Make Money Online

Know what you want…

Seems simple right? In my experience, dealing with hundreds of clients over the last 12 years, very few can actually quantify what they want.

Some tell me they want marketing help (far too vague), but when I ask about success metrics, they almost invariably cite traffic as their primary success measure. Now, not to discount traffic, but that’s not what pays the bills is it?

ROI shouldn’t be calculated on traffic*, but by counting other other measures. If your aim is engagement, count comments, reviews, buzz. If your aim is sales, count overall revenue increases, direct conversions, increase of average sales…

In an SEM campaign in particular, knowing what you want is vital, because every click costs you. Your campaigns should be highly segmented, helping you know where each dime goes, how each ad performs, how each keyword you’re buying contributes to the goals you’ve set.

Search Engine Guide has an excellent post up today about segmenting your keywords:

There are four distinct keyword segments each representing a different phase of the searcher’s buying cycle. After going through the process above you should be left with one or more groups of keyword that can be optimized into a page or several pages. The next step is to take each group and segment them even further based on those keyword segments.

Once you know what you want, you can do A/B testing to determine where your money’s going and whether or not your plan is working.  Know what you want and you have a heck of a lot better chance at getting it.

*there are a few, rare exceptions to this rule

Social Bookmarking

See more here:
Online Marketing Goals

Over the past few months the industry has seemed to gone through some slight changes. Rebill offers for the most part are not run like they were before. I know this because of what’s happened to my own traffic, getting approval on my own offer, and then friends that I’ve talked to who have had to go back to “legit” affiliate offers.

So now what? Some food for thought…

Oldies but Goodies

Offers like credit reports, auto insurance, dating, etc. These are the classics but they’re offers that have been running strong this entire time for a reason…they convert. Some of the very first offers I ran back in the day were all 3 of those I listed above, and all 3 were profitable. I also see Google ads as well as Facebook ads for all 3 of those, which tells me that it looks like they’re converting just like the old days.

Mobile/IQ

Mobile used to be the hot “shady” thing to do, when rebilling people for $9.99 was unethical. My oh my if we only knew we would rebill for 10x that amount and go to bed with a smile on our faces (’our’ just referring to the entire industry). Mobile offers are doing well from what I hear. I see some ads on Myspace and other teenage oriented sites, and I also hear incenting these offers on app traffic is working nicely.

Edu

If you take a closer peek at Facebook and a few other places, you’ll see a few people running education offers. These have been kind of a “sleeper” for a while now, I ran them a while ago with some success. The only thing you have to watch out for is quality, they can end up nailing you on it. But other than that it’s a nice leadgen with a good payout for just completing a form with no credit card.

Good Ole Fashioned Business

Maybe it’s time for you to take some of those rebill profits and pour them into a business idea you’ve had in your mind for the past year. Don’t forget that affiliate marketing is just one of the ways to make money online. Build a site that people want to visit every day or a service that they don’t mind paying to use. In the age of Facebook/Digg/Reddit/etc, sharing has never been easier. This makes viral sites all the more easier to go viral.

Just some things to think about in case you’re a deer in headlights now that the FTC truck is speeding at you.

Source:

This week, we’ll be hosting two live webinars to help you discover how you can make the most of your AdSense account with a detailed understanding of DFP Small Business and AdSense for search.

The DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad Manager) webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 2nd. This webinar will cover how you can:

• Use DFP Small Business to sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your direct-sold and network-based ad inventory (including AdSense)
• Have AdSense backfill your directly-sold inventory and compete with your other ad networks
• Optimize your AdSense placements

The AdSense for search webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 3rd. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Optimize your AdSense for search performance
• Improve the relevance of your search results and ads using keywords

We encourage you to post your questions in advance of each webinar on our Google Moderator pages for DFP Small Business or AdSense for search.

Sign up for these webinars here! We look forward to seeing you soon.

