Justin Dupre

A Short Hiatus

Justin Dupre — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:47:29 +0000

Just wanted to update to my frequent blog readers, forum members and store customers that I’ll be updating my blog less frequently. You probably already noticed.

I will be getting things back to normalcy within 1 – 2 months after I am done with my current project. In the meantime, I will still be checking the forums, adding downloads, sending out freebies on every Friday, and completing orders from the store. I may return to blog once a week or every so often. I’ll open the chance for guest writers to step in. If you’ve got something interesting, contact me.

Thanks for keeping up with me and reading my blog guys! I’ll be back soon enough.

How I Was Able to Generate Leads, Build a List, and a Passive Income Website All at Once

Justin Dupre — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:00:58 +0000

Creativity – a key factor for the success of good affiliate marketers. Without the ability to think on your feet and constantly evolve the way you are putting things together, you’ll never be able to survive in the industry. The simple landing page to lead gen offer is getting harder to convert, and we’re starting to see an overall change in the the industry affecting the way many work – merchant accounts being closed, Google and Facebook accounts being shut down, and a more stingy economy are slowing things down.

I wanted a way to get by all this, and turn my “Affiliate money now, plan for the future later” thinking around. How could I get my conversions now, keep in contact with my leads, and that into a passive income? My plan was pretty simple, but I haven’t heard it talked about a whole lot. I think for a lot of affiliates, there is a giant stigma around 1 thing – content sites – and that is exactly what I had in mind. Get the lead by building a list. Get the lead on an affiliate offer. Send the lead to my own content website where they could subscribe and I could generate a passive income through banner advertising, other affiliate offers, or Adsense.

I needed a broad niche that could be scaled out over many traffic sources. Gaming. Many people up to age 35 play games, and there is a plethora of gaming offers to choose from. I started out with a landing page that would look something like this.

The landing page can have images and colors easily swapped depending on what game offer I am promoting. I started off with testing on 3 offers, and all of them worked well. I have scaled it to tens of offers and I’m constantly expanding them outwards.

Anyways, how this works is I say in order to get this game, you need to enter your email first (incentivizing my own list. You always need to give away something, and in this case it was access to the page of the offer). Once I got their email, I send them a thanks for subscribing message with a link to the website I built (more about that below). After clicking the button, they’d be sent to the game offer. Email submit rate is as high as 50% for some games and traffic sources, and at its lowest id 5% on some more obscure games and traffic sources. Conversion rate for them, once on the offer, is around 10 – 20%. ROI ranges from 0 – 200%. I keep most offers on-board as even if I’m not making money off them, I still get to build out my list and potentially a long term passive income from them.

About the website – it is just a simple arcade site. I’ll post an article and build a few links out every week to increase search engine rankings, however, it also has a lot of social pushing power with Facebook Like’s button, Stumble and Twitter. It auto-drips game feeds like Mochi Games into it (which also provides me with some money from their ad serving), so it builds on itself, users can create an account for an even more optimized list of potential customers. I can mail to both lists about new games on the site and affiliate offers. Adsense ads are up, and it also rotates through some banner ads to more affiliate offers.

It’s been a very successful idea that I can now recreate over a ton of other niches. Health, make money online, automobile, and dating are all in the works or being planned. The true beauty of it is that I am making money right away and for a very long time down the road, not just a very long time down the road or just making money now.

So why am I posting a successful venture that others could easily copy and recreate my success, therefore increasing my own competition? I just don’t think very many people will hop on the chance to make money this way, and I like to help others out despite how ridiculous that might sound. Again, within my circle of affiliate marketing friends, not many have long term plans. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle, work 16 hour days now, and hope you the offer is still up after you wake up.

With this idea, I’ve combined the daily hustle with something that will keep making me money even after an offer is all dried up. It grows on autopilot and requires very little work after it is all setup.

Tired of Getting Denied From Networks?

Justin Dupre — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:58:37 +0000

It’s an affiliate network’s job to keep scammers and poor quality traffic runner’s out. If you put no effort into your affiliate application, no website, no email address other than Gmail or Hotmail, and your name isn’t floating around in the industry already, chances are, you’ll probably be flagged as an unknown and most likely denied access to the network.

So besides filling in an affiliate website, a real email address attached to one of your own domains, some other forms of contact (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc), and a little info about you and the traffic you run in the additional info field, what else can you do to better ensure you get approved?

