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.

Related posts:

1. Why You Don’t Want to Run Email Submits
2. PPV Walkthrough – Part 2 – What Affiliate Offers Work?
3. Be Prepared to Lose

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.

Related posts:

1. Give Me Your Campaigns and I’ll Pay You for Them
2. How Much Do You Value Your Time?
3. Make Some Money You College Bastards

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!

Related posts:

1. Freebie Friday for the 18th Is Coming
2. The First Freebie Friday
3. Freebie Friday: February 26th, 2010

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.

Related posts:

1. Alternative Benefits of Building an Email List Now
2. Let Me Set Things Straight
3. PPV Walkthrough – Part 2 – What Affiliate Offers Work?

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.

Related posts:

1. 1 Tip Per Day Starts Now
2. Realistic Profits After Your 1st Month of Affiliate Marketing
3. 3 Things You Need to Perfect Before You Become a Great Affiliate Marketer

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.

Related posts:

1. How to Pick a Demographic and Wrap an Offer Around It
2. Kim Kardashian’s Teeth Whitening Rebill Affiliate Marketing Offer
3. Don’t Know What to Run Next?

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

1. Picture of hot chick
2. Target 18+ men
3. …
4. 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!”

Related posts:

1. Is Dating Dead?
2. Targeting Women With Dating Offers
3. The Transformation of Affiliate Marketing Begins?

Running my landing page/creative store for affiliate marketers has been a lot of fun, but I end up selling a lot of stuff to people that want into the industry, but have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. No HTML knowledge, no real idea of what a landing page is and have no idea how to upload it to a server (if they even have one that is). You’d be surprised, actually, by some of the emails I’ve received. Something along the lines of, “I downloaded it, now how do I put it on Facebook?”

*Facepalm*

Alright, so we all started off somewhere and not all of us have the same knowledge on computers, servers, domains, and tracking. This post should help you get started. This post will require some Googling, for your own good, and to allow me to cover only things that should be important for most of the landing pages I offer in my store. There is plenty of other sources of similar information out there like this, so learning how to do research will be good for you now and the rest of your internet marketing career.

For those of you that have been affiliate marketing for more than a few weeks, you probably don’t need to read this as it is about as basic as it gets.

Much of my store items deal with PPV, so that’s how I’ll be setting up this quick tutorial.

Tools We’ll Need

• Hosting (preferably a VPS to start off with)
• A Domain Name
• Tracking202/Prosper202
• WYSIWYG/Text HTML editor
• A Landing Page (Free Download!)
• An FTP Tool

Hosting Options

You’ve got a plethora of choices with hosting. Number 1 thing to stay away from is shared hosting though. Unless you like long load times, lots of down time where you won’t be able to connect to your site, and don’t mind all of that cutting into your ROI, STAY AWAY (especially with PPV traffic)! I won’t get into the details of why you shouldn’t use shared hosting with PPV traffic, but all I will say is you will lose more money with it than you will save by using a cheap host.

At the very least, go with a VPS. I always recommend Wiredtree. They’ve got fantastic support, so even if you are total technical noob on the server side of things, they’ll help walk you through anything, and I mean anything. When I first started with them, I probably sent them 5 different tickets a day and they were all answered within 10 minutes. The price for a low end VPS (which is all you need for now) is around 50 -60 bucks a month, which is really nothing when you can easily make that all back within a day.

Once you start making big money, move over to a dedicated server or two.

Buy a Domain

For most of my PPV landing pages, I just buy a few different general domains that can be used for anything. Doesn’t need to be anything fancy. I could use something like JDsGreatDeals.com or something like that. Don’t worry too much about it. I buy my domains from Namecheap.

Anyways, you need to point the domain to your server. If you don’t know how to do that, ask your hosting provider. Wiredtree has a great setup document they give to all their customers. Read it and you will learn a lot!

Tracking202/Prosper202

Again, I’m not going to go into all of this. Tracking202 has some fantastic documents to help you set things up. All you need to do is pick your self-hosted version (Prosper202) or use Tracking202 off their server. I recommend Prosper all the way. Faster, editable and more secure.

