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?

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!

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

Pure Experience

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

Focus

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

Management and Organization

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

Collaboration

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

Responsibility

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

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

A lack of effort and focus. This is the main quality of any failed affiliate marketer. The chances you are going to drop a couple ads you stole off a Facebook spy, take the exact images and ad copy and make $100 bucks, these days, is slim to zero. I try to teach my coaching students the best I can, giving them whole campaigns that are currently profitable, but after a few days of testing I always get this reply – “This seems like too much work. Is there any easier way to make money?”

The mindset that affiliate marketing is “easy” is a problem a lot of people are stuck with. Bloated affiliate network newsletters that provide very little details other than “This offer is generating huge EPCs for our affiliates across all traffic networks with an xyz style landing page” and lame informational products filled with misinformation, developed by those that don’t actually know jack$hit, don’t help with AM being perceived as “easy”. This is what I tell my clients when they ask that previous question:

“Sure, but it involves flipping burgers and dropping buckets of fries all day long.”

I imagine all of my affiliate marketing work as a large part of my business. Like almost any other business, it doesn’t just launch and blow up overnight. I’ve got research to do. I have to know what my target market wants and how they want it. I need to know how to deliver it before they get it. And then even when I know all that, I still need to test it and other similar variations to get in the black. There is no “easy” way to get around that. Even if someone hands a campaign to you on a silver platter, if you aren’t analyzing why it works and how you can improve it, you’ll always fail and end up back in square one.

You do need to focus, and put effort into building campaigns up, 1 at a time. Test 10 landing pages instead of 2. Test 100 images, rather than 10. Try 5 very different headlines, then test adjectives on your best performing ones. This extra effort and focus is what has made some of my clients $500 campaigns after 1 week of coaching, and I believe it is one of the redeeming qualities that has made me the marketer I am today.

The good ol’ credit report. Lots of affiliates have been banking off these offers for a long time. And while you might think you are too late to bring anything new to the game, you really aren’t. Take a look at dating, beaten to hell with 1000 sticks, but there is still so much money to make in it. So pick up your sticks and get ready to take a whack at credit reports because I’m going to be showing you how you can start making money being a credit report slingin’ affiliate marketer.

The Offer

I’m not going to sit down and pick out any one offer here. We will indefinitely be using landing pages, so don’t be worried with the size of the offer page or anything. One thing we won’t be doing is trying to throw credit reports at people who are already looking for them. Most call centers and credit report lead genners have these keywords and targets on lock down, so you’ll literally be spending $20 per click on search or $1+ on PPV per view just to get someone to see your stuff. You won’t be able to compete.

Be sure the credit report offers you choose allow the traffic sources you affiliate market on, and read any special terms they have. Some of these guys can be strict on your traffic and not getting paid isn’t a good way to start your affiliate career.

The above offer is CreditReport.com and is a top ranked offer on multiple networks, so it’s a good place to start off when picking your credit report CPA offers.

Research

I always go through a few similar domains to compare the statistics Quantcast gives me. The above stats on CreditReport.com were very consistent over the several other domains I checked. It was a lot of lower income, lower educated women viewing these sites. Also, African Americans and Hispanics topped the charts here, as well. Look down at the Audience Also Likes section and you’ll see some high affinity sites that paint a good picture. It is a lot of people trying to save as much money as they can, so we’ll want to play this into our landing page angles.

When you can start using this data creatively, that is when you are going to start being an awesome affiliate marketer.

How To Run This Offer and Landing Pages

I’m going to suggest you guys get an account at TrafficVance and start running credit reports on PPV. It is 10x cheaper that search, and it is extremely difficult to push credit reports on social media. Later down the line this shouldn’t limit you, but if you’re an affiliate newbie, any other traffic source will just get extremely difficult to target.

So the name of the game with credit reports is to get creative with your angles and try out as many as you can. Some will stick, some won’t so don’t get discouraged if you try something here and it doesn’t work.

Okay, so lets look at some of the data we had before in the research phase. One angle we will want to target is people looking to go back to school. You will need to use a landing page to get your angles across and inform the viewer why it is absolutely essential that they get a credit report. In this case, your landing page could list some of the benefits of knowing your credit score and those can be:

• Borrow more money from the bank to go to a better school
• Get better interest rates
• Get more money to pay for tuition and living expenses
• Pay for books
• Get a new notebook computer

Etc, so forth and so on. You cannot just go out there and test 1 sales copy on your landing page. Design can come second, but your sales copy always needs to be split tested. In PPV a 1-2% increase in conversion rates can mean doubling your income in some cases, and landing page copy is the number 1 benefactor towards conversion rates.

