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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This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Rich Snippets for recipes
Rich Snippets are the brief annotations you see beneath search results that summarize what’s on a webpage. In addition to Rich Snippets for reviews, people, video and events, this week we unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for recipes. This means that when your search results include sites with recipe content, you might see quick facts pertaining to the recipe in your search results, like preparation or cooking times, right on the search results page.

If you have a site with recipes and want to be sure Rich Snippets show up in search results for your page, check out our documentation on how to mark up recipe information as well as our general help articles on Rich Snippets. Bon appétit!

Example search: [baked ziti]

See original here:
This week in search 4/16/10

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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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This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

This week’s enhancements include:

Locking SafeSearch now in 39 languages
Last November, we announced the option to password protect your SafeSearch setting and filter out sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch Lock helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We’re pleased to roll this out globally in 39 more languages. It’s easy to set your preference, and once you do, you’ll see a visible change to your search page. Even from across the room, you’ll be able to see bright colored balls on the top of the screen. Check out this video to learn more.

Microdata support for Rich Snippets
HTML (hypertext markup language) is the core language of the web. And since it was created, HTML5 has become the fifth major revision of HTML. What’s different about HTML5? The specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages. Paritcularly of interest to webmasters, this week we were excited to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa.

By using microdata markup when web pages are created, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve their presentation in Google search results.

To learn more about rich snippets and microdata support, here are some links:

• Rich snippets documentation
• Overview of microdata
• Official microdata specification
• Rich snippets testing tool

Stay tuned for next week’s post on launches, more enhancements and news about search.

Posted by Jen Fitzpatrick, VP, Engineering

Read the original post:
This week in search 3/15/10

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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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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?

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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 is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

The Google that you used today is actually better than the Google that you used yesterday. On a daily basis, we make a number of algorithmic enhancements and release other search features that ultimately make finding what you’re looking for quick, easy and enjoyable. Here are a few of the exciting feature releases this week:

Hours and menu information in universal search
Want to know when your favorite museum is open? Interested in ordering in and need to quickly check the menu for that restaurant around the corner? This week we were excited to launch hours and menu information in local results for universal Google search. Now you can add the words “hours” or “menu” to your search to get back the information you want in a snap.

Example searches: [computer history museum mountain view hours], [sushi sakae burlingame menu]

Rich Snippets for events
What are Rich Snippets? They show brief annotations that webmasters make to summarize what’s on the page so you can see it at a glance on your search results page. So far we’ve launched improved snippets for two formats: reviews and people. Today, we unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for events. The next time you’re searching for events, you’ll see how the new format lists them as search result snippets, along with dates, locations and links directly to pages about those specific events. And, as webmasters implement the new markup on their webpages, you’ll begin to see these event results more frequently.

Example search: [concerts in san jose]

Answer highlighting
Earlier today, we were excited to release the answer highlighting feature, which helps you get to information more quickly by delivering the likely answer to your question in boldface type right in search results. If the pages returned for these searches contain a simple answer to a factual-based search, the snippet will more often include the relevant text in boldface for easy reference. Read more about answer highlighting here.

Example searches: [who is the author of 1984], [p.s. i love you release date], [terminator salvation director]

We hope that you enjoy the features we launched this week — and that they make your search experience even better than yesterday.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Here is the original post:
This week in search 1/22/10

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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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