Oh god. Wasting my time, but I think I could use a little relaxation.

If any of you out there reading this is playing, go ahead and add me:  justindupre#1199.

I’ll be back on track with some nice blog posts this weekend!

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.

You’ve got a campaign profitable. Good for you. It’s your first one to get past the break even point, but you are only doing 20% ROI. You’ve optimized your ads and have got tracking working so you know exactly which ad is converting and which ones are only collecting your money. But 20% isn’t really doing you a whole lot unless you are spending a couple thousand a day. As a new affiliate, you probably aren’t at that level yet. If its not your ads that are the biggest problem, and you aren’t quite ready to test landing pages if you aren’t already, then your affiliate network might be the next problem to look at.

Every affiliate network and their dad’s say they don’t shave or scrub. They also all say they have the highest payouts and hottest affiliate managers. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if they are or not. What matters is that you are getting the maximum potential out of all your affiliate marketing campaigns through your affiliate networks. To do this, YOU NEED TO TEST THEM!

Here’s the dealio:

Every affiliate network shaves. If they say they don’t, it doesn’t really matter because you can’t see whats happening on their backend anyways. Just assume it. Now, the affiliate network can give individual affiliates different scrub/shave rates based on whatever idea they would want to do this for – To make them more money, to scale back on low quality leads, they don’t like your attitude – anything. This is one reason to split test networks. Don’t just look at who’s paying out more, because one network might have a higher payout, but a lower conversion rate to compensate for that on their backend.

Now, we’ve also got advertiser shaving the network as well! It’s a two story issue here. So we’ve got 2 different things to look at. Is the advertiser giving a network a lower conversion rate overall because their affiliates are sending poor quality traffic? This can be an issue with some larger affiliate networks, I’ve noticed. Because telling those networks to reach hundreds of individual affiliates pushing bad traffic would be a major pain in everyones ass, they’ll just lower their overall conversion rate.

So, again, combat this by thoroughly testing different affliate networks. Use AffPaying.com to find your offer and which networks it is on. Also, try asking for a zero-scrub/shave rate payout from your affiliate managers. The payouts could be slightly lower, but I like this because I get a much better picture of what is converting with faster and much more consistent conversions (And with that you can see the we-don’t-scrub-or-shave-BS go out the window).

Hey! What’s going on affiliate marketers!?

Just thought I’d share with you a nice couple of landing pages, absolutely free of charge of course. I won’t go to indepth on the lps, because you can just check out the images at the bottom of this post to get some previews of what they look like. Now, all you gotta do to download them is simply share this post on Twitter by using the Tweet&Get It button. If you feel that’s not worth the cost of these landing pages, then look somewhere else for your free, easy to use, download and customize landing pages elsewhere!

There are 2 landing page variations included in the free landing page download, and both include full HTML/CSS coding as well as a Photoshop file to make any visual changes you would like to the landers!

Tweet&getit is powered by Viuu

Tweet&getit is powered by Viuu

And if you are in need of a custom landing page, or some other templates be sure to check out AdsandLPs.com for our low rates and excellent landing page designs!

Just stumbled upon this theme in ThemeForest. While I always say static HTML/CSS landing pages outweigh using CMS like WordPress (added weight means slower to load), this WordPress theme is a great alternative for those without the know-how or money to pay for a custom newspaper style landing page. Drop some widgets, customize them sidebars, throw your tracking in the page and viola! You’ve got yourself a simple and easy to use Newspaper style LP without the hassle of having to edit too much HTML!

Click here to check it out!

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!

I haven’t actually done this 9324 times, but I’ve lost track. It’s that time again! You can ask me any questions you’d like about affiliate marketing, productivity, business, Thailand or life in general, and I will take some of my favorite questions and turn them into blog posts right here on JustinDupre.com.

So, shoot! Ask away!

Just a small heads up here -

Mark Anastasi – a figurehead in the “guru” community – is launching a book called The Laptop Millionaire. I am mentioned in the book (probably says something about ladyboys and blow or something like that), but with his book launch he’s doing a little giveaway. By little, I mean $8,000,000 in prizes for those preordering the book. Get more details on that here.

The Laptop Millionaire covers a lot of affiliate marketing strategies, and I believe I should be in there somewhere in the Facebook Ads section. I have yet to read the book (won’t be out till April/May) but it should be a decent read for those just breaking into the marketing scene.

Anyways, just wanted to thank Mark for mentioning me in his book. I’m sure it’ll bring a fair bit of traffic to my blog, and I know your book launch will be a big success!