Landing Page

You can download that free lander here, or buy more from my store (or subscribe to my forums which include a crap ton of downloads available the moment you subscribe (currently over 60 and growing daily!))

Setting up the LP

To set up the landing page, you’ll want to open up the index.html file in your favorite text or WYSIWYG editor. I’m using Dreamweaver, just because it allows me to visually see changes when I alter the HTML a bit. Dreamweaver has a free trial, and I highly recommend you purchase it as soon as you can (pricey, but 100% worth it).

So here’s what that looks like:

It’s a confusing massive wall of text, right? Read up on some HTML to get the jist of what it all means. Google is your friend.

The first thing you’ll want to take a look at is the <title> tag in the header (underlined in the image above). This is what is shown at the top of the browser. It is VERY important for PPV, as this is the first thing loaded and what any user will see when they get a pop-up. I’ve seen lots of people set this as “Test Landing Page 1″. That’s just dumb. Sure, its a little bit easier to keep track of when you are opening it up yourself, but it can be a serious deterrent which means they might just close out before the whole landing page loads. I’ll be pretending this is a weight loss offer I’ll be promoting, so I’ll set it as “Want to Lose Weight, Fatty? | LOSE 10 POUNDS IN 1 HOUR WOW!” It’s stupid and unrealistic, but it gets your attention, and that is what it is there to do.

Rather than edit the code, there is a small text box on the menu bar at the top you can use to easily change this.

You can save the file, and click the file again to open it in your browser to see the change you just made.

Now, you’ll want to change the header and bullet information. This is fairly simple in Dreamweaver. You can just highlight the area in the Design preview window pane, and it will highlight area in the HTML pane, as well. Then just type in whatever you want. See the above image to understand what I’m saying here.

You can do the same for each bullet point.

Then you’ll want to send users to the offer page when they click the button. This is a rollover button, so it has some tricky code added in, but it still isn’t hard to add in your link. Click the button and it will highlight the button code in the coding panel. On the bottom is the properties toolbar. You’ll see an area called link. Simply enter in your affiliate link that you grabbed from Tracking202 (You’ll figure that part out with the documents and help available on Tracking202).

When you’ve done all this, make sure you add the landing page code (From Tracking202) before the end body (</body>) in the code panel.

And you’ve finished editing you landing page. Not too hard, right? Right. Moving on, we’ve got to set it up on our server.

FTP Software

I use SmartFTP. It’s fast, remembers all my domains and passwords for me (I always forget), and does a whole ton of other more advanced stuff. You can try FileZilla or CuteFTP if you need something free.

Anyways, connect to the domain on your server. If you still haven’t linked your domain to your server, you should probably figure that out first. Ask your host’s support on how to do that if they don’t provide documents on how to do that (Wiredtree does).

Alright, moving on. Connect to your domain on the server. It should look like the above. I’m just connecting to justindupre.com here. I’ve got a bunch of folders and stuff set up here, but you probably won’t have many except for maybe a private folder and a public/www folder. Just open the public/www folder. The other stuff isn’t important.

You will want to make a separate folder if you plan on using this domain for multipleΒ  landing page. Just right click on the pane on the right and make a new folder, just like in Windows. I’ll make a sample here and rename it 111. So this sets me up the whole URL of http://justindupre.com/111

From there, all I do is drag and drop my files (grap the index.html and the whole img folder) from Windows browser explorer into that folder. Then I press the play button and it automatically transfers everything to my server!

Check out your work!

All that is left is for you to start buying traffic!

And that is all there is to it. Now, I know I didn’t go too far in depth, but that is because there are so many posts on this subject, that itΒ  is hard for me to just not copy them all and paste it here. Again, Google, Google, Google. We hate it, but we love it. Learn how to use it!

Now go out there and start making money.

Looking for case studies and more in-depth walk-throughs that show you how to take that landing page and start making money with it? Join the forums!

