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).

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.

Gaming offers are a great place to start out as a new affiliate. They pay out relatively well for very little information (Name, Password and Email Address and a Download), and are broad enough that you can target wide demographic of people and scale it out once you are successful. Other than a bit of testing, there isn’t any real proven formula of what games will work and which won’t, but because you aren’t dealing with $10+ payouts, you could logistically test this offer on $20 to see how it goes, then scale out and optimize if you think you can make it work.

The Offer

Iron Grip Marauders (Available on WolfStorm and C2M) is a full 3d in browser game capable of running across all PC systems (possibly some mobiles and iPads, but you’d definitely want to check with your affiliate managers first). It is kind of a mash-up of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft mashed up with MMORTS games like Warcraft 3. Your character is in control of a tank where you can hold strong points and use the land to get an advantage over NPC and real world players. It is always important that you understand your offers like this before you push them to anyone. You want to make sure you’re hitting the right crowd to maximize your chances of being profitable. This can be promoted in Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. You will want to translate your ads into the appropriate language for each country you target (Use OneHourTranslation.com)

So the offer page here is actually pretty decent. Unfortunately, the video does not autoplay, nor does it even play in the same window which is pretty odd. Anyways, it isn’t too wide for direct linking on PPV so that is a choice. I would start off testing this offer on almost any traffic source by direct linking, then make a landing page if I see potential but need to squeeze a little more ROI out of the campaign. The more things you split test, the higher budget you’ll need to plan so always keep that in mind.

Research

Demographic research on a gaming offer isn’t too important. The main gamers market that most game publishers focus on are 18 to 34 year old males and that is actually increasing year by year. We’ll want to focus more on the niche markets available to us. I’ve already listed a few similar games out there. Try playing Iron Grip for yourself for a few minutes. Check out the game mechanics and see how things work. Then, do your research on what games this one can be compared to. I already listed MMORPGs and MMORTS games, but you could even work in MMOFPS games, as well. Take a look at the other games the publishing studio has been involved with by checking them out here. This offer could most certainly be cross promoted by targeting these games and mods.

Here are some other games you could try targeting and browsing:

• Supreme Commander
• World of Tanks/Planes/Boats
• Dungeon Defenders
• War Rock
• Battlefield
• Call of Duty
• Command and Conquer
• League of Legends
• DotA

There are so many others here that you’ll want to test, so check out sites like MMORPG.com and OnRPG.com for lists of games and user discussions on the forums.

How To Run This Offer

Your main traffic source for this offer should be Facebook. The targeting options will play to your favor. You’ve also got PPV on LeadImpact (there still isn’t much international traffic available on TrafficVance), however traffic here will be limited still.

Start off by picking a country. I’d choose Germany as it’s a decently sized country and is well known for its gamers. The language is relatively easy to translate, as well. Now, you are best off targeting those that are 18 and up. Some people want to targer those younger than 18, but there is a serious issue in doing this. Most people are unable to pay for things only when they are under 18. Iron Grip is fueled by in-game micro-transactions. If you are sending young traffic, your quality will drop severely and you could be booted off the offer. I make sure I’m always above this limit wherever possible. Include interest targeting by the list of games you’ve collected during your research. Group only a few games at a time as some might be winners and some could be losers, and small groups make it easier to test.

And writing your ads does not have to be complex. Take a look at the hundreds of game ads you can find on Facebook and borrow ideas from them. Here are some examples you can use:

• Build A Killer Tank – Build the strongest tank ever seen. Shoot down your enemies and prove that you deserve the number one spot on the leaderboards. Play Iron Grip FREE!
• Play Iron Grip – Build epic tanks. Destroy Evil Armies. Play Iron Grip today and become Commander of the World!
• Best Game Ever – With over 1 million players, Iron Grip is the best game ever made! Play free now!

Nothing silly and complex here. I’ve always loved the term K.I.S.S. and that applies to most of my affiliate campaigns, this one included.

Difficulty: 2 out of 5

This offer is only slightly difficult to run because you cannot run it in the US, CA, UK, etc. You will want to translate your ads to the users native tongue as this will increase CTRs. CTRs directly effect CPCs on Facebook, so keep that in mind. The higher your CTR, the lower your CPC.

Final Comments

I believe this will be a killer offer. You’ve got a great niche game with a good group of followers from several other niche games. Let them know this game exists and I’m sure they’ll at least sign up to try it. If you do make it profitable, try advertising on MMO-based sites through display advertising for even more scale!

