It’s been a stressful couple weeks for me, which is why I haven’t been posting as much as I’d like. Been starting a new business, trying to workout, and then I got a large infected cyst cut out of my back earlier today. With it gone, I can finally focus (it was so painful I couldn’t even sleep) and get things back on track. To help jump start the blog, lets get some of your questions answered!

If you’ve got any questions about affiliate marketing in general, employees, management, Thailand, or anything else you want to throw my way, ask them in the comments section below. Each question will be answered with a dedicated blog post and a link back to your website or blog. So go ahead and start asking!

This is a very simple post. Anyone that has been marketing on Facebook for more than a week, you’ve probably figured this out or read it somewhere else already. Move on to the next blog if you were looking for some advanced Facebook cloaking script or a campaign on a silver platter. This one is for the noobs.

So, lets talk a little about affiliate offers. Let’s say you’re from Thailand and you are browsing offers to run in the UK. If you try and view those affiliate offer links from your Thai IP, most of them will redirect to a Thai offer – something that wasn’t what the original UK offer was for. Affiliate networks do this so that if you are accidentally picking up traffic outside of where you really want to target, or are just too lazy to set up a geo-redirect script, you and the network might still make some money. In some cases, you’ll be redirected to an “Offer expired” or “Invalid something or other” page. These are all just because you are sending traffic to an offer from a country where that offer doesn’t accept traffic from. Bad sentence, I know. Read it slow and over a couple times.

So, what happens when you try and put an ad up on Facebook for an offer that doesn’t accept US traffic (most of the ad “disapproval” team seem to view ads from the US, as I don’t have this problem much when running US offers)? The ads team will get sent to the “Offer expired” or whatever page or redirected to an offer that isn’t the one you are advertising in your ad content. If you are trying to direct link with just your affiliate offer URL, you’re a dumdum. Get Prosper202, a VPS, and use it to track all links. It will make what you need to do to get around this issue 10 times easier.

So, get yourself familiar with Prosper202 and how to set up an affiliate offer in it. It isn’t hard. I just uploaded a video in my forums that goes over it (only paid subscribers will see this video). Rather than using your affiliate link, you want to pull the direct link to the offers landing page and put that where your affiliate link would go. This way, the Facebook’s Ad team won’t be redirected by the affiliate link’s antics. After you build the campaign, pause all the ads and wait for them to get approved (cross those fingers). After approval, go back to Prosper202 and switch the link for your affiliate link. Resume the campaign and count your affiliate monies!

Simple as that.

Want to give a big shout out to Dukeo for doing a little number on me on his blog. He also paid someone to draw this:

Much love and thanks. I gotta say, I’d look damn good in a suit. Heading out to Gucci to get one made up!

You can read the post here. It talks a little about me and some of my other public business ventures.

This is a follow up to a question asked in my “Ask Questions Get Answers” post. If you have a question related to affiliate marketing, leave a comment in the comments section of that post and try to drop a follow up post on my blog to answer it later.

If you aren’t familiar with Paid to Click sites, they’re exactly what they sound like. You sign up on these sites, click links and get paid fractions of a penny or so for each link you click. In most cases, you are required to stay on the advertiser’s page for 15 – 30 seconds to earn your payment for that click. You can buy referrals and make money off them if they stay active, too. That being said, if you are in  a tight spot for money, you’ll still just be wasting your time with this crap. The most you’ll make is a couple bucks a day and I’m sure only the top 1% are only making about that much. I don’t know the real stats or anything like that, but come on! Check out the sites yourself and have a laugh.

So you have the ability to pay others to click your ads. This is going to be pretty random and generally crappy traffic for general affiliate offers. Most people log on, click links, open the page, wait, close it and move on to the next. In a way, this is very similar to setting up a CPM campaign on PPV traffic. It blankets all targets, and you pay a flat cost for all of them (usually discounted from normal targeted PPV rates). In the end it is all about having the right offer for everything.

Now that isn’t to say you can’t make money with them. You want to know what you’ll see a lot of? Other Pay to click sites advertising on them. Set up your own PTC site, drop it on a bunch of these and you’ll probably be able to make some bit of cash. The only real kinds of niches I see working here are other crappy make money online schemes. You’re going to have to do a lot of landing page split testing, add in countdown timers, sound, video – the works – to see any bit of success. At least, that is how I’m gauging it.

So is it the best place to advertise? No way. Is it new? Nope. Is there money to make? Absolutely. It all comes down to what kind of research you are doing. My advice to you is to go and sign up for all of these sites. Check out what ads people are paying for, and track how long they stay on the site. If its on long enough, create a similar campaign and scale as much as you can!

Just want to open up the comments for any internet/affiliate marketing questions you guys might have. Make it a creative question and I’ll follow up with an answer for you in a following blog post. Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but so long as we get some questions in the comments here, I should be able to get some good posts in for you guys!

So I’ve been a bit silent around here. The lack of posts comes from all these wordpress updates that are screwing with my theme. I’ll be back, but not until after the design gets cleaned up. We’ve got a lot of issues on this theme: post spacing is effed, plugins are breaking, and it just looks like a sloppy mess.

