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.

Not all affiliate marketing campaigns have to be well thought out and devilishly planned. This is one such example.

The Offer

So the offer I’m looking at now is World Golf Tour. I see from oDigger that it is available on EWA Network and WolfStormMedia at around $0.90 per conversion. Only $0.90, you say!? That’s right, but payout isn’t everything. I’ve made $50,000 a month with 1-2 dollar payouts, so this should not deter you in the slightest.

Let’s take a look at the offer page.

Wow! Simple, pleasant and easy. Fill in the form and collect your money. That’s about as simple an offer as it gets. Due to the low payout, I can only assume that it has a low scrub rate. The multitude of registration options through Google, Yahoo, or Facebook is awesome, as well. The easier it is to sign up, the faster you are going to make monies.

I’d like to run this on contextual traffic (PPV on TrafficVance), as that is where it will be easiest to target this offer. However, we run into one slight problem. The landing page is about 300 pixels too wide for the standard PPV pop up. You can try direct linking, but even taking a JPG image of this offer page, replacing the form with a big “SIGN UP FREE” button (or an email submit for your own list) would probably be the better choice. While users can scroll side to side on a PPV pop-up, it isn’t something that you’d find most users doing. Perhaps asking your affiliate network for permission to iFrame the signup form would work as well. That’ll be down to a network by network, advertiser to advertiser basis.

Another great thing about this offer is that it can be promoted to multiple non-English speaking countries (SE, DK, NO, FI, NL). This makes it a great choice for Facebook ads, as well. You can test it out on US traffic but you’ll need a high CTR as click costs on FB US traffic can be outstanding.

Basic Research

Quantcast tells us that most people that visit WGT.com are white, affluent men in their 30s and up that are interested in golf. If this comes to any surprise to you, its time to get out from under that rock. If you are targeting with a mix of demographic and interest targeting (say for example, Facebook), take this stuff to heart as you’ll have your best conversions when following this data. With PPV, demographic targeting won’t be as important as interest targeting, especially when it is so easy!

Where to Run This Offer

So if you are going to be running this offer on TrafficVance or LeadImpact, it will be easiest to do so simply by targeting golfing related key terms and URLs. I’ve put together a list of 700+ golfing terms I pulled from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can get it by helping me out by Tweeting about this post. Just click the button below to do so.

Tweet&getit is powered by Viuu

Cool! So you have the list now. If you want to target URLs, I would get a URL scraping tool. My favorite is AffPortal. It’s affordable and super easy to use.

Grab conversion pixels and post them on the offer. Not all your keywords and URLs will be winners. In some cases only 1 out of 1000 may be profitable. Some people think PPV is cheap traffic, but it can be relatively expensive to test. This might be the case with this offer. Remember to stick with it, spend $20 and see where it goes. If you are picking up some conversions, this is good. Spend a little more to make sure conversions are consistent. I’ve spent $500 in one day, only to make $100 back. I paused everything that didn’t convert and after a week I made back that $400 loss and was profitable for more than a few months. That is sometimes the sacrifice you have to make to get things working on PPV traffic.

Now, if you are going to try this offer out on Facebook, here is a sample ad I would use:

“Love Golf? – Then play World Golf Tour. Play against the Pro’s scores and beat them in tournaments for real cash prizes. Sign up FREE now!”

It is a stupid simple ad that you can use when targeting appropriate interests (You can target any of the Tiger Woods Golf games, Sim Golf, or go as broad as Golf if you are feeling up to the challenge). It gives an emotional connection that requires a response (Love), induces challenging the users skill to build interest, as well as a call to action with the key term ‘free’. That’ll be a biggie to your CTR. If you are planning to run this offer in non-English speaking countries, please use a professional translation service like onehourtranslation.com. Google Translate will do a horrible job trying to get this exact message across.

Remember to split test your images and landing pages constantly so you can better maximize your ROI!

