Justin Dupre » affiliate network

Is Affiliate Marketing Stressful?

Justin Dupre — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:31:16 +0000

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.

Lead Gen Offers I Would Run if They Existed

Justin Dupre — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:31:30 +0000

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.

PPV Walkthrough – Part 1 – What Is PPV?

Justin Dupre — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:03:46 +0000

Here is something no one else is doing, yet. A CPV/PPV walkthrough. Think of this as the PPV equivalent to Nickycakes Facebook Newbie Guide (which is an excellent read for all you that want to advertise on Facebook. I’ll also be basing the posts around Nickycake’s own… think of it as flattery because he did good job at it). I don’t think many people are blogging about this out in the open, because they want to keep it a secret. Well, whatever… I’m not going to hand you the guide to success here, but more of a very broad roadmap with some roads missing here and there. I obviously can’t give you the exact path to a big paycheck as that could damage my business, but a little healthy competition never hurts… plus I like to network and help others out.

What will you need for this walkthrough to work.

A Google Scraper (Just sign up at AffPortal. You’ll thank me later.)
An account at MediaTraffic

Anyways, let’s get on with it.

What is PPV?

PPV (Pay-Per-View), is also known as contextual advertising or Cost-Per-View (CPV). Unlike search or display advertising, you aren’t paying per click (PPC) or thousand impressions (CPM) on a banner or text ad. Rather, you are paying for each pop-up served to a computer with adware installed in it. Adware is ad supported software, games or toolbars that a user downloads onto their PC. Most of this software hits the Internet thanks to internet marketers like us getting users to download them. You can probably log in to any affiliate network account you have and see offers like MyWebFace, Gamevance, etc. That’s what I’m talking about.

A pop-up is generated when you bid on a keyword that is then searched for. Alternatively, you can target individual websites. When a user with adware installed visits one of these sites, the pop-up is generated. You can use a landing page or pop a banner instead. Typical LP size for pops is 750 x 550 pixels, which is something you can actually get around (I’ll talk about that in a later post). It is pretty much as simple as that.

Each pop costs you an amount of money, no matter the user clicks through or ignores/closes your pop-up completely. With MediaTraffic, the lowest amount you’ll be able to bid is 1.5 cents per view. Some networks will go as low as $0.0025 for international views, and I’ve seen bids higher than $0.50 before for some more competitive niches. It can be a cheap, or very costly form of advertising depending on how smart you go about doing this.

The great thing about PPV though, is once you hit the sweet spot on a target or keyword, you might be doing 1 conversion over 100 pops. If you are running a rebill offer, that is $30 – 40 on a couple bucks ad spend. Talk about ROI! It does take work though, and like I said, I am not giving you a complete road map to success, so get off your lazy arse and do some work to fill in the blanks I will be giving you!

So what else will this guide consist of? I’ll talk about how to track your PPV campaigns, picking out offers, how to use AffPortal and do research, building landing pages, how to setup a campaign in MediaTraffic, how to optimize your campaigns, how to scale, and give some good insider tips on what you can do to become a little more successful with PPV. If you’ve got some more suggestions you’d like added, just let me know and I’ll try to add them in.

Sponsored Post: White Fire Media Affiliate Network

Justin Dupre — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:56:42 +0000

Yeah, sorry, I’m gonna sell out for the sake of my benefit. Monies! Just a couple about this and all sponsored posts: these companies are paying me to write a review about their product or service. Everything is from my mouth, and if you want me to review a shitty product I’m gonna tell you and all my readers it’s a shitty product. Actually, I won’t even take the time to waste my readers time. So don’t spam your shitty ebooks in my email asking for me to help you promote them.� Anyways, here’s a sponsored post about White Fire, a small start-up affiliate market and what I think about it.

White Fire Media is a new CPA affiliate network out there, among thousands, trying to make its way up the pack into another Advaliant or Convert2Media.� Thankfully, they aren’t trying to look like your average ever other day affiliate network. Looks like they’ve actually spent some time and money on their webpage and design. We likes that.

To get some more information from the them I asked Affiliate Manager Josh Galligan a couple simple questions about White Fire Media network – “Why do you think affiliates should work with you guys, a newer network, rather than some of the more established CPA networks? And what sets you apart from everyone else?” His reply turned out more like a novel, but here you go:

“Well, we�re certainly not going to try and pretend like we�re the next big thing in terms of affiliate networks. Pretty much every single affiliate network has claimed that it�s the best and offers the best service when it launched. And it�s not like they�re lying � I think that they all do this because, in a perfect world, that�s exactly what networks WANT themselves to be like.

