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Game & Work

Retro video gamer & an inspired digital marketer

5 Great Reasons to Attend Affiliate Summit NYC 2018

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Affiliate Summit is definitely the best Affiliate Conference and probably the #1 Internet Marketing conference there is. No where else can you go and learn, network, and share with so many affiliates/publishers, networks, and companies in one place. I mean they get thousands of people every year and every year it grows and gets bigger. Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, the owners of the show, do a tremendous job at orchestrating exceptional shows twice a year. Now they are doing local meet-ups which I’ve heard are great. They have an exceptional staff to help in the process so everything runs as smoothly as possible. I go every year. Here are some great reasons to attend the Affiliate Summit in New York:

1. Great People – you are guaranteed to meet tons of exceptional people involved in the Online Marketing industry at Affiliate Summit. It’s a really friendly atmosphere and bustling with people of all types. There are also quite a lot of international folks that fly in from other countries for the show. Some good people watching there too because they will try to stand out. The affiliate marketing industry is really friendly by nature and so you will undoubtedly meet people that can help you further what you are doing. Building relationships is what it’s all about, and meeting people in person always kicks it off on the right foot.

2. Great Speakers and Panels – Affiliate Summit always has great speakers and panels of experts on a wide range of relevant and timely issues to the Affiliate Marketing industry and online marketing in general. I will be speaking this time around..Yaaay! I hope you can come out and see me present about how to use LinkedIn to maximize your business development. You can go to Affiliate Summit just for the networking, but why do that when you could go and learn so much from the speakers, so I highly recommend getting the passes that get you in to see the speakers. Here is the Facebook Event for my speaking session, make sure to RSVP!

3. Great City – New York City is a great place to go to a conference. I really like the Hilton hotel for the venue because you can really bump into and meet people more easily than at a sprawling conversion center. Not to mention you can stay at the hotel and be more comfortable because you can just go up to your room if you need to whenever. Adtech was much better when it was at the Hilton, so I’m glad Affiliate Summit is still there. I don’t think I need to say much about New York City, great food, great sights, great times all around.

4. Great Parties – They always have really good parties at Affiliate Summit NYC. You have to find out which are the best though, which can take a little digging around and talking to people to know which ones will be the best. You can try to get invites to the ones that sound great. You really can’t go wrong though. I’m not huge into conference parties these days, but I like to go at least for a little while to see who I might bump into or meet. I might go out late one of the nights to get the full experience. Usually I’m pretty focused on business and talking to people, so the parties are like a fun novelty. If you go to the right ones you can really have a blast.

5. Great Networking – If you like to network, then Affiliate Summit is for you! You can’t help but network and meet people with that many people at the show. If you are proactive and willing to go up to people and introduce yourself, you can really make some amazing connections and you never know who you might run into that can help you further what you are doing more than you ever imagined. Their “Meet Market” event is really great to network at and you are definitely going to get a lot out of the experience. Make sure to bring a lot of business cards and you should try to gather as many as you can yourself at the show. A couple hundred business cards is definitely do-able.

These are some great reasons to attend Affiliate Summit East! This year will be a great show, so I hope you will attend and we can meet. Thanks and I look forward to seeing you there!

$0.01 Per Click Advertising Update

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If you read my post $0.01 Per Click? Junk Traffic?, I have bought dirt cheap PPC traffic to run my affiliate offers.

After a week here are the results. If you ever see a claim for tons of traffic for little money then it’s probably too good to be true. However it’s fun to test.

Buying The Traffic

10,000 clicks purchased for $100 from www.clicksor.com

In 10 days they claim they sent me 10,000 clicks.

Sweet! That is some nice traffic for the price.

Directing The Traffic

Since I was buying  that traffic I needed somewhere to send them.

I chose an offer from Clickdealer. The one for Antivirus that pays $22.40 per signup.

I thought if one conversion happened I would make money.

The Results

3 conversions 😉

Clickdealer statistics show 7218 clicks in the past 10 days.

