This is a quick video I made to explain a little bit more about Quantcast and how to use it to find better targets. Whether you are trying to get something specific for your PPV campaigns, find some sites to drop banners on, or just need to do a little bit of research, this video shows you how to do it.

I’ve been experiencing an influx of a lot of new people reading my blog. Many are currently considering dropping in to affiliate marketing. Many have purchased “guru” info products filled with nothing but lies and fake “profit buttons”. To say that a lot of people aren’t prepared for affiliate marketing is an understatement. They’re under-prepared and misinformed about what a true, productive affiliate marketer does to get to make a 4, 5 or 6+ figure month.

Let’s first take a look at one of the largest issues. There is a real lack of real information hitting people that are just researching affiliate marketing. Instead of seeing Wickedfire, Affbuzz, AffPlaybook or one of the other great true affiliate marketing info resources, they get cattle prodded into a “guru’s” list where they are sold the same press-button-profits software and information that doesn’t actually work. It generally doesn’t work, because even if it did make money at one time it is probably dated information well beyond its time. On top of this, they get told they can copy/paste profits – copy campaigns or websites or whatever and make the same amount of money who has they’re business together. Nah-ah… not happening.

But that is how gurus succeed, they target the people that know nothing and do it very well. They also have great social circles to help push it, where I know a lot of affiliates would struggle as they think they can do this on their own. The best affiliates work hand in hand with the advertisers, affiliate networks, managers, traffic sources, everyone to push their revenue to the max. This is not a one person game. People rely on you and you need to rely on other people and build your circle of business and trust!

I also want to talk about money here. $500 isn’t going to cut it. That’s enough to test a few hundred ads on Facebook, but after that, you are SOL. Look at affiliate marketing as a business. What business do you know can rent out a shop location, stick up ads, provide products or services with $500? Not very many. Luckily, you don’t need a 6 figure loan to open up a store front as an affiliate marketer, but you do need some deeper pockets than just a few hundred dollars. You would be a very lucky affiliate to turn $100 into $1000 on your first shot, so if someone is telling you those numbers, they probably ain’t true. My number is to shoot for no less than $2k that you are ready to spend, risk and lose. If this is a last ditch attempt to get out of debt, read on.

Desperation. Desperation is setting yourself up for failure. I know many people have sent me emails asking me about coaching with something like the following:

I’m really interested in your coaching but I really need it to work because I have huge medical bills and credit cards I need to pay off or I have to declare bankruptcy. Will I absolutely make money I only have a couple thousand left k thx bai.”

When you get desperate, you look for options to quickly bail you out rather than sit back and take a couple days to plan. I do not recommend AM to anyone who is desperate for money for whatever reason. You will make rash decisions, you’ll stop planning and try and overload yourself with too many campaigns on too many traffic sources and you’ll make a lot of mistakes that will lose you money rather than make it. Have a secondary plan. If AM doesn’t work out, can you take your skills elsewhere? Or can you get a steady income doing something else first then come back?

Let’s take a look at things that are better to do rather than trying out CPA marketing in an act of desperation:

• Find any local job you can. If you don’t have a job, and think that McDonalds is below you you are an idiot. That burger flipper is making $7 more dollars per hour than you are watching the TV. Take anything you can get if it life is that desperate. You can always continue looking for other jobs. I took 3 different jobs in one month when I was 18, upgrading in pay each time because I just was so driven to make more money and be financially independent from my parents.
• Freelance. Write for 1 cent per word if you have to. Learn Photoshop and make $3 banners and $10 logos. Learn how to code HTML and offer up $5 landing pages (on a good day, my old landing page store was doing $200+ per day with zero advertising other than what you would see on my blog). It took me 5 minutes to upload new landing pages and it paid my designers wages in a day or 2. Another great money maker is to call up local businesses in the yellow pages, ask if they have a website, and if not, charge them $300 to make a simple logo, upload a free WordPress theme with some images, then charge them a monthly maintainability fee. I know guys that would make 10k a month just off the maintenance fees alone!
• Start writing a blog on something you know, that has products and a large target market you think you can get a unique angle on. Start becoming a go to guy in that niche by posting frequently to niche forums, blog comments, Twitter, Facebook and word-of-mouth. This is a slow start, but something you can do a couple hours per day instead of watching TV or playing games. Build a list and start creating your own products to sell to your readers. It will take some time, but as long as you are persistent you should see some returns after a few months to a year depending on how much time and effort you put into it.

