This is a quick video I made to explain a little bit more about Quantcast and how to use it to find better targets. Whether you are trying to get something specific for your PPV campaigns, find some sites to drop banners on, or just need to do a little bit of research, this video shows you how to do it.

I’ve been experiencing an influx of a lot of new people reading my blog. Many are currently considering dropping in to affiliate marketing. Many have purchased “guru” info products filled with nothing but lies and fake “profit buttons”. To say that a lot of people aren’t prepared for affiliate marketing is an understatement. They’re under-prepared and misinformed about what a true, productive affiliate marketer does to get to make a 4, 5 or 6+ figure month.

Let’s first take a look at one of the largest issues. There is a real lack of real information hitting people that are just researching affiliate marketing. Instead of seeing Wickedfire, Affbuzz, AffPlaybook or one of the other great true affiliate marketing info resources, they get cattle prodded into a “guru’s” list where they are sold the same press-button-profits software and information that doesn’t actually work. It generally doesn’t work, because even if it did make money at one time it is probably dated information well beyond its time. On top of this, they get told they can copy/paste profits – copy campaigns or websites or whatever and make the same amount of money who has they’re business together. Nah-ah… not happening.

But that is how gurus succeed, they target the people that know nothing and do it very well. They also have great social circles to help push it, where I know a lot of affiliates would struggle as they think they can do this on their own. The best affiliates work hand in hand with the advertisers, affiliate networks, managers, traffic sources, everyone to push their revenue to the max. This is not a one person game. People rely on you and you need to rely on other people and build your circle of business and trust!

I also want to talk about money here. $500 isn’t going to cut it. That’s enough to test a few hundred ads on Facebook, but after that, you are SOL. Look at affiliate marketing as a business. What business do you know can rent out a shop location, stick up ads, provide products or services with $500? Not very many. Luckily, you don’t need a 6 figure loan to open up a store front as an affiliate marketer, but you do need some deeper pockets than just a few hundred dollars. You would be a very lucky affiliate to turn $100 into $1000 on your first shot, so if someone is telling you those numbers, they probably ain’t true. My number is to shoot for no less than $2k that you are ready to spend, risk and lose. If this is a last ditch attempt to get out of debt, read on.

Desperation. Desperation is setting yourself up for failure. I know many people have sent me emails asking me about coaching with something like the following:

I’m really interested in your coaching but I really need it to work because I have huge medical bills and credit cards I need to pay off or I have to declare bankruptcy. Will I absolutely make money I only have a couple thousand left k thx bai.”

When you get desperate, you look for options to quickly bail you out rather than sit back and take a couple days to plan. I do not recommend AM to anyone who is desperate for money for whatever reason. You will make rash decisions, you’ll stop planning and try and overload yourself with too many campaigns on too many traffic sources and you’ll make a lot of mistakes that will lose you money rather than make it. Have a secondary plan. If AM doesn’t work out, can you take your skills elsewhere? Or can you get a steady income doing something else first then come back?

Let’s take a look at things that are better to do rather than trying out CPA marketing in an act of desperation:

• Find any local job you can. If you don’t have a job, and think that McDonalds is below you you are an idiot. That burger flipper is making $7 more dollars per hour than you are watching the TV. Take anything you can get if it life is that desperate. You can always continue looking for other jobs. I took 3 different jobs in one month when I was 18, upgrading in pay each time because I just was so driven to make more money and be financially independent from my parents.
• Freelance. Write for 1 cent per word if you have to. Learn Photoshop and make $3 banners and $10 logos. Learn how to code HTML and offer up $5 landing pages (on a good day, my old landing page store was doing $200+ per day with zero advertising other than what you would see on my blog). It took me 5 minutes to upload new landing pages and it paid my designers wages in a day or 2. Another great money maker is to call up local businesses in the yellow pages, ask if they have a website, and if not, charge them $300 to make a simple logo, upload a free WordPress theme with some images, then charge them a monthly maintainability fee. I know guys that would make 10k a month just off the maintenance fees alone!
• Start writing a blog on something you know, that has products and a large target market you think you can get a unique angle on. Start becoming a go to guy in that niche by posting frequently to niche forums, blog comments, Twitter, Facebook and word-of-mouth. This is a slow start, but something you can do a couple hours per day instead of watching TV or playing games. Build a list and start creating your own products to sell to your readers. It will take some time, but as long as you are persistent you should see some returns after a few months to a year depending on how much time and effort you put into it.

