Be Original (Like Everybody Else)

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Josh Todd

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.

My 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.

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Josh Todd

Edit 12/21/2010: The information in this post is outdated. For an up-to-date and complete guide to setting up your PPV campaigns with Prosper202, download my free eBook, “PPV 101”.

Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT. Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202. Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time. Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.

The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202. With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy. Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.

The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it””s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools. What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network. By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202. When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:

yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=

You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”. You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.

First, download John Hasson””s JAH Simple PPC tool. It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:

It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs. Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC. Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations. Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.

With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form. Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form. Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form. The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name. Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).

Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go! If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form. Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.

Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Landing Pages For PPV

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Josh Todd

We all know that landing pages are a very important part of PPC marketing, but it is important to realize that they can have a huge effect on your PPV (Contextual) campaigns as well. It seems like most people that start PPV are just doing it to direct link. It is quite attractive to forget about all the variables except the offer and the URLs you are targeting, but you might be hurting yourself in the long run by doing this.

For example, I was experimenting with a ringtones campaign on Media Traffic. I had about 1,000 URLs setup for my targets, and I decided to just start with direct linking by grabbing my Contextual Affiliate Link for the campaign (it was Ringtones.net at affiliate.com). It started getting traffic immediately after I set it live, and before the day was out I had about 1,000 views (displays) on the offer. To my dismay, there wasn’t a single lead showing!

What I didn’t realize initially is that Media Traffic only displays a 750 by 550 window for your ad. Once I tested it, I realized that with the smaller window size a good portion of my ad was being obscured. No wonder it wasn’t converting very well, they were only looking at half of a landing page! I asked my account rep, and he confirmed that 750 by 550 is the max for MT as of now. They are considering going to 800 by 600 (like Zango) sometime in the future.

This was what led me to create my first landing page for a PPV campaign. The main reason was so that I could control exactly what was being viewed by the user when my ad pops up. For starters, I made sure that the LP I created was exactly 750 by 550. There would be nothing obscured this time. Also, with PPV you don’t have to worry about putting a bunch of arbitrary text on the page, because there is no Quality Score issues or “User Experience” to worry about. The results to my initial LP were very promising. I put it up on Friday night, and by the end of the day Sunday I had generated a 20% profit. Not too shabby for the first try.

I quickly realized that one of the other benefits to having an LP is that you can tell how many people are clicking on your ad and determine your click-thru ratio. If you are just direct linking to the Contextual link then you will lose all your click data, and impressions and leads alone are not enough info to tweak your campaign for the maximum profit. On my page for example, I found out that I was getting about a 2.3% CTR. The next step would be to play with the ad copy & images on the landing pages to get a higher CTR. For PPV, it needs to be something eye-catching so they don’t just immediately close the window when it pops up. Consider what page they are going to be viewing already when the ad pops up, and consider modeling it after the design of that page.

Whatever you do, testing is the key. The right ad, displayed to the right people, is what creates a killer campaign. Now go make some money!

Stop Cheating Yourself Out Of Money

Posted on January 19, 2009 by Josh Todd

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.

How To Direct Link On Google – Part 2

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Josh Todd

My last post has generated a lot of response and questions from people, so I wanted to discuss a couple of other points about the method that I outlined in Part 1.

First of all, there is the question of whether this method could get you banned from Google AdWords. I would consider this a gray-area technique. It’s not something that is an instant ban, but if you exploit it to a huge degree, then yes, it could lead to your account being terminated.

The reason that I posted this method is that it can be a great way to test out a campaign, but I can’t stress enough that you should be building landing pages for offers that have proven successful with the direct link method. It is very hard to build a long-term, sustainable business on the internet without creating a website.

Second, some people have questioned the ethics of using another site that doesn’t belong to you as the display URL. The easiest response there is, if you don’t feel comfortable doing it, then don’t do it. An alternative to using someone’s website is that you can use a domain that you own as the Display and Destination URL to get your ad approved, then switch the link to your affiliate link with Edit Keyword Settings like I suggested. This way you don’t have to spend the time to build out a full dedicated landing page, but you are still using your own domain so you won’t get any complaints from other webmasters or feel bad about doing it.

I would also like to stress that the tutorials that I publish on this blog are not meant to be the absolute blueprint to success with affiliate marketing. There is no such blueprint. The goal with this blog is to give you, the reader, some good tips & advice to get going with some campaigns and marketing methods, and then you can tweak them and customize them to find what works the best for you.

