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?

Not all affiliate marketing campaigns have to be well thought out and devilishly planned. This is one such example.

The Offer

So the offer I’m looking at now is World Golf Tour. I see from oDigger that it is available on EWA Network and WolfStormMedia at around $0.90 per conversion. Only $0.90, you say!? That’s right, but payout isn’t everything. I’ve made $50,000 a month with 1-2 dollar payouts, so this should not deter you in the slightest.

Let’s take a look at the offer page.

Wow! Simple, pleasant and easy. Fill in the form and collect your money. That’s about as simple an offer as it gets. Due to the low payout, I can only assume that it has a low scrub rate. The multitude of registration options through Google, Yahoo, or Facebook is awesome, as well. The easier it is to sign up, the faster you are going to make monies.

I’d like to run this on contextual traffic (PPV on TrafficVance), as that is where it will be easiest to target this offer. However, we run into one slight problem. The landing page is about 300 pixels too wide for the standard PPV pop up. You can try direct linking, but even taking a JPG image of this offer page, replacing the form with a big “SIGN UP FREE” button (or an email submit for your own list) would probably be the better choice. While users can scroll side to side on a PPV pop-up, it isn’t something that you’d find most users doing. Perhaps asking your affiliate network for permission to iFrame the signup form would work as well. That’ll be down to a network by network, advertiser to advertiser basis.

Another great thing about this offer is that it can be promoted to multiple non-English speaking countries (SE, DK, NO, FI, NL). This makes it a great choice for Facebook ads, as well. You can test it out on US traffic but you’ll need a high CTR as click costs on FB US traffic can be outstanding.

Basic Research

Quantcast tells us that most people that visit WGT.com are white, affluent men in their 30s and up that are interested in golf. If this comes to any surprise to you, its time to get out from under that rock. If you are targeting with a mix of demographic and interest targeting (say for example, Facebook), take this stuff to heart as you’ll have your best conversions when following this data. With PPV, demographic targeting won’t be as important as interest targeting, especially when it is so easy!

Where to Run This Offer

So if you are going to be running this offer on TrafficVance or LeadImpact, it will be easiest to do so simply by targeting golfing related key terms and URLs. I’ve put together a list of 700+ golfing terms I pulled from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can get it by helping me out by Tweeting about this post. Just click the button below to do so.

Tweet&getit is powered by Viuu

Cool! So you have the list now. If you want to target URLs, I would get a URL scraping tool. My favorite is AffPortal. It’s affordable and super easy to use.

Grab conversion pixels and post them on the offer. Not all your keywords and URLs will be winners. In some cases only 1 out of 1000 may be profitable. Some people think PPV is cheap traffic, but it can be relatively expensive to test. This might be the case with this offer. Remember to stick with it, spend $20 and see where it goes. If you are picking up some conversions, this is good. Spend a little more to make sure conversions are consistent. I’ve spent $500 in one day, only to make $100 back. I paused everything that didn’t convert and after a week I made back that $400 loss and was profitable for more than a few months. That is sometimes the sacrifice you have to make to get things working on PPV traffic.

Now, if you are going to try this offer out on Facebook, here is a sample ad I would use:

“Love Golf? – Then play World Golf Tour. Play against the Pro’s scores and beat them in tournaments for real cash prizes. Sign up FREE now!”

It is a stupid simple ad that you can use when targeting appropriate interests (You can target any of the Tiger Woods Golf games, Sim Golf, or go as broad as Golf if you are feeling up to the challenge). It gives an emotional connection that requires a response (Love), induces challenging the users skill to build interest, as well as a call to action with the key term ‘free’. That’ll be a biggie to your CTR. If you are planning to run this offer in non-English speaking countries, please use a professional translation service like onehourtranslation.com. Google Translate will do a horrible job trying to get this exact message across.

Remember to split test your images and landing pages constantly so you can better maximize your ROI!

Final Comments

What you are left with here is a very simple offer. Target middle aged men into golf. It’s not a difficult task to pick up some really easy money here. I realize this post isn’t as extremely in-depth as my other posts, but it really doesn’t have to be. This is not something that you are going to have to think about for a long time to break a profit!