So basically the people I’m buying the traffic from claim they sent 10,000 clicks so far and the place I’m sending them to say that only7218 actually showed up.

LOL, I reckon they must be getting lost somewhere.

And if you want to make some conversion with cheap PPC traffic then you can try a test.

How To Do Online Campaign Research?

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These days, 90% of my work is research/analytics related. It takes me minutes to set up a campaign, but days to do the research it takes to launch that affiliate marketing campaign. Sure, throwing shit at the fan and hoping it spits out a little poo-poo that sticks to the wall is fun and all, but 90% of the time it just comes back and hits you in the face. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like getting poo-poo on my pretty face. Decreased profits, increased spending, and lower ROI are results of this poo-throwing… Enough about poo.

I like research. I do a lot of it. What does this mean for me? It means I’m launching a lot less campaigns, but the campaigns I do launch normally profit with very little optimization after all the research is brought together and launched. It requires patience and a lot of discipline. I keep saying this, and I’m going to keep saying this… We don’t live in 2017 any more. You can’t just throw some boobies up on Facebook and expect to profit. Google wants you to stop selling and give pure information on your websites. And we’ve got 10 times the competition we used to. Becoming a smart Internet marketer starts with thorough research.

In aid for you guys, I’ll be leaving this post with a short list of great resources for demographic and psychographic research. Learn how to use them to your advantage that will give you an edge over all those other marketers stuck with poo on their faces.

  • Alexa
  • Google Keyword Research & Strategy with Keyword Planner
  • Google Trends
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Twitter and Trending Topics
  • Media/Press Kits/Releases
  • Magazines/Newspapers (Check out those ads!)

What Is oDigger.com?

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I’ll be honest here… I don’t read many blogs, I don’t frequent many forums, and I haven’t signed up for many outside tools. A lot of what I do and what I have is all internal. But oDigger.com has become a daily browse for me. They wrap up a lot of features you’re going to want to check out, with everything from a blog, an affiliate offer search engine, and one of the most unique things I’ve seen to date out of the affiliate industry, a spin on all these groupon style sites you see popping up.

Here is why I love oDigger: The affiliate offer search engine. One of my beliefs is that if you aren’t on top of new offers the day they’re put up on any affiliate network, then you are too damn late to the game. If an affiliate network says x or y offer is so hot, you’ve already missed out on your opportunity to take a large piece of the pie. oDigger aggregates new offers from over 200 networks and puts it across their simple to use affiliate offer search engine. Running in a hot niche and only want to see offers related to it for a simple split test? oDigger lets you do that! You can also sort and optimize by type of offer (lead gen, sale, etc), country, payout, date added or affiliate network. In total, they’ve listed 65,000+ offers! I just love the preview feature they’ve included. It saves me the hassle of having to log into a VPN just to see an offers landing page.

Speaking of affiliate networks, oDigger has a large affiliate network review database. You can never have enough affiliate networks to pull offers from. Each review page allows individual affiliates to comment on the network and leave a rating, allowing you to see who’s really paying their affiliates and who’s doin’ them in the butt. On top of that, you’ll get some contact information snipets and a listing of each networks top offers which are great for when you’re running out of ideas on what to run.

oDigger has told me they’ve got a lot of exciting things coming to the table there so it’s something you’ll want to check back on consistently.

Check out oDigger now and start making more money today!

Tips When Waiting For Ad Network Campaign Approval

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Here’s a common question, and its got a simple explanation. Should you target broad or target niche? There are a couple different things that will effect this, but in the end, it shouldn’t be hard to come to an answer on your own.

When looking into how you build your campaigns, whether broad or niche, there are a couple things you’ll need to look at first. That is traffic source and offer niche. These two will determine your traffic generating potential, your ability to target smaller demographics if going niche, and how targeting broad or targeting smaller angles will effect your overall campaign performance. We’ll also consider your budget.