Final Comments

What you are left with here is a very simple offer. Target middle aged men into golf. It’s not a difficult task to pick up some really easy money here. I realize this post isn’t as extremely in-depth as my other posts, but it really doesn’t have to be. This is not something that you are going to have to think about for a long time to break a profit!

I’ll be honest here… I don’t read many blogs, I don’t frequent many forums (except my own, of course), and I haven’t signed up for many outside tools. A lot of what I do and what I have is all internal. But oDigger.com has become a daily browse for me. They wrap up a lot of features you’re going to want to check out, with everything from a blog, an affiliate offer search engine, and one of the most unique things I’ve seen to date out of the affiliate industry, a spin on all these groupon style sites you see popping up.

Here is why I love oDigger: The affiliate offer search engine. One of my beliefs is that if you aren’t on top of new offers the day they’re put up on any affiliate network, then you are too damn late to the game. If an affiliate network says x or y offer is so hot, you’ve already missed out on your opportunity to take a large piece of the pie. oDigger aggregates new offers from over 200 networks and puts it across their simple to use affiliate offer search engine. Running in a hot niche and only want to see offers related to it for a simple split test? oDigger lets you do that! You can also sort and optimize by type of offer (lead gen, sale, etc), country, payout, date added or affiliate network. In total, they’ve listed 65,000+ offers! I just love the preview feature they’ve included. It saves me the hassle of having to log into a VPN just to see an offers landing page.

Speaking of affiliate networks, oDigger has a large affiliate network review database. You can never have enough affiliate networks to pull offers from. Each review page allows individual affiliates to comment on the network and leave a rating, allowing you to see who’s really paying their affiliates and who’s doin’ them in the butt. On top of that, you’ll get some contact information snipets and a listing of each networks top offers which are great for when you’re running out of ideas on what to run.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was oDigger Deals. Think of this as the Groupon for Affiliates. While the selection on deals are slim now, I think they’ve got a really interesting thing going on for them here. Things like Profit Siege (a handy PPV Building Tool) and the WhatRunsWhere Deal (Media Buying Spy Tool) are their two current deals, both excellent for the price and what they offer. Eventually, you might even see some of my own projects up there. oDigger has told me they’ve got a lot of exciting things coming to the table there so it’s something you’ll want to check back on consistently.

Check out oDigger now and start making more money today!

Matt asked this question in the “Got Questions? Get Answers” post. If you have an affiliate marketing question you would like answered, get your ass over there and start asking!

The affiliate with a limited budget. I used to be one, but back then, I think things were 10 times easier. Now, its not impossible to get things rolling with only $500 to your name, but it is quite a gamble. I say you’ll want to start out with at least $5000 these days. Why? Basically, you’ll run into something that makes money eventually. Once you’re steaming past $100+ spend a day, that $500 is going to be gone fast and you’ll be waiting for checks in the mail for a long time. Cash flow is important, because by the time you get paid, that campaign might be out of steam and making no one money.

So lets just pretend you’ve got cash flow, but only have $500 to test and get something rolling to unlock the other pile of cash. Where are you going to start. Well, we’ll want to keep things simple. The simplest thing to run is dating. Dating on PoF or Facebook has always been strong. What it’s all about there is getting lucky and having big boobies in the image. Any affiliate network can tell you the best converting dating affiliate offer, and you should be able to put together some decent ad copies. After that it’s all up to you split testing a hundred or so different images. The most difficult part of the day is actually getting anything decent past Facebook Nazis.

If you’re looking for other options, though, Zip/email submits lead the pack. Set up a poll style landing page, stating that those that participate will qualify for a free $500 giftcard to wherever for whatever. Someone in my forums has been sharing a lot of success by doing this on Facebook Pages. This will also work on PPV. Try it with a recent news item.

Another suggestion? I am constantly browsing for new offers… Brand new never had an affiliate offer set up for them before offer. These things are simple to play as they’ve got 0 competition. Targeting their page directly on PPV is an old trick, and its simple to scale to pages reviewing them or their direct competitors. So long as it doesn’t require a credit card, you should be able to generate a light amount of leads.

