HasOffers better, hands down. Sign up for a free account now!

Affiliate Jump (Off A Cliff)

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Josh Todd

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.

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

Posted on July 30, 2009 by Josh Todd

If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts. Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea. A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher. I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor. When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site. The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on. It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window. This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool. This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche. One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you. This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them. This tool does it all for you. Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page. This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in. These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results. It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it. On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day. As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run. You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package. I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash. If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads. I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better. If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link. If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.