Looking for more angles? Look back at the research again. Look into people buying houses, cars, and boats and other things people will probably need a loan to purchase and own. Remind them that with their credit report they can buy a bigger, better car, borrow more money, get more furnishings for that new house, get better terms on that new apartment lease. Also, look into the demographics a bit. Split test the images on your landing page, as a picture of a black or Hispanic woman on it may help improve landing page CTR.

Difficulty: 4 out of 5

I’m going to rate this one pretty high because you need to think creatively to get your piece of the pie. This isn’t something you can just go out, direct link, and copy. You need to split test a lot of things, but once you do, you will find your angle and you will be able to scale out things quickly with a formula for success down.

Final Comments

Try a lot of different offers and angles out here guys. Again, direct linking and thinking inside the box here is a big no-no.

If you need any help getting on your feet with credit reports – or anything else affiliate marketing – check out my 1-on-1 affiliate marketing consultation/coaching services! It is a true fast track to becoming a performance marketing god!

I know this offer like the back of my hand. It should be no secret that I love myself a cute Asian woman. Small, adorable eyes, great physiques… there is a lot to appreciate there. But I know you aren’t here to hear about my odd fetishes. You’re here to talk about affiliate marketing, so lets get down to business with an Asian Dating/Bride Order offer, Asian Beauties. Asian Beauties can be found on a lot of different networks, and if your favorite CPA network doesn’t already have it, ask for it!

The Offer

This is a pretty standard landing page. The sign-up info on the left would fit on a PPV pop-up, so if you want to try direct linking, go for it. The woman in the right side of the landing page rotates through various different girls.

Asian Beauties advertises itself as a dating site, but in actuality, they’re more of a mail order bride site. If you sign up, you’ll be chatting with women located in Asia with the goal in the end to bring them over to the states or whatever other country you’re advertising this in. They monetize by charging money to access some profile information and to chat with the girls, send messages or deliveries, and they also organize dating tours in Asia.

While you might think this offer is best suited towards a general demographic of guys like me that are infatuated by Asian women, I want to show you why you are wrong.

Research

While the site isn’t “Quantified”, I’d still call a lot of what you see here as accurate. Obviously it will be dominated by men. But the age demographic tells a nice story. We’re looking at older, single men who are probably pretty desperate. Many of these guys have an average middle class salary, and the race demographics paint an interesting picture, as well. Targeting African and Hispanic communities will push this campaign along.

For some better research, actually try signing up at Asian Beaties. You shouldn’t get spammed to death so long as you avoid filling out your profile information, but you’ll get an idea into what kind of guys are on the site, what the girls have to offer and how they’re profiles are built (a lot of them are sold on the finding an older guy for marriage idea). Targeting these desperate guys are going to give you higher quality leads which typically turns into lower scrub rates and higher, exclusive payouts for yourself. Remember this!

How To Run the Offer

This isn’t a difficult offer to run. For those you know will be interested in meeting women from Asia, you can simply direct link. It should run fine. For those that are single, 35 years and up, but aren’t neccessarily looking for, specifically, an Asian wife or girlfriend, a landing page would help push your conversion rate up significantly. Either way, I’d still test it no matter what angle you decide to run it with. I’ll talk about the landing page in the next section.

So where are we going to run this offer. You’ve got a ton of choices on where you can run this. PPV, search, display and social can all play their part in this offer.

If you plan on running PPV traffic, remember the demographics I was talking about earlier. Use Quantcast and the Google DoubleClick Ad Planner to find websites with high amounts of African and Hispanic older male traffic. I hate to be generalizing, or come off as sounding racist, but black men love a small Asian woman. Build landing pages around each of these demographically targeted campaigns. Again, this will be covered in the Landing Page section.