Welcome to class, students. Now sit down and shut up! Professor J. Dupre is going to be taking you on a crash course through writing a dating ad, and even throwing you a couple tested and working ad copies that are currently working. You’ll even get some targeting advice!

K.I.S.S.

First thing to keep in mind is that writing a competitive and good dating ad should not be a life-sucking, difficult experience. As you grow your affiliate marketing portfolio and business, you’ll start to notice that some of your best ads have been some of the most simple. Take a look at the following dating ad headlines:

• Want a Girlfriend?
• Meet Cute Asian Girls
• White Girls Love Black Guys

These are all simple ads that I run. Feel free to borrow from them if you’d like. K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid) works for dating, because lets face it – People that use dating sites are simple people. They’re in it to find a match, or a quick fling. You will want to change your message depending on who you’re targeting, but no matter what, a simple ad will always work and can be a great base to build your dating campaigns upon.

Some of my best performing ads and landing pages are simple one liners that follow this key rule.

Engage the User

You’ll notice my first ad above is a question. It’s a simple, yet effective way to engage a user, especially one that can answer the question to your benefit. Targeting plays into this game here, so if you were to use my first example here, make sure you are targeting single men that are interested in meeting women. Facebook makes this simple enough (and requires it), and the same can be said for Plenty of Fish. With other traffic sources, you’ll have to play around with the traffic before you can nail such a broad statement down. Try looking for demographics and psychographic targeting with younger middle-aged men that are stuck in front of their computers more than the average person. The lower their education level, the better! Remember to keep things simple!

Make Use of Variables

This is easy to do with Plenty of Fish. Let the user know you are addressing them as much as possible. With a PPV ad/landing page, welcome the user with whatever search term or site they were originally browsing. Let the user know that because they are xx years old, or because they came from xyz.com, they are getting additional benefits. Here are some examples:

• Jenny from xyz.com just joined datingsite.com. Meet her now!
• Women on datingsite.com are looking for 34-year old men from your city. Click Here!
• Are you a short guy? 1000s of women on datingsite.com love short men!

FREE!

Use that word. It will incur an increased CTR on your ad, although it might have an effect on overall lead quality. This is something you will have to test out on a offer to offer basis. Also, keep in mind that not all offers will allow you to use the word “free” in your advertisements.

Now then, if you have any questions on the above, want to drop your own advice, or just feel like spamming my blog, the comments section is below. Use them and abuse them!

I keep myself happy in many ways, but rather talking about what happens late at night, I’d rather tell you about some business tips and tricks I use that have almost the same effect. Be prepared for, probably, one of the wildest posts you’ve ever seen here.

Know Your Target and Your Offer

“I TaKE TeH ReaL MaTuRe SiNGLeS’… Okay shit I can’t write like this anymore. “I take teh real mature singles offer and target man 21 up!! WAI no monies?

Too bad its not 2008 when that kind of crap would fly on Facebook. I’m serious… that stuff worked. 10 cent bids, targeting men 18 and up (no relationship status need be checker here), mad monies. MAD MONIES! To you mister Russia/India/wherever, I think you’d have better luck building a time machine than the angle you’re going at now.

Gone are the days of blindly targeting whomever you’d like and making a damn fine dollar. I have this step I use called “research” which has become an integral part of any marketing campaign, CPA or not, that I build. Research is a wonderful thing in that it allows me to learn a market slice’s intentions before I actually go out and blow money trying to get them to buy my drugs – we’re talking acai berry here, of course. That’s still not outlawed in the states is it? Okay, good!

