Make Money Online

This is another virtually pointless post, yes. I’ve promised posts and more frequent posting and just haven’t lived up to it.

I’m just making this post to say: I still have plans on blogging more in the future. I’ve learned A LOT of information that I can definitely share. Right now I’m just too busy to really think about anything else but my main projects. A project 5 months into the making is going to launch in the near future (for real this time) so it’s like cramming for finals week in my head right now.

Once things cool down I’ll be able to relax and get to blogging more. Priorities folks…gotta win the bread.

This post will be totally useless without some usable piece of affiliate marketing information so here it goes: something I’ve been experimenting with in a few small affiliate side projects is collecting email address information and THEN shooting them to the affiliate offer (”You’re getting a free [blah blah], just enter your name and e-mail address to continue!”). It seems there are quite a few people out there doing this. E-mail them with some “Welcome” packet of affiliate offers, sub them to your list and just mail out more affiliate offers. Plus make commissions off whatever offer you send them to after you capture the name/email. There’s almost always higher payouts for email only offers too. Something to think about and test.

Sorry for being lame.

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Read it here.

Did an interview with my good buddy Volk, it’s kind of an update of what’s been going on with my business.

I feel like everyone coming to this blog from Volk’s is looking for something good to read, so I promise I’ll write something tasty up this week for you guys to check out.

Happy Friday.

See the original post here:
Check Out My Interview w/ Volk

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*Spoiler alert*

So after six seasons, LOST finally concluded last night. I started watching the show three weeks before this season, I got through all of the prior five seasons in that time. Once I started watching, it seemed to get more and more confusing but I just wanted to see how the show was going to end. I wanted all the questions that had been building up to be answered. What was I left with? …Nothing.

When I first started watching, I thought it was going to be just a shipwrecked trapped on a deserted island show…cool idea. Then they bring in polar bears, Dharma, time travel, and all sorts of crazy sci-fi elements…I was loving that. In the end, they explain none of it. At the start of Season 6 they create this “side flash” storyline. The whole season everybody is wondering what that even means, but I think all of our heads were still more curious about the island. What was the black smoke? What’s really special about the island? We’re told this last season would “reveal all”, but it seemed to just keep stringing along this side flash plot-line. This all builds up to the final episode where all they do is close out the weird side flash storyline they created. How do they close it out? Oh, they’re just all dead no big deal. WHAT??!?!?!

I’m sitting there wondering :

• What is the purpose of that black smoke?
• How did EVERYONE else die? It’s not just Jack in that church, it’s everyone who appeared to escape on the plane too.
• How did man in black turn into the smoke monster instantly after being thrown into that well, and why?
• What were all the weird symbols and markings?
• Island moving? Time travel? Yeah none of that explained.
• Dharma Initiative? They started going into that hardcore I think the second season, and then just dropped it.
• How is Richard immortal, and then why is he mortal in the end?
• WTF is the light in the center of the island?

These are just questions that are coming off the top of my head. I thought it was awful to just end the finale with a 2 and a half hour reunion only to find out that they’re all united in death. Seriously…they’re all dead?

I feel like I wasted so much time on this show, anybody saying it was a great finale has become just to emotionally attached to all the characters that anything would seem good. Even them all…being…dead.

Except for Ben, but they don’t explain that either. He’s just chilling outside the church that’s in…purgatory? Earth? Where the hell are they that once they walk into a church they get to walk into heaven or wherever that white light leads?

Seriously people…you cannot be happy about this ending. If you are, you’ve been duped hard.

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Well, this was an update over 2 years in the making. Yep, the last time I updated my Affiliate Marketing Guide was in April of 2008. You can imagine a lot of things have changed since then, a lot of the links were dead/irrelevant.

I’ve scoured quite a few industry blogs and looked at the past year or so of content and was able to find some good picks. I’ve added some new categories to keep up with the times (PPV is a popular category now). The more recent articles I popped in at the top. You can view the guide here.

The Most Important Part

So, I’m sure I missed a bunch of great articles. This is where it’s your turn to add to the guide, almost like a Wiki or something. If there’s a good article relating to any of the categories of the guide, post it as a comment here and as long as it’s good, I’ll add it to the guide. Thanks!

Here’s a list of the newly added articles :

Nickycakes Newbie Guide
Free Affiliate Marketing Guide
Landing Pages And The Urgency Of Time
Mad lib form style testing results
Photoshop Guide For Affiliates
Landing Page Rotation Script
6 Seductive CTR Tips
Tuesday Tips – Improving Landing Page CTR
The 1 Penny Tip
Top 100 TrafficVance Targets
TrafficVance – Demographics & Tips
PPV Network Reviews
A Simple Way to Split Test PPV Landing Pages Without a Rotator
3 Ways to Increase Your PPV Landing Page CTR
Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns
Media Buying 101: Introduction To Inventory (A Step-By-Step Guide) – Part 1
Tips on Media Buying
Optimizing Google Content Campaigns
Google content network basic strategy
The Beginners Guide To Advertising On Facebook
Plenty of Fish. Plenty of Money.
Free Geo IP Javascript To Increase Conversions On Your Campaigns
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 1 – Intro & Tools
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 2 – URLs, URL Variables, and using Live HTTP Headers
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 3 – Basics of Assessing Your Target
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 4 – cURL
Noobies Guide on How to Scrape: Part 5 – A Basic Scraper
Monetizing International Traffic
Becoming An Advertiser : Part 1 (Overview)
CS1.1 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 1
CS1.2 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 2 – Keyword Research
CS1.3 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 3 – Landing Pages and Tracking
CS1.4 – PPC Case Study Part 4 – Advice, Tips and Campaign Structure
CS1.5 – PPC Case Study Part 5 – Campaign Update and a Top Secret Tool
CS1.6 – Pay Per Click Case Study Part 6 – Stats Recap and Going Forward
How I Generated $1,700,000 in Auto Sales Despite a Weak Economy
Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Results
How I made $7,144.00 using TrafficVance.
NEW Facebook Ads
Plentyoffish Self Serve Advertising.

Excerpted from:
Affiliate Marketing Guide UPDATE

Search Engine Keywords:

• how make money with trafficvance

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Haven’t made a post in a while, I’d like to get back to posting more but I’ve said that before, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve had some industry friends come out with a few things though and figured they were worth sharing.

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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.

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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.

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AffChat at Uberaffiliate

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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)

Search Engine Keywords:

• nicky cakes

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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.

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Affiliate Marketing in 2010

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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

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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.

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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.

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Surprise Ray-Bans from Visa

Search Engine Keywords:

• how visa makes money
• visa black card ray ban

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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

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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

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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

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