We also have time. A successful affiliate marketer does not need to spend 12 hours a day in front of their computer checking stats, but the “4-Hour Work Week” isn’t really something I’ve encountered in my 4-5 years of experience unless I was just really lazy. And it would usually be those lazy weeks where things would go wrong and I’d stop making money. The only likely hood you will get to that level is if you have 20 people managing every aspect of your affiliate marketing business. If you aren’t prepared to put in at least a few hours per day, you won’t make it off the ground. If you want to be one of those 6+ figure a month guys, look forward to full workdays or fuller than what you would get at any office position.

Now do you really think you are ready for affiliate marketing? I think 98% of the people that want to get started in affiliate marketing really have no idea what they are up against, and the above is the real truth they don’t know yet. As a new affiliate marketer did you have any of these issues, and if so how did you come to the realization that it wasn’t as easy as it was made out to be?

One of the tough things about being an affiliate marketer is that it is an extremely volatile industry. Offers go up and down, networks scrub and shave, traffic sources change, you’re constantly being outbid – these are just a few of the problems that can make an affiliate marketers job difficult. Its hard to say you can ever be 100% stable in any business though. But lets take a look at some things I’ve done, and that you can follow, to become a better marketer and hold on to campaigns just a bit longer.

I always start with research. This is something I know a lot of affiliates slack off on. They’d rather get data, then optimize off that data. I take my research on offers, demographics and psychograpics, put them all together to build a niche and tight campaigns, collect data on that and optimize further including new research information. Researching can be anything from figuring out your target market to knowing what your main competitors are doing and how you can improve off that before you launch your campaign. A smart and efficient marketer knows what they are getting into before they get into it.

So, how can we do better research? My days simply start out with reading the news or checking out new trends . Knowing what is going around in the world around you is going to help you pick niches, offers and put together traffic sources. You can target these trends on different advertising platforms through standard affiliate offers by using unique angles that other affiliate marketers aren’t going after. These aren’t always the largest campaigns, revenue-wise, but due to using a bit of creativity, they’ll last considerably longer than just broadly targeting something and inducing “banner blindness” to a larger target.

Another one of my favorite daily use tools is Quantcast. Quantcast allows me to find demographics for most larger websites on the net, or find websites that have the demographics I’m looking for. Also, they have a similar site/”users also visited” site feature which makes not only understanding demographics easier, but also getting under their head, or understanding psychographics of your market a little better, as well. The better you understand a target market, the better you will be able to manage them long term with a wide range of affiliate marketing campaigns.

You can also look into other tools such as tracking (which will always be essential), spies, and management tools that will just overall make your life easier.

Another issue I see a lot of affiliates with is cash flow. When most new affiliates start they have a couple hundred to a thousand or so bucks to their name with the hope of dropping a few ads and seeing 200% ROI. It just doesn’t work like that. You need money to make money. In your first couple months, if all you have is $1000 to work with, the max you can hope to see returns on is $2000. If you’ve got $10,000, you could possibly make $20,000. That doesn’t mean you will, but your first couple months are essential for cash flow as that is when you’ll be experimenting and learning the most. It also means networks probably aren’t paying you out on net-7 yet, which puts hinderece on whether or not you are making your money back right away.

So how can you help maintain overall cash flow? I started off in affiliate marketing by writing freelance. I still do it from time to time, as well as writing for a small group of blogs in only topics that interest me. Using your skills whether it be writing, teaching, programming, design or communicating, can be an excellent substitute income when you need that extra cash to put towards your affiliate campaigns. This is especially true when you are very short on cash. I hear way too many people complain that it is grunt work, too hard to learn, etc etc. You aren’t helping yourself out. Either stick it out for the additional cash to help you out of a rut, or keep complaining – just don’t let me hear about it.

Are you constantly building out your campaigns? I start most of my campaigns on one network, then scale out, usually with identical ads to continue to roll in money, even on old campaigns. Sticking to one network and/or one offer is an affiliate death trap. Make sure you are constantly building out new campaigns, even if you don’t have the money to run them yet, having them on lineup will accelerate you when you are ready for them. This gets much easier to handle when you have employees managing campaigns and other menial tasks for you.

Another big one I know many affiliates miss out on is having a stable business plan. If your idea of running a business is “Meh, I’ll get to it when I get to it or just wait for some better offers”, you’re not going to be having a very stable business. Network, manage, and plan your affiliate marketing. You don’t always have to stick 100% to it, but it will help guide you as you are scaling out to 4 or 5 figure days.