There is a lot of money to be made in this industry, and it’s not always going to be easy. It’s a lot easier than working 60 hours a week in a job that you hate to bring home just enough to keep the bill collectors at bay though… Anything with the kind of potential that you have as an affiliate marketer is going to take some time to become successful at, but the rewards are definitely worth the effort that you put in.

That being said, I will continue to offer more strategies and tutorials, and I will do my best to answer your questions & comments to steer you in the right direction. So keep reading, and keep the feedback coming!

How To Direct Link On Google

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Josh Todd

Direct linking on Google is a very popular way to test out affiliate offers to see how they convert before you devote the time to building a landing page. To get started, you need to login to your Google AdWords account and start a new campaign. You want to start a New Campaign with Keywords, not Placements.

Be sure to choose the proper country for the offer that you are promoting. Google recently threw a monkey wrench into the works by setting the default countries to “United States and Canada”. A lot of CPA offers will only accept traffic from one or the other, not both. So pick your country and move on.

Creating your first ad will be the next step. An ad consists of a Headline, 2 Description lines, a Display URL, and a Destination URL. Go ahead and create a catchy headline and a descriptive ad containing a call to action, you want to get people to click on your ad now, not next week or next year.

The Display URL is an important step, and this is where we are going to trick Google into thinking that you already have a website built out for your offer. Just do a normal Google search for your main keyword and pick a URL from one of the sites that appears in the organic (non-sponsored) links. Make sure that the URL is not also advertised in the Sponsored Links on the right side of the page, because if it is, this trick won’t work. Copy the URL and paste it into the Display URL box.

Now that you’ve got your Display URL, you want to use the exact same URL for your Destination URL. I know what you are thinking, “But wait, how will I get paid for sending traffic to a site that isn’t mine?”. Fear not, we are going to fix that in the next step. This is just to get Google to approve your ad and hopefully assign you with a decent Quality Score.

So at this point your ad should look something like this:

Next you will choose your Keywords and enter your Daily Budget and CPC (Cost Per Click) bids. Keyword generation and selection is a topic for an entire discussion in itself, so I will just advise you to do your research before hand and have some keywords to get started with before you setup your campaign. Google’s Free Keyword Tool is an excellent place to start.

We are almost done. Go ahead and review everything and hit Save Campaign. Now we need to do the final step to direct the traffic to your affiliate link instead of the website that you are using for your display URL. Once you have saved the campaign, you will be taken to the campaign overview screen. Click on the Keywords tab, and then check the box to select all of your keywords. Once you have them all selected, click the Edit Keyword Settings button.

This will take you to a screen where you can input a new Destination URL for each keyword. Go ahead and put your affiliate link into the first field, then hit the little down arrow button, this should copy the URL into all of the keywords for you. So, for example, if your affiliate link is http://login.tracking101.com/ez/aasldkfjd (not a real link), it should look something like this:

UPDATE: Make sure that you remove the http:// from your affiliate link when you put it into this Destination URL box, because it will give you an Illegal Characters In URL error if you don’t. There is a drop-down box to the left of where you put the link in that lets you select http:// or https:// for a secure affiliate link. It defaults to http:// which is what most networks use.

Then just hit Save Changes, and you are good to go. Congratulations, now you know how to get a direct-linked campaign approved on Google.

Now go make some money!

Marketing CPA Offers On PPV – Part 2

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Josh Todd

Time to get back to work! I hope you all had a Merry Christmas. When we left off in the last post, I had recommended that you sign up with some CPA Networks and the 5 major contextual networks. Now that we have done that step, we can move on to the juicy stuff.

In PPV traffic, you can target keywords if you want to, similar to PPC. However, I would not recommend this method unless you have a larger budget and you want to get some fairly general traffic to an offer quickly. The biggest advantage to PPV, in my opinion, is that you are able to target much more specifically by using URLs. As you probably know, there are literally billions of different URLs on the internet, the key is going to be finding the ones that will make you money.

It’s really quite simple. Once you have an offer from your CPA network that you want to promote, you will go to Google (and Yahoo & Bing if you want to be really thorough), and search for each of the key phrases that you want to target. For example, if you are promoting a Ringtones offer, you could search for Ringtones, top ringtones, Beyonce ringtones, Lil Wayne ringtones, Lady GaGa tones, etc.

