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!

Pay per view ads, cost per view ads, or pop-up ads – Whatever you want to call them – they’re a popular traffic source for affiliate marketers. The ad networks are less strict, you can get every sort of niche up and running there, and there is a good amount of money to be made on these PPV networks. Even so, I deal with a lot of people struggling to make their first buck with PPV. The following is a summary of some of the quickest and easiest suggestions any marketer can drop into their own campaigns for a quick boost of ROI.

Use a Landing Page

I know a lot of you want to go the easy route and build out direct linked campaigns all day. And in some cases it works. You get a $4 payout converting at 1%, making you 4 cents per click. That’s all fine and dandy, and if you are only spending 1 – 2 cents per pop up, you’re making a good chunk of money back, at least if you have the scale. But I’ve found in most cases, when I’ve direct linked, I can drop in a very, very simple landing page and double, or better, my ROI. A simple landing page for me has an interesting header, a few bullet points, a call to action/button and an image or video. K.I.S.S.

Get Rid of Everything

Well, not everything, but you know those 1000+ targets you added? How many of them are actually converting, and how many of them are just collecting 1-3 hits per day? Give yourself a time limit on how long you’ll run each target. A couple days is usually enough. After that time has passed, pause all targets that don’t have a single conversion on them. Chances are they’ll only pick up 1 or 2 conversions per month at that rate, but it’s more likely it will just lose money for you in the long run. On many of my campaigns this has taken me from a loss to a profit just because I was running on so many different targets that the 975 out of 1000 targets that weren’t performing kept dragging me down. In many instances, you’ll find maybe only 1 – 10 targets per 1000 make you any amount of money.

Double Check Your Targets

I shouldn’t have to tell you this one, but I run into it a lot. Doesn’t matter if you are pushing 10 or 10000 targets, always double check your list for odd targets. The way I do this is a drop my target list into TrafficVance first. I can then rank the targets by Activity which will give me a rough estimate on just how much traffic each target will give me. If it is full or close to full, I’ll always double check just to make sre that it is relavent and that its not a massive social media site or something I know won’t convert no matter how well I sell it on my landing page.

An offer paying out $7 for a simple email and state submit? Where do I sign up? But truth be told, there is a lot more to that offer than when the eyes see.

Compare that $7 payout to an offer that is paying out only $1 for the same information. Besides, $6 can you spot the real difference? They’re probably different niches, but other than that it’d seem smarter to focus on sending more traffic to the higher paying offer than the lesser paying offer.

Truth be told, I never let a payout get in the way of what I choose to promote. You know why that $1 conversion is all you’re getting? Because I bet its so simple to create a conversion, all you need to do is drive clicks lower than 10 cents and target the right country, age and sex and you’ll make money.

Why is the $7 payout seven dollars? Because its a hard conversion and its probably got a  higher scrub rate. They might actually validate the user info on the spot, or want the user to full out multiple pages of data before they’ll give you the conversion. Want to test this method? Find the same offer on multiple networks, get your conversions flowing and notice the discrepancies between conversion rates of the $1 offer and the $7 offer. Your $7 offers will range much further out from the average.

For those thinking you’ll never make decent money with $1 or $2 payouts, I’ll throw you an example. I’m huge into international dating. Facebook, banners, even some PvP and search… I took 1 offer in January and February, paying out a little over a dollar per lead, and made around $30,000 (100%+ ROI). What it came down to was simply driving down my click costs as much as possible and scaling the campaign to whatever traffic I could buy up. I did very little optimization, and where allowed, I didn’t use a landing page. I only split test a few different ad copies on Facebook and search traffic. It was some of the easier money I’ve made in the past few years.

Low payouts work. Don’t be scared to go after them. That $7 or $100+ however much offer might seem that much more attractive, but I almost always guarantee the risk to get there with me 10x higher.

Need help getting on track to $30,000 per month? Check out what my 1-on-1 affiliate coaching can do for you. Click Here!

Creativity – a key factor for the success of good affiliate marketers. Without the ability to think on your feet and constantly evolve the way you are putting things together, you’ll never be able to survive in the industry. The simple landing page to lead gen offer is getting harder to convert, and we’re starting to see an overall change in the the industry affecting the way many work – merchant accounts being closed, Google and Facebook accounts being shut down, and a more stingy economy are slowing things down.