We also have time. A successful affiliate marketer does not need to spend 12 hours a day in front of their computer checking stats, but the “4-Hour Work Week” isn’t really something I’ve encountered in my 4-5 years of experience unless I was just really lazy. And it would usually be those lazy weeks where things would go wrong and I’d stop making money. The only likely hood you will get to that level is if you have 20 people managing every aspect of your affiliate marketing business. If you aren’t prepared to put in at least a few hours per day, you won’t make it off the ground. If you want to be one of those 6+ figure a month guys, look forward to full workdays or fuller than what you would get at any office position.

Now do you really think you are ready for affiliate marketing? I think 98% of the people that want to get started in affiliate marketing really have no idea what they are up against, and the above is the real truth they don’t know yet. As a new affiliate marketer did you have any of these issues, and if so how did you come to the realization that it wasn’t as easy as it was made out to be?

This question was originally asked in the “Ask Questions, Get Answers” post I made last week. If you have any questions you would like answered about affiliate marketing, life in Thailand, or business in general, be sure to pop your head into that post and leave any comments there! If you would like to anonymously ask any question, just contact me!

Just Go After What You Know Best

I don’t think picking a vertical should be a huge problem. Here is the most simple advice I can give you: pick what you know and go with it. I recently set up a campaign when I found an offer about flight simulation, something I enjoy doing in my down time. I built a lead path, collected emails, and shot them over to an offer. I understood the biggest problem with that crowd of people (most public flight simulation software available today sucks), and I attacked them with that angle. Straight off the bat, the path was profitable with ZERO optimization. Again, I know what my crowd wanted to hear because I know their problems. If you can pick a vertical based on what you know and like already, 90% of the work should already be done for you.

Start Off Simple

Another suggestion I can give you is to go after the easier niches. Things like email/zip submits, short lead gen offers, dating and gaming are all very simple to pull a decent conversion rate from. In most cases, they can be pulled off without a landing page, where I know many new affiliates struggle to put together. Jumping head first into the shark infested waters of high payout rebill offers might seem like a good idea because of the large payouts and high roof for testing with that high payout, but most affiliates that are there have their business dotted and crossed to a T. If you want to play with the big boys, you should have a big boy budget, so do not run these unless you are ready to pony up several thousand dollars just for a test.

Ask Your Affiliate Managers

Many new affiliates ignore their affiliate managers. Some are full of bullshit, so I don’t blame most of you guys, but you can always ask someone to switch you to another affiliate manager if you don’t like your current one. Another problem is that many affiliate managers ignore new affiliates not yet generating any revenue. This is a large and obvious issue with many of the larger networks. Try finding smaller and newer affiliate networks that are hungry for more affiliates.

When you have an affiliate manager you can get along with, treat them as a friend. Your best buddies are more willing to spill personal and private information, and the same concept applies to affiliate managers and their favorite affiliates. Simply start out by saying hi to them everyday in an email or IM, ask them how their day was, and ask around for any new offers that might be hot. Showing some small effort that you are actually building out campaigns and sending them traffic will give you a huge boost in status, even if it isn’t a lot, it shows you that you are working on it and with a little effort could become a successful affiliate marketer in your AMs eyes.

Watch Trends

A great source of information when you are stumped on what to run can be trending topics. Look for products you could target, and pull ideas from Google Trends or the top tweeted hashtags. Current events are a source of huge income for those with the ability to quickly grow and scale their campaigns in a short amount of time.