Social traffic sources like Facebook and Plenty of Fish can also work for this offer. If you’d like to go after the nerdy guys like me that love Asian girls, you’ve got an easy shot at doing so with well-targeted interests. You can target Asian country names, Asian interests such as food, culture, and entertainment figures. Of course, this limits the amount of people you can actually hit with this style of targeting. Again, look back at the Quantcast report. Lots of older guys, specically African Americans, Asians and Hispanics. That’s not to say you can’t go out and target other races either (I know I’d get my freak on targeting white guys like myself). There are plenty of ways to hit races based off general targeting options Facebook gives you. While you’ve got interest targeting, you can also target by geographical area, languages, and schools which will all have their own racial makeups.

Landing Pages

So if you are targeting directly to those already interested in Asian dating, all you’ll have to do is split test a few different designs and images of ladies to figure out which one works best. Your landing page‘s copy will sell the idea that the are thousands of single Asian girls, its free to create a profile and they’re guaranteed to find a good match. Do not overcomplicate things. Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be complicated and I notice a lot of affiliate marketers making it harder on themselves than it has to be.

Now, if you’re going after demographics that aren’t quite presold on the Asian dating thing, you’re going to want to list some general benefits that they can get from Asian Beauties. Here is a list of examples you can rip for your own ads and landing pages:

• Asian girls are more submissive (not really true, but its a broad generalization many people make), and love to take care of their men.
• Asian girls are easier to talk to.
• Asian girls love older men. You will be able to date a girl much younger than you.
• Asian girls are much more sexual than others. (True story, bro!)
• Asian girls age much slower/get sexier with age.
• Asian girls are smarter.

Again, the basic idea here is to sell them on the idea of dating an Asian girl, then pushing them to AsianBeauties to find one.

Final Comments

You’ve got a well branded and recognized offer here. Make sure you aren’t running adult traffic, and you’ll have the strongest leads on men 40 years and older. Also, AnastasiaAffiliate can get you this offer directly on a CPL or CPS offer. You can also white-label their site and users into your own dating site! There are a lot of exciting options with this offer, so explore them all and scale out your earnings.

Cupid.com is one of the hottest dating offers in the affiliate marketing space these days. I’m not talking just US traffic here, but internationally, as well. France, India, South Africa, as well as most of the English speaking countries are covered under Cupid. Cupid can be found on lots of networks, so use oDigger or Offervault to find a network with the offer. There are a ton of ways to run this offer, and I’m going to be covering some of them in detail later in the post.

The Offer

So the conversion path on Cupid converts after a first-page, short profile submit and email confirmation. Simple enough and very standard for a dating offer. This landing page is far too wide for PPV direct linking, but you can try DLing on social, text and display ad networks if you’d like (Note that Cupid has multiple different landing pages for each geographical area and sometimes based on ages). I typically run my dating offers targeted towards the type of person I’m targeting. If you’ve got a large testing budget, you’ll be broad targeting for as much traffic as possible. If you are a smaller budget affiliate, you can create landing pages based tightly around specific targeting. Dating is one of the easiest niches to start in as a new affiliate marketer, and Cupid will give you some good footing with English traffic and non-English traffic.

How To Run the Offer

I’m not going to be showing you how to research a dating offer. It’s pretty damn simple. If you are targeting men, they want sex and young, hot girls (general rule of thumb, but not always true). If you are targeting women, they want long-lasting relationships with stable, well-off men (again, just a slight rule of thumb). The highest quality traffic you can send is from non-adult traffic sources targeting those 30 and up. Targeting men 18 – 24 can mean a fast track to being booted off a lot of dating offers.

Anywho, where can you run this offer? PlentyofFish is a great place for any new affiliate marketer to get their feet wet in dating. The great thing about PoF is the shear amount of targeting options one can play with. When you are on a small budget, this can make building tightly targeted, high ROI campaigns very easy. For example, you could build a campaign around short men in their 30s, are Asian’s that smoke and drink. Yeah, its a crazy tight targeting scheme, and it might only be able to generate 100 clicks a day. Even so, with a correctly written ad and a landing page built around that demographic, you could be looking at a 10% overall conversion rate (converions:ad clicks). This is low balling it, especially when you target so tight. In an example like this, you’d want to test out ads written like so:

Cupid has thousands of girls looking for short Asian men, aged {age:30+}, living in {state:your area} to smoke and party with them. Create your profile free now! ({age:} and {state:} will add the appropriete user data to each of those fields in the ad)

On top of this, you would want to create a landing page that is tailored towards whatever demographic you are targeting. In this case, you’d probably want pictures of fun looking, young Asian girls that are partying and all that fun jazz. If you were targeting me, I’d like to see that landing page, as well. Haha.