Research is so damn simple in this day and age. It’s as simple as walking up to a stranger in Target and asking for their opinion on which hot chicks picture they would rather click on. If you aren’t the ballsy type, this information is easily accessible on the web. Media kits, survey results, thousands of case studies, market research tools, income reports, advertising reports, or you can just go survey people on Chatroullette for an hour or two (Been there done that, saw too many balls, told my employee to do it, did it, later he rage quit and threatened to sue… blah blah sexual harassment suit blah blah). Kidding aside (that was a joke, really), if you aren’t doing research before hand you’re going to end up doing it with your own money. And if you are doing that, just make sure you are using some tracking. (Microsoft Excel does not equal tracking)

Work with What You Love

I love Asian women. Thank god South-East Asia is full of them (It’s also full of men that think they’re women. Contrary to popular belief I’m not into that shit one bit. Oh, but the ladyboy dating niche = mad money… just sayin’). I’ve got dating sites, Asian girly picture sites, and general tourism sites hooked up out here. I build my own lists, make my own offers, and I love it! Every once and a while I’ll pitch in and do some of the grunt work, writing articles, building links, collecting images and manually throwing up Facebook ads to get disapproved later just for this niche. You gotta do what you love, so pick something out that you know and love, especially when you’re trying to make your first buck online. Of course, I’ve got my health, gaming and biz op niches cornered, but Asia is something I call my own and tackle harder than everyone else.

“But Justin, I just like making money.”

Well then, learn to love to work your ass off, as well. This industry is not for those stricken with the lazy ass gene. Read on for more details.

Never Quit

How cliche. In all seriousness, though, don’t quit. Don’t drop the ball. Hold the ball, fondle it, love the ball… too far? Okay no more balls.

I know affiliates that went from millions of dollars up to being $17 dollar gangsters the next year because they rode off of their success and gave up pursuing even greater riches (they probably didn’t have the best financial management skills, too).

Think about that for a while. Today you have $1,000,000. The next year, you’re a $17 gangster. Keep that image burned in your head. You do not want to be $17 gangster. $17 gangster gave up on chasing that greenback and went after shiny cars, strippers and blow. He probably thought, “I still got money in the bank and I’m still making some decent money off that one campaign I struck gold on… no need to work today.” Do I have to tell you how many times I’ve been rolling in $1-3k days off of one campaign and then have it cut off because I got banned on any number of traffic sources? It happens and when you get the $17 dollar gangster attitude, it is going to happen to you.

The real key is to continually progress and push your work. What works on Facebook could scale out to other traffic sources, and in most cases, there are almost always other places to buy very similar targeted traffic. Set up a media buy, move your landing pages over to PPV. Hell, scale out on Plenty of Fish, AdBuyer or mobile. The 17 dollar gangster didn’t do that, but you will now that you’ve read this post.

Now, there are plenty of other ways to keep yourself a happy and successful affiliate. Get yourself a nice, ergonomic chair and a cat and practice your evil laugh every time you see a dollar sign show up on your P202 Spy (modify it to play a “cha-ching” sound when it happens, as well, for “teh epic lulz”). Surround yourself with other successful or those that have the potential to become successful affiliates and help each other out (You never know when your good karma might come back, and the same goes if you’re a loner who’d prefer to hold everything back). And just in general, have fun with everything you do.

This blog post has exemplified some of the new found happiness and fun I’ve been having for the past month. I was very close to burning out, even though I’d had a great deal of success this year. I just had to remember that it was me that made the success, and not the other way around. If you don’t absolutely love affiliate marketing, get out there and find something you do love.

Pay per view ads, cost per view ads, or pop-up ads – Whatever you want to call them – they’re a popular traffic source for affiliate marketers. The ad networks are less strict, you can get every sort of niche up and running there, and there is a good amount of money to be made on these PPV networks. Even so, I deal with a lot of people struggling to make their first buck with PPV. The following is a summary of some of the quickest and easiest suggestions any marketer can drop into their own campaigns for a quick boost of ROI.

Use a Landing Page

I know a lot of you want to go the easy route and build out direct linked campaigns all day. And in some cases it works. You get a $4 payout converting at 1%, making you 4 cents per click. That’s all fine and dandy, and if you are only spending 1 – 2 cents per pop up, you’re making a good chunk of money back, at least if you have the scale. But I’ve found in most cases, when I’ve direct linked, I can drop in a very, very simple landing page and double, or better, my ROI. A simple landing page for me has an interesting header, a few bullet points, a call to action/button and an image or video. K.I.S.S.