So I’ve had my designer do some designing for me, and this is what she came up with. I’ve got two options here, but I want to hear what my readers will like better, and how I can improve the blog theme. If you want to go ahead and help out with the design in a more significant way, maybe by editing the themes below or creating your own design, I’ll certainly make sure you get at least a footer link and an ad space for a few months for helping out!

Design 1: This one is a bit more like this theme, but cleaned up.

Design 2: A bit… different, but might be the change the blog design needs.

So which one do you like? What should be changed? What should be added or removed? If anyone wants to help out in the design process or wants the file PSDs, just use the contact form to reach out to me!

(Also, I want to give a shoutout to Dukeo who helped me with another project I was working on! Did a great job coding up a blog theme for me! Check out his Affiliate Marketing blog for some great content while I work on repairing my own blog).

nDemand Affiliates has been a long time advertiser on the blog here for the past few months, but you might not have heard a lot about them. Well, now it’s time for them to get their turn under the spotlight with a review on my blog.

So to get started here, I wanted to ask Mike Pacheco, the CEO of nDemand, a couple of questions about his affiliate network.

Me: How long has Ndemand been around?

Mike: We’ve been around for 2years. This last year we’ve really started advertising a lot and trying to get our name out there.

Me: What does nDemand do for its affiliates that others don’t? What separates you guys from the hundreds of other affiliate networks?

Mike: We try to do the basics: Great support – if you can’t reach your affiliate manager you can almost always reach me. I respond very quickly, and I always give out all my contact info so I can be reached fast.

nDemand pays our affiliates on time, every time. Our default is payment scheme is net 30, but we do have weekly and bi-weeklies available for quality publishers (we have solid relationships with our advertisers and can find out rather quickly on the quality of your traffic.

We listen to our affiliates and take their feedback to hear. We used to have a flash based website and had a lot of publishers complain on the way it worked and looked, so we took their advice and totally redesigned it. Also, we started out on Direct Track and had a lot of pubs complain about tracking so we switched to Link Trust.

We like affiliates to be loyal so we ask them what offers they want us to get them, and we get them for our affiliates at great payouts We try to get unique or exclusive offers. nDemand has a few exclusives and we’re always working on getting more.

As the CEO I try to make sure every affiliate loves the experience they have with us I know you can’t please everyone but we try we try to make our network more of a friend and family environment than just business all the time. Also I feel like we are very newbie-friendly. nDemand has got a lot of people willing ton help and give advice because we know what it’s like to be new also.

Mike is a really great guy, and I always chat with him on AIM. Very easy to talk to and works hard to get what he wants for affiliates, even for newer guys! He’s also very active outside of nDemand and you can see him comment blogs and in some forums.

So what’s my personal opinion of the network?

They look pretty great, honestly. They don’t have thousands of offers, but maybe that’s a good thing. I know if I was a new affiliate and had to pick between 1000s of offers, 99% of them probably crap, I’d feel very lost. The offers I saw on nDemand are some of the ones I run on other networks at street payouts that are very competitive. I’m sure there is room for paybumpbs, which you can just shoot a mail over to Mike to get.

There is a custom built landing page after log in meant to display your daily stats. As I haven’t sent any traffic to nDemand yet, there is obviously nothing to show, but its a nice touch. It puts it apart from the hundreds of other affiliate networks out there.

It seems like there is still some visual work to do on the backend, some buttons missions, and black and orange is a really odd color scheme for an affiliate network, but that shouldn’t shy you away from joining. Stick to their dating, mobile and as-seen-on-TV offers and you should be set to go with some decent offers. Chat with Mike and you’ll find he is a really great guy!

And be sure to talk to them at ASW if you are going. Looks like they’ll be giving away an iPad, Xbox 360 + Kinect and some Gucci gear!

Become an nDemand Affiliate today!

I’ve been trying to clean up the language on my blog to seem a bit more professional. Taking my skills on to consulting for small businesses that want to expand online requires me to seem a little more squeaky clean. However, when I hear about new affiliate marketers that say they’re on a budget and can’t afford to spend money on “expensive” hosting, leaving them with cheap shared hosting for their tracking and landing pages, I just want to rip my hair out.

“IT’S A TRAP!”

No, really – it is. The idea that you think you will save money by using shared hosting is one of the worst traps you can get yourself into.

Let me tell you a little story. Way back when, when I was a little nooblet of an affiliate marketer just getting off the “I’ll make millions of dollars with Amazon and eBay” train and just hopping on to the “Well, everyone is talking about dating affiliate marketing so I’ll try that” train, I was using shared hosting. I didn’t really have any money to my name except the leftovers of a $20,000 student loan for one year of college. I obviously wanted to minimize costs, so shared hosting seemed the way to go. I wish someone could have heard me think that, then punch me in the face and tell me what an idiot I was.