Whether or not that network actually proves these statements to be true is another matter. But yes, we do think that we offer some great services and yes, we do think that we can help out and manage our affiliates just as well as the next network. It�s well-documented that I�m incredibly passionate about this industry � I�ve been busting my ass to try and improve the content/writing sub-industry for the past year and a half � and owner Jeff Cox is just as obsessed. We both eat, sleep, and breathe this industry and we both know what it�s like to be at the starting line. We realize that the majority of our affiliates are going to have no idea what in the world they�re doing � and that�s fine.

We�re perfectly ready and capable to guide them by the hand into money-making territory. As for the more well-experienced, veteran affiliates, well, we�re here to service any of their needs as well. Those needs tend to be more about getting paid on time and getting the offers that they want, WHEN they want them � but we�re just as up for servicing those types of needs as well.

What really sets our network apart from the competition though is that I�ve decided to put my professional Affiliate Marketing content skills to good use. For any affiliates that join White Fire and need help content-wise with a landing page (or other basic, one-page site), I�m going to write that content (per request) 100% free. I usually charge in the area of $4.00 per 100 words, so it�s proven to be quality and it�s proven to be popular in the industry. It�s also proven to be expensive, which makes this stipulation of our network that much more intriguing.

That alone should get affiliates to work with us, but quite honestly, we�re hungry and we�re willing to work as much as possible to get fed. Both Jeff Cox and I have climbed our way up the industry ladder the hard-way, rung-by-rung. So we know that we�re A) Not entitled to absolutely anything and B) Are not going to get anything on this network side of things easily. But just like all of the other obstacles that blocked our paths thus far, the question isn�t whether we�ll succeed � the question is when?”

Good enough. And yes, I do know Josh, and yes, his content is very good, top notch shit. Some of the top offers I’ve run through landing pages used Josh’s writing, and they converted like cheese and crackers in your mouth. Or some other stupid saying. So free content when you push some revenue to their network sounds like a golden opportunity to start split testing already.

Taking a look inside, they’re run on LinkTrust, which in my opinion is much better than DirectTrack that a lot of other networks run. It allows easy placement of pixels, organization and easy stat retrieval. All looks good and normal. Featured offers, News and Events are listed, Total revenue information and your affiliate manager contact info is there for easy access.

Let’s take a look at offers (browsing as I’m typing here!). They’ve got a really wide range of offers that aren’t your Netflix or Blockbuster, DirectTV offers that every other network puts on their home page as featured advertisers. This is a good thing. Diet, insurance, dating, financial, and several other niches are all here. They’ve even got an e-cig offer up which is just getting popular now. White Fire has got a lot of offers that other networks have, but that’s not a bad thing. I’m sure as the network grows they’ll be able to get dibs on some nice exclusives.

Payouts are set at pretty fair streets, as well. Ask your affiliate manager for bumps and I’m sure they’ll hook you up with what you need.

One thing I liked was I was approved within 10 minutes without asking for it. They are going to be paying attention to new affiliates and giving you what you need to advance.

Overall, if Jeff and Josh can keep their words on what they plan to offer with White Fire, they should be building up a decent team and network to provide what affiliates need. If you are interested in checking them out, you can sign up for them at this link by clicking here.

You can never join too many networks, so go and check this one out to see what you can start making money on now.

Facebook Runs a Profit

Justin Dupre — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:57:49 +0000

I thought this was an interesting read about how Facebook, for the first time in its years running, is actually running a profit. The announcement was made last Tuesday. (Yeah I realize I’m about 6 days behind the world here in Thailand.) :

Facebook’s user base is nearly as large as the U.S. population and, for the first time, the site has turned a profit.

That was the double-barreled announcement Tuesday from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who thanked the site’s users for helping its online community cross the 300 million threshold. There are about 307 million people living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“We’re just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s blog.

“Because we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for the world to connect, one of the things we think a lot about is how to make Facebook perform even faster and more efficiently as we grow,” he wrote. “We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the Web.”

This is great in that it’s giving us more consumers to advertise to (at the note of about 800,000 per day). However, I think I know why they kicked my off their platform. With profit, they probably don’t need my internet monies. Anyways, another interesting point in the article -

About 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the U.S., according to statistics posted by the company. The site started out as a portal for college students but has attracted the attention of baby boomers and older generations in recent years. Facebook says its fastest-growing demographic is people older than 35.

So, get on your affiliate network managers and ask them what is hot for people older than 35 not living in the United States. There is a huge market that isn’t in the United States, and well, a lot of people are missing out on a significant amount of revenue because of that. As networks and advertisers get better hold of this concept, we’ll certainly see more affiliate offers being brought up to our attention.

You can finish reading the article for yourself at CNN here.