I wanted a way to get by all this, and turn my “Affiliate money now, plan for the future later” thinking around. How could I get my conversions now, keep in contact with my leads, and that into a passive income? My plan was pretty simple, but I haven’t heard it talked about a whole lot. I think for a lot of affiliates, there is a giant stigma around 1 thing – content sites – and that is exactly what I had in mind. Get the lead by building a list. Get the lead on an affiliate offer. Send the lead to my own content website where they could subscribe and I could generate a passive income through banner advertising, other affiliate offers, or Adsense.

I needed a broad niche that could be scaled out over many traffic sources. Gaming. Many people up to age 35 play games, and there is a plethora of gaming offers to choose from. I started out with a landing page that would look something like this.

The landing page can have images and colors easily swapped depending on what game offer I am promoting. I started off with testing on 3 offers, and all of them worked well. I have scaled it to tens of offers and I’m constantly expanding them outwards.

Anyways, how this works is I say in order to get this game, you need to enter your email first (incentivizing my own list. You always need to give away something, and in this case it was access to the page of the offer). Once I got their email, I send them a thanks for subscribing message with a link to the website I built (more about that below). After clicking the button, they’d be sent to the game offer. Email submit rate is as high as 50% for some games and traffic sources, and at its lowest id 5% on some more obscure games and traffic sources.  Conversion rate for them, once on the offer, is around 10 – 20%. ROI ranges from 0 – 200%. I keep most offers on-board as even if I’m not making money off them, I still get to build out my list and potentially a long term passive income from them.

About the website – it is just a simple arcade site. I’ll post an article and build a few links out every week to increase search engine rankings, however, it also has a lot of social pushing power with Facebook Like’s button, Stumble and Twitter. It auto-drips game feeds like Mochi Games  into it (which also provides me with some money from their ad serving), so it builds on itself, users can create an account for an even more optimized list of potential customers. I can mail to both lists about new games on the site and affiliate offers. Adsense ads are up, and it also rotates through some banner ads to more affiliate offers.

It’s been a very successful idea that I can now recreate over a ton of other niches. Health, make money online, automobile, and dating are all in the works or being planned. The true beauty of it is that I am making money right away and for a very long time down the road, not just a very long time down the road or just making money now.

So why am I posting a successful venture that others could easily copy and recreate my success, therefore increasing my own competition? I just don’t think very many people will hop on the chance to make money this way, and I like to help others out despite how ridiculous that might sound. Again, within my circle of affiliate marketing friends, not many have long term plans. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle, work 16 hour days now, and hope you the offer is still up after you wake up.

With this idea, I’ve combined the daily hustle with something that will keep making me money even after an offer is all dried up. It grows on autopilot and requires very little work after it is all setup.

We all know you cut out the URLs and keyword targets that have done significant amounts of traffic, yet provide a negative ROI. You’d be one broke hustler if you didn’t. I’d also be slightly inclined to call you stupid.

However, what about the stuff that just picks up a few views per day. You’ve had the campaign running successfully over 1 month, but you’ve got 1000 or so targets that just sit there, trickling in traffic that have converted maybe once or twice, or not at all, in 4 weeks. Do you wait till you spend 1 – 2 times the payout before pausing them to see if just maybe they are profitable?

Well, you could, but how much fun would that be when you find out 90% of your targets will never be profitable? If I have 1000 different targets on a 4 dollar dating niche offer, I’d have to spend $4000 – 8000 just to test all those targets, and some targets may take a year to even get that amount of traffic. Sure, I might find 10 – 20 more targets that give 30 – 50 more conversions per month, but that is only 6 extra bucks a day.

I say, if they don’t have conversions after 7 days and haven’t reached your spend limit, just kill them. I do it to my campaigns, and I’ll notice a small increase in ROI just because I don’t have these 1000s of small insignificant targets creating 10 cents of pops each (That would add up to a minimum of $100 extra ad spend going to testing that just wouldn’t give you enough data unless you waited a month or so to collect it all). It just isn’t worth the mini-management you’ll have to do.

