Justin Dupre » Justin Dupre

Let Me Set Things Straight

Justin Dupre — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:38:31 +0000

A lot of people took some things I said in this post the wrong way. Yes, it included some poor information and for that I apologize. I wrote it quick and wanted to get it out which I shouldn’t have done without getting my facts straight. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Anyways, let me explain one thing, specifically this paragraph:

“You’ve got much better options else where. Think about it. You get paid about $1 per email you send in. 100 emails = $100. Alternatively, you could promote games for about $2 a lead = $200 per 100 leads. Orrr you could do dating and get paid $4 per lead = $400. Insurance and credit offers nail you $10 – $20 per lead, adding up to 1k – 2k dollars at the end of the day. Get started in rebills and you double that. See what I’m talking about here? Would you rather spend time optimizing a campaign for $100 or $1000?”

There seems to have been some mis-communication here. If you throw an email submit up on a traffic source and get 100 leads from it, you can’t expect the same amount of leads throwing up a weight loss rebill offer on the same traffic source. This should be common knowledge, so for those that were thinking I was saying the opposite here, well, I’m not that stupid.

What I’m saying, is do you really want to be focusing on (generally) short-term email submit offers paying you out a buck-10. You don’t have to focus on rebill offers either, and I’d almost advise against that as well. I’m just saying that I think we as affiliates have much better choices out there. For any traffic source, there is almost always a leadgen or sale offer that can out-perform any email/zip submit with some optimization. They require more work, yes, but in the long run, through my experience, are more stable than any email/zip submit offer you can run.

There are some email submits, though far and few between, that do work. The email submits that get sign-ups for mailing lists convert and covert well over a long period of time (recently, we’re seeing a lot of stock/penny stock offers doing this). The ones that require the user to fill out offers to get their prize generally get thrown on to the fail boat after a couple of days.

It’s really down to what you want to promote and how much effort you want to put into testing and setting up a campaign at the end of the day. Email submits are pretty simple. Set up a link on a traffic source, rotate through a few until you find a winner and sit on it until you start getting scrubbed. It’s easy to set up, but in most cases, very short term. If you’re setting up a lead gen, it can take a bit more time. You might have to set up a landing page and test those to, which adds another step. But, after that is taken care of, you’re set to go for a much longer amount of time and through that initial testing, you can much more easily scale it out without having to worry about changing offers, rotating through different affiliate networks, etc.

All offers do die, many scrub no matter what style of offer (submit, lead-gen, sale, rebill, etc), but I think many will agree that their lead-gen offer campaigns have lasted much longer than “free prize” email/zip submit campaigns. Hell, lead-gen offers can start sucking after 1 day, however, again from my experience, that isn’t very common. It’s happened a few times. Many times I get a week or two. But several campaigns running with lead-gen offers on the right traffic source, for me, have lasted months at a time.

I don’t run an offer because it pays out more, but because I see more potential and long term scalability out of it. To me, I just don’t see this in email submits. It’s a short-term hit and run campaign unless you like managing and switching out offers on it everyday. I feel my time is better used working on other campaigns. If you can scale an email submit to $1000, well that’s damn skippy. I think its possible, especially if you’ve got exclusive access to any sort of decently sized traffic center (a list, your own network, a large website), but I think you’re much more likely to hit $1000 a day long-term, with a different style of offer.

Maybe some of you can stand to take on that kind of workload and the micro-management you’d have to deal with. I can’t, so I don’t see it as a scalable source of income vs. the amount of time it would take to manage.

Those that called the post idiotic and nonfactual are completely justified to do so, and looking back on it I had to facepalm myself, but I just want to let you guys and my readers know, with more clarity, why I don’t run email submits. Now go make some money, dammit.

Saving Money for Your Campaigns

Justin Dupre — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:40:43 +0000

I’m nearly broke, can’t pay my rent next month and I’m unemployed. What’s the best way I can make a ton of money online with minimal investment?

…You’d be surprised how often I get this question.

Affiliate marketing is a business, and just like any business you work in or work for, requires some major investments, time and money. There is no magic vending machine that allows you to insert one dollar and it spits out 5 or 6 quarters.