Get Rid of Everything

Well, not everything, but you know those 1000+ targets you added? How many of them are actually converting, and how many of them are just collecting 1-3 hits per day? Give yourself a time limit on how long you’ll run each target. A couple days is usually enough. After that time has passed, pause all targets that don’t have a single conversion on them. Chances are they’ll only pick up 1 or 2 conversions per month at that rate, but it’s more likely it will just lose money for you in the long run. On many of my campaigns this has taken me from a loss to a profit just because I was running on so many different targets that the 975 out of 1000 targets that weren’t performing kept dragging me down. In many instances, you’ll find maybe only 1 – 10 targets per 1000 make you any amount of money.

Double Check Your Targets

I shouldn’t have to tell you this one, but I run into it a lot. Doesn’t matter if you are pushing 10 or 10000 targets, always double check your list for odd targets. The way I do this is a drop my target list into TrafficVance first. I can then rank the targets by Activity which will give me a rough estimate on just how much traffic each target will give me. If it is full or close to full, I’ll always double check just to make sre that it is relavent and that its not a massive social media site or something I know won’t convert no matter how well I sell it on my landing page.

People tell me that the online dating niche is dead. I tell them that there will never be a lack of people that need love. People tell me that the biz opp niche is too expensive. I tell them there are always places where you can find anyone that wants to make more money. People tell me that weight loss affiliate offers have too much competition… you should get the point of where I’m going with this.

There are 3 things that I see always staying consistent with general civilized society:

• They always want love, affection, and care.
• However much money they have, it’s never enough.
• No matter how good the look or how they feel about themselves, they always want to improve their body/self-image.

That being said, there is literally no lack of people on any website out there where this can’t be put to the test. If you’ve got the right landing page and ad creative, dating, MMO/biz-op and health niches will convert just about anywhere. If you think different, you’re just giving yourself an excuse to “not deal with it”.

Yes, this has been a quick post, but its just a reminder to those that think some things aren’t possible or feasible because they’re “too hard” or “too saturated”.

I can’t say I don’t blame you for asking this question. It’s very difficult to make new affiliate marketing campaigns last more than a week or so with little effort, much harder than it was a few years ago, at least. Any one that’s been it as long as I have knows that’s the truth. We’ve had to battle rising competition, dying traffic sources and inflated cost per clicks in an ever dying economy. Coupled with “banner blindness” and consumers becoming more web savy, this all leads to shorter campaign lifespans for the average affiliate marketer.

Don’t be the average affiliate. Times change; adapt.

I want to open this post further by identifying one of the main problems that lead to low quality, short campaign lifespans. Fake blogs, fake polls, incentive advertising, false and misleading claims – this is the a general painting of the CPA affiliate marketing industry. While that’s a broad statement, there are enough people out there that know exactly what I’m talking about, and it is quite possibly one of the main issues that networks and advertisers aren’t doing enough to combat. Publishers that engage in shenanigans like this are out to make a buck for themselves, but on the whole, are forgetting that there is an advertiser out there that is just as money hungry as them. When an affiliate goes out and misleads a user, they’re going to generate a poor lead on that offer. This drags down the overall lead quality for the offer, which in turn drags down other affiliates through higher scrub rates, lower payouts, or a complete shut down of that offer.

So one of the ways to combat poor quality affiliates is to be a high quality affiliate. Send qualified traffic to your offers.

What are some ways we can pull up quality? Knowing your target market is key. Credit report guys: how do you think those credit report advertisers feel when you send traffic to them like it’s an IQ test? Fans of 50 Cent and Britney Spears probably isn’t going to make up a majority of your target market. I can tell you off the top of my head that its going to be people interested in buying houses, cars, small business owners and newly weds somewhere in their older 20s to 40s. Now that is as qualified as I’m going to get by basic targeting.

And how fucking hard is putting in a little effort to really know who your target market is? Spend a few hours today and browse magazines at a local bookshop. Look at the ads in major, high profile magazines. Do you think that any business would sink 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars on an ad in those magazines if they weren’t making money from it, or under a very high assumption that it would, in one form or another, generate revenue and positive buzz for them? These guys do their research, and pay their marketing teams millions of dollars a year to know that these ads are effective, or should be at the very least. Find the demographic/psychographic data of that magazine (email and ask for a media/press kit and it’ll tell you right in there who’s reading them) and you’ll be able to sync that up with hundreds of different affiliate offers.