Let’s look at mobile for example. Most mobile traffic isn’t very targetable. You’ve got some demographic targeting options here or there, categorical targeting, and you can run search campaigns, but outside that, mobile advertising platforms are what I consider broad targeting platforms, almost exclusively. Basically, to get traction on mobile you need something that can appeal to a broad spectrum of people.

Facebook and PoF are two of my favorite networks for nitpicking small angles and generating massive ROIs. On Facebook you’ve got interest, city, school, and other great targeting options, all of which you can build small targeted campaigns around. However, if you were to build an international campaign, due to language borders and knowledge you’ll need to find targeted keywords for other language interests, it might be better to just save yourself the hassle and go broad.

The biggest difference between broad targeting and niche/tight targeting is the amount of traffic, revenue and ROI you will receive from either setup. With broad targeting you have a potential for greater traffic and revenue, but your ROI could suffer. On a tightly targeted campaign, you are much more likely to make a greater profit percentage, but that comes at the cost of having to build more campaigns due to lowered revenue and traffic generating capabilities.

Let’s go back to PoF. PoF has most of its traffic in the US, CA and UK. Outside of that you won’t be getting much traffic. These are very competitive countries and PoF is a very competitive market. Instead of trying to target broad here, I would almost suggest going after niches. You can target red head, smokers with no car that are abusive alcoholics and come out of it with money in your pocket. That’s just some of the crazy targeting that I’ve seen work on PoF before.

Now, lets also take a look at your budget. Are you going at this with $500 in the bank or $50000? Broad targeting introduces greater risk due to the lower ROIs they generally receive. If you are a low budget affiliate marketer, definitely go niche. You’ll be hampering your ability to get anywhere if you try and blow it all on one broad campaign. Instead, slow it down and test out multiple small niches until you find one that cracks. Take what you learn from that campaign and expand!

Do Webmasters Expire or Renew Their Domain Names?

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I now have a domain portfolio of 100+ domains. I’ve probably developed less than 25% of them. I also have scores of affiliate sites that I developed for paid search campaigns that are no longer active.

Most of my domains (and even a lot of live sites) just sit around and collect digital dust. Every once in a while I’ll go through my portfolio and disable auto-renew for some of my domains.

In some cases, it’s a no-brainer. In other instances the decision is a little more complicated (thin site + mediocre domain + zero traffic).

This Saturday one of my domains quietly expired. At some point I decided the domain wasn’t worth the $12 renewal fee, so I let it lapse. When a domain expires the registrar will typically hold it for another 30 days just in case you change your mind.

As I’m going through my stats today, I see that the domain I once thought was worthless, generated $40 in commissions over the last couple of days (with no effort). I quickly logged into my Godaddy account and hit the renew button.

I have no idea where these sales came from, but I can see that I’m getting some organic traffic from my logs. This site doesn’t have a lot of rich content, and was never optimized for natural search, but seems to be getting a trickle of traffic now.

Many SEO’s say that domain age is an important ranking factor in natural search. Anybody who has spent time in the Google sandbox would probably agree.

The first thing you should do when you register a domain is setup a quick page with a little related content. It doesn’t have to be quality content – just something other than the registrar’s default parking page. Even if you don’t have an instant monetization plan for the domain, it will start earning a little age rank. When you’re ready to develop your domain you’ll have a running start and avoid some of the problems younger domains encounter.

Hanging on to a lot of old domains can be expensive, but letting them go too early could cost you even more.

What Are The First Steps into Affiliate Marketing

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If you have an affiliate marketing question you would like answered, drop by the post here and ask your questions in the comments section. Alternatively, you can head to my contact page and ask me a question via email!

So you’re completely new to affiliate marketing and want to test the waters for your first campaign. That’s great, but I can tell you the biggest mistake most new affiliate marketers make is rushing into affiliate marketing rather than taking their time, making sure they are prepared fully to tackle making their first money online with paid CPA marketing. Let’s get down to what you need to know!