Here is an example daily schedule of how I manage my day and campaigns. First off, I wake up and read the news, drink my coffee, and check emails. After that, I only check emails a couple more times per day. If you can cut out access to Facebook completely, do so. Unfortunately, a lot of my business happens there, so I have to train myself to stay away from chatting with friends and only use it as a business tool. I go through any meetings and calls according to my daily planner. Another first thing I do is check the status of my running campaigns. Is ROI dropping? Are my offers all still up? I’ll do what I have to do to manage that. Afterwards, I start browsing OfferVault and talking to affiliate managers looking into new offers, campaigns and angles. If I find something worth while, I do my due research on it, send an email out to my designers to make landing pages or collect additional data (data mining and consolidating that data into a spreadsheet eases the amount of tedius analysis I would otherwise have to do on my own). I then start building those new campaigns. I don’t refresh my stats every 15 minutes, I don’t check my emails or Facebook every 15 minutes, and I avoid getting distracted by blocking myself from viewing sites that would otherwise kill all my time.

There is a lot more I could write on this subject, but I think I’ll leave you guys off here. Feel free to ask any questions on this topic in the comments section below!

The Power Editor from Facebook is, lets face it, way behind its time. But its here now, and it gives us all just another way to upload ads to Facebook.

You can test the tool out here. Unfortunately, its only usable with Google Chrome, so those using Firefox or other browsers will have to make the switch. You will also need to change some privacy settings in your Account Settings to use a secure connection with Facebook (https://). That can cause issues with outside ad uploaders supported by the Facebook Ads API, so be aware that you may have to switch back if you use anything else to upload ads.

I like this tool as it can make uploading ads very simple by using Excel. That’s pretty powerful. To get a template, just export one of your current campaigns, delete the data and fill it in with your own ads. Each ad goes on its own line. Leave the campaign name column blank to insert the ads into a new campaign. This brings up one issue though, not being able to submit multiple ads to multiple campaigns. So you will have to break up your ad uploading to do this.

Another neat feature is the storage of all your ad images. You can select those images in the platform and directly create new ads without having to upload them again.

The tool also handles bidding changes a little better than the standard ad platform. Now you can update all your ads in one campaign without running into limitations and oddities you may have hit upon before.

It also brings back the return of the impression column. Frequency was a great addition to the original ad platform, but having to multiply frequency * reach to figure out my overall impressions made me feel like Facebook was just trying to troll me.

So, overall its a welcome addition to those that want a free ad uploader, but by no means is it a game changer. There are affordable, fantastic ad uploaders that just know how to do it better.  You can check out the Power Editor by finding the link on the left sidebar of your Facebook Ads Manager page.

Facebook is no longer the great advertising spot it once was – or so they say. Personally, I think that’s a load of bull. It’s not the same, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a place where you can start making your first few dollars with affiliate marketing. It’s changed a lot. Ad approvals are less consistent, clicks are more expensive, and its a lot more competitive than it used to be. Times change, so if you’re like me, you’ve been changing with them and adjusting your affiliate campaigns to work with them, rather than keep them stuck in the past. For those of you just getting started with Facebook Ads, I recommend starting with dating campaigns. They work, and they work well. Here are some tips you noobies, as well as some of you veterans, to get your dating campaigns on track.

Pictures matter. Test hundreds. Test thousands. I find a lot of my coaching students get frustrated easily by this part. Starting up on dating with zero idea of whats working, and what kind of images get the clicks is tough. But when you are only testing 20 images with 20 clicks, and wondering why you don’t have a conversion yet, you’re just not trying hard enough. Pictures are the most important part of getting an ad with a high CTR. Those high CTRs are what drive your click costs down and bring your ROI up. In the beginning, you will be spending a lot of money trying to find these great images, but, guess what? When you’ve got those images, you can scale them across borders and advertising platforms to make all that money back. I put that all into my research budget category.

What kind of images work well? Boobies and cleavage! Yeah, they work well for getting your account banned. Forget about that, and forget about squeezing one in between 100 clean images. I almost strictly use shoulders and up images (we’re talking about females). They get approved much more consistently, and YES, they do work. Sometimes, full body shots work, but they aren’t approved as consistently.