Presell is essential to qualifying your leads. Giving people more information through a landing page on what they’ll be getting after they opt in, sign up, or purchase is key to lifting up quality. It doesn’t even take a lot of effort to come up with a very effective presell. One of my longest lasting offers, that I’ve been running for the past 6 months, uses a simple 3 bullet style landing page. It lists the benefits, gives them a slight heads up on whats on the other side (after they opt in to a list) and shoots them off to an offer to regain all the initial costs I lost by paying for the traffic. It averages about $100 a day, but I spend 5 minutes a week tweaking it and changing bids. About 2 – 3 hours of time for $18,000. I knew my target market, I knew the solution, and I simply gave them a quality answer to their problems.

On top of the quality of your traffic another thing that you’ve got to fight is scale. This world has nearly 7 billion people, but you’re only targeting a handful when you drop an ad on Facebook or Plenty of Fish or TrafficVance or where ever the hell you’re targeting. Banner blindness sets in within the first 5 to 10 views of the same banner. If you can’t make an impression on the first few times someone sees your ad, you’re going to be left with fuck all. Constantly scaling to new traffic sources, as well as rotating ads and banners will increase the lifespans of your campaigns, no matter how shitty the quality. I’m kind of pinning the tail on the donkey here, but I see so many people complain to me that they make great money on x traffic source the first 3 days, then people stop clicking, and their conversion rate sinks from those that are clicking. Your clicks are just bored of seeing the same ad or going to the same offer that they might have hit before… or you’re really finally getting scrubbed due to your piss poor quality traffic.

All in all, it comes down to running a legitimate business. Are you out for the quick buck, maybe 1k today and tomorrow and that’s it? Or are you looking to build a long-term development that, yes, on a day to day basis might not generate as much cash, maybe due to more expensive clicks or less scale, but makes you 10k over 6 months? Run a tight ship, know who you are targeting and why you are targeting them, and learn that there is more out there than just Facebook and PPV, and you’ll slowly start to see that you’re going to develop better campaigns that last much longer. It’s really as simple as that.

This question was asked by Shawn in the Got Questions, Get Answers post. I’ve also picked it as my favorite question out of the bunch which means Shawn wins a free custom designed landing page (this was announced to my email list. If you aren’t on it, sign up form is on the right!). Get over here if you have your own question you would like to ask!

Angle of attack, an important part of any marketing campaign, is the choice of words and targeting you take to make your affiliate campaign successful. I know a lot of you take the hammer to the nail on this one, targeting single 25 year old men or sites like “Match.com” for your affiliate dating niche campaigns. That’s all fine and dandy, and there is nothing wrong with it. If you can make money with it, well, more power to you. But campaigns like this are rare and traffic sources and offers that work with this technique get exploited and crowded the moment anyone utters a word on them.

That is why I feel it is ever important for affiliates to think outside the box. Create your own angle of attack.

When I’m trying to come up with new angles, I start thinking of issues and problems with individuals or businesses. For every problem, there is an affiliate offer or 50 that provides a solution. I use this example a lot with my coaching students – Depression. It’s a serious issue. Now the most obvious solution is to try and push some Ritalin or a psychiatrist their way. I’m not so sure you’ll find any affiliate offers for these guys, or something legit at least, so we’ve got to think of other solutions.

The most depressed people I’ve known, and even tearing out a page from the book of my past, are generally single. You can substitute in your dating offers for this kind of targeting. Finding a match and talking to other people about their issues can help get someone depressed out of their rut. For this example, or for anything else taking a non-direct angle, you’re going to want a landing page. Nothing complex or long winded is needed as this is a legitimate solution for some people dealing with depression.

For me, this is quite a shallow angle of attack. The greater you go, the more pre-sell you are going to need. There is a limit. Don’t be a dumbass and try and to push an affiliate dating offer with the following example: “Got a bad golf swing? Join datingsitex.com and users there will help you straighten it!” I hear about people going to extremes all the time, thinking its so unique it just has to work.

What you want to remember is that even when these extremes work, you want to provide quality to your affiliate networks. Better quality means better private offers and higher payouts will come your way!