Posted by Caroline Halpin – AdSense Optimisation team

Original post:
Join us for two live webinars this week

Long story made short with no explanation : I’ve just created a chatroom here at Uberaffiliate, you can click here to connect to it.

Now for the explanation. If you’re anything like me, some days you’re at your house chugging away at campaigns and you just get bored. Maybe most of your friends on IM are working and can’t talk, you don’t want to wait for people to reply to your forum posts, and you just want to take a break. That’s why I set up a small chat room attached to UberAffiliate. I plan on just popping it up in a new window and letting it chill in the corner of one of my monitors. I used to hang around the Cakes chat room, but the past few times I’ve gone in there hasn’t really been anybody on.

This is also a way I think I’ll be able to connect with you guys (the readers) better. A lot of you send me IMs during the day and I’m either not paying attention to Adium, or by the time I get back to the computer to respond you’re already gone.

So if you just want a place to hang out and chat/shoot the breeze with other marketers, just head to the chat room.

Nothing big, maybe I’ll see you there maybe not! Oh if you have your own IRC program that you’re more used to, the channel is #affchat.

View original here:
AffChat at Uberaffiliate

Hey guys and girls. I just want to write a little message, and I want other affiliates to comment on this issue as well. This is kind of aimed towards affiliate networks.

This post is coming because of something that has happened to me many times. If it’s once or twice at one or two networks, okay maybe those are legit. But when it’s happened at almost every network I’ve been at, some have to be true. This actual post is because I’m planning on running smorgasbord of offers with 1 network. They gave me the heads up that 1 of the offers I requested was no good to run. So my response was basically what the rest of this post says, and a ‘thank you’ to that network.

How many times have you asked “So what are your top converting offers to run for Vertical X?” and got a list back, ran those offers, only to find out that it’s converting worse than what you’re running now?

This has happened to me quite a few times. I’ll get a list of the top offers, and then I’ll ask my AM what the offer is converting at for most affiliates. They usually say very nice things, like “It’s converting at 13% for affiliates with a $5-6 EPC”. Now I’ll be getting like a $3.50-4 EPC now so this sounds amazing, almost double my revenue. So I run the offer and guess what, it’s a $2 EPC and I’m now almost losing money. It’s just happened too many times for them all to be my fault (I know my traffic is good because I’ve run it fine on other offers that look exactly the same).

For an affiliate like me, who doesn’t even want to talk to networks anymore unless they’re going to be honest, I propose this :

Instead of telling me what offers “your affiliates are running great right now”, give me some REAL numbers I can look at. If you have 1 affiliate running at a $6 EPC and 10 affiliates running it at a $2 EPC…tell me the offer has a $2.50 EPC. If that doesn’t beat what I’m running now, that’s just the way it works and I won’t run the offer. But if you’re honest about it and you get an offer in a month that has a $3.50 EPC overall, when you come to me I’ll actually run the offer. It’s annoying to run the offer, not see the $6 EPC, and lose money half the time just to find out that it’s a bad offer.

There was 1 vertical where I literally ran at least 20 different offers where every time I was told were the best offers at the time with great EPCs, only to find out that they all sucked. Lost at least $10,000 just to learn that anything an AM tells me about this offer is going to be a lie, and I should just call it quits.

Anyone with me?

Read the rest here:

So Nickycakes has come out with his first affiliate industry product he calls LPLockdown. It’s a service that provides cloaking for your landing pages so other affiliates can’t see or steal them.

LPLockdown : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good

We’ll start off with the good here. The things it does for your pages are nice, if you’re not currently doing something like this with your pages, you should look into it. LPLockdown will :

1) Cloak your pages from other affiliates. Cakes has a database of affiliate IPs he’s collected, so when they hit your landing page they’re redirected somewhere else.

2) Steal their traffic if they steal yours. if someone rips your page 100% and leaves your javascript, you can redirect traffic from their page to your page/offer.

3) Uptime/downtime monitor so if your landing page goes down you get a notification.

