Tag Archives: Affiliate Marketing

Stop Cheating Yourself Out Of Money

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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

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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

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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.

Google Adwords Screenshot 2

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.

Google Adwords Screenshot 1

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:

Google Adwords Screenshot 6

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.

Google Adwords Screenshot 5

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:

Google Adwords Screenshot 7

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

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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

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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!

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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!

affiliate.com’s Economic Bailout

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Today affiliate.com announced their Revenue Stimulus Program.  Here is the official announcement:

Affiliate Economic Bailout

In today’s challenging economic climate, it seems like just about every industry is getting some kind of bailout program.  But, we haven’t heard anything proposed for the Affiliate Marketing Industry.

Rather than waiting for the Congress to institute a bailout program for our Affiliates – we thought we would just do it ourselves.

Introducing the
affiliate.com Revenue Stimulus Program

Our industry was built on the principles of self reliance and innovation.  In the tradition of those guiding principles, we have instituted the affiliate.com Revenue Stimulus Program to help our Affiliates generate some extra income this holiday season.  We believe that the best way to help Affiliates drive more revenue is to give them an incredible payout increase on one of the hottest offers in the industry.

Beginning today (Monday, December 15, 2008) at 10:00am Mountain Time, we will be raising the payout on Ringtones.net (6013) to an unheard of $16.  (This new payout will remain in effect until December 31, 2008.)

Ringtones.net
Payout Increase – $16
(From December 15 – December 31, 2008)

Take advantage of our Revenue Stimulus Program today and watch your revenue soar this holiday season!

This is the time to make some serious money with Ringtones.net.  I’m not just saying this because I work for affiliate.com, this is a HUGE payout on a Ringtones offer.  I remember when Flycell used to pay something similar and people were going crazy for it.  If you already promote ringtones, you owe it to yourself to switch out your links for the next 2 weeks and enjoy the extra revenue boost.  Nothing starts off the new year like an infusion of cash.

Now go make some money!

Affiliate Conferences – Are They Worth It?

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affiliate summitIf you have anything to do with the internet marketing or affiliate marketing industries, then you know that Affiliate Summit West is coming up very soon in January.  Thousands of affiliate marketers, networks, advertisers, merchants, and vendors are going to be heading to the Rio in sunny Las Vegas to meet up.

What you may not know is how big of an effect going to Affiliate Summit or one of the other large conferences (like ad:tech) could have on your business.  Is it worth it to shell out your hard-earned bucks for a plane ticket, hotel room, plus the price of the ticket (which could run anywhere from $350 to $2,000+)?

The answer is yes! These events are absolutely priceless when measured in the amount of opportunities you have to network & expand your horizons.  That might sound a little vague, but consider the following…ad-tech

Affiliate marketing is more and more about relationships.  With 300+ ad networks out there competing for your business, there is bound to be some overlap, and there are going to be a few (if not many) offers shared between the networks.  So what do you do?  Is it better to bounce around from network to network chasing an extra $0.25 per lead?  Or should you stick with one network and give 100% of your traffic to them no matter what the other guys are doing?

I would say neither.  A good affiliate marketer must always be on the lookout for the next big thing, but at the same time it is essential that you develop strong relationships in the industry.  This is what will give you the upper edge.  Imagine if you had been able to jump into the Acai or Ringtones markets a good 3-6 months before the competition.  You would already have found the profitable keywords, you would have your campaigns going full tilt, and at that point the new guys coming in will have to go through or over you before they can get a piece of the market.  That is a very good position to be in.

blogworldSo how does this tie into going to a conference?  Simple.  You will have the opportunity to meet with network reps, AMs, and advertisers in person.  This is so much better than trying to chase someone down over the phone or email.  You will leave a much longer-lasting impression on the people you meet, and a good friendship/connection in this business could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.  Also, a lot of the big networks and advertisers use the events to unveil their new products/campaigns/announcements to the affiliates.  You will have a leg up on the competition because you will be there and get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

search engine strategiesFinally, if you are at the conference and staying at the hotel where it is being held, hanging around at the hotel bar can be an excellent way to network with people.  I would even say that if you are within driving distance of the conference, it might be worth it to take a drive over to the hotel, just to hang out there and network.  After a couple of drinks, you would be surprised what kind of information will come out of the mouths of “super affiliates”.

So there you have it.  If you haven’t been to one of these yet, you need to be there and experience it.  And if you have already been to one, I have little doubt you won’t miss one again.  If anyone is going to Affiliate Summit West in January, drop me a line and let me know if you’d like to meet up for drinks or drop by the affiliate.com booth and introduce yourself.  See you all there!

Using YouTube Videos To Promote Your Offer

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It’s official, YouTube has surpassed Yahoo and is now the #2 search engine, right next to Google.  If you are looking for a fast and free way to start getting more traffic to your affiliate offers, you need to add a YouTube strategy to your campaigns.  The concept is simple, you create a video pertaining to your niche and put a link to your website or domain the description on YouTube.  If you want to be really fancy, you can also get software to put a watermark on your video that will display your website on the video itself.  The videos don’t have to be anything fancy, it could be just a few pictures in a slideshow format with some music in the background.  The key is titling the video and tagging it with the right keywords.  A great tool for creating videos for free is at www.animoto.com.  Have fun!