Alrighty! Who’s ready for another little contest here? It’s been a while, I believe.

The idea behind this contest is pretty simple. I’m looking for some ideas to help build my subscriber list with a new giveaway. As you know, I now give away about 700+ female images that work great for Facebook dating. However, the niche is very saturated. Unfortunately, I don’t feel the images are of much help to anyone anymore. Too much competition, click costs soaring, and a lot of scrubbing equals no profit for the affiliate.

So, I’m looking for something new to replace those images. My question to you is: What?

I need something that will generate conversions on my list, be interesting and unique to most affiliate marketers, and not be some rehashed ebook that every other affiliate guru and their mom has put out. Some general ideas I’ve come up with are:

• PPV Case Study
• Facebook Case Study
• PoF Case Study
• Small Media Buy/Display Banner Case Study
• 5 – 10 Free Landing Pages
• A coupon for some services or landing page in my store

None of these are truly unique and creative enough, so I thought I’d come ask for help. Whoever comments or contacts me with the best idea here by Friday wins a custom made landing page design (A $97 value). 2 runner ups will get a 50 images from my Facebook/PoF image service from my store. You can take my ideas and extend them, or come up with your own great idea.

And whatever turns out to be the winner, I will send it out to my whole list, so even those already subscribed will get it!

Deadline for entries is this Friday!

EDIT: 1st place winner now gets 2 custom designed landing pages. 2nd gets 1 custom landing page designed!

Here’s a simple question that requires a simple answer with an extended explanation. If you have any questions you would like answered, ask them here.

“Hey bro, this is great! So i wanted to know what do you mostly use to track you ppv campaigns such as know which url thats paying and stuff?”

I use the same tracking I use for everything else. Prosper202. There are a lot of reasons you may or may not want to use Prosper202 for your PPV campaigns, though.

Let’s go over a few cons – Prosper obtains a lot of data. It’s a lot and it can stress out your VPS or server fast if you aren’t properly equipped for a massive PPV/CPV campaign. Honestly, all the data you need to collect is sub-ids, keyword, time of day and landing page the hits came from (assuming you are using one). Traffic source might be important, too, if you are running over multiple networks. If you’ve got the know how, you might want to create a light, stable tracker specifically for PPV.

PPV traffic can easily crash a server. I’ve had campaigns that give me upwards of 50 clicks a second. Sending millions of? hits to your server, even just a simple redirect script to an offer page, can kill you. I’m well prepared for this with my Wiredtree server, though. You might want to check them out if you need a dedicated platform for tracking. Prosper has no trouble or hiccups running on it.

To use Prosper to track conversions on PPV campaigns, all you need to do is ussually check the tickbox that says “Target Pass-through” or “Pass target/keyword data”. Note – If you are targeting URLs, this will not show up in referral data. This will show up under the keyword column. You can then use the Analyze >> Keyword section to figure out where your conversions are coming from. Make sure to grab sub-ids from the network to see if your pixel may have missed firing on some conversions.

Alternatively, you can completely skip tracking and use the networks integrated conversion tracker. These aren’t always the most reliable, though, and I certainly don’t recommend that, especially if you are rolling out a heavy campaign.

This was emailed to me in response to my Ask Away! post. Feel free to ask me any questions about affiliate marketing there or contact me via email.

When targetting groups of people at a tight level [on Facebook] (City+single age+Keywords+Gender), how many individuals would you consider as being ‘too low’?

I’ve found that when I try and target groups that are too small I don’t get any impressions.

Or do you create multiple highly targeted ads tailored for each group?

I know this is pretty broad but do you have any sort of rule of thumb?

There are few decent questions there that deserve answering.

As far as how many people is too few to target, when I ran campaigns like this, I would target 100-200 people some times. I’d run it at CPC because I knew CPM would burn through them too fast. I’d be getting about ~1% CTRs making my click cost only a cent or two. Of course, either way, I’d burn through that demographic really fast. It usually only took me 1 minute to set up the ad for them, and I’d make 1000 – 2000% ROI on my investment, so it was completely worth the time. It wasn’t a campaign that was sustainable for a long time. I could normally run it a few days every month and make conversions from it, then pause it for a month and open it again.