You Can Always Spy

Spying on ads is a grey line subject area. Everyone has one, but no one likes to talk about how they use it. I don’t have an issue with it anymore as most people that use spies to try and simply copy-paste campaigns fail. The proper way to use a spy is to see whats hot, how other affiliates are running their ads, and how then brainstorm on how you can improve those ads. Can you tighten up the targeting? Is there an angle you can take the campaign that others aren’t? Is there a better offer out there you can run? Again, don’t just steal campaigns word for word. Chances are if they have been running it any decent amount of time, they have that demographic on lockdown and will outbid and outrank you with the same ad.

If you are still absolutely stumped on what to run, you can try some coaching with me. I can help you pick exact offers, show you where and how to run them, and get you breaking even to profitable within a months time. Check this out for more details.

One of the tough things about being an affiliate marketer is that it is an extremely volatile industry. Offers go up and down, networks scrub and shave, traffic sources change, you’re constantly being outbid – these are just a few of the problems that can make an affiliate marketers job difficult. Its hard to say you can ever be 100% stable in any business though. But lets take a look at some things I’ve done, and that you can follow, to become a better marketer and hold on to campaigns just a bit longer.

I always start with research. This is something I know a lot of affiliates slack off on. They’d rather get data, then optimize off that data. I take my research on offers, demographics and psychograpics, put them all together to build a niche and tight campaigns, collect data on that and optimize further including new research information. Researching can be anything from figuring out your target market to knowing what your main competitors are doing and how you can improve off that before you launch your campaign. A smart and efficient marketer knows what they are getting into before they get into it.

So, how can we do better research? My days simply start out with reading the news or checking out new trends . Knowing what is going around in the world around you is going to help you pick niches, offers and put together traffic sources. You can target these trends on different advertising platforms through standard affiliate offers by using unique angles that other affiliate marketers aren’t going after. These aren’t always the largest campaigns, revenue-wise, but due to using a bit of creativity, they’ll last considerably longer than just broadly targeting something and inducing “banner blindness” to a larger target.

Another one of my favorite daily use tools is Quantcast. Quantcast allows me to find demographics for most larger websites on the net, or find websites that have the demographics I’m looking for. Also, they have a similar site/”users also visited” site feature which makes not only understanding demographics easier, but also getting under their head, or understanding psychographics of your market a little better, as well. The better you understand a target market, the better you will be able to manage them long term with a wide range of affiliate marketing campaigns.

You can also look into other tools such as tracking (which will always be essential), spies, and management tools that will just overall make your life easier.

Another issue I see a lot of affiliates with is cash flow. When most new affiliates start they have a couple hundred to a thousand or so bucks to their name with the hope of dropping a few ads and seeing 200% ROI. It just doesn’t work like that. You need money to make money. In your first couple months, if all you have is $1000 to work with, the max you can hope to see returns on is $2000. If you’ve got $10,000, you could possibly make $20,000. That doesn’t mean you will, but your first couple months are essential for cash flow as that is when you’ll be experimenting and learning the most. It also means networks probably aren’t paying you out on net-7 yet, which puts hinderece on whether or not you are making your money back right away.

So how can you help maintain overall cash flow? I started off in affiliate marketing by writing freelance. I still do it from time to time, as well as writing for a small group of blogs in only topics that interest me. Using your skills whether it be writing, teaching, programming, design or communicating, can be an excellent substitute income when you need that extra cash to put towards your affiliate campaigns. This is especially true when you are very short on cash. I hear way too many people complain that it is grunt work, too hard to learn, etc etc. You aren’t helping yourself out. Either stick it out for the additional cash to help you out of a rut, or keep complaining – just don’t let me hear about it.

Are you constantly building out your campaigns? I start most of my campaigns on one network, then scale out, usually with identical ads to continue to roll in money, even on old campaigns. Sticking to one network and/or one offer is an affiliate death trap. Make sure you are constantly building out new campaigns, even if you don’t have the money to run them yet, having them on lineup will accelerate you when you are ready for them. This gets much easier to handle when you have employees managing campaigns and other menial tasks for you.