Step 1: Be Prepared with Everything you Will Need To Start
There are several tools and information you will need before you actually want to start doing any affiliate marketing. First up – affiliate networks. People always ask me which ones are the best, and that is a tough question to answer. Typically, the best would be the one that makes you the most money, but that’s dependent on your lead quality, how much each network/advertiser shaves, payouts and too many other factors to list. Your best be is to go to AffPaying.com and sign up for multiple affiliate networks? How many? As many as you can. The more options you have, the better off you will be. Don’t limit yourself, and don’t be lazy by saying “these 3 are enough.”

You absolutely, positively need tracking, and you need it on a great hosting provider. I would recommend Prosper202 or my personal favorite, CPVLab, on at least a VPS of some sort. I use Wiredtree for their great support, but there are others out there that work just, as well. Shared hosting will not cut it, so if you are thinking you will be okay on your $5 a month hosting, think again. You’ll be throttled or be sending clicks to a dead page if you start sending too many people at one time. NEVER USE SHARED HOSTING! You’ve been warned.

You will want to consider research tools, as well. There are freebies out there like Quantcast Planner, Google Ad Planner, Compete and Alexa. But there are more advanced tools available like WhatRunsWhere, AffPortal, paid forums, tools like Scrapebox, ad spies, or premium services that can help you speed up your process. Plan according to your current budget. You can get most information that you can get from these paid tools for free, but they help you do it much faster. Time or money, you’ll have to decide which one you have more of.

And that brings me to another point. Time and money are also things you need to prepare. Attempting to become an affiliate marketer with $200 on hand isn’t going to get you very far. Just as well, if you only have 1 hour a day of free time, all I can say is good luck. Try to have $2000+ and at least 4 hours per day when you are getting into affiliate marketing. Anything less and you’ll be limiting yourself far too much.

Also, prepare some skills. Get a basic understanding of Photoshop to create banners and HTML to create or edit existing landing page templates. Be able to use Excel to compare costs versus revenue. And build up on your relationship and communication skills, because even though most affiliate marketers start as a one man band, the better you can communicate, the further you’ll propel your earnings.

Step 2: Pick a Traffic Source
As a new affiliate marketer, you’re probably well aware of several different traffic sources. I suggest you pick one and stick with it, then scale out to other ad networks. I see far too many newbies hopping around from one traffic source to the next using identical campaigns and not going anywhere. Avoid this by sticking with one traffic source and making one proven offer work there by trying new angles and strategies.

Let’s talk about the different networks you have available:

Social – Facebook and PoF are two of the bigger contenders here. Facebook has a lot of traffic and is one of my favorite places to test many new offers. It is especially good for non-English speaking countries, and is where a majority of my current income comes from. On the other hand, it can be expensive to test. If you have a decent budget and are willing to test a lot, this is a great place to start.

PoF is another network very similar to Facebook, but with much less traffic, especially internationally. It’s great because you can micro target very specific angles for a large ROI, but that is also its downfall. You typically won’t get any traction going broad and you will have to spend a lot of time managing all these small campaigns to make a decent amount of money.

Mobile – If you have the money to test here, mobile is the future. Pick one carrier and a couple different handsets and start testing ugly, simple banners. Due to the lack of determining what clicks are real and which are misclicks/fraud, this can make mobile marketing expensive. Also, there is a lack of any real tracking available to the public (that will change very soon though). The lack of tracking makes this only a good option for those with $5000+ to test and good organization/tracking skills.

Search – Google Adwords is the biggest contender here, but they straight up hate affiliate marketers, or at least our fairly simple tactics. Unless you’ve got some legitimate cloaking, don’t consider it an option. Bing and Yahoo (Adcenter) are okay with affiliates and I’ve had limited success here and there. If you are coming from an SEO background, you might enjoy working with search and have an easier time with it. 7search is also an option, and they are very open to affiliates, but traffic quality can be hit or miss.

PPV – Pay Per View or Cost Per View (CPV) is another good option for new marketers. It’s relatively simple to work out. Find similar targets to your current offer, optimize out those that don’t perform profitably. As you advance you’ll start using angles and landing pages to broaden out the actual amount of targets you can hit and make a good ROI off of. In order of quality, the best PPV networks out there are TrafficVance, LeadImpact, MediaTraffic and DirectCPV. There are some others out there, but currently these are the only I’ve run traffic on before.