Also, I’d take a large demographic and just break it up into highly targeted ads. Custom images, ad title and ad body were included in this. It would drop my average CPC on these ads by about 20-30 cents on some campaigns.

I’m not too sure whats wrong with Facebook impressions. Rather than give impressions to the highest bidders, they like to split up impressions instead. So if 100 more advertisers enter the same demographic on the same day, you’re up against them. It’s a wonky (shitty) system that needs improvement. Some days you’ll get millions of impressions, the next day you’ll be like “Facebook doesn’t want my online monies today or what?”

As for a rule of thumb, Hey! As long as its making you a decent amount of money, and its worth the amount of work you put in to it, go for it. Some days I’d work on campaigns all day that would make me 4 figures a day, some days I would build small Facebook campaigns that took 10 minutes to set up and make me 20 bucks a day on each ad.

Money is money, and how you make that is completely up to you!

Here’s a pretty good question I got from the Ask Away post -

“Are there any techniques you could share for targeting specific races of FB? If I have an offer that’s demographics lie within a specific race, what can I do to target on FB?”

This really shouldn’t take long to explain. There are a couple ways you can go around doing this.

Number 1 is keywords. If you don’t know what keywords your race is that you’d like to target, I’d suggest going in to Google and typing in something like “(race) forums” or community, social network, website, blog, etc. Take a look at the keywords in the meta-tags. Target those. Also, take a look at what is being discussed on the website. If they are talking about ex. Fishing, add fishing to your keyword list. Target one keyword per ad and track conversions by that keyword level.

Another simple way is to take a look at census data. Target on the city level. Check this out: List of U.S. cities with large African American populations. Target cities that contain a high percentage of the race of people you are trying to target. Or, target home countries if the offer allows international promotion. That’s a no-brainer, though.

Colleges often publish demographic data as well. If you find a college with a high density of one race, chances are the surrounding area/city can also be included there.

There are also “work places” you could probably target, as well.

And that is how you racially target. I’m sure there are others out there that know some better tactics, but I’ve found this usually works for me. I’ve heard people turning large ROI running racially targeted campaigns with LPs built specifically to that race.

Constantly, on a day to day basis, I get asked for help. The way it is asked for is usually in one of the following forms:

• Yo Justin! I saw you do a lot of stuff on (traffic source). I’m trying to get started there now. Can you share some tips? Thx man peace -Bob
• I’ve spent 12 dollars on this offer on (traffic source) and I still don’t have any conversions. What gives!?
• Hey. Just wondering if we could chat. I do a lot of stuff online and want to make more money. Hoping you could help me. Thanks
• How much do you charge for coaching? I want to hire you.

Alrighty. You’re probably wondering why I won’t reply to you. Here’s why: I don’t work with freeloaders. I won’t help people that aren’t willing to spend some time (and a reasonable amount of money) to get results. I don’t have much time to sit back and chat. And I’m no ho (I don’t sell my body, huns).

If you want an answer from me, let me know who you are. I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass if you read my blog and love it, but thanks for that comment anyways. Be direct. Be specific. If you want me to be able to answer any questions, you’ll need to give me details. I hate broad general questions with answers you can probably find on Wickedfire. In fact, run a search there before you come running to me.

Also, chances are if I don’t know you very well, I won’t be the most willing to help you out. If you have something you’d like to share with me, go for it. I like to build relationships with people that know what they are doing. If you have lots of experience in one area, and need a leg up in a newer area, then maybe we can trade intelligence. But like I said, I’m not open to much to random people just saying they know stuff. Trust is something I don’t do something fast anymore.

Those people that ask me questions like why they aren’t making money on $X – $XX spend a day, obviously don’t have the budgets to split test every possible variable. That is why you aren’t making money. If you don’t have the experience to set up a campaign and have decent ROI, you need to gain that experience and data yourself. Myself, and most others, are not going to hand out our knowledge free. We spent thousands to get it, and you should too if that is what you want.

So if you still feel like you have a decent reason to contact me, do so, but know the above reasons might be just some of the reasons I won’t reply.