Likewise, Facebook Ads headlines and ad bodies make up for a larger push towards actually converting. Again, something you will have to test out considerably. These do affect CTRs, however not as much as the image. What I like to practice is making my headline a question, and then finishing up the ad body with a concise and clear call to action that lays out exactly what the user has to do and what they will receive after clicking the link. This makes sure the user is prepared for whats on the other side. Also, always remember to put the name of the site you are promoting in the ad. Facebook likes that.

Clicks 18 – 29 are cheap, but they don’t convert well. Ages 30 and up convert much nicer, but are more expensive. It’s a game of give and take. This is mostly due to the mindset of the users when they sign up to a dating site. The younger they are, the less they actually care about maintaining a real relationship (applies to men, mostly). Targeting women requires more emotion inducing ads and landing pages. You need to work to build their trust that they will meet the right guy more than doing so for men.

Weekends, ad approvals are less consistent. If you are having trouble getting ads approved, wait a few hours before trying again. Also, never submit 1000 ads all at once. If you have 300 ads you want to submit in one day, do 100 ads once every 5-8 hours. I think if any Facebook Ads staff saw 1000 dating ads from one publisher they would probably disapprove them all rather than having to look through all of them.

Start international to test ads. US/UK clicks are expensive! There are other countries where you can buy cheaper traffic and get good information on your ads/images first. South Africa or Ireland for example. If you can translate any language, go for those countries first! France, Portugal, Brazil, Spain, or anywhere in Asia are good testing beds for later campaigns.

Don’t let Facebook’s slow pacing or disapprovals faze you. It’s part of the game. It’s what they do. The sooner you shrug it off, the better. I get a lot of complaints from clients and random emails asking how they can fix this, and besides following the ad guidelines, there really isn’t any other advice I can give other than “Suck it up and submit some new ads.” Until Facebook decides to better implement some consistent approval process (which they probably never will), you’ll just have to go with the flow and take whatever Facebook dishes out for you.

That’s it for now folks. Facebook and dating isn’t dead. It’s just a changed game. Shit happens. Times evolve. Anyone that says x-traffic source is dead is simply because they’re trying to do the same things people were doing there 3 years ago. Now get out there and start making some ads!

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.

Ahem – I’m sorry for the lack of posts here. You know how it is. We get busy, blah blah, not enough time, blah blah – but then I’d just be making excuses for myself. Time to get back to business with some regular postings again.

So today I’ve got a great video with an awesome new SMS-marketing tool from Leadsmob.com. This tool allows you to easily build landing pages, lists and send out emails and SMS to use with mobile traffic. It’s litterally an all in one spot to get your mobile monies on, and it really impressed me. Anyways – rather than me try to explain something I’m relatively new to, listen to Joshua Wexelbaum explain just how you can build a campaign using Leadsmob.

So some pretty cool stuff indeed. The ability to build a mobile optimized landing page, and capture all the data right there is amazing! I’ll be working more one-on-one with my homeboy, Josh, and Leadsmob so hopefully one of my later posts I can show you a case study on how I was able to integrate it into my daily affiliate marketing business.

Sign up to Leadsmob today and get some free credits to make some money with! If you need any help, feel free to contact me or Josh!

If you’ve been affiliate marketing any long than a few days, you probably know that frustration from the industry is nearly almost ever present. You campaigns aren’t converting, your ads don’t get clicks, click costs are too high, and a once great converting campaign gets taken down or starts shaving leads. These are just a few of the problems I deal with on a daily basis. Now if you are struggling to jump off the ground and make a real profit, read through the following tips and put them to use. Remember, I’m not trying to feed you bullshit – these are tips that I’ve put in to practice when necessary, and they help me get back from frustrating days.

1. Slow Down

Now, you might think that taking 20 campaigns and throwing up general campaigns at Facebook or TrafficVance might be the best course of action to find something that converts. Do 10 minutes of keyword and target scraping for each offer and you’re done! Great plan, right? Wrong. If you fail to even get a single conversion with this method, it wouldn’t surprise me. Launch carefully planned, carefully researched campaigns. Look at what others are doing first, why what they are doing works, and “borrow” if you have to. If you are outright stealing campaigns, failing to understand why things convert, you’ll always be relying on others to make money before you. The real big ballers are the innovators.

2. Target Tighter/Smaller

Broad campaigns are what everyone dreams of. Setting up a RON campaign to millions of people and making thousands a day in return. If you are new and struggling, this is most likely going to be cause for frustration and significant losses. Come of with an angle or a very niche offer that requires you to target smaller reaches and less populated URLs and keywords. While you won’t be making thousands with this kind of method, if I was new I would rather see $10 of profit per day rather than $500+ lost a day.