The business opportunity offer – we’ll just call it the biz-op from here on – is one of the most widely available offers to affiliate marketers. That only means that there is a ton of money to be had from biz-ops. While it may seem like an extremely daunting niche, you’re probably thinking about it too hard. The real issue here is legality. Most biz-ops don’t naturally work as advertised, and as such, it makes it hard to get real testimonials which is what truly makes any product a real seller. Don’t forget this when you’re affiliate marketing or selling anything for that matter. Good Testimonials = Good Money.

The Offer

Today we’ll be looking at one offer, My Real Income. It is available on CPATank, WolfStormMedia, EWA, and CPAProfitz. It is currently one of EWA‘s top affiliate offers, which is partly why I picked to cover this one. Remember that this is just one of hundreds of biz-op offers available, so split test them all as in many cases you can easily find something that converts better. Your best bet is once you’ve fine tuned your landing pages, to talk with your affiliate managers on a daily basis and make sure you are using a top convering offer. The backend on this is a rebill style offer, meaning their charge $4.95 upfront, probably for some software, and after 30 days they’ll be charged another $77. It’s a shady offer, to say the least, but it is prominently displayed on the checkout page which is better than some other similar offers I’ve seen.

Let’s talk a little bit more on the offer page. This is a very standard style biz-op offer page. Note that different networks might offer different styles. It does have an exit pop, so while I would never, ever recommend direct linking on a business opp offer, you will have to ask your AM nicely for one with no exit pop if direct linking is your plan. But again, don’t direct link on this unless you feel like losing money. I’ve never, ever direct linked to a biz-op and broke a profit.

Another great thing about this My Real Income is that it is available for multiple countries other than just the US. If you are still only targeting US demographics, you need to start thinking internationally. The traffic is cheaper, there is a lot of people out there, and most people in the United States probably aren’t in front of a PC right now. Something about a Wallstreet protest. Actually, they’d be the perfect demographic for this offer and we’ll talk about that in a bit.

Research

We’re going to be skipping the demographic and psychographic research because it’s not to difficult to find out “who” exactly wants to make more money. They are people like me and you, your parents, your childern – everyone! What is going to work best for this is having a relateable back-story, targeting people that can relate to what kind of story is being told, then show them how they can turn their life around. Essentially you are going to need a testimonial, and it will be down to you to make that a real one or risk legal action with a fake or non-endorsed story.

How to Run This Offer

Biz-ops can profit on pretty much any traffic source. Where it is extremely strong is social, PPV, and display traffic. Unfortunately, submitting something like this to Facebook is banworthy, so don’t think about working there unless you’ve got some really hardcore cloaking setup. If you are new to affiliate marketing, don’t worry about this. Cloaking is bad for business anyways.

You’ll want to think about angles and how you can promote this. Let’s think of one now.

• Stay at home moms that can’t do anything to help their husband’s pay the bills and put food on the table.
• College students finding it hard to pay for school with harsh creditors or unable to find a job after graduating to be able to pay off their loans.
• Office workers tired of the 9-to-5 grind.
• Wallstreet protestors that are tired of being ripped off by “the man” (now they can become “the man”!)
• Immigrants that find it hard to get a job due to their lack of education or status in society.

And there are so many, many more angles you can go after. You’ll have to spin an intricate story of how they used to be broke or in a poor situation, and now they are the master of their domain – so to speak. If you aren’t good at writing landing page copy or getting into the mindset of the demographics you are targeting, it might be time to hire another writer. Paul Gannon – AKA LPCopywriter – is a go to guy for something like this. He is pricey, but his work speaks for itself and he’ll try and work around your budget when he’s in need of work (but with the quality of his writing, you should give him a tip when you’re making 4 figures a day). I’ve also got a personal contact for copy writing all my “professional” stuff. If you’d like his contact information, contact me.

So where are some specific places you can run this. I would start off with display traffic. People have been reporting excellent success on traffic sources like AdSonar and Pulse360. But the fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of other display networks to try out, as well. Using PlentyofFish is another option due to the fantastic targeting ability, although you may run into approval issues depending on how you decide to push the offer. In most cases here, you’ll be using standard banner sizes. Remember to try out tens to hundreds of different banner styles and copies to optimize the hell out of this offer.