Another big one I know many affiliates miss out on is having a stable business plan. If your idea of running a business is “Meh, I’ll get to it when I get to it or just wait for some better offers”, you’re not going to be having a very stable business. Network, manage, and plan your affiliate marketing. You don’t always have to stick 100% to it, but it will help guide you as you are scaling out to 4 or 5 figure days.

Here is an example daily schedule of how I manage my day and campaigns. First off, I wake up and read the news, drink my coffee, and check emails. After that, I only check emails a couple more times per day. If you can cut out access to Facebook completely, do so. Unfortunately, a lot of my business happens there, so I have to train myself to stay away from chatting with friends and only use it as a business tool. I go through any meetings and calls according to my daily planner. Another first thing I do is check the status of my running campaigns. Is ROI dropping? Are my offers all still up? I’ll do what I have to do to manage that. Afterwards, I start browsing OfferVault and talking to affiliate managers looking into new offers, campaigns and angles. If I find something worth while, I do my due research on it, send an email out to my designers to make landing pages or collect additional data (data mining and consolidating that data into a spreadsheet eases the amount of tedius analysis I would otherwise have to do on my own). I then start building those new campaigns. I don’t refresh my stats every 15 minutes, I don’t check my emails or Facebook every 15 minutes, and I avoid getting distracted by blocking myself from viewing sites that would otherwise kill all my time.

There is a lot more I could write on this subject, but I think I’ll leave you guys off here. Feel free to ask any questions on this topic in the comments section below!

Facebook is and probably always will be my favorite advertising network to simply “drop a couple ads.” It’s quick and easy to set up, the targeting options are first rate, and the ROI can be through the roof. I’ve had a few campaigns hit 500% ROI (on $xxx+ ad spend). But what I see, day in and day out, are more and more affiliate marketers struggling to make Facebook work. They drop $100 without knowing the basics behind the bidding and impressions system, then say “This sucks. Screw you guys. I’m outta here.”

So I’m going to give you a little heads up on what makes affiliate marketing campaigns tick on Facebook ads. And remember when going into Facebook, that even a little loss is a good learning experience. Take what you learn from your first campaigns and apply them to later campaigns. You are investing in data and personal experience. Use it.

Step one to even thinking about starting up on Facebook is to understand bidding. Now, unless you have a very high CTR ad, never bid CPM. Facebook straight out came and said that CPM is better for branders that don’t need clicks. Yeah – made me say WTF, too. The traffic quality is generally less than what you’ll get on CPC, and performance of clicks is also lower than what you’ll get from CPC.

CTR is directly responsible for your ads CPC. You want a good CPC? You need a great CTR. What is the main influence of CTR when running all your affiliate marketing ads on Facebook? Images. You will be testing lots of images to get this good CTR. A good CTR for me is anything of .2% and higher, although I’m usually okay with .15% and up. It’s not impossible to break a profit with a CTR below this if you write great ad copy (which is the main influence of conversions when direct linking), but you’ll be hard pressed to do it.

Want some tips on how you can increase your ad CTR? Check out this post I made on PoF/Facebook Ad colors.

And lets talk about niches. Everyone talks about dating and gaming. Why? Well – they work. Dating and gaming are two niches that take very little effort to start profiting on.

• Dating: Pick a country, rotate through a couple offers, test a few hundred ads and you should come up with the right combination of ads that makes you at least some sort of profit.
• Gaming: Pick a niche of games, target all the other niche games you can in Facebook, get some bright and colorful images, rotate through a couple offers and you should end up with profit.

It’s a little more detailed than that – and a little less throwing shit at the wall – but these two niches are stepping stones into bigger and better niches like education and health. I wouldn’t break into any other niche until you can get a few campaigns profitable in these niches. You need a bank roll before you can start rolling in the bank.

