Why Tablets Will Change Everything

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I won a free iPad at Ad-Tech San Francisco. Since then, I have been playing with it and trying to figure out where it fits into my digital toolbox. I already have an iPhone and a MacBook, so do I really need this thing? The answer is a resounding yes.

iPad Pro

Fanboys rejoice, the iPad Pro is here

First and foremost, there is the look and feel. Yes, technically it’s just like a big iPod Touch, but in practice it is far different. You know how in Avatar they have those fully touch-controlled, transparent-monitored computers? It’s like that, only not transparent. But the sheer sensation of technological wonder you feel when surfing the web on an iPad is amazing.

The whole experience is so tactile. The web isn’t just a flat image on a screen anymore. You can touch it, drag it, zoom it, select it, copy it, and paste it, all with a couple flicks of your fingers. At first I wondered why there wasn’t a Facebook app for iPad, then I realized you can actually just use the real Facebook, not a watered-down version. And when you tap the Comment button instead of click it with a mouse, it is so much more satisfying…

The small issue of Flash support notwithstanding, the iPad can and will replace my MacBook as my travel companion. For marketers, you can easily check your stats, pause campaigns, respond to emails, and write blog posts from it (like I’m doing now, the WordPress app is killer!). The instant-on readiness and the battery life will blow away any laptop out there, bar none.

The only thing it’s not good for is doing intensive work such as creating campaigns and graphic design. As tablets become more powerful in the future, I could see them taking over that role as well. The iPhone is slated to get multitasking with the OS 4.0 update, will we see it on the iPad as well?

The bottom line is, when you are on an iPad, you don’t just surf the web, you integrate with it on a much different level. It is so natural to read a book, stream videos and movies, read comics, play games, and network in social media sites that it makes me look for excuses to get away from the computer and use it. As someone who uses the web every single day, the iPad is an amazing new way to experience it, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for tablet computing.

Ads Are Pending, What Now?

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There can be a lot of downtime in Affiliate Marketing. All of the social platforms, PPV networks, and many other traffic sources require manual approval of ads. This means that after you submit an ad you can be waiting anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days before you can see if all your hard work paid off. This can be frustrating, so what is a bored marketer to do when his ads are pending? Let’s look at some options…

Clock

Create More Ads

Ah yes, the old standard. We could certainly spend our time creating more ads. The problem with this is it leads to a downward spiral of waiting for ads to be approved. For me, it’s like for every campaign that has a group of ads pending takes up about 10% of my available brain power. So I’ve got five campaigns pending, then I’m seriously impaired. I can’t think of anything except whether or not the ads are approved, has my budget already been blown through, was the CTR any good, etc. So yes, I do create more ads in my downtime, but only up to a certain point.

Go to the Gym

This is a good idea that I had recently. Maybe I could take my downtime and start working off those internet marketer pounds that creep on so easily! I have yet to successfully pull it off, but in theory it works good. Working out relieves stress and takes your mind off of the ads that are pending. Come home, take a shower, have a bite to eat and then log back in and hit F5. I’ll have to try that…

Play Video Games

There is a self-destructive part of my brain that likes to think that after I’ve completed two hours of work for the day, I have earned the right to screw around for the remaining daylight hours. This is not true. This is one of those situations where you have to ask yourself, what would Ryan Eagle do? Love him or hate him, the guy is motivated. He knows what he wants, and he goes out there and gets it.

Write a Blog Post

Now we’re talking. What better thing to do with your downtime then write about your downtime in a blog post? It’s a great way to feel like you are doing something productive, while keeping your mind on the goal at hand. This is going to be my new go-to method for passing time. I made a mid-new-year’s resolution to try and blog every day. It’s harder than it looks.

Ok I think that’s all for now. Time to go check and see if my ads are approved yet.

What If Affiliate Marketing Was Easy?

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Some of you reading this blog right now are huge successful affiliates. To you, affiliate marketing is like breathing, you just wake up in the morning and do it. But for everyone else, breaking into affiliate marketing can seem like the hardest thing they have ever done. If you’ve never done anything but work for someone else, it can be a major shift in your mindset to get the motivation and the sheer will necessary to be successful making money online.

But what if Affiliate Marketing was easy? What if all you had to do was sit down at a computer, press a few buttons and money would come falling out? Well, for one, I think the national unemployment rate would go down because people would just get money from their computers instead of welfare and the government. But also, we would see an even larger influx of people jumping into the market than we have now.