PPV is another venue you might be able to get something working on. I would use PPV traffic more to build a list of people looking to increase their bank account, and push multiple offers to them that way rather than exclusively this single offer. Building a list around this offer is a choice for any broadly targeting ad campaign. I use Aweber to build my lists, and while sometimes they can be strict, it is easy to implement into any landing page and there are a ton of statistics you are able to track which makes it easier to make more money with that extra data!

Landing Page

Disclaimer: I’m no legal expert, and you should in no way, shape, or form take any of my advice as professional legal advice. Consult a real lawyer on any questions you might have about affiliate marketing and the legality of your actions.

Here is where it gets sketchy. Again, it will be difficult to generate commissions on this offer without using testimonials. Now, the FTC says that using fake testimonials is a big no-no, and they’ve cracked down pretty hard on those that have made a fair chunk of change using fake blogs and fake articles style landing pages. Unfortunately, it is hard to really suggest a better way to promote biz-op and other rebill style offers. So how can you do this the right way? Start paying for testimonials. Sign contracts. Leave big bold disclaimers at the top of your landing pages. Let people know it is just an advertisement. Avoid promoting offers in your home country. Again, I’m no legal expert, especially on what your landing page needs to say to make this all legal and in the green.

In actuality, I stopped pushing rebill offers a couple years ago after Oprah opened a can of whoop-ass on several affiliate marketers. The advertorial/fake testimonial stuff is starting to pop up again, which is striking my interest and I’m watching it and planning my return as I write this.

For some examples of what these “advertorial” style landing pages look like, you can download a free one over here. That’s a very old example, and you can see even there that the site owner goes into detail on the legalities of using it. If you do some hunting on more recent examples (WhatRunsWhere is a great place to start), you’ll find that lots of these affiliate advertorial style landing pages look more and more like real news websites.

Another example is from the offer New Online Incomes. If you’d rather promote this offer, a lot of the legal weight it lifted off you and put on the advertiser as it is their landing page. However, it doesn’t appear to be a rebill offer which is where a lot of user complaints stem from. Rather this is a CPS offer, meaning it converts after a full sale.

A great thing to include on your landing pages would be inserting the viewers city into the ad copy. “I’m just a normal [cityname] mom that went from rags to riches blah blah…” sounds much better than without the city name included. IMKazu goes into great detail on Geo-ip city insertion here.

Again, the legalities on this are sketchy. There are no firm rules on it, but if the FTC comes after you, good luck protecting yourself. This type of offer might not be for everyone, especially if you aren’t able to protect yourself one way or another.

Difficulty: 4.5/5

This isn’t a hard offer to promote after you have a landing page set up, but due to legal issues, I have to give it a high difficulty rating. You’ll also need a decent budget to start promoting a biz-op rebill offer. Display traffic, where this will dominate, is also a tricky beast to tame, but not quite as hard as search (in my opinion).

Final Comments

Be careful. I know I’m not painting a glorious picture here, and I’m not sure I could 100% cover my ass while running this offer, even after 4 years in this industry. There is still a lot of money to make in biz-ops however. It might be better to try this offer out with building a list out for those interested in finding a way to work online than pushing to a site full of testimonials, especially if you can’t prove the claims are real or paid for.

If you need helping launching this campaign, or are completely new to affiliate marketing and need a helping hand, my coaching services are here for you!

Today, I’m going to be giving a review about AnastasiaAffiliate.com. You might better know them from the dating CPA offers you see on several CPA networks – AnastasiaDate.com, AsianBeauties.com, AmoLatina.com and AfricaBeauties.com. Rather than running through different affiliate networks, you can run it directly through Anastasia Affiliates themselves. This means more money, better payouts, and more payout options.

A little about Anastasia Affiliate before I go further in depth with this review:

Anastasia International is the world’s largest International Introduction and Romance Tour Company, in business since 1993. We have been in affiliate marketing field from 1994 (our old affiliate program – http://4affiliate.net/) and we launched our new affiliate program in 2008. Anastasia is the industry leader with over 90 million unique yearly users on her combined sites. Over 1200 prominent dating agencies in most major cities of the world work with us. Our international male clientele enjoys the fastest and most popular ways of communicating with ladies around the world, principally through email correspondence and live video chat. More than 600,000 letters are sent by our clients daily.