Eagle Web Assets

Justin Dupre — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:30:11 +0000

Welcome back to Monday, every full-time affiliate marketers favorite day! Why? Because they can stay home and sleep recovering from any crazy weekend plans they went through.

All joking aside, I want you guys to start hitting up my favorite affiliate network. EWA is run by none other than the Birdman himself, Ryan Eagle. This guy just hit his 22nd birthday so I thought I’d throw some rep. at him here. That’s not to say he doesn’t have enough already.

A little history on Ryan – he used some reallly, realllllly, realllllllllly bad publicity to get his name featured in the realm of affiliate marketing. It was so bad, that somehow it was good and now everyone knows who he is. Some love him, and some hate him. He’s bathes in his money, so I’m sure he doesn’t give a shit anyways. His motto: Money, Hos, Cars, Clothes. Ryan’s got his priorities straight.

So why do you want to join a network run by Ryan? Well, if you aren’t able to get a lot of cashflow going, Ryan will pay you weekly. You’ll get weekly checks if you make less than $1k, and if you are making more you’ll get it deposited straight into your bank account.

Want a bump. Ryan streets stuff higher than the bumps I’ve gotton on other networks. He doesn’t have 50 affiliate managers to pay, and most of his affiliates are very high volume ballers just like Ryan himself. So he’s got high streets, and he’ll still have room to bump you.

Need tips on offers to run? You don’t even have to ask when you work with EWA. I get a couple emails a week from them that will straight up tell me what offers to run, and even HOW and WHERE to run the offers. He’s handing out easy money for stupid affiliates! Get on that!

So are you ready to get on board with this kick ass, private network? Join EWA by clicking the link here.

The Tatto Media Contest Ends Tomorrow!

Justin Dupre — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:09:15 +0000

For the 37 of you that signed up, it’s time to hit it hard tomorrow! My contest with Tatto Media has been a mix of good and bad. The good is that 37 of you managed to sign up to Tatto Media in under 2 months time. That means at least some of you want to make some money.

The bad part is that only about 7-8 of you did any volume! And those that have, haven’t pushed a whole lot of traffic. No matter though, because the contest has to end. One of you will be walking away with either a netbook or 25.5″ Samsung computer monitor. You can still do a lot of volume tonight and tomorrow to try and get as many chances as you can, though!

And even after the contest is finished, you shouldn’t just stop pushing volume with Tatto Media. They are a very good affiliate network, and Mike knows his stuff. If you need any offer, any payout bump, or just have a question on how you can scale a campaign and make more money, he’ll be there for you!

And as always, I am available to answer most well thought out and specific questions to all my referrals via email. Just contact me. (Please don’t ask me generic questions that can be answered with very basic research. I’m still a busy guy with my own business and I won’t take the time out of my day to answer it. Sorry!)

Getting Into a CPA Network.

Justin Dupre — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:35:42 +0000

You’ve gotten your guts all gathered up, and you are ready to get your first CPA campaigns up and running. Well, first, you should sign up for some networks. Here are the guys I recommend you sign up with.

Now, you’ve set in your information. A couple days later, you get an email saying your application has been declined. Most people give up here. I don’t want this. So, here is how you are almost always guarenteed to get accepted into a CPA network.

Set up a blog/website

Most CPA networks ask you to provide a site you are working on or have worked on. It doesn’t matter if you run PPC traffic to it or not, but you should at least provide an example that you know a little about being a webmaster. When I signed up for my first few networks, I just used an old blog about random things I found using Stumble Upon.

Provide Contact Info

Give as much contact info as you can. Some networks like to call new affilaites before approving. Give up your AIM/MSN/Skype in the comments section to give further connectivity. Being able to communicate easily builds trust. CPA networks need to trust you to run quality traffic to their offers.

If all else fails…

Call the network

So many people never have the courage to call up an affiliate network to ask to be accepted. Grow some balls and do it. Let them know you have some knowledge in PPC and are ready to send them lots of traffic. Hell, even lie to them if you have to and say you are spending xxxx amount of dollars each day to some private offers and are looking to expand a little bit. Google should be able to find the numbers. If not you can ask the members over at WickedFire.

If you want a pretty surefire way to get accepted, use any of the links found on this site and shoot me an email from my contact page. I’ll help you get all set up on any network, and can give you hints and tips on how to run specific campaigns!

Need Another Reason to Run With Tatto Media?

Justin Dupre — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:51:13 +0000

If the contest wasn’t enough to make you want to split test your traffic with Tatto Media, I hope this email I got from Mike Cataldo, my affiliate manager, sways you into joining:

Justin,

I just saw you running some clicks…i bumped the xxxxx a couple bucks
for you. Bumped xxxxx as well.