And, again, don’t let yourself get frustrated by Facebook’s silly antics. They aren’t the most helpful groups of guys when it comes to us affiliates, but no where else will you find a traffic source that gives you nearly the same amount of data!

Jumping into affiliate marketing alone can feel like you’re jumping into a small pool filled with great white sharks – a lot of risk and not a whole lot to help you actually succeed. Affiliate networks provide little help, or insignificant information because many make money off internally run campaigns and scaling off what their affiliates can do, public forums and blogs are filled with too much information or misinformation, and a lot of the handouts you might find is old and dead information. Many people turn to private mentorship and coaching in hopes of better, smarter and cleaner information. While I might be biased, working with the right coach can be many new affiliate marketer’s saving grace. It can take you from a sinking ship to an absolute battleship on the affiliate war front. These are some of the best reasons you should take the plunge and get a proper mentor!

Pure Experience

Obviously, the main reason to have an affiliate marketing mentor is to have someone with experience “on your team.” Making breakthroughs in affiliate marketing on your own isn’t impossible, but it does require a lot of trial and error, testing, and most of all, time and money. Having someone there to share their experience will cut down on a lot of the time and money you’d be using to set up campaigns otherwise. I make sure my students get information on past and current campaigns that work, why they work, and how they can break through into getting them work with the most minimum investment possible. That doesn’t mean you’ll be making $1000 overnight, but it does mean eventually you can be able to work up to that point.

Focus

The main reason a lot of my affiliate marketing coaching students have failed to make money is a lack of focus. There is a lot of information overload, and not having the correct information or too much information found on the Internet can leave you feeling lost or like you have to try everything to succeed. I set most of my students up with 1 or 2 offers in our first calls, and tell them focus on these for the next couple weeks. When I mean focus, I mean you work on nothing else but researching these offers, finding ads run by other affiliates, studying ads for the same offer/niche, learning how to write proper ad copy, designing and setting up landing pages if necessary, and finally building, running, optimizing and scaling campaigns. Focus means putting in smart work to get great returns. Any good mentor will make focus a sticking point.

Management and Organization

A good mentor will also help with management and organization of your business. When I work with my students I make sure they understand what it is they have to do, and help them organize their weeks so the next week we have some details and statistics to go over. If they don’t have anything, it either means they’re not focusing and I have to go back to that point, or I need to further assist them with organizing their business. With affiliate marketing, you’ve got a lot to manage – time, money, statistics, and personal well being. Making sure you have access to the correct tools too succeed is essential to your success. Any mentor will make sure you have access to these before you start your actual coaching/mentorship.

Collaboration

When you work with an affiliate marketing mentor, you should eventually get to a point where you have lots of ideas running through your head and want someone to talk to about them. I’m always open for collaboration. Have a great idea for a campaign, but not exactly sure how to make it work out or if it will even stand a chance? Come at me with it! In being able to share what you’re thinking, you’ll be able to expand some of your ideas with a mentor that has more experience and ability to creatively help you build a unique affiliate campaign that will expand your daily revenue to the next level.

Responsibility

This one goes hand in hand with focus and management. As a new affiliate marketer, you’ll probably be working alone at home on your own terms and hours. In this situation, you don’t have anyone to be responsible to for getting things done. But you know what I dislike more than anything else? My coaching students that don’t take my advice and get anything done. A good mentor will help keep you on track and moving forward. Fail to get anything done and you are not only failing yourself, but you’ll be failing your mentor. When you hire a mentor, you should keep in mind that you are paying your own money to get good, proper advice and not using that information push yourself further can be rather frustrating for them. I know I give my students the absolute best information my experience has given me, so I can only hope and imagine that most instructors, mentors and coaches out there are doing the same for the sake of making sure their clients get their moneys worth, as well as keeping their name clean!