So what really sets going through Anastasia Affiliate better than going through direct CPA networks is that you’ve got multiple ways to get paid. You can choose to take the typical CPL payout of $5 on all free leads generated (Note: You can ask for payout bumps! I got one right off the bat!). But that’s the boring way to get this done. How about getting up to $250 on each user’s first purchase. If a user you’ve signed up spends any money on any one of AA’s sites, you’ll get up to $250 the moment they deposit, even if all they deposit is $20 or so. There is a more standard CPS-style program you can take part in as well which pays you for each and every sale generated by users you’ve signed up.

The only downside I see to payments is that they are only made once per month. The affiliate managers, though, are attentive, and willing to help out, so this might be negotiable based off of how much money you are bringing in.

What I really want to touch on here, though, is Anastasia Affiliate’s White Label Program for their newest AsianBeauties.com offer. This offer is killing it for me right now, and once I integrate the WLP, my numbers will only increase. Don’t know what a While Label Program is? Basically, you get to take the AsianBeauties.com offer and turn it into your own site. You can brand it, create your own sign up pages and welcome messages, and customize many of the options not available with your typical CPA offer. Hosting on the AA server‘s is free, so all you really need is your own domain name and a little creativity to get started.

One tip I’ll give you on the Asian Beauties offer is to try targeting Black men (English speaking countries). They convert really well, internally for me, on this offer.

Interested in working more, 1-on-1 with Anastasia Affiliates? Check out their programs and grab more info: Click Here Now!

We have a lot of free will, being stay at home affiliate marketers. We can make our own hours, travel anywhere we want on a whim, live in foreign countries, party, dance get trashed on Dom… whatever. To say a lot of successful affiliates probably live an exotic lifestyle is probably an understatement.

But through things I’ve done lately, people I’ve met, and my entire experience with being an affiliate marketer for the past 3-4 years, I’ve seen how maybe not treating my business like a business has screwed me over in some places. I haven’t been able to maximize my earning potential. I’ve been treating my business as an extension to my personal life – something I can mix between hanging out with my friends, going out, shopping, eating at a nice restaurant, etc. It has absolutely no priority over any of those. It hasn’t been a living, breathing separation from all that. If hanging out with my friends sounds more fun than building that one last campaign, I’ll hang out.

That isn’t the way you would run a storefront business, and you shouldn’t follow my lead here if you plan on making your money online.

I’ve done several things to try and change this around. I made myself a time table that actively splits the time I dedicate to who I am (personal time) versus time I have to get business done. I don’t have to stay strict to it, but it gives me a good guideline to stick with. It’s important you completely separate the business world from your personal life. If you can’t afford to rent an office, move into a separate room with no distractions, or sit out at your local coffee shop. I’m trying not to let any personal distractions get in the way of what I do now.

Another thing I’ve done horribly is maintain relationships. You think just because you work in virtual space, that you don’t have to maintain a business relationship with anyone. This is so wrong.

Your affiliate managers, network owners, advertising managers and reps, your employees, even your competitors should always be kept in the loop. Email the people you work with most on a daily basis, say hi in Skype, send gift cards to the people that helped you make the most money in the past on their birthdays, and always be willing and open to talk about your business and what you do. You don’t have to give them your landing page and keywords, but a small spark now can light a wildfire down the road. We want those wildfires.

Perhaps, on my end, its a personality issue. Shy and not as confident as I’d like to be. But I’ve made a vow to work on it, and the next time you meet me, hopefully that shines through.

So do you treat what you do like a business, or are you still stuck in that position where you feel like, “Meh. My campaigns will hold out another day. I’ll check back tomorrow.”

It might be time to reconsider your practices if its the latter.

This is a follow-up post to a question asked in Ask Away Round 4. If you have any questions about affiliate marketing in general and want some answers, feel free to leave a comment there or shoot me an email.

So, you’re ready to fire up an affiliate campaign, but you’re absolutely stumped on what to run. It happens a lot more than you’d like it to, and I have the problem on a daily basis. There are a few steps I take to get around this and start thinking.

Hit Up the News

Start reading some popular English news sites. Browse through the different categories you see there and you might see a trend of posts talking about one niche or a product or something you can turn into an offer on your own. You can also start browsing gossip sites. Notice the advertisements. Anything being promoted on gossip sites would probably make for a great niche to promote, number 1, because if they’re making money spending huge on media buys there, they’re probably making a decent return. Also, the quality of traffic on celeb gossip sites is horrible, so again, if you can make money there, you can make money anywhere. Google Trends is also great for seeing whats hot.