Hope all is well! Let me know if you need anything else.

–
Best,

Mike Cataldo”

I didn’t even have to ask for the bump. Talk about awesome, right?

For more information about Tatto, make sure you read this post and also enter for you chance to win a netbook or new computer monitor!

JustinDupre.Com and Tatto Media Sponsor Contest! Win a Free Netbook or PC Monitor!

Justin Dupre — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:00:42 +0000

Who’s ready for the first (of many I’m hoping) contest for affiliate marketers on my blog? I am!

Mike Cataldo of Tatto Media is an excellent AM. So excellent in fact that when I contacted him about starting up a contest on my blog, he said yes! For those that don’t know about Tatto Media, here’s a little stuff about them.

Well, they are an Boston, MA based advertising network with options available for advertisers, publishers, and affiliate marketers. They are ranked in the top 40 by comScore for behavioral advertising reaching a large percentage of the Internet audience.

After signing up and becoming an affiliate, I could tell Tatto Media wasn’t just a normal affiliate network. They’ve got a nice selection of offers all built on a custom back-end. That means no mess with DirectTrack and other poor click-tracking systems going down. Everything is very clean and built from the ground up. Payouts on offers (They’ve got dating, mobile, email-submits, insurance, and many other niche offers) are decently high, and I’m sure if you are doing enough volume with them, they’ll bump that up even higher. The referral program only gives 1% of the affiliates revenue, but this just means Tatto Media can pay out that affiliate higher on their offers!

And what else about them? Well, Mike, my affiliate manager, actually owns a ton of offers on the network himself. That means he doesn’t actually deal with a middle man that takes 20% off of what you could actually be making. He is very accommodating to giving payout bumps so don’t feel afraid to contact him if you want some more money!

So after chatting with Tatto Media and Mike about this contest, they gave me a big old budget to work with and I picked out two pretty cool prizes you can win for this contest. They are the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook and the Samsung SyncMaster 2693HM 25.5-inch LCD Monitor.

For those that are always on the go, but don’t have a notebook yet, the netbook could be a killer prize for you. It’s sleek, small, and will allow you to refresh your Prosper202 stats while you are away from your desktop station. Looking at it kinda makes me want to win this prize myself. Here are some more specs on it.

Up to 9.5 hours battery life
First netbook with the Intel Atom N280 processor (667MHz FSB)
10-inch screen & large chiclet keyboard for comfort
160GB hard disk drive plus 10 GB Eee online storage
Built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for easy wireless connectivity
Multi-touch touchpad for ease of use

And for those who aren’t worried about portability or who’ve already go it, you guys should go for this! The Samsung SyncMaster 2693HM 25.5-inch LCD Monitor is an absolute beast of a computer monitor. This is the same one that I use and I absolutely love it so much that I am soon going to buy a second one. It’s hugeeeeeee! 25.5 inches of desktop space will help you build more affiliate marketing campaigns, open up more programs and windows, and just increase your overall productivity by nearly 4x! I speak from experience.

So what do you have to do to win!?

There will be multiple ways for you to have a better chance to win than others, and I will constantly be informing you on how you can get more chances. For now, here are some ways for you to get a piece of the pie.

*This step is required! You must sign up to Tatto Media using this link. It is important that you use this link and only this link. It’s important as it will allow me to track affiliates progress for additional chances to win. Just for signing up and being accepted into the Tatto Media Affiliate Network, you will gain one chance at winning!

Start marketing! For every $100 dollars in revenue you generate at Tatto Media, you will gain 5 more chances at winning either of these amazing prizes! $1,000 in revenue and you’ll have 50 chances. At 10,000 dollars, that is over 500 chances to win!

For now, another way to pick up a chance to win is by following me and tweeting on Twitter the following message:

@Justin_Dupre + Tatto Media are giving away a FREE netbook or 25.5″ Monitor to affiliates! See how you can win! -� http://bit.ly/8zVeN #taju

Make sure the hashtag and link stay the same so I can easily track who has been entering for an extra chance to win.

The final way I will list a chance to win is to blog about the contest. Make it long, make it short, it doesn’t matter. As long as the post isn’t marked as spam and picks up as a trackback to this post, you’ll pick up 1 more chance.

So obviously, your best way to win is to sign up on Tatto and start generating revenue. You will have until June 30th, and then all entries will be counted (I’ll keep up to date daily) and a winner will be chosen. I will update with more posts about this contest as time goes on. If we get enough participation, maybe we can even up the game with greater and a more variety of prizes!

So what are you waiting for? Start getting to work with Tatto Media now for your chance to win either a 25.5″ Samsung computer monitor or a brand-spankin’ new ASUS Eee PC!