Call the network. A simple call can get your approval expedited. Even if you run no traffic to any offers or landing pages currently, read up on current trends, do your research, and at least make it sound like you know what you are talking about. A good place to read up are affiliate blogs over on AffBuzz and forums like WickedFire and even Warrior Forum in some instances (despite what all you haters think, there are some good threads at WaFo that drop some bombs that very few people act upon).

If you still can’t get approved, try starting an affiliate blog. I can’t tell you how great a tool my blog is. I don’t sign up for affiliate networks anymore, they literally email me an account and give me tips. My blog gives me tons of other benefits on top of that, but we’ll save that for another post.

Join my forums for more in-depth discussion on getting approved at an affiliate network. Click here for more info.

PPV and Shock and Awe Landing Pages

Justin Dupre — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:31:03 +0000

There is an old trend for landing pages coupled with PPV traffic known as the shock and awe method. It’s a widely used style of landing pages used to grab attention through random images that sometimes just seem way out of place and completely make no sense with the type of offer you are trying to promote. If you are having trouble generating a high CTR on traditional landing pages, trying out this style might work out for you.

If you are just learning how to write HTML, or have no experience what-so-ever, making these landing pages are very simple. As long as you know how to use Photoshop or other similar photo-editing software, and know how to make a link in a basic HTML web page, it’s pretty damn simple. Think of these style of landing pages are large banners, which is really all they are.

What you need is a really shocking or funny image. I’m going to use a picture of a cat because I love cats, and so do millions of others.

Aww. A crying kitty. Surely, it will get some attention when a user sees it, and that is what we want. All you need to do is add in a headline, a call to action or a button and you are good to rock with a very simple landing page. I added a border for some extra color and effect.

All I need to do now is import the image into a black HTML web page and link it to the offer I want it to go to. Feel free to test out this example if you’d like.

Will this style of landing page work for every type of offer? No. If you are trying to peddle off acai rebills with this, good luck. Your offer should be good enough to direct link, but might need a little more pizazz to get people to actually notice what the website is about. If you want to push offers that require a credit card, stick to testimonials.

I’ll have a few landing pages like this up in the store in a few days, and I’ve already got some up in the forums. If you are a member, check them out!

Quickly Launch a PPV Campaign

Justin Dupre — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:59:41 +0000

AffPortal is the must have toolset subscription for PPV. I don’t care how much you hate paying for stuff, if you can’t write these tools yourself, you might as well hop on it. There are 5 so different scrapers for URLs, keywords and even a scraper based on demographic searches. Essentially, they can allow you to launch a new campaign in 15 minutes. And here’s how I do it.

Step 1. Get Your Offer

I’m not going to help you pick your offer. Last time I did that I got berated. It’s all on you guys. Get the landing page URL, or one similar to it. For example, if you are doing a car insurance offer, use geico.com.

Step 2. Grab More Keywords

Try keywords in your campaigns. Why? Because they can convert just as well as any URLs, in some instances, better. Head over to the Google Keyword Tool. Paste in geico.com under the website form and search. Voila. Keywords! Hopefully you’ll have a list of about 100 keywords or so here. If you want some more, copy the whole list of keywords, paste it in the keyword form, and search again.

Step 3. Take It to AffPortal

Head over to AffPortal and use the Batch URL Scraper. Unless you want to test out low traffic URLs, just keep your Search Depth at 1 page. Copy in up to 100 keywords at a time and you’ll be given a shiny new list of hundreds of URLs. Paste them all into Excel and hand-examine them to make sure you aren’t targeting any irrelevant sources. If you want more variety and targets to test, run your list through the URL shrink or URL Modifier tools.

Step 4. Implement

Start testing it on whatever traffic source you want. Paste it all up and you are good to go!

Now – this isn’t the most effective way to launch a campaign, and it certainly isn’t the only way you can go about targeting, but if you are looking to launch 20 campaigns in 1 day, this is the way I do it. Of course, this is the way many other do it, so it might not be the cheapest. If you are looking for good offers that convert and trying to do it fast without a real budget because you plan to make back what you spent through scaling it, then I’d suggest this. If you only have 100 dollars, stick to being more cautious.

For those of you that need help in bidding wars in TrafficVance, you are gonna love the auto-bidder in my private forums. Check it out!

Let Me Set Things Straight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving Money for Your Campaigns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why You Don’t Want to Run Email Submits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winners Divided by Losers = Less Than 1

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

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

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

It Is Not Constant… Ever.

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

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

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