Tag Archives: Affiliate Marketing

Amazon Says “No” To Twitter Links

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As more and more affiliates are trying to figure out how to monetize Twitter, one of the largest affiliate programs on earth has decided against it.  Amazon is refusing to pay affiliate commissions on clicks generated from Twitter, citing a clause in the TOS that states that the clicks have to be generated from “your site”.  Since Twitter is not your site, the clicks are invalid (at least according to Amazon).

This seems like an odd move to me, and it”s an even odder move if it becomes a precedent for other websites that will no longer be accepted as legitimate traffic sources.  What does this mean for affiliates that use 3rd party adservers or tracking software so that all the clicks appear to come from a different site than their own?  Will Amazon only be allowing affiliates to place banners on their websites instead of the RSS methods that we have enjoyed up until this point?

I”m assuming that Amazon must have received a bunch of complaints about the links in Twitter as people were tricked into clicking by their “friends”.  This is not really any different then when CPA advertisers declared that they would not accept traffic from MySpace or Facebook messages, bulletins, updates, friend spamming, etc.  There were major lawsuits filed against several companies including Media Breakaway, parent company of affiliate.com.  I suppose it is best if Amazon pulls the plug now instead of waiting for things to get ugly and bringing out the lawyers.

So bottom line, if you have a nice auto blog setup with an RSS feed to your Twitter account, you better pull the Amazon links from it ASAP or you are just burning money.  As far as I know, you can still post eBay Partner Network links, RevTwt links, and CPA links.

It”s not quite back-to-the-drawing-board yet, but it is definitely a sign of things to come.

Real Money On Twitter?

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I was able to sit in on a few of the panel discussions at the first Affiliate Convention in Denver this week, and one of the things that came up over and over again was the power of Twitter.  By now, pretty much everyone in the Internet Marketing world has a Twitter account, but how many people are really making money off of it?

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker was quite adamant that there is an “imbalance” right now in the realm of monetizing Twitter.  Similar to Facebook and some other new ad platforms when they opened up, he feels like there is a lot of inventory to be had for cheap that can be arbitraged very effectively.  That being said, action needs to be taken now because this won”t last forever!

One of the tools that has come to my attention this week (and was mentioned at the conference) is RevTwt.  One of my friends is a prolific Twitter-holic, and he has played around with putting some RevTwt ads in his feed to make some extra money.  They pay out on a CPC basis, similar to Google AdSense.  This is all well and good, but I think that the real potential to make money with Twitter is in doing the advertising, not the publishing.

You can sign up for an advertiser account at RevTwt and their clicks start extremely cheap, as low as 8 cents.  Any marketer worth his salt should be able to arbitrage that into something that makes much more money.  Maybe some of those campaigns that you have paused because clicks got too expensive on Google?  A campaign that makes you an average of 60 cents per click is a loser if you are paying a dollar a click, but if you are paying 8 cents then it becomes profitable again very quickly!

The thing I like about RevTwt, or just ads in general on Twitter, is that there is a possibility for implicit trust built in for the end users.  If their friends are the ones that are tweeting, they are much more likely to click on the ad because they feel that it is something that was personally recommended.  Couple this with those oh-so-popular Flog landing pages, and you”ve got a potential goldmine.

So there you have it, the time is now, I would love to see more people get out there and experiment with advertising on RevTwt and Twitter!

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network – Part 2

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By now hopefully you have had a chance to get your website up and running, and if you are lucky your EPN account might have even been approved.  Now there is only one step left to do: get out there and market your new niche website!  You are going to be marketing this website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), not PPC.  It is the best way to get free traffic to your website and keep it going for months and years to come.

It’s really not too tough, because the search engines are going to do all of the heavy lifting, you just need to make sure that your site is in the best position to get indexed.  The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you have a keyword list that you are targeting.  You probably came up with a decent list when you were researching what niche you wanted to create your website in, but if not, now is the time to create it.  You just need 20-30 keywords that are centered on your main keyword and slight variations of it.  For example, if you were selling Nike Running Shoes, your list could include Nike Basketball Shoes,  Buy Nike Shoes,  Best Nike Cross Trainers, Nike Air Jordans, Nike Socks, Nike Sports Shoes, etc.

Once you have your keyword list, you are going to put those keywords in your Meta tags.  You also want to make sure you write a good two to three sentence Description of your site to go in the Meta tags.  This will be the text that appears in the search engines under the link to your website.  You want to write something that gets people to click on it, such as “Get the cheapest prices on Nike Running Shoes on the planet.  Our list is updated daily, check it out today!”