Lazy Affiliate Marketer

If Affiliate Marketing was easy, there wouldn’t be any ebooks or over-expensive training seminars and programs. Maybe all the gurus would go back to selling things on infomercials and leave the internet marketers alone? Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad after all…

More importantly, if Affiliate Marketing was easy, I wouldn’t be doing it. Neither would a lot of people I know. Why? Because if it was easy then it wouldn’t be as profitable. If it was easy, advertisers wouldn’t need affiliates at all. They could just direct link their campaigns on their top keywords and the leads would come pouring in.

The reason that we have value is that we are willing to do the things that other people are not. We are willing to test hundreds of creatives and up to thousands of keywords. We are willing to spend money to make money. We are willing to keep creating campaigns even after the last five in a row have been a complete and utter failure. We are willing to work 80 hours a week for ourselves so that we can avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else.

If Affiliate Marketing was easy, it wouldn’t be any fun.

The Top 5 Prosper202 Hacks & Mods

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Almost every affiliate that I know (who is worth his salt) uses Prosper202 for their tracking. For the uninitiated, it is the open source version of Tracking202. Open source means that everyone is free to poke around in the code and mod or hack it to work better for their specific instance.  Also it means that you keeep all your data on your server and host the installation yourself. Since the release of Prosper202 there have been a few nifty hacks that have been released on various blogs, and they are a pain to track down so I thought I’d compile my favorite 5 mods here.

1. Adding New Traffic Source Icons To Prosper 202

This one comes from the Masterless Samurai himself, Wes. It’s a fairly simple mod, but extremely useful. The original P202 install only has a few Traffic Sources (PPC networks) built in. Now that affiliates are using P202 to track almost every traffic source imaginable, you will want to add the new icons in so you can see at a glance which accounts you are looking at in the Overview report. If there’s no icon, it just appears as a question mark. It’s nice to be able to add newer traffic sources like Plenty Of Fish, etc.

2. Redirect Prosper202 To Any Tab

This is one of two mods on this list by Jasper, aka Nerdy Affiliate. This one is also simple in nature but a big time saver. When you go to check your stats, it takes 3-4 steps for you to get to the information you want. With this mod, you can set it up to go straight to the reporting page that you want when you go to your tracking domain. Very handy.

3. Prosper202 LP Click-Through for Text Ads & Keywords Mod

This one is also from Nerdy Affiliate. It is a pretty deep mod that adds an additional layer of statistics that you can track: the landing page click-through rate on an individual keyword or text ad basis. This is used to compare the effectiveness of each keyword or text ad by seeing which ones generate the highest click-through rate from your landing page to the offer page. Without this mod, you are only able to tell the overall landing page click-through percentage for all keywords combined.

4. Prosper202 Offer Rotation Setup

This one is by AdHustler, and it’s not an actual hack to the software. It is just a different mindset for using the offer rotation feature in P202. This doesn’t take any coding to setup, just simply follow the instructions on the linked post and you will see how effective it can be for split testing offers to make sure you are getting the most money for your traffic.

5. Prosper202 Complete Install Package for Hostgator

Hostgator is one of the most popular web hosting companies our there. Because of this, more than a few people have tried to install Prosper202 on their Hostgator account and run into a nasty error. The guys at BlueLayerMedia have created an all-in-one fix and install package for version 1.3.2 of P202 that will get you up and running on your Hostgator account quicker than you can say “make monies online”.

If you’ve got a sweet hack that I didn’t list here, let me know in the comments and share the wealth! The open source nature of P202 and its users is what makes the software so essential.

Are You Serious Facebook?

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I know I’m a few days late in writing about this one, and I was going to let it go. But every time that I read or see a link to that recent letter from Facebook it just burns me up. You know, the one where they say, “CPM ads will continue to get impressions but may receive less clicks.”  Wait, what?!?

Here are my questions to you based on that letter, dear Facebook:

  1. How are you going to make CPM ads get less clicks? Does this mean that you are going to stop people from clicking on my ads somehow? I’d really like to know what you mean by that.
  2. What makes you think that other performance marketers and I are going to sit around and suddenly be okay with paying double the cost for our ads? There are plenty of other places out there to buy traffic, and now more than ever I am going to be moving campaigns over to them.
  3. Do you really compare yourself to Google as a traffic source now that you are the #1 site in the US for monthly visitors? I’ll make it easy for you: don’t. Google can charge $14 a click on top keywords because it’s worth it. People that are searching for a Mesothelioma Lawyer are worth thousands and thousands of dollars. People that are browsing a social media site looking for ways to waste the rest of the hours in their work day are not.