Hit Up a Network You Can Trust

Affiliate networks are sleezy, but there are a few out there that know what they’re talking about. EWA, Qwik, A4D, C2M are all pretty decent in that they have affiliate managers that are or have at some time in their life been affiliates themselves. I really like checking out EWA as they have a leader board of best converting offers on their home page after logging in. This helps me not only pick niches, but offers as well.

Know Your Traffic

Another thing you’ll want to do is to know your traffic. What are the main demographics for it? Where is it coming from? Then, match the traffic source to the offer. Use demographic research tools like Google Ad Planner, Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast to really dig deep into your traffic demographics. Run the offers through those tools, as well, and see which one gives you the closest match!

Keep It Interesting

If you are still stumped, use what you are interested in and pick out an offer you’d sign up for yourself. Target people with similar interests and demographics as you and you might be able to build out a successful campaign.

For more in-depth tips and coverage on selecting and running an offer, you might be interested in joining my private forums. You’ll get one-on-one help from me, as well as from many others already in the community! Click here for more details.

Excuse me while I go off on a rant for a bit, but I’m sure many of you have been screwed over by your affiliate managers on more than one occasion, and if they have, this is how you probably feel.

Yesterday I was running an offer, and have been running it for over a month without a peep from the offer’s management. They decided to back out as the ROI on the offer just wasn’t worth it for them. That’s all fine and dandy, until you factor in that my affiliate manager who knows I’ve been running this offer failed to inform me in any way. So I found out for myself when my traffic was being redirected to another offer. Luckily, that offer was backing out for me with a slight drop in ROI, but still profitable.

I try not to check my stats too often and build other campaigns out, which I was doing. Eventually, I fell asleep.

I woke up to check my stats today to see something really funny. I was down about -80% ROI. They switched the offer on me again. I got no email, no warning, and the offer wasn’t even in the same niche as the traffic I was running to it. Let’s not forget the 300% decrease in payout.

I don’t care if my traffic wasn’t converting on your end, I don’t care if the quality was bad, and I don’t care if you have to switch offer links because of that, but your responsibility is to let me know when you have to do this, why, and what I can do to improve or get my quality back up. Don’t just say, aww he’ll figure it out himself. Don’t assume because I didn’t do $100,000 revenue last month, that I won’t do it this month. I don’t know if you’re trying to intentionally burn a bridge with me or not, but shit like this loses me a lot of money that just makes me wanna say, “You know what? I’m done sending you any kind of traffic.” There are too many other networks and affiliate manager that know what they’re doing to just let something like this slip by.

Affiliate Summit West is happening next month, and this will be my first time at the conference. Of course, there will be the mixing, mingling, and getting to know your affiliate managers (I will be avoiding Azoogle, though. I know you want my traffic, okay!?)

So, that being said, I don’t really know what is going on as far as parties and dinners and who is gonna be doing what. So, if you are a network, affiliate, attendee, whatever, that is interested in buying me a juicy ribeye steak and some nice champagne, I’ll be sure to repay the favor with a mention on the blog (if all you talk about is BS, though, I’ll be sure to mention that, too!)

January 19th is my birthday, so who is covering the bar tab on that? Haha.

I will post updates closer to the date of the conference.

I’m writing this out of frustration. Frustration that one of my affiliate managers just doesn’t get it. Despite the number of times I’ve tried telling him that I’m not going to tell you where I run my traffic, what my landing page looks like, what keywords I’m bidding – There is NO WAY IN HELL I will ever give up that information. So just stop asking. The number 1 thing you can let me do is let me do my own thing.

I understand communication is an issue here, but if I don’t ask you a question, I probably don’t have any. I don’t mind you telling me what is hot, but don’t come and tell me that your latest Shamwow rip-off product is doing soooo hot because you can run Facebook traffic to it now. Show me some EPCs, show me how you think it would run, show me what your internal affiliate team is doing to make it profitable, but for the love of god, stop asking for all my personal campaign data. Anyways, if you know it’s doing so hot on Facebook, you probably wouldn’t need me to tell you my traffic sources and landing pages.

If you are a current affiliate manager, put some money down and try running your own offers (without jacking your affiliates ideas). Get some knowledge into the area you are working. Affiliate marketing isn’t just all about seeing what the EPCs are, its about knowing what makes those EPCs, and I don’t want to give up that data, nor does any other successful affiliate. Okay? So you can stop asking me now, k thx.