With PlentyOfFish ads, you’ve got a ton of other targeting options to play with. Age, Income (lower incomes generally convert higher on most niches), body type (She is looking for her Teddy Bear (bigger guys) to cuddle with tonight!), Ethnicity, Has children (Cupid has thousands of women looking to help parent your kids), Education Level, Religion, Pets, Hair Color and so, so, sooo much more to play with. For the affiliate on a small budget, this is a gold mine. You can dig deep with your own niche and make 100 – 200%+ of your investment back incredibly easy with just a little bit of creativity.

For the broad targeters and even those on smaller budgets, things like session depth, search type, intent, login count, ads clicked, frequency, and browser type can all be ROI effecting targeting options. I’d recommend setting a login count of less than 100 to start and a frequency of 3, as well as making sure you remove all mobile traffic (unless you are using the mobile compliant Cupid offers that exist).

Another reason I like PlentyofFish is because it is generally cheaper to test there than it is on Facebook. While Facebook has become a literal pain in the ass these past few months with stricter ad rule enforcement and random disapproval, its still a huge source of revenue for myself and other dating affiliate marketers. When I get a winning ad on PoF, as long as the ad image isn’t too sexy, it can be transferred to Facebook pretty easily. Some things like personal information may have to be removed, and you’ll have to get creative with targeting (if you are trying to target Asians you’ll have to do so through interest and geographical targeting – think cities with large Asian populations). Facebook will work better for those affiliates targeting broad, and a larger budget will be more appreciated here.

PPV – Dating on PPV is all about the landing page. You’re going to want to test out 100s of landing pages. Think of it like PlentyofFish. You don’t just test one image… no! You create hundreds of ads with 100s of different ad images and maybe a few different ad copies. You’ll be looking for single men. Finding sites and keywords to target with lots of men is not impossible. Tools like the Quantcast Planner and Google DoubleClick Ad Planner make this simple. Again, if you are on a lower budget here, you can take angles through race or the type of dating they’re looking for (mature, flings, f*buddies, gamers looking for gamers, STD dating, be creative!).

When I’m testing landing pages on PPV, I tend to avoid higher traffic targets. This is so I don’t burn through a testing budget on just those targets. I’ll actually move them to a separate campaign so I can still test them, but with their own budget as to reduce the risk of burning through $100 or so just on a few targets where the rest don’t get enough to convert.With higher traffic targets, you’ll want a seperate group of landing pages designed around the pages they are popping on. A good way to sell this is to include a line like so in the headline:

Hey XYZ.com users! Create your free dating profile at Cupid now!

You also have the option of display traffic. I like to reach out to smaller sites that offers are running well for on my PPV targets and see if I can’t buy banners there at a flat monthly rate. There are so many banner networks out there that its hard to cover all of them in a single post here. Try out a few different networks, test out their targeting options and optimize off of the best performers. There is huge potential to scale your campaigns from PoF, PPV, and FB and buy general display traffic. This is where the biggest affiliates have their 5 and 6 figure revenue days.

Landing Pages

This is a veryyyyy, very general, broad dating landing page design. It’s in no way, shape or form amazing, and it would have to be used for those that have had a good presell through the ad they clicked from, however the layout and some of the other features are what I wanted to touch on.

People like knowing that there are others online or available to chat with at the moment. The “online” stickers help sell that feature. What is missing is geo-targeting insertion, or including the name of the users city/area in the headline. That is one thing that should always be included on nearly every landing page for every niche you market in. Giving the users choice through the various different women can be important, too, however, if you know your targets a little better you might only want to include blondes, or Asians, or bigger women or older women.

The inclusion of the word FREE, where allowed, always increases LP CTR. Include it in your ads and landing pages whenever possible. Here I’m also asking for an email address as if it is part of the sign up process. I would single opt-in something like this as you are just trying to get them to sign up for this offer. You can test for the double opt-in, but it’ll be pretty difficult. You get the email send them through to the offer, then send them a reminder email to sign up for the offer in case they didn’t earlier. Just another extra way to reach out to the user.