If you feel you are in need of a coach or mentor, I do offer my own coaching which you can find information on here. I stick to the 5 keys above, and if I don’t, I’m not doing my job right. Before choosing your own coach or mentor, me or anyone else, make sure you do due diligence and research on any potential mentors. Paying for someone that can’t teach you what you want to know, or what you need to know can lead to some awkward moments or feelings of wasted money. I’m completely open to anyone reaching out to me via email or Skype (hyperionxl) before you make the plunge in any of my coaching programs.

I loveeee winter. While all of you are bitching and moaning about snow and piss poor weather, I get to enjoy the tropical weather, great food, amazing locales and beautiful women! Thailand is definitely the place for me. But enough bragging about that. Let’s look at what’s been happening, and has happened for me every Winter since I started affiliate marketing: I’ve been crushing dating!

Dating has always killed during the winter. People are snowed in, lonely, and unable to go out and meet people, especially during this part of the year. That is all the way up until today, Valentine’s Day. Now if you haven’t thought about running dating the past month or two, you’re a fool. It’s easy money.

So what happens after V-day? Dating still survives and will still make money, but numbers start to drop. People stop worrying about meeting the one on this “special holiday” and start worrying about other things.

So what should you start looking into? It’ll be spring soon, and after that summer. People want to enjoy their great weather, so entice them. Biz ops are prime during summer. The angle, more freetime and more money for your family is great for targeting moms and dads.

How about weight loss? Slip into that bikini by the time summer rolls around with some Acai berry. And this isn’t just for women either. Men want to look good, as well! Quick 6 packs are always killers and you’ll want to start working on those campaigns now. Other beauty products such as acne solutions and anti-aging kill it year round, but especially when its time to go out and enjoy summer!

And how about those kids? As soon as they get out for summer break, they’ll be free for a lot more computer time. Gaming offers can mix well, although you might want to watch out on quality if you are targeting young. Mix in some older demographics to keep conversion quality up and good for the advertiser.

Sorry I’ve been slow on posting lately. I’ve been down and dirty with some new projects in the works. More info will be released soon, but for now I gotta keep my mouth locked and shut!

Seriously, I’m not dead. I wasn’t strangled by any Thai ladyboys, and the mafia hasn’t put a hit out on my head, yet. Also, Internet marketing isn’t dead.

Anyways, click here to download this neat little landing page. Change the background up and use it for whatever niche you need it for! If you need a custom landing page designed, hit me up. My team can do your standard PPV LP, news and blog style landing pages, or we can design and code your own offers landing page at a decent rate.

I’ll be back with more regular posting soon. The past couple months and the next 6 months I have a ton of business projects going into motion which means I need to put the blog on the back-burner sometimes.

If you’ve been affiliate marketing any long than a few days, you probably know that frustration from the industry is nearly almost ever present. You campaigns aren’t converting, your ads don’t get clicks, click costs are too high, and a once great converting campaign gets taken down or starts shaving leads. These are just a few of the problems I deal with on a daily basis. Now if you are struggling to jump off the ground and make a real profit, read through the following tips and put them to use. Remember, I’m not trying to feed you bullshit – these are tips that I’ve put in to practice when necessary, and they help me get back from frustrating days.

1. Slow Down

Now, you might think that taking 20 campaigns and throwing up general campaigns at Facebook or TrafficVance might be the best course of action to find something that converts. Do 10 minutes of keyword and target scraping for each offer and you’re done! Great plan, right? Wrong. If you fail to even get a single conversion with this method, it wouldn’t surprise me. Launch carefully planned, carefully researched campaigns. Look at what others are doing first, why what they are doing works, and “borrow” if you have to. If you are outright stealing campaigns, failing to understand why things convert, you’ll always be relying on others to make money before you. The real big ballers are the innovators.

2. Target Tighter/Smaller

Broad campaigns are what everyone dreams of. Setting up a RON campaign to millions of people and making thousands a day in return. If you are new and struggling, this is most likely going to be cause for frustration and significant losses. Come of with an angle or a very niche offer that requires you to target smaller reaches and less populated URLs and keywords. While you won’t be making thousands with this kind of method, if I was new I would rather see $10 of profit per day rather than $500+ lost a day.