Display – Traffic sources like Pulse360 and SiteScout are included in this category. They’re usually the pinnacle of any affiliate marketers career. If you can get profitable here, you’ll probably do pretty well. That being said, it is very expensive. You will be bidding against many other affiliates, as well as branders with multi-million dollar budgets and hundreds of people managing their ads. If you are new and don’t have the budget, don’t start here.

Step 3 – Pick a Niche/Offers
I’m going to keep this step short and sweet. Stick to something you are interested in or know a lot about. The most profitable campaigns I’ve run are always about things I love and understand. I know the problem and I know how to find others who are looking for a solution to that problem. Serving them my ads relieves them of that problem.

Many newer affiliates get started out in dating, gaming and freebies. These are all great niches to give you good experience that you will use to scale out further down the line.

Step 4 – Put It All Together and Start Running
One of the best teachers is experience. Using the above steps, you should now be at a point where you can start running some ads. You’ve got the budget, you’ve picked out an offer or two, you’ve done your research, and you know who to target.

It’s time to put that all together and make some ads. I would recommend doing this all manually, being in full control of your campaigns when you start out. Down the line, you can indulge in outsourcing this task or buying into an ad submitter, but for now you need to understand how everything works.

Double check your links, landing pages, pre-write your ad copy, collect any images and put together banners, understand that you will have to split test and get rid of any worries in your mind. Don’t let 2nd guesses hold you back from testing anything. Grow a pair of balls and put your money on the line, but be aware you need to be prepared for 0 revenue in return. That’s how the game is played and if you can’t keep a level head about it, your wheels will only turn and slip rather than gain traction.

Step 5 – Understand and Optimize Off Your Results
So you’ve got your first ads up and running. Fantastic! I hope you were at least able to break even if you did enough preparation, but don’t feel turned away even if you lost it all. To get to profit, you will probably need to test several different variations of your ads, tweak your targeting and understand your data.

This is why its important you understand how to track. Did each of your ads have unique identifying sub-ids? Were you able to find these in your tracking software? How did each ad perform on an ROI basis. Did you have a high CTR and a low CVR. Did you have a high CVR and a low CTR. Change the ad copy or ad image, one, not both, and see how each change affects both CTR and CVR.

Optimization is a real art form and each person will do it differently. If you’re adamant about it, you could try to squeeze as much ROI from an ad as you possibly can, or if you are like me, you might stop and focus on scaling once you hit an ROI of 100% or so.

A simple walkthrough on how I optimize my Facebook ads is to first find a high CTR image, then split test that with several different offers and ad copies until I get one that performs to my needs. I continue to split test small changes in ad copy and that data helps me as I test out more and more different images.

How To identify Hot Products

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One of the best ways to stay in front of your competition is by discovering products and services before they do. For example, when iPhone came out many mobile phone manufactures updated their product line up with new models. These new models and their associated keywords had little or no competition before and after iphone launch, allowing smart affiliates to take advantage of low click costs and prime ad placement.

Here are some tips to help you discover hot products and services – before your competitors do 😉

1. Subscribe to Magazines and Newsletters for Your Product Niche – Stay a step ahead of your competition by getting information about upcoming product releases before everyone else does. I subscribe to dozens of trade publications, newsletters, and magazines in the product categories I promote. Often times I’ll be the only person bidding on a new product keyword, which allows me to build a good click-through history before the product becomes mainstream.

2. Become a Customer – If you want to get the latest coupons, promotions and product releases become a customer of the merchant’s you’re promoting. I also recommend that you subscribe to their customer newsletter, and read their press releases and corporate blog.

3. Use Google Alerts – Google has a keyword alert service that will send you an automated message anytime there is news or information about your selected keyword(s). I use this service to keep current on industries I work in and news about competitors.