Again, affiliates on a budget, I strongly suggest you get some real financial backing before you try going all in. Not having that cash flow when it counts will hurt your chances of making real money when you’re paying for traffic.

This is a follow-up post in reply to a question asked on my “Ask Questions, Get Answers” post. If you’ve got any questions on affiliate marketing, drop them in the comments of that post!

So you’ve gathered up $1,000, launched a few campaigns, and eventually one stuck. You spend your $1,000 promoting it, but now what? You’re crap outta money. You’ve got no credit line, or it isn’t high enough. You’re probably stuck waiting 7 – 30 days to get paid out, depending on which affiliate network you are working with. You’re already working a second job or freelancing and dumping all the money from that into your marketing campaigns, but that still isn’t cutting it. That’s a lot of lost opportunity to make more money just because you are lacking it. So what are your options.

Number 1: Most affiliate networks are very flexible with payments. If the traffic you’re sending is quality, of course they are going to want you to send more traffic. When I was starting out, this was my exact problem. I had limited funds, spent it all on a great campaign and didn’t even have the money to buy a decent meal (thank god for ramen!). At the time, I was working with Ads4Dough talking with the owner, Jason. I told him I was out of money. The next day, he wired me all the cash I made, even from the day before, and I was set for another week. By that time, I was making enough to get paid weeklies.

Number 2: If you’ve got great credit, it might be worth it to try and apply for a credit card. I uses an American Express Plum Card back when CCs were easy to get. These days, card companies might hassle you quite a bit if you don’t have the best credit. If all else fails, try for a student credit card. They’ve got horrible terms, but if its just a quick boost you need for your campaigns, they give you at least a couple days more time to run campaigns. Cut ‘em up when you’ve paid them off and have enough cash flow to pay with cash. I quit using credit cards about a year ago.

Number 3: Get a business loan. If you’re registered, and again, have great credit, try and go for it. I haven’t tried this and wouldn’t know where to start, but I know a few buddies that have used this when they were in a squeeze for some cash to feed their profiting campaigns.

Number 4: If you’re a smooth talker, ask your friends and family for money. Give them a percentage of your profit, show them your campaign stats, and prepare a small presentation for them. Venture capital, if you will. Hell, go out and try some real venture capital and getting in some angel investors. If you got the communication skills, you could potentially raise tens of thousands of dollars!

Number 5: Sell your stuff. Hold a garage sale, sell old collectibles you don’t even look at anymore, or just pawn them off. Once you start making cash back, you can buy it back anyways!

So those are all the suggestions from me. Do you guys have any other ways you can think of on how to get a quick buck to fuel your campaigns when you’re short on cash? Drop them in the comments section below!

For those of you unfamiliar with PPV advertising, it stands for pay-per-view advertising. Each ad is served as a pop-up or pop-under. Advertisers have control to serve these ads where they want by picking certain targets – websites that users browse or searched for keywords. This allows you to be very creative with your targeting, whether demographically or psychographically. In this post, I will be talking about how I used PPV to make a long term stable dating campaign.

Now, when you hear about PPV traffic, a lot of people talk about using URL targets. They allow you a bit more edge in targeting down what you really need. There is a downfall though: there is a ton of competition and this makes it very costly. These two things make it difficult to keep PPV campaigns going long term. I wanted to “beat the system” if you will.

I picked a very general and broad niche – dating – which is very competitive in itself, and made it my goal to create a long term campaign out of it. I picked 5 of the hottest offers in dating, rotated them in Prosper, created my link, and uploaded that to TrafficVance. I also made sure to put conversion tracking from TV on my affiliate network so I could more easily optimize the campaign without having to check stats from different sources.