3. Work With One Traffic Source

Stop jumping around. Just because the first 3 campaigns you tried didn’t work out, doesn’t mean the next 10 will fail. Chances are, if people are talking about 1 traffic source and how they are making money with it, they probably aren’t lying about it. If they can get something to work, so can you.

4. Stop Hopping Around Different Offers

Just because your first ads didn’t profit, doesn’t mean it is a complete loser. This goes hand in hand with the above. If people are talking about an offer, there is most likely money to be made in it. Pick a few different offers, max, and make them work for you!

5. Work with Only a Few Smaller Networks

There are lots of large networks out there that have thousands of affiliates. These guys usually have a fantastic amount of offers, but support can be real hit and miss. When I was struggling to find new offers that worked, I would branch out to smaller affiliate networks and ask them what some of their strongest offers were. They are usually more willing to divulge inside info, as well as having much faster and better attended support. The more loyal you are in sending traffic to these small guys, the better they’ll come to treat you.

6. Get To Know Your AM

Affiliate Managers have access to a lot of data. EPCs, traffic sources, creatives, landing pages, etc. Again, we’re going to hold hands with the above point. The more loyal and talkative with your AM, the better you’ll be treated. Affiliate Managers are paid when we get paid, so if they aren’t helping us, they’re not gettin’ any money from me! Say hi and remind your AM you are around every morning and ask them about any new offers. Make sure they remember who you are!

7. Go Private

If you get to know your AMs a little better, they might be able to let you into the world of private offers. There is so much untapped potential here, because most people think that affiliate networks make all their offers public and requestable to everyone. Larger networks can have 100s of hidden offers that you might not know about until you actually ask to see them. These offers have less competition and shitty traffic squandering them, and you’re 10x more likely to draw a profit from them.

8. Always Track Everything You Can

You can use the free Tracking202, or upgrade to the newer and more frequently updated CPVLAB. Both are excellent and have some features that the other doesn’t. Use these guys to track all the data that you can and analyze it! What time of day did you get the most conversions? When are you getting the highest EPC? When is it the lowest? Which banner ad gets the highest conversion rate? Which keywords are only breaking even and is there something you can do to bump the CVR on those targets?

9. Try Landing Pages Out

I know you want the easy way out with a directly linked campaign, but in 90% of my campaigns, a landing page almost always converts better. That little added presell can help take someone not interested in what you are marketing, into a potential lead, and it helps build trust and flow with those already 100% ready to fill in the offer page’s fields.

10. If all else fails…

Get a coach/mentor/consultant to work with you. Yes, I know. Shameless self promotion. But there are people out there that are willing to give you genuine advice. Use them if you feel like you need a really big boost to get in front of the wolf pack.

Do you have any tips you can share from when you were a noobie affiliate? Drop them in the comments! And don’t worry – my 31 Campaigns aren’t going anywhere. You can expect a new one tonight, as well as a freebie Friday giveaway hitting your inbox tonight as well!

The email submit offer. I typically avoid these due to the atrocious scrubbing, but for those of you that need a quick buck, email submit offers can be great. They are simple, convert fairly well at the start of running any offers, and they don’t take too much thinking outside of the box to get started. If you are really struggling to get your feet wet, I suggest you follow some of the guidelines I am about to give you and put them to work.

The Offer

The key with email submits is to quickly test as many of them as you can off the bat. There are several NFL Jersey email submits that exist out there. Envyus Media, EWA, C2M and WolfStormMedia all have a selection of free NFL jersey email submits. Also, remember to split test across the networks once you find your best converting offer. It will help you maximize your ROI and keep the campaign up longer with a smaller scrub rates. Again, most email submits will start scrubbing leads very quickly unless you have amazing traffic. Finding that kind of traffic is not easy.

As far as landing page designs go, I’m a bit disappointed that I couldn’t find custom links for each team. This might be something you want to ask your affiliate networks about. Say for instance I wanted to target people back home, I’d want a page dedicated to getting a free Minnesota Vikings jersey featuring jerseys of the big name Vikings players. I haven’t actually cared much for football any time in my life, so I couldn’t tell you who they are, but this is some research you’ll have to do when we talk about landing pages.