When you get the search engine results for each of your terms, there are going to be both natural (also called organic) results, and paid (or sponsored) results. The sponsored results usually appear to the right of or sometimes above the organic listings. Open up an Excel spreadsheet or a Notepad, then copy the display URL for the top 10 organic sites and the top 10 sponsored results. Rinse and repeat for each of your keywords.

Once you have done this with 10-20 keywords/phrases, on each of the 3 major search engines, you will have a decent-sized list of URLs to start with. If you are using Excel, use the Find Duplicates command to make sure that there aren’t any dupes in your list.

All you have to do now is upload your list of URLs to the PPV network(s). If you have more than a couple hundred URLs, most of them have some sort of bulk upload template that you can download and fill in, then re-upload to them with the URLs in it.

There you have it, a simple way to get going with PPV marketing with CPA offers, and you don’t have to create landing pages or register domains or any of that mess.

Now go make some money!

Marketing CPA Offers on PPV

Posted on December 23, 2008 by Josh Todd

For the uninitiated, PPV (Pay-Per-View) is a type of display advertising. It allows you to market your website, landing page, or CPA offer by displaying it for users that have downloadable software installed on their computer. Commonly called Adware, they get this software typically by using free games and services (like screensavers, etc.) from websites like GameVance.

A word about Adware: it is not Spyware! Spyware is a parasitic form of software that installs itself on your computer without your permission and can do anything from log your IP info and website history to install viruses on your computer. Adware is perfectly legal, and it is installed with the permission of the user when they download games & other software from different websites online. That being said, let’s continue with the overview…

There are five major PPV (also called Contextual) networks currently. They are Traffic Vance, Lead Impact, DirectCPV, Media Traffic, and AdOn Network. If you are new to PPV, I would highly recommend starting with just DirectCPV and Lead Impact, or even one of the two. Eventually, if you decide to get deeper into PPV, it would be advantageous to sign up with all of the networks, because they are all going to have different users with their software installed. Traffic Vance is a little harder to get started with because they require a $1,000 deposit up front as well as a referral to get ads running with them. Lead Impact requires $200, and Media Traffic & DirectCPV require $100 (I believe). AdOn Network requires a much smaller deposit, but they only offer Pop-Under ads instead of Full Page Pop-Up ads, which are much more effective.

You are also going to need to sign up with a few CPA networks, if you haven’t already. I would highly recommend Neverblue. You need to make sure that you are promoting the correct offer, as not all offers accept contextual / PPV traffic. They will sometimes have a special link that you have to use for PPV (called the “Contextual Link” on DirectTrack networks, and the DLS [Downloadable Software] Creative on Neverblue).

This should take you a good day or two to sign up for the PPV networks and the CPA networks, if you have already done this, just hang on, I am going to get more in-depth on how to promote offers in Part 2 of this post.

Server Change Successful!

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Josh Todd

I made the transistion from WordPress.com over to a self-hosted WordPress installation today, and my database survived intact! It was not my first time setting up a WP installation or anything, but it’s always nasty when you have to transfer databases… Not too many changes on the blog for now, although I am looking forward to finding a theme that works better for me, so you might see some more drastic visual changes coming up.

Also, this blog is going to be more of a priority for me going forward. So far I’ve done a few useful posts, but mostly industry news stuff. I like doing the news stuff so I will keep doing that, but I am going to do my best to share my experiences on the affiliate side of the game.

I want to have the whole package. I want to be a successful A.M. for affiliate.com, and I want to be a successful internet marketer by any other means possible as well. I will be posting different marketing tricks and my experience with them to help save you time when you decide to get the ball rolling on a new traffic stream.

So grab a chair, stick around, and feel free to leave a comment once in a while. If I know what you guys are dying to learn, then I can step up and take a swing at it myself. First up, I am experimenting with the fascinating (and sometimes confusing) world of PPV, or Contextual advertising. There will be a full post on this coming up soon. I just need to do some fine tuning on my campaigns before I spill the beans.

Oh, and if I don’t speak to you sooner, Merry Christmas!

Inside Affiliate

Making Money Online + Affiliate Marketing + PPV + PPC = Life