If you don’t have any money, get out of the industry unless you have significant capital to invest in it. The last thing you want to do is spend your last $100 on a failed dating campaign on PoF. If you are having trouble paying your rent, paying the lease on your car, or whatever, it is time to get a job. I don’t care about how bad the economy is or how there are no jobs available. Any job making you any amount of money is better than no money and nothing to pay the rent with. McDonald’s is always hiring, and while it isn’t glamorous, no one says once you have a job, you have to stop looking for other jobs. Paint the town with job applications, submit 50 in one day.

Stop being a lazy ass because you want to stay home all day and play games. Next month you’ll have to sell that Playstation just because you can’t afford a few packs of ramen.

You can always freelance in your freetime, as well. I used to make $100 bucks a day for a few hours of writing. Hit up Digital Point, Warrior Forum, and WickedFire, write some decent sales copy, and make money writing or designing logos. Making $5 an article or logo is better than no money… am I right?

Sometimes you gotta sink your standards down temporarily to get to the goods at the end of the road. Don’t be afraid to do it, because once you can get the start-up capital to start affiliate marketing and do it right, it can be well worth the wait.

Freebie Friday – It’s Up to You Guys to Decide

Justin Dupre — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:43:50 +0000

What do you guys want for Freebie Friday? It’s coming up within 2-3 days here, so I thought I might give my readers a chance to decide what they get.

It can be a landing page, a Facebook/PoF Image Pack, or banner creatives. I’ll have it cooked up for you, so by Friday afternoon, you’ll be able to take it and launch it with a new campaign!

Drop a comment below with what you want (styles, niche, colors, whatever) and I’ll pick one to be put into your email boxes in a few days!

Why You Don’t Want to Run Email Submits

Justin Dupre — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:42:59 +0000

Everyone will tell you email submits are easy when you’re a noob. And I’m sure they are for the first day or two. Then you’ll start to see your conversion rate drop like a rock.

Co version rates on email submits are hardly ever steady. Why? Because they rarely ever back out for the advertiser. Most email submits are just used to build lists, then sell them to other companies to spam them. With a list of 10000 emails built up, you might only get about 5 percent opening an email sent out, then another 5% actually clicking through to whatever spam site or offer is being mailed out. It’s cheap and shitty traffic.

You’ve got much better options else where. Think about it. You get paid about $1 per email you send in. 100 emails = $100. Alternatively, you could promote games for about $2 a lead = $200 per 100 leads. Orrr you could do dating and get paid $4 per lead = $400. Insurance and credit offers nail you $10 – $20 per lead, adding up to 1k – 2k dollars at the end of the day. Get started in rebills and you double that. See what I’m talking about here? Would you rather spend time optimizing a campaign for $100 or $1000?

In fact, you’d be better off building your own list than using an offer on an affiliate network. Sometimes my offers die and there are no good offers to replace it with. I can save the traffic for later by building out my own offer page, just collecting user data and emails. Then I mail bomb them when an offer comes up and I make all that money back, and I can continue to keep making money off those emails. And if I want to be like those email submit advertisers, I can sell the lists if I choose.

So with all that said, running an email submit offer is probably the dumbest move you can make in this industry. You won’t learn much, you’ll have to optimize new campaigns within a few hours after launch, and they pay out piss poor. My time is worth a lot more than the money they pay.

Need some landing pages and creatives to build out your campaigns? Check out the forums where we have over 80 files ready for download today! Click Here.

Winners Divided by Losers = Less Than 1

Justin Dupre — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:45:55 +0000

I’m just gonna spell it out for you guys. You will fail. You will fail a lot more than you will win. That’s internet marketing.

I got a question about what my percentage of profitable campaigns is over failed campaigns. If you are asking for an average of over the past 3 years I’ve been into affiliate marketing, its probably somewhere around 10%. 9 out of 10 campaigns fail. But, that’s just an average. Sometimes I’d go 1 month with 9 out of 10 campaigns profiting. Some months I wouldn’t have a single new campaign profit. Affiliate marketing is never balanced, and you can never set a goal for yourself on the percentage of campaigns you want to be profitable.

It Is Not Constant… Ever.