Most of thee offer landing pages are pretty wide, which could cause trouble on PPV. You can try direct linking with all of these, but in the end you will still want to test out multiple landing page designs. Check for exit pops, as well. The first offer page listed up there had an exit pop meaning it would be difficult to direct link anywhere.

Research

I decided to do more broad research by searching NFL.com in Quantcast. Demographic and psychographic analysis won’t be super important here. You are obviously just looking for sports nuts and people into the NFL and their own home teams. You can see there are some good targets you might want to include in your targeting mixes near the bottom. These will be good for PPV and targeted display traffic if you can get that. Again, this is a simple offer and thinking outside of the box won’t go to deep here.

How To Run This Offer

There are a ton of choices here. For those of you that use free traffic, Youtube and Facebook Pages are an option. I don’t use much free traffic, but you could slowly build groups and videos about each team and from time to time drop your affiliate links in there.

The most preferred method available, though, would be paid traffic on social media, PPV and display traffic. Again, I would run this offer targeting one team at a time, or perhaps even by well known rivalries (Vikings vs. Packers – Which side are you on? Vote now to get your free jersey!)

On social media, you’ve got PlentyofFish and Facebook. Facebook might not allow email submits. As I haven’t tried an email submit on Facebook, I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not they’ll be cool with this. Before you go submitting 1000 ads, test with just 1 to 3 ads and see what they do. Anyways, on Facebook you’ve got some great targeting options. You can go broad by targeting everyone in a single state with an ad like: “Love the MN Vikings? – Show your support by claiming your free Minnesota Vikings jersey now!” (Targeting broad on PoF is how I would run this offer, as well), or you can simply just target fan pages and interests targeting the individual teams you’re targeting. This is plenty simple.

On PPV, you can simply collect targets based off your teams. Use PPVPlaybook to get a list of keywords related to your team, then run it through a wide scrape. Use both key phrases and URLs in your targeting to maximize your reach and earning potential. After testing target for 3 days, pause anything that does not have a conversion. This will help you save money on many targets that maybe haven’t reached the 1 – 2 times the offer payout, but might not actually convert if they get that far.

Now, you’ll have a hard time targeting broad traffic on display unless you can target down by state and in a sports category. There are some traffic sources out there that allow you to do this, so do some hunting. I think you’ll be better off targeting fan blogs and sites. I’ve found several Minnesota Vikings related blogs that were all just running Adsense by simply using the Google Blog Search. Email these sites and let them know you’ll pay them 10 – 25% more than what Google Adsence based off of their average sitely earnings. Try and get data from the previous year during the same months, as most of these sites will be rather dead in the off season, and more trafficed during the playoffs and super bowl.

Landing Pages

Simplicity is key here. Research top players from each team, build out custom landing pages for each, and test, test, test. Ad copy here can be simple. Something like “Click Here To Claim Your Free Minnesota Vikings Jersey” is fine and dandy. Also remember the “rivalry” type of landing page you could do.

Another great landing page to build would say something like this:

“Which team do you think will go to the Super Bowl this season? Pick your favorite and win a Free NFL Jersey of your choice!” – Below all this, you include all the logos of NFL football teams and make each one individually clickable. A broad landing page like this allows you to test out a few simple designs rather than building out individual landing pages for each team. This is simple thinking outside the box to do a good job over a wide range of traffic.

Difficulty: 1.5 out of 5

I give this a 1.5 because you still need to split test and rotate landing pages/offers. However, there isn’t anything that shouldn’t be too complex and you won’t need a boatload of cash to actually start making much money.

Final Comments

Again, this is a very simple offer and you shouldn’t have to spend too long figuring out how to promote an NFL offer to the right people. Get out there and launch your campaigns now before NFL high season picks up!

I know… I know. I’ve been really slow on pushing these out. I’m going to do my hardest to push more of these posts out and catch up this week. I’ve been caught in the middle of some personal drama and tons of business opportunities, so I’m a bit behind on the blog here. I apologize to all my readers for that! All I can ask is that I hope you forgive me, and hope these types of posts help you out.

So, anyways, today I’ve picked out an offer that’s been doing really strong. The gaming vertical is one that will always be strong as its so prevalent in today’s entertainment industry. With the advancements of browser based gaming and graphics technology, rather than sit and download a 10 GB game, we can just load them up in Firefox and play them right there. Battlestar Galactica is one of those games. Let’s get into it, shall we!