But how to turn one of the most, if not the most, competitive niche into my own long term stable campaign? That was the question indeed. Keywords were the answer for me. First of all, I gathered all the dating keywords that I could:

• dating
• singles
• online dating
• christian dating
• singles chat
• dating services
• personals
• matchmaking
• etc

These keywords on their own were pretty competitive, although you can still find some basic dating keywords for $0.011 or so. After collecting all these keywords (I just got them all from the Google Keyword Tool and AffPortal), I needed a way to make them less competitive. One thing I do with a lot of my other dating campaigns is target locally. That is what I would do here.

Wikipedia helped me gather a list of all the states and their largest cities. Using that list in combination with my dating keywords list, I was able to create a keyword list of over 30,000 keywords with this tool. Now, you might think I’m insane for using so many keywords, but you have to realize these are long-tail keywords:

• local matchmaking services in New York
• meet singles in MN
• online dating for Californians
• Anchorage singles chat

After firing up the campaign, I kicked out offers that wouldn’t perform well until I was left with only a couple that got results that were the most profitable. Most keywords were only getting 0-2 pops a day, however the total campaign would get me about 1-3000 pops per day, all at only 1 cent a pop. Surprisingly, I was getting about a 100% return on my money right off the bat. I put very little time into managing it. I even used it to build a small list, rotating in one of my own squeeze pages.

Every time I would get a conversion on a long-tail keyword, I would fire up AffPortal and do a Google scrub of all websites for that keyword. That allowed me to add several thousand more targets, many of which performed very well, too. All it all, I spent about $900 over 3 months on a campaign that took me all of an hour to make and another hour or two to manage. Revenue was at about $2000.

It is basically a free money kind of campaign for me, and the revenue gained from it is so marginal that I thought I would share it here. The idea here isn’t to blatantly go out and copy the campaign (although I know half of you will), but take away the idea and creativity that went in to building it. I thought outside the box, and I was rewarded for it. The most original marketers are the most profitable, and until you stop copying others campaigns, you’ll always be struggling to make the next step up to bigger profits.

Looking for more case studies and answers to your questions? The forums might be just what you’re looking for. Click here.

When I get a review request from an affiliate network, I always take it very seriously. There are far too many networks being built everyday and, unfortunately, most of them only offer brokered offers with lower payouts and higher scrub rates compared to other more reliable networks. When I got a request to do one for T3Leads, I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with that. T3Leads is an extremely unique affiliate network in that you can choose from a large set of pre-built lead-gen offer pages and send traffic to those, or you can install their custom CMS and create your own forms and website to drive traffic to!

Above you can see some of the offer niches they cover. Like I said before, all of these are lead gen offers, which are considerably easier to convert than any cost-per-sale offers you may have tried before. My affiliate manager at T3Leads, Daniel Demirchyan, says some of their most popular niches are auto loans, loan modifications, and insurance, with a strong emphasis on payday loans (they have over 40 lendors!). As you can see from above, though, they have lots of other little niches that aren’t talked about a lot in other forums of blogs you read. That makes working with T3Leads a great chance to try something new and grab a part of a niche that isn’t flooded.

The above picture shows T3Lead’s simple to use lead-gen form generator. While the on-site forms are only available for a few niches, T3Leads includes its own CMS that you can download and install on your own site to basically create your own offer page. This allows you to collect leads on your own landing page domain names. It’s a great implementation for search marketers, as well as PPV marketers. Keeping all your prospective traffic on one domain really helps streamline everything and generate a sense of trust between the user and website. Below are shots from the easy-to-use CMS backend that you can use to create your own offer page.

All documents and instructions on how to use the T3Lead’s custom CMS are included in your affiliate dashboard. If you do have questions about the CMS, or anything else about your account or offer, though, T3Lead’s has a unique solution that I really think other affiliate networks should take now of. Rather than try and email an affiliate manager and hope you get an answer while your mail gets lost in the downpour of other emails your network gets, T3Leads implements a ticketing system. This ticketing system is supported with staff at your service 24 hours a day. This is great for someone like me who doesn’t always have the privilege of being able to IM someone when it is 1 pm my time, but 1 AM U.S. time.