The next step is to get some inbound links going to your website.  The easiest method is going to be to submit your website to free directories and social bookmarking websites.  The higher the Page Rank of the site, the more juice it passes on to your website.  Adding these links can be a little time consuming, but we are going to stretch it out.  You do not want to go out there and submit 100 social bookmarking links the day after you create your website, this will almost certainly get you penalized or “sandboxed” by Google.  I prefer to let the domain sit for a week or two and then start adding the social bookmarking links in groups of 3-5 per day, just like a site would grow through word-of-mouth or natural backlinks.  If you don’t want to do this grunt work yourself, you can hire someone to do it for a fair price.  This is definitely the way to go if you are cranking these sites out.

The next step is possibly the hardest one: wait.  It takes some time to get these sites indexed and ranking, but if you’ve done your research properly it should not take very long at all to get on to the first or second page of Google for your main keyword term.  Once that happens, the clicks will start coming in to your EPN account and with those, come commissions.  You are not going to become a millionaire with this method, but I have personally followed these exact same steps and made anywhere from $50 to $300 per month from a single one of these sites.  Once you have the first one done, crank out another one!  The key is volume.  $300 x 10 websites = $3,000 for month, and you are 100% profitable because there are no PPC costs.

Now go make some money.

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network

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There is no free lunch.  However, there is something I like to call, “A little bit of effort for a lot of return.”  eBay Partner Network is one of those opportunities.  You might have heard about the glory days of getting $25-$50 for free account signups back when eBay had their affiliate program on Commission Junction.  Make no mistake, those days are gone.  However, this does not mean that there is no money to be made with EPN.  On the contrary, it can be quite a nice little extra stream of income.  Let’s look at how it’s done.

Before we go any further, if you don’t have an EPN account, go here and sign up for one right now.  It takes them a little while to get around to approving you.  You can do the setup without your account and API key, you just need to have it before you go live with your site.

First of all, you are going to pick a niche.  There are many eBooks and blogs written just about picking a niche, but let’s not overcomplicate things.  All you are looking for is a small niche, something that gets around 20,000+ searches on Google every month, and it has less than 500,000 resulting pages when you search for it on Google.  To get yourself kick-started, I like to check out eBay Pulse.  The various Top 10 lists they have there for different categories are a great place to start.  If you can’t find anything small enough, then laser target even more.  Too much competition for baseball bats?  Zero in on one specific brand of baseball bats, a smaller brand even.  The more targeted the better, as long as there are searches for it every month.

Once you have picked your niche, the next step will be choosing the platform for building your website.  The most popular options here are phpBay and BANS, but these both come at a cost.  They are worth the money, but if you are looking to just start out with your first EPN niche site, I would recommend McJiffy.  It is a completely free open-source script, and I’ve used it for profitable sites myself.  The rest of this guide will assume that you are using McJiffy.  Once you have got your platform squared away, it’s time to set up your website.

You will want to buy a domain name with your relevant niche keywords in the domain itself.  You also want to have some type of value-based keyword in your domain.  Examples: CheapHuffyBikes.com, PaylessNintendoGames.com, etc.  I would recommend sticking with a .COM or .NET, stay away from .BIZ or .INFO, they look cheap and spammy.  We are going to be promoting our EPN site through SEO, so it needs to be relevant and easy to remember.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle will be hosting.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, I’ve used Hostgator shared hosting for this, just make sure you get the Baby package with unlimited addon domains.  This way you can use the one hosting account to host all your niche sites.  Quantity is the name of the game with this tactic.

Now that you’ve got all the components, it’s time to put them together and build your first EPN site!  Unzip your McJiffy script, and upload it to your hosting account on the root of the domain that you purchased.  There’s just a couple of modifications that need to be made to the McJiffy site to maximize profit.  First of all, use Google Images to find a relevant header image for your website.  You can just leave the green default header in there if you want, but the image will make it look much better.  Second, you will want to write a description of your product and/or website.  Something like, “About Huffy Bikes”.  This doesn’t have to be 100% original, you can grab content from Wikipedia or even the company’s official website and bio, just make sure you re-write it in your own words so that Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content.  Try to keep this description/bio to around 300-500 words.  If you suck at writing, you can hire an article writer to do this for you for very cheap.  Just check around on the various forums.

All of these steps should take you several hours if you are quick, and a few days if you are taking it easy.  We’re going to take a break at this point to let you get started on your website, and pick up next week on Part 2: Marketing Your EPN Site.

Now go get to work!

Can Ringtones Still Make Money On Google?

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If you are promoting ringtones offers, then you no doubt have been affected by the recent changes to Google’s AdWords policy regarding mobile offers.  The question is, how big of a hit is this to the Ringtones vertical?  Is it still possible to market Ringtones on Google?

One thing that can be said about affiliate marketers is that they are a creative bunch.  Anytime something like this happens in the industry, there is a few days of moaning and gnashing of teeth, but after that everyone gets back to work and decides that it’s just another obstacle to overcome.  Some of the big guys might even be glad for changes like this because it knocks the newbies out of the running for a while.  It will take some time for the effects to be fully felt, but perhaps the change could even result in lower click costs, due to less competition.