The Offer

Before you go balls to the walls on promoting something, it’s always a good idea to know a little more about what exactly you are affiliate marketing here. In this case, it is a game based off an original sci-fi television series. Wikipedia it up or go out and buy the blu-rays because BSG FRACKING ROCKS! Sorry… I let my fanboy out. The landing page is pretty big which might make it awkward for direct linking on PPV (AffPortal has got a great tool for previewing landing pages and offer pages). Plus, it’s got very limited info, so you’ll probably only get conversions on people looking to already play it, yet haven’t gotten an account, if you just direct link it.

The offer page on this guy might differ from network to network. I’ve seen some with no captcha like above, while others have captchas. That might be an offer-side action, though. You can bet your ass, though, that a non-captcha landing page would convert better.

Research

Have you wiki’d Battlestar Galactica, yet? Get on it. That will help you know a little more about the series. Obviously, targeting fans of the series is going to equal money, but you’ve also got a whole slew of other people you can target. In any case, we’re still going to be using a Quantcast to do a little more demographic and psychographic research

So, you can see, I put in two domains in Quantcast. The first site is BigPoint.com. BigPoint are the publishers of BSG Online. I also threw in BattlestarWiki.org. This site is actually quantified which means you get a real in-depth look at the traffic information there. So what that picture tells is is that we have a bunch of unemployed white and Asian nerds that are 18 – 34 years old, that live in their parents basements because they don’t have a job that pays enough money to repay the debt on their undergraduate and graduate school student loans. Or so it seems. Whether or not the income information is 100% accurate or not isn’t too important, as its pretty safe to assume high anyone that watches and still follows the series even after its end, is a total fracking nerd. That’s going to be our main demographic.

Also, important to point out that BigPoint publishes a lot of games, some of which will be perfect targets for us.

How To Run the Offer

This isn’t going to be a tough offer to test. PPV and Facebook are going to be excellent places to hit just the demographics and niches you want. Outside of that, your best bet will be direct banner buying from related web site owners. I think you’ll have a hard time finding a BSG related site that doesn’t have this plastered up and down the sides in every spot imaginable, but you might find some if you do some real digging.

Okay, so you’ve got the simple path. Targeting Battlestar Galactica related key terms and URLs. This is bound to get you mixed up in some bidding wars and hard entrance. If you have a small budget, this isn’t what you want to do. There is plenty of ways to go about this with having 0 to very little competition.

So lets go back to BigPoint games. There are a lot of games there, including another old gaming CPA offer that used to be pretty popular, Dark Orbit. This is one offer you can target. We’ve also got Deepolis and Nanofights which could also substitute for excellent targeting. I guarantee both of these have a following on Facebook and will have traffic on TrafficVance.

When you are writing ads for Facebook, keep in mind what nerds and gamers like about online games. Community, leveling up, getting powerful and enjoying a fantasy life they can’t have in the real world. Combine this with the nerdom of Battlestar Gallactica and you’ll be able to come up with some unique ads.

Cylon or Human? (or vice versa here! ALWAYS SPLIT TEST!) – Choose your side. Relive the action of the Battlestar Galactica TV show with the FREE online game! Play now!

Love BSG? – Play this fracking awesome game! Jump in your Viper, kill bad guys and become the top Ace on the Battlestar Galatica!

Fight for Survival – Help save the human race from extinction. Join the revolution in the Battlestar Galactica online MMORPG now!

Stupid and simple. If you are targeting some more abstract nerd topics, sell it a little more on the side of being an awesome game over the fact that its BSG. Some players may not be familiar with the series.

Landing Pages

A landing page for this offer isn’t going to be amazingly complex. The best thing to do here is to include some video from the series and or game, autoplay it where allowed and split test your ad copies and designs. There will be no formula for instant success other than testing. And always continue testing. Sure, that LP might be making you 100% ROI with a 10% CTR, but I know it is possible to have landing pages with CTRs of 20% and up over a broad range of targets. Always keep pushing yourself for more and more money. If you need some copy for your landing page, don’t think too much. The offer page has some you can rip, as well as the games info page.

Final Comments

This is a successful offer with a very niche following. You may be able to hit fans of the series currently following it, but chances are they’ve already seen the game and tried it. You’ll have a better chance of going outside the box here and broadening your targeting to those interested in other similar games, sci-fi television shows and movies.

P.S. I’m looking for an Asia based web designer to add to my team (S.E. Asians preferred). If you think you’d make an excellent addition to my team, contact me!