So I started putting up ads, set a low $25 dollar budget and rather watch stuff like a hawk, I went to bed and hoped I didn’t just spend $25 for nothing. The next day I wake up and look at Facebook to see I spent all $25. Probably one of the most stressful mornings I’ve ever dealth with at that point. I saw about 70-80 clicks or so (clicks were cheap way back when). Okay time to check stats, right? WTF? 15 clicks to the offer and 1 conversion. Alright… I was happy about getting 1 conversion, but where the hell did my traffic run off to?

I checked my Prosper202 install and same thing there – 15 clicks.

It was my crap shared hosting. Shared hosting is notorious for being pitifully bad at handling surges of traffic. I wouldn’t doubt that I sent all 80 of those clicks in a half an hour, probably faster. If not for the traffic I was sending, someone else on this server (probably shared between hundreds of shared clients) was making my traffic get throttled of timed-out. People weren’t even able to load my P202 redirects. I’m don’t know the technicalities of hosting (so maybe one of you more savy guys want to help explain), but shared hosting sucks.

If you are serious about becoming an affiliate marketer and using paid traffic, it is time to upgrade your hosting to something better than HostGater or GoDaddy’s $3 a month shared baby plan. A VPS/dedicated server gives you tons more resources to work with and lowers the chance of you getting throttled and losing all that paid supply (traffic) due to congested shared hosting. I guarantee if you are using shared hosting with affiliate marketing and aren’t profiting yet, that hosting solution is 90% of the problem. A VPS/server will save you money, while on the contrary shared will cost you hundreds more!

I’ve recommended these guys again and again, but if you need hosting, go with Wiredtree. Tons of coupons all over the Internet, great deals, excellent support, etc – Wiredtree just can’t be beat in my book.

This post is a followup to a question that was asked in the forums, but that I thought I would bring on the blog, as well. Mathi asked:

I seem to be stuck in a rut for a few months and barely making $100 a month even after spending more than that.

I saw your email yesterday saying to promote dating offers on FB. Should I be taking that path or try to find other offers to run on FB?

If you say that dating still works on FB then I will give it a go. :-)

I think I just need you point me in the right direction.

So what does it take to be a successful new dating affiliate on Facebook. I came up with some of the following answers.

Dating on Facebook is not and will not be dead. There are a few ways you can go about it to stay profitable.

1. Go international. OneHourTranslation.com will translate your ad into any language accurately and with the same meaning. Sometimes messages get fumbled in translation, but these guys do a bang up job. It will cost you anywhere from 3 – 8 dollars depending on how long and what translation level you want.

A lot of affiliates are still to lazy to go this route, so if you put in the extra cash and work to get things translated correctly, it can play out well for you in the end. International markets have very little competition, or less than the US/UK/AU/etc, at least, making them prime real estate for your dating ads. The only downfall is that many users in other countries don’t set their relationship status, so it can be hard to find a decent amount of singles. You’ll have to market to many different demographics and countries to make this venture worth while. It may also be hard to find an offer that profits for your target country, especially if you can’t read the landing page.

2. You can stick with US dating, but you might want to segment and find very niche dating sites or dating products. Fetishes, ethnic/religious dating sites, etc. Stay away from the general dating sites that will take any and all singles traffic. They convert poorly and the only way people are making money on them is by constantly rotating images, landing pages, and spending a ton of money for very low margins. Try using keywords to psychographically target users (ex. Find singles that love to play Golf!)

3. If you have the capital or the technical knowledge, create your own dating site! You keep all the money yourself, which means no more small margins or getting cut off from offers. It takes a lot of research to figure out how to get users to convert and keep them subscribed though, so you’ll need to work on that. One thing I would do if you were going this route, is to go niche like in option 2 above. Create a network of dating sites. Keeping users engaged with other users interested in the same this is what makes dating sites thrive.

Really, the key to dating or any other niche that is big on Facebook is to avoid going the lazy route. Use a landing page, rotate and track everything, and think of unique ways to target your core market through the use of keywords or other alternative targeting settings. Going out and targeting every single guy 18 and up worked about 2-3 years ago. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case anymore. Out of the box thinking and effort will give you an advantage above other marketers.

For more answers to your questions, check out my forums or 1-on-1 coaching!

Alright! I’m back for the most part.

You’ll notice a couple new things, like the messed-up slider, some new advertising options, a Facebook box down near the bottom of the sidebar and some other minor layout changes. Other than that, it seems to be the same old blog. I’m up on a temporary host for now, until I can find a dedicated box to put the blog on. If you own a hosting company and are looking for a great way to get some branding/advertising space, contact me and lets talk business!

The forums should be back and working, and updates are coming at a very steady pace. We’ve got nearly 150 download threads up, all including scripts, landing pages from the store (which is up and running as normal), Facebook/PlentyofFish ad images, and ad banners (Many say the downloads are 100% worth the subscription cost). There are also case studies and some discussions worth checking out! I check back everyday to make sure I answer any new threads and replies. If the forums aren’t enough, you can always consider 1-on-1 consulting/coaching, where I’ll help walk you through your marketing questions and problems.

Anyways, I got some decent posts planned out for the next few days, so you best subscribe and get ready for them. I’ll be throwing some good information to soak up and get you guys to profit. If you guys want a post about anything, leave it in the comments and I’ll do my best to hit on those subjects.