Related posts:

1. How to Setup a Landing Page on Your Server
2. Creating a Landing Page With WordPress
3. Hosting Your Affiliate Landing Pages

Competition in the affiliate marketing world is fierce. It’s no different than any two companies in the same industry. Constant competition to keep their costs low and profits higher. Constant competition to have the latest innovation in their product before they’re competitors get there. And a lot of blackhat stuff like spying, under the table deals, and throwing radioactive waste in the water. I hate saying this, but if you want to profit big time, too, it’s time to play the game with your competitors (or invent a new niche… not impossible, but good luck!)

There are affiliates out there that want to play fair, do things right, stay ethical, etc. All this is possible, but you’ll have a hard time bringing in 4-figure days. You’ll miss a lot of the fun and fire of the competition, too. And it is very hard to say what is ethical, and what isn’t. A good salesman does what he has to do to close the deal. It’s just the same in the online world as it is in the offline world of advertising and marketing.

So how do you really stay in front of your competitors? Constant research, constant analytic tracking, constant product development, and staying in the loop with whats happening in the news with digital advertising and CPA marketing. It’s a tough, tough industry for the individual because it takes a lot of time to do all of these things. Most new affiliate marketers don’t realize that is how much work it really takes, and just using my girl images and throwing up ads on Facebook won’t work. The game has evolved far beyond that point.

So what can a new affiliate do to get through these things?

• Save Money – Get some decent bankroll. Work two jobs if you have to, because the full time marketer works just as hard, if not harder than someone who works overtime at McDonald’s 60 hours a week. You can try affiliate marketing with $20 a day, but you won’t get far, it will take a long ass time to test every variable for maximum ROI, and by the time you’re done testing the campaign, the network is already scrubbing you or the best offer has been pulled already.
• Build tools – spys, scrapers, automatic bidders, cloakers, split testing scripts. Build them all or find them if you can. They’ll all help you out considerably.
• Competitive Analysis – Use that spy, or just start hunting out ads yourself. Look for landing pages, see where they are getting traffic and sending it, and innovate off of that. Don’t straight up copy them unless you only have the mental capacity of a 5-year-old and that’s your idea of creative… wait, scratch that… a 5-year-old would do a better job at it than you.
• Start Innovating – Make a new niche. Create your own product. Build your own affiliate empire by letting others steal each others work and you making all the money. Become an advertiser yourself. Build your own traffic source. Make money, get paid, dammit!

Want some ideas on how new affiliate marketers can make it in this industry? Join the private forums for case studies, downloads, and one-on-one advice with me. For more details, click here.

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Marketing Is Easy
2. Taking Your Business to the Next Step: Thinking Long Term
3. 1 Thing at a Time Is More Than Enough

It’s such a vague question.

There is no right answer. There isn’t even a wrong answer..

You can get nearly every vertical to work on any traffic source, it just takes different tactics to get there. They all take work and they all require you to spend money to test. There is no grand campaign niche that will make you $100 today or tomorrow without a little experimenting and work.

This is affiliate marketing. If you can’t get used to the idea of actually putting in any work, go back to your 9 – 5 office job, because affiliate marketing is more stressful, requires more technical and analytical skills, than any job where you are working under a boss.

So the next time I get that question, I’m going to tell you this: Test everything. Whichever offer makes you the most money = best offer.

I don’t want to come off as a frustrated, stuck-up ass, but the thing is I’ve gotten so many different niches to work, after considerable testing and analyzing, that it wouldn’t matter what I tell you. I could tell you car insurance. I could tell you gaming. I could tell you dating. I could tell you make money online offers. It means nothing if you aren’t willing to put in the effort it takes to make these campaigns work.

Every offer will work with every traffic source when you hit the right spot.

Talk about this post in the comments below, or move over to the private forums for case studies, exclusive downloads and one-on-one tips with me!

Related posts:

1. PPV Walkthrough – Part 2 – What Affiliate Offers Work?
2. Targeting Women With Dating Offers
3. 1 New Thing a Day