Were MMORPGs The First Social Media Platform?

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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

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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

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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

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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!

Testing Offers 101: From Red to Green

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One of the toughest ongoing questions for affiliate marketers is, “How do I know when I’ve spent enough money testing an offer?”  Everybody has a different approach. There are a couple of truths that we need to look at.

  1. It is very rare to find a campaign that is profitable right out of the gate. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it is very rare. In most cases you will need to test, optimize, test, optimize, then test some more before you really get it dialed in and profiting enough to make it worthwhile.
  2. Some campaigns will not work no matter how much testing and optimizing you do. There is nothing more frustrating than beating a dead horse.

Sound like a Catch 22? It all boils down to your tolerance for pain, or your willingness to lose (or I like to say “invest”) money in a campaign before it sees a profit. How do you test properly without blowing too much money, and still avoid dropping potentially profitable campaigns too early? Here’s what I like to do…

First of all, when you setup a campaign, you want to spend about 2x to 3x the payout of the offer for the initial test. If the offer payout is $5, then you want to spend approximately $10 – $15 on the initial test phase. This is the “gathering data” phase.

Stats

Green is good

Once you have done this, you will have some data to work with (assuming you’ve been tracking everything, with Tracking202 or a similar program). Here’s the type of questions you want to ask in order to evaluate your data:

Did it get any conversions at all? If so, what keywords / urls / referrers / ad copies / banners were they from? Did you make a profit? Would it be profitable if you bid on less keywords? Would it be profitable if you bid on more keywords for a cheaper price? The list goes on, but these questions should give you a start.

For me personally, after the initial testing phase, if I haven’t received any conversions at all, I usually dump the campaign. That’s -100% ROI, and that’s going to be hard to overcome without a drastically different strategy, and it’s probably not worth it. If you are anywhere from -50% ROI to 0% ROI, then you might be able to profit with optimization. Try using a landing page or direct linking (whichever you didn’t do the first time), try different ad copies, pictures, headlines, calls to action, etc. Use the data from the test to see what is working and what is not working.

However you got those conversions in the testing phase, focus on that precise set of circumstances and recreate them in greater volume. Once you understand how and why you got some conversions, you are well on your way to having an optimized and profitable campaign.

Now go make some money!

Affiliate Marketing Is Dead, Everyone Move On

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How many times have you heard someone echoing this doomsday sentiment lately?  People act as if this has never happened before.  I can hear them now… “But Facebook ads are way harder to get approved now!  Plenty of Fish doesn’t have enough traffic!  Nobody believes offers anymore, they are getting too smart!  There are too many competitors on PPV!”

Oh noes! Aff mktg is dead!

Oh noes! Aff mktg is dead!

Maybe you got into affiliate marketing by accident.  Maybe you fell into your first profitable campaign and haven’t been able to duplicate it.  Maybe you’ve been sitting on autopilot spending all of your Acai money.  Whatever the case, these next few months are what separate the men from the boys.

This entire industry goes in cycles.  Much like the stock market.  There are bear markets and there are bull markets.  Can people make money in both?  Absolutely.  But not by doing the same thing.  Take a look around.  What are people talking about?  What are the fads now that you can make money off of?  What are the new traffic sources or affiliate offers that are popping up?

There is opportunity everywhere, but it is going to take some work to monetize it.  Let’s face it, the “work” that we have to do in this industry is not that bad.  We are not grabbing our shovels and pickaxes and going back into the coal mine.  We sit here in front of our computers every single day and make a lot of money for it.  The only thing that changes is you are actually doing work instead of screwing around on forums and wasting time all day.

To all the whiners out there, I hate to be harsh, but shut up and get back to work.

Hydra Acquired by Adknowledge

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Well, it has finally happened. MediaPost is reporting that Adknowledge has acquired Hydra.  Everyone knew this was coming, no surprises here.  Numbers were not disclosed, but I’m guessing that it wasn’t much money.  Nickycakes speculated that this was coming back when they canceled all those affiliate accounts a few months ago.  Looks like you were right, Mr. Cakes.

hydra

Breaking Down Your PPV Campaign

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So you’ve scraped several hundred urls, you have launched the campaign on at least one PPV network, and you have traffic coming in.  What now?  Well, chances are you are not going to be profitable right off the bat.  If you are then, great!  But there is still optimization that can be done.  If you are just under the line, even about -50% ROI, you can probably pull it up into the black with a little adjustment.

A lot of times you will find that out of those several hundred urls that you scraped, only one or two will give you the majority of the traffic right off the bat.  If it’s a site like google.com or facebook.com that slipped in there by accident, then you should just pause those.  But if it’s a site that is related to your niche that gets a ton of traffic, then it is time to break down your PPV campaign.

Breaking down the wall

Here’s what I mean by that: take out that #1 url, the one that is getting the most traffic, and make a new campaign just for that url.  Then, you want to create a landing page that is specifically targeted towards users of that page.  You want to match the style of it and the colors as well as you can, so that it feels like a natural extension of the site they are visiting instead of an intrusive popup.

If you can achieve this, you are bound to see a large increase in your click-throughs and hopefully conversions as well.  There are still no guarantees, but this method is one of the best ways to optimize your campaign and either get it profitable or squeeze even more profit out of it.

Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

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You’ve heard about them.  People that make their money entirely online.  A world of sleeping in until noon everyday, working in your underwear, and taking champagne baths bought with all of the money you are making in Affiliate Marketing.  But hold on just a sec cowboy…  While it’s true that many new affiliates jumping into the game right now will someday reach that level, it is not something that happens overnight.

champagne

Affiliate Marketing can be stressful.  You can spend hours, weeks, and months testing out offer after offer, trying to break through and find that first big campaign.  Then once you have found it, the network can take it right out from under you, or Google & Facebook can take away your traffic on a whim.  So now you are back at square one.

This all sounds very discouraging.  I’m not trying to talk anybody out of pursuing a career online, but I am trying to get you to take a realistic look at what you are getting yourself into.  You are starting a business.  Starting a business is hard.  You certainly don’t want to jump into the deep end of the pool before you have even learned the dog paddle.

The best advice I can keep you is this: don’t quit your day job! If you have the ability to absorb a few losses and keep yourself afloat while you are learning the ropes, you are going to have a much easier go of it than someone who needs a campaign to work in order to put food on the table for dinner.

Ask any successful affiliate how they got their start, and I would be willing to bet that most of them got into this as a hobby or a part-time thing while they were still working somewhere else.  When you are ready to go full-time, make sure that you have a bankroll saved up to float yourself for at least 3 months or so, in case things don’t quite go the way you wanted.

If you put in the extra work to set yourself up for success in your new business, that champagne will taste even sweeter when it comes.