Also, you’ll probably want to design the landing page with the same basic design influences as Cupid, especially if you are trying to get an email address, as well. A good landing page can have a 25%+ CTR. My best LPs do 50%.

Final Comments

Dating is a huge niche. There is no lack of traffic, and there never will be as there are always people looking for someone to love. Start small if you are on a budget and slowly go from one sub-niche to the the next to build up your revenue until it is high enough to start targeting broad and buying as much traffic as you can to scale out to huge profits! If Cupid doesn’t work out for you, rotate one of the hundreds of other dating offers available to you.

This October, I’ve got something very special planned for you guys.

“31 Days of Campaigns” will be a series of 31 posts, back to back, giving you an inside look into the methodology I use to build campaigns. I will be choosing 1 new offer every day, showing you why I picked that offer, how I would run the offer, giving you inside statistics and research, and maybe even a few landing pages and image packs so you guys can go out and try it on your own. The goal of all this is to help you see exactly how an experienced affiliate marketer would pick an offer, research, build a campaign, how to use a landing page, how to write an ad, and all that good stuff. All of this will be free and available to view on my blog. I’m not asking for a single cent!

If you have any suggestions on offers you would like to see me talk about, comment below. Alternatively, if you’d like to help out, create a post following this format to be posted on the blog (with some nice link love, of course), feel free to hit up my contact page!

I’ve been in Thailand around 5 years now. I started out as an exchange student and now I’m a full blown entrepreneur. I’ve learned my fair share about this place and how it is positively and negatively affecting my business. Enjoy the post, and the eye candy.

1. Things aren’t always what they seem to be

There are a lot of people pretending to be what they really aren’t. Thailand is full of women that aren’t just that. In order to get through all the BS and fake crap spit out, you need to know what to look for. In Thailand, that means looking for big feet, an Adam’s apple, or just going for a “ball-check” if you’re up for it. As an internet/affiliate marketer you should know what to look for in an affiliate offer, traffic source or CPA network before you start dealing with any of them.

2. Knowing the local lingo gets you places

Living in Thailand without knowing some basic conversation isn’t impossible, but you are going to be stuck in the main tourist destinations, without much bargaining power, and you might have some difficulty ordering food or talking to the locals in some areas. As an internet marketer, you should know the lingo before you jump into things. Tracking, CPA, EPC, CPM, CPC, PPV, FB – these are all just some of the abbreviations and keywords you should be familiar with. It’ll help give you a jump start and give you more power over making decisions in your marketing business.

3. Sex sells

The sex tourism industry, as much as I hate to say it, is huge in Thailand. This is a simple idea. Sex sells everywhere around the word. When building landing pages and advertising banners don’t forget this. It can have a large impact on CTR to CVR (see step 2 if you don’t understand that).

4. Keep your infrastructure and traffic clean

This is a problem Thailand could use a lesson on. There is always a traffic jam somewhere in Bangkok, 24/7. Sidewalks are used as motorcycle lanes, emergency shoulders are for passing, internet connections are slow and unreliable, and the government is corrupt and sloppy. Keep your statistics well organized and on hand, have a server capable of holding extra traffic in case you need it (I recommend WiredTree), and do your research before you build out a 10,000 target PPV campaign (easy to do with the likes of AffPortal)

5. Avoid Being Lazy

I love Thai people. I love my Thai employees (they’re extremely talented), but its more of a culture thing that being on time, finishing projects on schedule and that doing things now when you have the free time is hardly ever an option. It can rub off on you. Avoid this situation at all costs. If you think you have nothing else to do today, and can slack off and play games, sit back down and think hard. In my business, there is always something I can do, whether it be research, campaign optimization, client work, coaching, phone calls with CPA managers, split testing ads, data mining, new offers to launch and oodles of more things. Get into the habit of doing more before you get lazy with the culture surrounding you.

Thailand really is a great place, but its got its own pros and cons when it comes to business. There are lots of distractions which you’ll need to learn to avoid (see the above image), the Internet can be slow and shoddy (3g is just picking up speed in Bangkok, DSL is the main connection type while broadband was just made available in limited areas), and if you want to do local business you’ll be hard pressed to find good employees, as well as trying to deal with local Thai clients. Even with all the cons, I love the place and think that everyone should come here and try it at least once in their lifetime.

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.