In conclusion, Facebook has made another major play to screw affiliate marketers and anyone that knows how to arbitrage traffic. Sooner or later, they are going to realize that it will hurt them in the long run when they have completely eliminated a massive source of advertising revenue. The real question is, by the time they figure this out, will affiliates have moved on?

This one has.

MyAds Minimum Bid Price Is Now 1 Penny

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MySpace MyAds has never been as popular as Facebook Ads.  One of the major reasons is that overall, the traffic quality doesn’t seem to be as good as Facebook.  That, coupled with a $0.25 minimum CPC on MyAds, led to Facebook taking the lead early on.  But the times, they are a-changin’…  I personally am sick of getting my ads rejected under Facebook’s stricter policies, and will definitely be giving MyAds another try.

Now that the minimum bid price is only $0.01 on MyAds, with the right targeting and a high CTR, it should be more than possible to get a very positive ROI.  Keep in mind that a lot of MySpace users these days are of a younger age, since most adults have moved on to Facebook. Try promoting offers that would appeal to the youngsters.

Also, don’t use the banners that your affiliate network has available for you on MyAds.  CTR is everything, and 9 times out of 10 those default banners bite the big one.  They aren’t split-tested and optimized, they are just thrown together by some graphic designer making $25 an hour that has no clue how to market things online.

And there you have it!  Let’s make some monies.

Does Reading Blogs Cause Blindness?

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I apologize in advance for the linkbait title. Now that you are here though, fine reader, I need your help. Since the start of this blog I have always had a reverse-type theme. This means a light font on a dark background. I chose this look because I wanted to stand out from all the other make money online blogs that all looked like copies of each other (black font on white background, typically blue header and theme).

Recently though, I was reading Ca$hvertising, an excellent book on marketing by Drew Eric Whitman (check it out if you haven’t already), and in one section he goes off about the evils of reverse-type fonts and how they are much harder to read and cause more eye strain on people. I know this blog isn’t an advertisement, but now that a few of you are actually reading this blog on a regular basis I thought I would leave it up to you.

So here’s a little poll… The future of Inside Affiliate’s theme is in your hands.

[poll id=”2″]

Ad-Tech SF 2010: I Can Has Traffics?

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As I walked through the Exhibit Hall of Moscone Center West for Ad-Tech San Francisco 2010, I got the feeling that I was one of many.  Many affiliates and advertisers that have been scorned by Google and, most recently, Facebook.  Many people that were looking for the next big thing, or even better, the traffic source with killer ROI that nobody knows about.  You probably won’t hear a lot of people blogging or tweeting about what they found, but based on my experience I would say that most people got their money’s worth.  Especially if they knew what they were looking for.

For me, the real value was in the three events that I attended on Tuesday. First was the AffBuzz meetup at ‘Wichcraft, an excellent sandwich shop just a couple blocks from the convention center.  This was a great event because there was nobody sponsoring it, it was just affiliates and bloggers chilling and talking shop over lunch (that we paid for ourselves). I hope Justin decides to continue the meetup at future shows.

The second event was the Meetup202 event put on by Bloosky / Tracking202.  Say what you will about Bloosky and their nefarious schemes to make money off the of 202 users, they do know how to throw a good event.  I’m not just saying that because I walked away with a free iPad either, although it rocks (I’m sure I’ll post about that later).  All of the Meetup202 events I have been to at conferences have been the highlight.  I would travel just to go to the meetup, because the caliber of the people there is second to none.

I got to chat with Jon Shugart, the creator of Keyword Rockstar.  He’s a cool guy, really sharp and excited about his product.  I use it myself and I would definitely recommend checking it out. I’ve been meaning to do a review, maybe I’ll get around to it next month.

Finally, the PPC.bz / EWA Network party was definitely real.  They chose to have it at a full on concert venue instead of the typical tiny club or packed out hotel suite.  I personally liked this approach, as it gave everyone a little bit more room to spread out, mix, and mingle.

There wasn’t really anything spectacular or memorable that stuck out to me about the Exhibit Hall.  However, I did leave with the feeling that this was a good show and that I am going to make more money because of it.  And that’s all these things are really about, right?