Get the idea out of your head that if you don’t profit on your first 10 campaigns, you’ll never profit. It just means you are probably in at the wrong time, running on the wrong traffic source, or may need to seriously reconsider your targeting. Start looking at each conversion and seeing what contributed to it, rather than what looking at how much you lost. Obviously you shouldn’t disregard how much you are spending, but if you make back at least half of what you spend, you are already half-way to breaking even. That’s a big step forward.

I can sit here and give you bullshit percentages and numbers, but truth of the matter is it wouldn’t matter. I can tell you to shoot for 10% profitable campaigns, but again, that wouldn’t matter. This month you might have 90% profitable new campaigns, the next 0. It’s a constantly shifting percentage.

Don’t forget to check out my forums if you are interested in affiliate marketing case studies, free landing page downloads (currently over 70!), and other in-depth conversation! For more info, click here.

How to Pick an Offer to Promote

Justin Dupre — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:28:07 +0000

This is a follow-up post to a question asked in Ask Away Round 4. If you have any questions about affiliate marketing in general and want some answers, feel free to leave a comment there or shoot me an email.

So, you’re ready to fire up an affiliate campaign, but you’re absolutely stumped on what to run. It happens a lot more than you’d like it to, and I have the problem on a daily basis. There are a few steps I take to get around this and start thinking.

Hit Up the News

Start reading some popular English news sites. Browse through the different categories you see there and you might see a trend of posts talking about one niche or a product or something you can turn into an offer on your own. You can also start browsing gossip sites. Notice the advertisements. Anything being promoted on gossip sites would probably make for a great niche to promote, number 1, because if they’re making money spending huge on media buys there, they’re probably making a decent return. Also, the quality of traffic on celeb gossip sites is horrible, so again, if you can make money there, you can make money anywhere. Google Trends is also great for seeing whats hot.

Hit Up a Network You Can Trust

Affiliate networks are sleezy, but there are a few out there that know what they’re talking about. EWA, Qwik, A4D, C2M are all pretty decent in that they have affiliate managers that are or have at some time in their life been affiliates themselves. I really like checking out EWA as they have a leader board of best converting offers on their home page after logging in. This helps me not only pick niches, but offers as well.

Know Your Traffic

Another thing you’ll want to do is to know your traffic. What are the main demographics for it? Where is it coming from? Then, match the traffic source to the offer. Use demographic research tools like Google Ad Planner, Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast to really dig deep into your traffic demographics. Run the offers through those tools, as well, and see which one gives you the closest match!

Keep It Interesting

If you are still stumped, use what you are interested in and pick out an offer you’d sign up for yourself. Target people with similar interests and demographics as you and you might be able to build out a successful campaign.

For more in-depth tips and coverage on selecting and running an offer, you might be interested in joining my private forums. You’ll get one-on-one help from me, as well as from many others already in the community! Click here for more details.

So You STILL Want to Do Dating?

Justin Dupre — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:27:25 +0000

This post is a follow-up to a question asked in Ask Away Round 4. If you’d like to have your question answered in a blog post here, feel free to go to that post and ask away!

So you say you still want to do dating, and on social media none the less. Dating is a great niche, don’t get me wrong, but its basically a big cluster-fug of people that think dating is easy and throw shit at the wall, those that are too lazy to innovate and are willing to take 10% ROI, and then a small percentage of affiliates that do the work that it takes to get 100%+ return through some crazy targeting and tactics. It’s a very crowded niche and probably the most popular niche for new affiliates to try. With a lot of information on blogs and forums about it, its easy to see why noobs think it is as simple as

Picture of hot chick
Target 18+ men
…
Profit!!

That’s not quite the case. Do that if you want to waste money.

So what can you do to give yourself a better chance at money?

Targeting

Get creative with your targeting. I’m not talking creative like split up your ages thinking that is deep enough. Hit up divorced moms with blonde hair with an ad built specifically to them. “In need of a new husband that won’t call you a dumb blonde and love your rowdy kids? Find him on dating site.com!” I exaggerated some there, but that’s really how creative you’ll need to get. From there, you scale out. It takes a long time. Don’t be a lazy ass. I’m not gonna help you not be lazy, so that’s up to you. It’ll make you $10 the first day, and scale it out another $10 a day. Goals, yo… Goals.