All of the above is wrapped around the 3rd generation of their tracking platform. It is really slick and simple to navigate. It’s always nice to see an affiliate network go way outside of their way to improve their affiliates’ and merchants’ experience by using a custom built backend. It has all the tools and tracking plugins most affiliates are used to, as well as some that I wasn’t familiar with. Whether you’re new to affiliate marketing or a pure genius needing 100% control of everything from the site design to analytics and tracking, T3Leads has you covered.

Pro’s

• Ton’s of main-stream and deeper niche offers
• Dozens of fully customizable forms to insert on your own websites
• Custom backend and CMS for generating your own landing pages and offer sites with T3Lead’s forms
• Affiliate referral program that pays 3% of the gross revenue
• Bi-Weekly Payments (Weeklies if you generate more than $1000 a week)
• Ticketing system for 24/7 support

Con’s

• Requires some technical knowledge if you plan on using a custom offer page
• Some niches may be too competitive for newer affiliates.

Overall, T3Leads is a great and reliable network. If you’re looking for a network to supply you with an endless supply of email submit and dating offers, look at one of the other thousand copy-cat networks. However, if you are looking for a unique way to promote and generate leads, T3Lead’s just might have what you need.

Click here to register for T3Leads today!

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

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

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

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

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

Is affiliate marketing any more stressful than building a regular, physical business? Let me help you get this straight for you – affiliate marketing IS a physical business… you’ve got your storefront (your landing pages), stock and inventory (offers), a supplier (affiliate network), and employees (designers, copy writers, programmers, etc). Put simply, it is as stressful as any other business you can be in.

I was there while my father was building his restaurant up. It was hard… stressful – very much so. He’d come home and talk to me about budgeting and how he couldn’t take a paycheck just to pay employees on time (testing your affiliate offers, you usually break even or go bust). We’d go over how expensive some items were getting to produce (click costs, any one?) and we might have to bump the cost of our sandwiches (it was a Roly Poly franchise place). We never got the place profitable over about 2 – 3 years, so we had to let it go (offer died out, traffic too saturated, competion moved in, etc).

There are no easy, stress-less ways to make money. I know millionaires that get stressed when they lose a couple thousand testing a campaign. What differentiates a good marketer from a great affiliate marketer is ones ability to see through their stress, find a solution, and turn things around. Whether it be stock investment, real estate, brick-and-mortar shops, or affiliate marketer, we all deal with a ton of stress on a nearly daily basis.

For those of you who are advertisers, listen up. These are offers I want to run! If they exist, well, tell me what CPA network I can find them on. If they don’t exist, get your stuff together, find some lead buyers, and throw up a high converting landing page because I’m about to send you 500 leads a day!

• Plastic Surgery (I’ve seen them in the UK, but not the US)
• Colored Contacts/Eye Glasses
• Weight Loss Lead-gens (Why aren’t there any of these yet?)
• Buy Used Cars
• Computer Hardware/Repair/Troubleshooting
• T-Shirts
• Wedding Rings
• Vacations/Travel
• MMO leadgens (That don’t suck)
• Sell Your Own Porn Movie (Seriously!)
• Lawyer (I’ve seen a few of these, but they all convert horribly and look like a 5-year old designed them)
• Get Rid Of Your Speeding Ticket/DUI/DWI/Possession of Pot Brownies offer
• And just in general, more offers with an alternative PPV-sized LP

Want to add your suggestion to the list? I know a lot of advertisers and affiliate network reps read this blog. Perhaps one of them will drop by, catch your suggestion, and build the offer!

And don’t forget! Tomorrow is Freebie Friday. If you aren’t on the mailing list within 24 hours or so, you won’t get an awesome landing page I’ve got lined up for you to download. You can sign up in the form on the right sidebar.