3. Work With One Traffic Source

Stop jumping around. Just because the first 3 campaigns you tried didn’t work out, doesn’t mean the next 10 will fail. Chances are, if people are talking about 1 traffic source and how they are making money with it, they probably aren’t lying about it. If they can get something to work, so can you.

4. Stop Hopping Around Different Offers

Just because your first ads didn’t profit, doesn’t mean it is a complete loser. This goes hand in hand with the above. If people are talking about an offer, there is most likely money to be made in it. Pick a few different offers, max, and make them work for you!

5. Work with Only a Few Smaller Networks

There are lots of large networks out there that have thousands of affiliates. These guys usually have a fantastic amount of offers, but support can be real hit and miss. When I was struggling to find new offers that worked, I would branch out to smaller affiliate networks and ask them what some of their strongest offers were. They are usually more willing to divulge inside info, as well as having much faster and better attended support. The more loyal you are in sending traffic to these small guys, the better they’ll come to treat you.

6. Get To Know Your AM

Affiliate Managers have access to a lot of data. EPCs, traffic sources, creatives, landing pages, etc. Again, we’re going to hold hands with the above point. The more loyal and talkative with your AM, the better you’ll be treated. Affiliate Managers are paid when we get paid, so if they aren’t helping us, they’re not gettin’ any money from me! Say hi and remind your AM you are around every morning and ask them about any new offers. Make sure they remember who you are!

7. Go Private

If you get to know your AMs a little better, they might be able to let you into the world of private offers. There is so much untapped potential here, because most people think that affiliate networks make all their offers public and requestable to everyone. Larger networks can have 100s of hidden offers that you might not know about until you actually ask to see them. These offers have less competition and shitty traffic squandering them, and you’re 10x more likely to draw a profit from them.

8. Always Track Everything You Can

You can use the free Tracking202, or upgrade to the newer and more frequently updated CPVLAB. Both are excellent and have some features that the other doesn’t. Use these guys to track all the data that you can and analyze it! What time of day did you get the most conversions? When are you getting the highest EPC? When is it the lowest? Which banner ad gets the highest conversion rate? Which keywords are only breaking even and is there something you can do to bump the CVR on those targets?

9. Try Landing Pages Out

I know you want the easy way out with a directly linked campaign, but in 90% of my campaigns, a landing page almost always converts better. That little added presell can help take someone not interested in what you are marketing, into a potential lead, and it helps build trust and flow with those already 100% ready to fill in the offer page’s fields.

10. If all else fails…

Get a coach/mentor/consultant to work with you. Yes, I know. Shameless self promotion. But there are people out there that are willing to give you genuine advice. Use them if you feel like you need a really big boost to get in front of the wolf pack.

Do you have any tips you can share from when you were a noobie affiliate? Drop them in the comments! And don’t worry – my 31 Campaigns aren’t going anywhere. You can expect a new one tonight, as well as a freebie Friday giveaway hitting your inbox tonight as well!

We’re only a few months away from entering 2012 (and only about a year away from the end of the world, for those of you who believe the Mayan’s would have really made a calender that has infinite length if the world were to last that long). I’ve been writing a lot of “affiliate marketing campaign walkthroughs” the past month, and those things take a heck of a long time to prepare, so I thought I’d use a little downtime to talk about what 2012 has in store for affiliate marketers.

If you plan on sticking with affiliate marketing for the long haul, it is always important that you know whats on the coming horizon. Fall behind and you won’t be prepared to change and adapt your business and marketing tactics fast enough to keep up. I saw a lot of affiliates struggling after a successful 2009 moving into 2010, and the same for those that started in 2010 moving into 2011. A lot has changed since I started about 4 years back, and I can’t say many parts of my business has stayed the same. We’ll be seeing a lot of changes in 2012.

