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.

You’re god damn lazy!

And I bet you know it, don’t you. Lots of us were guided into affiliate marketing because we were led with promises of riches and a very small work flow. Work 4 hours a week for $10,000? Yes please! It doesn’t help that modern education, IE. the “guru” ebook, teaching helpless folk looking for a way out of the rat race, that this is a typical experience for someone with a free Blogspot blog, Adsense and an Amazon affiliate account. You can’t help but feel sorry for the suckers that fall for that crap (unless you’re the “guru” behind the monitor laughing their way to the bank to do it).

I’ve never bullshitted anyone about how “truthfully easy” this industry is. It’s hard damn work. People that make it to the top and STAY there are the ones working their asses off 10+ hours a day – harder than any paper pushing office job you’ve ever experienced. If you are an individual affiliate, here is a basic run down of all the skills you must posses to be an amazing affiliate marketer:

• Excellent communication
• Technical skills (HTML, design, etc)
• Ability to look at data and see patterns in it
• Mathematics
• Financing
• And the ability to deal with some of the most monotonous and boring tasks you’ve ever done before, day in and day out

Sure, you get to be your own “boss”. You can make up your own hours. You can work from wherever you want. But whatever hours you pick, and wherever you choose to use those hours, you’ve still got a grindstone to hit. You should still be researching your offers rather than throwing shit at a fan and watching it splatter all over the wall and hoping that something hits the tiny bulls-eye in the middle. You should still be scaling out to other countries and properly translating things rather than trying your luck with Google Translates blubbered translated gibberish.

And you should never sit on one successful campaign and hope that its still running tomorrow. The moment you’ve done that is the moment you’ve screwed yourself when you see Facebook has banned your account, or you see the offer was paused overnight without your AM informing you.

As an affiliate, it is your duty to keep up with trending topics, scout out new offers, scale, datamine, integrate new tactics, split test, rotate offers, design new landing pages and try new things on a daily basis. If you aren’t doing this, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

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.

Welcome to a new style of posting here on my blog. Actually, let’s just call it a re-branded post style. I’ll be doing short blog posts here and there every week that give away a bit of information and tips to help you guys progressively become a better affiliate marketer. These tips will range in complexity from absolute “noob” advice to tips that more extreme and experienced marketers could pick from.

In the first of, hopefully, many Affiliate Marketing Quick Tips posts, I wanted to talk a little about Plenty of Fish and some simple targeting advice. Let us talk about Session Depth and Login Count, more specifically.

These two targeting options allow you to target how many pages a user has browsed since they’ve logged in (session depth) and login count means how many times the user has logged in since they’ve signed up and created a profile on PoF. I love the latter, because it will make scraping ads a lot tougher.

Anyways, a simple way to make sure your ads are hitting new faces that haven’t been completely bombarded by your large-booby dating ads, try setting your session depth low. This has one drawback in that clicks will be a bit more expensive. You’re also dealing with higher quality traffic, though, so keep that in mind.

Now, session depth. Try playing with this, and more specifically, try playing with your ad wording. Create two ads – 1 with a low session depth, and one with a a session depth set at greater than the lower session depth ad. We can play with the users and get them engaged with our ad a bit more. “Did you miss the first ad, we sent you? Aww, that’s okay because you can still click here to get your account at xyzdatingsite.com now!”

And that has been an Affiliate Marketing Quick Tip brought to you by Justin Dupre.