The Bad

While there are positives to using this service to protect your page, there are cons to this.

1) It’s not self-hosted. And seeing as Nickycakes himself said it’s “by affiliates for affiliates”, do you want to give Nicky (an affiliate) potential access to all of your landing pages?

2) I have a friend who programs and said he programmed the exact same thing for himself in 2 days. Do you want to pay $50/month for something you can pay a programmer a few hundred bucks and have forever?

3) This is interesting…reverse IP lplockdown.com. You’ll find the site 11i.us. Check the WHOIS on that info. It’s Nicky’s actual info. Do you trust a product who was created by someone that can’t privacy protect their own self?

4) It looks like I designed that site the first week I learned Photoshop. The WordArt in the video gives it a nice ‘95 touch.

The Ugly

Everyone is pretty aware that this is NickyCakes’ product. I’ve gotten the chance to meet him and chat at events and he’s a nice guy. Like with all arguing on the internet I think once everyone comes together we realize how lucky we are and the pansy e-fighting that happens doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Be that as it may, Nicky’s online persona has always been ripping others in the industry to shreds. He rips on the big Gurus like Shoemoney and Chow, and also has torn apart myself (the Goober) and Ubercamp.

So the question is : if he really made this product to “contribute” to the industry, why does he have to charge for it (more so $50/month…maybe $5-10/month would be more legit)? Especially when it’s not anything advanced, it’s like making a blog post about how to track keywords with PHP. Again I’m not a programmer and haven’t seen the backend of LPLockdown, but after talking to friends it doesn’t seem all that hard to just do this on your own (or pay someone to program it for you). I’d use LPLockdown as a fresh reminder that you should be doing your best to hide and protect your pages.

Nickycakes having financial trouble perhaps? Gotta pay those taxes.

Here is the original post:
Nickycakes Gains GURU Status w/ LPLockdown (/sarcasm)

This isn’t meant to be a long and planned out post with my 2010 predictions, just getting some thoughts out.

Here’s what’s been happening with me and my product launch. My plan has been to set up a continuity offer with a product but have it be legitimate at the same time. Believe it or not I think there are ways to attract customers without offering them a Free* Trial. I’ve now been rejected by 2 or 3 merchants and am awaiting the reply on another. Because of all the scamming that went down in 2009, Visa/Mastercard are tightening their grip on things…especially domestically. And since I don’t have any real processing history, domestic is the route I have to go. So even though my offer is completely legitimate and actually charges them up-front for a sale, the banks are saying no just because there is continuity involved (I don’t want to get into the specifics, but my charges monthly would be under $20, not $110.33). This sucks pretty bad because now I may be forced to abandon that business model and try and make this work by just straight selling it. I’ve put too much time into it to scrap, but now I have to make huge changes. I have to now build a full website and come out with a mini product line so I can offer combo packages and things like that to incent customers.

That’s how 2009 impacted me, where will the affiliate industry be in 2010? While working on all of this product mumbo jumbo, I kind of “left” the affiliate industry for a while. Didn’t talk to my AMs much, didn’t browse offers, didn’t keep up too much on the news. Now that I’ve been looking to get some campaigns and other projects running again (with the product delay I have to make money somehow), things seem to be changing. Rebill offers that made up a lot of business for affiliate networks are dropping. There are still ones that exist and offers running well so it’s not like they’re completely dying, but things will change.

I think many affiliates will realize that before rebills came along everybody was still making money. Not millions every month, but there was plenty of money to be made and there still is.

I’ll keep you guys posted on what happens with my projects and how everything is influencing them.

Read the original post:
Affiliate Marketing in 2010

The Adwords “Bulls Eye” Profit Report by Alex Goad is one
of the most comprehensive and valuable free reports that
I have accessed in some time.

It’s not only relevant for people engaged in PPC campaigns,
but also for anyone involved in any form of Internet Marketing
for affiliate products or their own small business.    