The death of the average affiliate on Facebook is upon us. I know lots of us love Facebook, and lots of us have a burning desire to take a boot and shove it up the internal ad’s team ass over there. What we’ve seen that past year on Facebook ads are lots more banning from better tracking on Facebook’s end, and lots of changes to the system that tailors Facebook ads to small business, service, app and game owners. Rules have gotten stricter and there seems to be a 1 strike and your out rule applied. A hidden account quality score is almost certainly in place, meaning the better your score the more impressions you’ll get, along with cheaper clicks. And affiliate’s are getting categorized with a lower QS. On top of that, we’ve also got ads, like dating, with impression caps… either that or it is so bogged up with dating ads that there really aren’t enough impressions to go around.

Despite all the bad things I’ve listed above, hope is not lost for the ol’ affiliate on Facebook. Facebook Pages and Groups have become an amazing source for contacting and growing out subscriber numbers. On top of that, they generally seem to be cheaper overall. I suppose this has to do with the fact that the traffic stays on Facebook through the whole process. My plan for Facebook is to start researching what people are buying, learn how to target people that are buying information on that stuff, then to create subscription sites based around this while using Facebook pages and groups to build demand for my sites. I had a recent chat with someone doing this in a wild niche you would never think could make any money – Try 1000 subscribers at $40 a month each in a niche that is ridiculously easy to target on Facebook, not to mention cheap. I’ll keep the details private, but this is a simple form of adapting to the trends of Facebook just generally hating on us affiliates.

PPV. Another traffic source people either get along with off the bat or can never seem to get to work. We’ve seen a surge of tools that spy and autobid pop up lately. This isn’t good for the new affiliate, as it generally just teaches an affiliate how to steal landing pages and target lists, and then get in out of control bidding wars for those that don’t have access to the tools. Pop costs across the most popular traffic sources have been bumped. Less and less offers are actually accepting pop-traffic, and I don’t always blame them. From my internal testing, the overall quality is very low.

PPV isn’t all bad and blah. There are lots of niches and campaigns that still work, you just need to work a little harder to bump quality if you plan on running anything more than a couple weeks there. Make sure you are really preselling things hard if you are taking creative angles, because if there is one thing an advertiser hates, its gotta be the leads that were pre-sold illegitimately.

We’re seeing the return of the rebill these past couple months. That’s great because it’s easy money, but didn’t anyone learn their lesson the last time rebills blew up? A whole lot of Oprah and the FTC killing some affiliates and networks operations is what happens when you start pushing too much volume and fake testimonials. Until someone can find a way to sell these without being a complete joke and a lie, you’re going to be walking into unsteady territory. Hell, even Clickbank is cracking down on how Guru’s sell their bizops.

One strong note for the next year – MOBILE! Mobile is absolutely blowing up and is something you’ll want to start getting your ass on ASAP! We’ve got amazing technology that is making some smartphones more powerful than some notebooks I’ve seen on the low-budget market. With faster connectivity and dropping bandwidth costs and the constant need for many to get information on the go, mobile platforms will soon surpass online surfing time from PCs. More mobile ad platforms are slowly popping up, and WAP offers are killing traffic sources after a small amount of testing and optimization. Mobile is like Facebook ads 5 years ago – extremely cheap and very easy to game. Jump on it before the rush!

Of course, whether or not affiliate marketing survives depends a lot on the global climate and economy. I’d be an idiot to give a factual rundown of what is actually going on, but from what I gather, the US is headed for a zombie apocalypse, China will eventually being running child labor factories in western-developed countries, and the polar ice caps are melting. Now if any of this happens, big changes in affiliate marketing will come. If your main targets can’t afford to buy anything, you’re going to need to find a new market. The main idea here is that if there is a large social, economic or political collapse in any country you run traffic through, you can expect to lose a lot of revenue. If you aren’t a multi-national traffic buying machine now, get into the swing of things and start doing it!

How do you expect to survive 2012? What do you plan to do differently next year that you didn’t do this year? Have you packed up your zombie apocalypse survival bag yet? How will you be an affiliate marketer in 2012?