Google AdWords Machine

Grants? Nope. Acai? Nope. Ringtones? Hmm...

When you are thrown a curveball from the big G, it’s time to take a look at the variables and see what can be changed to increase conversions.  The glory days of 2002 are long gone, there will be no more promotion of ringtones on Google AdWords by telling people that it’s free, when it in fact costs money.  Now that you’ve got that ugly “$9.95/month” telling people not to click on your ads, you need to give them some other reason to.  Luckily you still have control over some of the most important aspects of your ads, the Headline and the Display URL.

SendMe Mobile recently sent out an alert to their partners pointing out the effect of changing the position of the carrier name in the Display URL has.  Most of the ads that you see will put the carrier after the slash, as in “URL.com/Verizon”.  SendMe suggests that they have seen an increase in CTR from putting the carrier as a sub-domain at the start of the Display URL as in “verizon.URL.com”.

This makes sense because it appeals to the people looking for a trustworthy source for their ringtones.  Now that the pricing is on all the ads, people are going to want to give their money to someone that seems legit, as opposed to “TonsOfFreeTones.com” ($9.95/month).

Of course there is the other alternative, which I’m sure many of you have thought about, which is to get your traffic from somewhere else.  I’ve heard more than once that Ringtones have been dead on Google for a long time, and while I disagree, this proves that people are not just relying on Google for 100% of their traffic.  It’s time to look at the alternatives, even outside the big 3 search engines.  There is lots of 2nd and 3rd tier search engines to be found, and there’s also PPV, not to mention doing specific Media Buys or direct ad placements on websites.

To answer the original question, yes, I think that Ringtones can still make money on Google, but it might be less and less a part of your overall marketing strategy for these offers.  It’s time to put on the thinking cap, go back to the drawing board, and get creative.

Now go make some money!

Scaling Campaigns With PPV

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So if you’ve been following this little series of posts on marketing CPA offers with PPV, then hopefully you have setup a few campaigns, tested some things out, and perhaps even found a winning campaign or two.  I consider it a winner when it is profitable at all.  It might be making $100 a day or $10 a day, but you are in the black.  So what’s the next step?  Today we are going to talk about scaling your campaigns with PPV.

scale imgThe first step is going to be checking up on your results from the tracking that we have installed.  Before we scale a campaign we want to make sure to “trim the fat” from your initial group of keywords.  Using Prosper202, we have been tracking exactly which keywords / URLs your traffic has been coming from, and most importantly, which ones are converting for you.  My rule of thumb is pretty simple: I like to spend at least the amount of the offer’s payout per keyword / URL before deciding if it is a winner or a loser.  Now this can be adjusted depending on your tolerance for losing money, but if you’ve got an offer that pays $20 per lead, and you kill a keyword at $10 of spend, then you might be losing out because even if you spend $18 to make $20 it’s still a profit.  At times, if you are convinced that the campaign will be profitable but you are still tweaking your Landing Page or something, you can spend 2x the payout if you wish.  It’s up to you, I’m just giving you a good place to start.

Typically, what I find is that the #1 URL (the one getting you the largest amount of traffic) is not going to be profitable.  This is not a rule, it’s just a trend I’ve noticed on my campaigns.  For example, I was running a dating campaign and noticed that over 50% of my ad spend and traffic were coming from Match.com, but I hadn’t received a single conversion for that URL.  Since I had spent more than the payout (which was around $3), I paused Match.com.  The day after that my traffic went down drastically, but my conversions stayed about the same.  Guess what that meant?  That’s right, this campaign went from the red to the black overnight.

Once you have trimmed the fat, you are going to want to find more traffic for your offer.  There are two ways we can scale a PPV campaign.  The first one is obvious, to try to find more URLs.  This definitely works, but it can be more time consuming because the whole process starts all over again.  The easiest way to scale a profitable campaign is to copy it over the the other PPV networks.

Unlike PPC, where you know that if you are on Google you are hitting roughy 70% of the market by advertising there, with PPV each network has a different user base.  Zango, for example, installs their software when someone downloads a free Screensaver program, a toolbar, or some other PC tool.  On the other hand, TrafficVance installs their software when users play games from the GameVance website.  Do you think that those user groups are going to have some different people in them?  Absolutely.  This is why I would recommend unpausing all of your “losing” keywords and starting the trimming the fat process over again with each new PPV network.  Just because a URL didn’t convert on Zango doesn’t mean it won’t convert on TrafficVance, and vice versa.

Since there are five major PPV networks, this is going to give you lots of places to try out your campaigns until you have a good sized profitable campaign going.  Once you have done this, it’s time to start all over again and find a new winner!

Now go make some money.

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.

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

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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:

JAH Simple PPC

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

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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!