Alex’s central premise is that if you define your

Read the original:
Adwords “Bulls Eye” Profit Report – define your best customer

Just wanted to say congrats to Jeremy on rolling out The ShoeMoney Sytem. As much hate as he gets (which the hate has died down tremendously because a) people realized that fat jokes are only funny for so long and b) plenty of legitimate trolls have entered the industry that are actually worth the negative attention), the man knows how to launch and run a successful web-based business.

Can you believe all the self-hype about it? I’m sure many people read “how to make money step by step” and are a bit skeptical, after all that’s what every shittyscammy bizopp promises. Will it lead you step by step to making money? Probably, if you actually digest the information properly. You can check out one of the free videos to kind of get a feel for it (I just watched about half of one of them). You can also read about it on his blog. If you’re just getting started into the industry or have some O.K. businesses running online, Shoe is a guy that’s worth listening too. If you’re just a shady aff raking it in on rebills trying to stay cloaked, you’ll probably find this boring.

I don’t want to plug it too hard because I don’t know the full system and I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but it looks like Shoemoney put a lot of work into this and so far it looks like he did a pretty good job. So, nice one dude.

P.S. This isn’t a paid review.

P.P.S. Like the category I put this in whoop whoop :p

Excerpted from:
ShoeMoney System, Cool Beans

Before you can begin performing niche market research, you must understand exactly what it is. To sum it up quickly, it is research focused on a specific audience of people within a certain market. The purpose is to discover if the topic of interest you are pursuing will be a lucrative business opportunity for you or not. Read on to find out more!

Here is the original:
Niche Market Research – The Profitability of Keywords Posted By : Troy Truman

I’m just assuming that this is going to have to be a series of articles, it would probably be huge if I crammed it all into one. At this point in time, I am almost ready to launch my product on the advertiser side. By the end of this week everything should be 95% ready to go. I want to just shed some more light on this area because there’s not too much content on becoming an advertiser. Most blogs just write about the affiliate side of things, but you still hear all the affiliates saying “being an advertiser is where the money is at”. Do we not see content on this topic because that’s the truth? At first I kind of thought this, but not so much anymore.

Being an advertiser is a HUGE hassle. If (like me) you’re doing it by yourself, it seems the number of things to do is endless. I would make checklists every week, and for every 1 thing I crossed off, 2 were added in. It’s stressful, time consuming, requires money and connections, and some knowledge. I’ve been working on this for almost 6 months now, and for the past 3 my income has shot down to $0…I’ve been spending all of my time and resources on this. I’m hoping this article series will save potential advertisers a lot of time, or at least give you a good “idea” of what being an advertiser is like.

After seeing Shoemoney’s post a while ago, I decided to get a Visa Black Card for the hell of it. Came home from a movie last night and saw this on my doorstep :

Pretty neat. Centurion card members can maybe post what holiday type gift they received from Amex (if any).

As far as the card goes itself, yeah it’s the poor man’s Centurion. Membership fees are $500/year (same as Amex Platinum), and the worst part is…the card is plastic. Point/cash-back wise, it’s no different than any other card really. Benefit wise, so far it doesn’t seem to really compare to the Amex.

A lot of times when I’m out at stores and use it, the cashier asks “Is this a real black card?” Unfortunately I always respond “Nope, this is the Visa version.”

All in all Visa thanks for the gift and all, but I will probably be canceling the card before the next membership charge.

See the original post:
Surprise Ray-Bans from Visa

This is just from a couple days ago, but DazzleSmile is suing Epic Advertising (Azoogle) and Jesse Willms (Just Think) for basically abusing their brand. Read the PR Here.

In a nutshell (from what I believe and have heard), DazzleSmile was already a teeth whitening company that nobody has heard of really. Just Think comes along and makes DazzleSmile Pro, the rebill offer. Azoogle is one of the many affiliate networks that pushed Dazzle.