Go International

Stop targeting single men in the USA. They’re tired of the god damn dating ads. Find an offer for dating sites in countries that don’t speak English. Get a PROFESSIONAL translation (I just use friends on Facebook or from my uni). Google translate is not professional, btw. And get to it. Stick to creative targeting like above and make monies.

Other Niches

You aren’t required to make money with dating. There are 100′s of other niches out there that aren’t talked about and have very little competition. Do some research, skim thousands of offers, and write down all the unique ones.

One question to all you guys… Why are you all so focused on dating? Getting my dating ad accounts on FB shut down was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It made me open my eyes and realize, “Damn… look at all these other offers I could have been running and making so much more money with all these other offers!”

Ask Away Round 4

Justin Dupre — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:12:32 +0000

I’ve done a few of these before, and they’ve done pretty well!

Basically, you guys ask questions, whether in the comments or by contacting me, and I’ll answer them in the form of a dedicated blog post. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s super fun!

Haha, no. But it has provided for some great blog posts and good info coming out from me. This is your chance to get some feedback, opinions and knowledge out of me, so take it! I’ll start by answering questions as soon as I get some mails or comments here, so the sooner you ask, the faster I answer.

Questions should probably be about affiliate marketing, but I have had a couple questions about Thailand, time management, blogging, and plenty of other topics! Nothing is off limits so… Ask Away!

Get More Images Free When You Order This Week!

Justin Dupre — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:43:18 +0000

This week only, through all orders Sunday, on my Facebook Ad Image Collection Service, I’m giving away extra images with each order.

Order 25 and get 30.
Order 50 and get 61.
Order 100 and get 125.

All you have to do is order some pics, and mention what kind of images you want, and we’ll be sure to add your extra free images on to any image order you make. Click here to go to the order page.

I just wanted to give this week a good kick-start, and what better way to do it than to get to work!

Looking for more savings? Private members of my forum save 25% on all orders they make in my affiliate store! You can get more info here.

US Bank Sucks… I’m Switching to Ally

Justin Dupre — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 01:14:20 +0000

So I was looking over my bank account at US Bank. They’ve been decent to me over the past 7 years I’ve had my money in there. I more or less was forced to bank with them, as my parents opened my first savings account there and they had access to manage all my checks through their accounts at US Bank. It’s a good bank if you live in the States. Lots of branches, helpful phone service (when I called at least) and it was pretty much a no-hassle service for me.

Anyways, back to me looking over my bank statements online today. I was pretty shocked to see they were charging me ridiculous amounts of money just for taking out money through an ATM. We’re talking about 3% here, and that is on top of the $5 the Thai banks charge me for using a foreign ATM card (another giant rip-off, I know). Now 3% isn’t too much if all you need is $20. But I’m withdrawing thousands a month – to pay rent, pay my employees, pay for my hookers and blow entertainment, etc. It can add up to several hundred extra dollars a month their screwing me out of.

A lot of you are probably wondering why I don’t just get a bank account in Thailand. Does paying tax to two different countries sound fun to you? I’m not sure about the rules on that, but just to be safe, I’m keeping my money in the US. I get a tax break for staying out of the US anyways, so it makes more sense to me. Plus, transferring money through PayPal or wires costs extra and take a longer amount of time. My designer, whom I’ve used PayPal to pay, insists I don’t pay him through it because it takes him a week to get the money into his bank account.

So a quick tweet for a no-international fee bank for my checkings came back with a reply to check out Ally. Their website is the shit by the way. Reviews were nice, so I said what the hell and started signing up. It took me 2 minutes to fill in my info. I thought it might take a day or two to approve, or they’d do some dumbass credit history check and ask me questions I don’t know the answers to, but I was instantly approved and have full access to the account.

Just have to wait for my check card and all my monies will be with them. So, to any US Bank reps that read this, I’m willing to let you guys redeem yourself if you’d like to refund all my cash you jacked from me. I’ll gladly continue to use your service if you can match Ally’s terms.

Of course, that probably won’t happen.

And, if you haven’t already seen it… the Ally commercials are sadistically hilarious.