5. Participate in Investor Calls – If you want to get the inside scoop on a company listen-in on the quarterly investor calls. During these calls company executives will often talk about top selling products and the outlook for specific product and service categories. To get a list of times for investor calls I recommend Yahoo Finance.

Effort and Focus

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A lack of effort and focus. This is the main quality of any failed affiliate marketer. The chances you are going to drop a couple ads you stole off a Facebook spy, take the exact images and ad copy and make $100 bucks, these days, is slim to zero.

The mindset that affiliate marketing is “easy” is a problem a lot of people are stuck with. Bloated affiliate network newsletters that provide very little details other than “This offer is generating huge EPCs for our affiliates across all traffic networks with an xyz style landing page” and lame informational products filled with misinformation, developed by those that don’t actually know jack$hit, don’t help with AM being perceived as “easy”. This is what I tell my clients when they ask that previous question:

“Sure, but it involves flipping burgers and dropping buckets of fries all day long.”

I imagine all of my affiliate marketing work as a large part of my business. Like almost any other business, it doesn’t just launch and blow up overnight. I’ve got research to do. I have to know what my target market wants and how they want it. I need to know how to deliver it before they get it. And then even when I know all that, I still need to test it and other similar variations to get in the black. There is no “easy” way to get around that. Even if someone hands a campaign to you on a silver platter, if you aren’t analyzing why it works and how you can improve it, you’ll always fail and end up back in square one.

You do need to focus, and put effort into building campaigns up, 1 at a time. Test 10 landing pages instead of 2. Test 100 images, rather than 10. Try 5 very different headlines, then test adjectives on your best performing ones. This extra effort and focus is what has made some of my clients $500 campaigns after 1 week of coaching, and I believe it is one of the redeeming qualities that has made me the marketer I am today.

How Your Facebook Pages Can Dominate

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I’ve been doing some experiments lately. A lot of them with Facebook Pages. With the ads becoming more and more expensive, and my phasing out of more short term campaigns instead for more consistent, long term revenue generating projects, Facebook Pages makes sense. They give me a place to engage a very targetted audience, get free publicity on top of my ads through likes and shares, and ad costs are generally decreased (most likely because Facebook likes it when you pay them to send traffic to their own site).

So we’re going to talk a little outside the norm today with some simple Facebook Page techniques you can use to start building your own long term communities.

Page Name
Simple as it may sound this is the first thing that you should consider since the name will be the one that appears in search engines when someone makes a search. Make sure to choose a name that reflects your business or product. If I have a gaming blog I am trying to promote, instead of using some strange name like Kotaku, I’d include the words Video Game somewhere in the Page name as well. If people are search for pages about video games, they’ll find my page without having to search for the exact name in Facebook.

Cover Image
Facebook Timeline is here whether you like it or not. One good thing about this new feature is that you can have a large cover image for your brand to greet your page visitors. Your cover photo should capture the essence of your business and have a size of 851pixels x 315 pixels. Don’t just make any photo your cover photo but instead choose quality images that are well composed and have attention grabbing colors.

Profile Picture
The profile picture should work hand in hand with your cover photo. You should make sure that the transition is seamless and that it blends in perfectly. You are only allowed an image size of 180 pixels x 180 pixels for this so be sure to make it count. Below are some excellent sample Timeline cover designs and their profile pictures from popular brands.

About Section
Pack in as much information as you can in this section regarding your business or product. Some of the important things to include are your website, contact information and a brief history. This way, people who may want to contact you or find out more about your page can find the information in this section. This is also a great place for people to jump to your main site.

Contests and Giveaways
In order for you to grow your fan base you should have an incentive for people to like your page. One way to do this is to hold contests and giveaway prizes. It’s a great marketing strategy and on several occasions has grown my page likes from 13 to 2000+

Update Regularly
Now that you have the basics covered what you have to do is to provide constant updates to your fans. Answer any questions that they may post and try to provide a much more personal experience as possible. Try to make a status update at least once a day.