As you can imagine, when you brand something with a shady rebill you’re almost guaranteed to destroy it’s brand in some way. People will be pissed off, they’ll report it to scam alert and ripoffreport and that ranks high in Google. I’d be pretty pissed too if I had a brand I built and someone came along and basically ruined it. Don’t quote me on this as it may be rumors and what not, but I did hear that jail time is going to be involved in this.

If you want to check out the legal jargon, check this link out.

EDIT : Just read through that entire PDF. Pretty intense but an entertaining story to say the least. Seemed like an internet marketing version of Law & Order lol. Some major charges going on in there though.

It’s a good thing I didn’t name my product Hydroxycut Pro like I was planning on.

DazzleSmile Sues Epic Advertising + Jesse Willms

Why does Zac Johnson have almost 9,000 subscribers and I have 6,000?

Do I need to make 90% of my posts sponsored posts about products I don’t even support/use and the other 10% about a recent “profitable” Facebook campaign that made $20? His most recent post is a sponsored post about a charity for the Make A Wish foundation. Come on now, you need the money that badly that you’re taking money from a place trying to promote a charity?

I mean really, I must suck. This dude posts his profitable campaigns that make $20 and he has 3,000 more readers than me.

Yeah I’m bitching. Give me the answer, NOW.

/sarcasm

But really…why? Zac Johnson pwns me.

P.S. Congrats to Wes and the 202 team, Tracking 202 has been acquired by Bloosky. You guys developed an awesome piece of software and deserve it!

The rest is here:
Zac Johnson, God of Blogging

Boy, when I look back into my past, it’s funny to see what I said and did. From the rise and fall of UberCamp, to my multiple admissions to “blog less” or stop blogging, I’ve been able to see quite a bit of indecision in myself. And it’s helped me learn about myself, a lot.

See while maybe most people would think making a public ass of themselves all the time isn’t professional or conductive to real business, I would say overall that it’s helped me. By constantly throwing my ideas out there impulsively as I think them, I get an incredible amount of negative feedback. And while it may also seem uncommon, negative feedback is what I thrive on. How can you make yourself as close to perfect as possible without first knowing your flaws?

Believe it or not this wasn’t just me venting impulsively (okay, mmmmaybe partially), this can have practical application in your life and work. Couple points :

a) Don’t be afraid to pursue any idea that comes to your mind. Even if you get all the negative feedback in the world, you’ll still never really know until you try it.

b) Throw every idea out to as many people as you can (while being confidential if need-be). So maybe you have a killer product idea and you don’t want to reveal it, but you want some type of feedback from fellow marketers. Give away as much information as you can, talk about general strategies you’re thinking of employing, and get advice! Practical example :

Determining a rebill price for my product was one of the toughest things to figure out. I wanted to have a legitimate value for the product being sold, so I came up with a pretty low price. Shot that idea out to a bunch of my biz friends, and pretty much got all feedback that said “Not going to work dude.” They were right. The numbers just didn’t work out. Eventually I got the idea that instead of charging $100 for a bottle of 16oz Pepsi, I could add perceived value by shipping them 2 bottles of 10oz Pepsi, at the price of $50 per bottle. It increases the cost to me a bit since I have to ship 2 bottles, but the end value to the consumer will (hopefully) feel like they are getting a much better value at $50 per bottle instead of $100. Obviously all of these numbers are highly embellished, but you get the picture. Ran that idea by the same friends, they thought it was a much more practical idea then what I originally had planned.

If I hadn’t asked my friends with experience and looked like a newb (which is what I felt like), I probably wouldn’t have come to the eventual conclusion that I did.

c) Keep putting yourself out there. Just because you ran into a tree and fell down doesn’t mean you can’t get back up and run right back into it. Things will fall off the tree every time you hit it, and that’s how you learn.

Not really a post about much here, but if you have all these ideas bottled up and just don’t want to look stupid…look stupid. Who cares?

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Be A Stumbling, Bumbling Idiot Like Me