There is an interesting thread about linkshare over on ABestweb about a possible Linkshare subsidary using absolutely dispicable tactics to steal money from affiliates and give a “share” of it to charity.

I have no problem with affiliate toolbars as most of them don’t plant a cookie if another affiliate cookie is already present or an affiliate link is detected. However, in this case, the guys at linkshare have created a particularly slimey parasite. Some of their 211 Million heist could be yours!

The fine folks over on the forum have created some videos to show how it operates. I’m not a “guilty until proven innocent” kind of guy, but the Linkshare silence says a lot.

Is nothing sacred anymore?

Some more coverage over here, here and here.

Ever wonder why there are so few audible or well known European players in the PPC affiliate marketing scene? Ever wonder why despite European countries having some of the lowest corporation taxes in the world that there are so few actively engaged in the PPC space?

I’ll leave incorporating in tax havens for another post, but the reason is Google. Google runs Adwords from Ireland and as such must charge VAT on ALL AdWords spend at the rate of VAT of the country you have listed in your billing details.

You affiliates in the US and Canada simply don’t know how good you have it. Can you imagine paying an extra 30% on your AdWords spend EVERY month? For some of you, that would eat completely into your profit margin and make a campaign completely useless.

The solution?

a) Incorporate in a tax haven.

b) Incorporate in the US or Canada.

c) Find yourself a “business partner” in the US or Canada.

Think of it this way, if you have a budget of say $250000 a month on PPC advertising with AdWords which would you prefer?

1) Pay ~ $62,000 to Google in VAT, effectively reducing your budget to ~ $188000

or

2) Pay your business partner (or sister company) $12,000 ?

Remember, there is a big difference between tax evasion (illegal) and tax avoidance (legal). I am not a lawyer, so speak to your accountant about this. If that saving of $62k a month was spent on actual clicks with a ROAS of 200%, that’s a LOT of money being left on the table. Use your head, get creative.

Now normally, In situations like this I would laugh at all the idiots who thought they could make a quick buck and be glad of flush out of shit affiliates clogging up the support lines. However, in this case, I’d like to comment on how ebay are actually handling it as apposed to bitching about loss of livelihood.

First of all, I would like to state that our account(s) have not been dumped and I know exactly why. Not because we have am EPC that ebay doesn’t deem quality, not because we don’t use software like “BANS” or “PHPbay” and not because we don’t send masses of ACRUS. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s just common sense.

Let’s look at it from ebay’s point of view. If you were a company with an affiliate program, what sort of traffic would YOU WANT? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that ebay wants NEW users. Sending existing users to ebay is all well and good, but really, aren’t they ebay’s customers anyway? You just pointed them in the right direction. While you should get paid for that, there is probably a lot less value to ebay in those users. Our account(s) were not dumped because we send a LOT of new sign ups to ebay. We push a LOT of volume and our revenue split is ~50/50 ACRU/Winning bid Revenue.

I have absolutely NO idea why people are suggesting that people with large ACRU numbers are the bad guys. People on the EPN forum are suggesting this and others are lapping it up. Are they retarded? EBAY actually WANT a high volume of new ACTIVE users. Why else would they offer such a high bounty for them? I have not seen or heard of ONE affiliate being dumped because of high (valid) ACRUS. Think about that.

Moving on, while I’m really glad to see a lot less competition out there now, I really think that ebay are shooting themselves in the foot with on this one. The ebay affiliate manager has been called a commie, a Nazi and is even receiving threats on the post he made, and rightly so (Read the whole thread, I almost feel sorry for the EPN manager). There’s terms and conditions, contracts, codes of conduct etc. and then there’s basic human decency. If the heads upstairs knew just how poorly “Steve” over on the EPN forum is handling this, I don’t think they would be happy. We ALL understand that there are quality standards to adhere too, but what’s happening is a virtual slap in the face to affiliates that were in the program. Again, while I am happy to see the bottom feeders weeded out, a little common courtesy would have gone a long way. Especially to those affiliates who have sent decent traffic to ebay.

All you had to do was give clear guidelines.

Steve and the crew at EPN, we know you have a job to do and we know you have targets and goals, but seriously, you should be ashamed of yourselves for how you are treating PEOPLE. I will actually be using this example as a case study in “Worst Case Scenario Reputation Management - How to Completely Fuck Things Up” at the end of the year. And as for the management team over at EBAY… hiring people right out of college who have really no clue what they are doing, no wonder your stock is tanking.

This is 2008, people blog about shit like this.

Don’t worry, we’ll still be pushing volume to you guys over on EPN but treat us like that and you’ll be dumped too. We’ve had our backup plan tested and in place since the beginning.

*** I have a feeling there are a lot of the big names frantically making calls because ebay no longer wants “volume”. They want something most affiliates cannot give them.

Before I start, I would like to point out that I have left out the obvious. Only poor people buy ebooks, only complete retards ask basic questions on affiliate marketing forums (most have an FAQ and there is a fantastic online tool called GOOGLE that allows you to search the ENTIRE WEB to see if your question has already been answered).

The question was as follows:

What is the best way to get started and “learn the basics”? Please be honest. Tired of reading countless websites with holes in their propositions so big you could fit a $%£^& through it. I have the theory just need a helping hand to know where and how to get started.

1) Stop Reading. The secret is NOT out there.

Blogs, forums, ebooks, membership sites etc. are not going to give you the secret sauce. If you had a way to make even just $10,000 a month that only you and a few others (your competitors) knew about, would you want others to know about it? Damn fucking right you wouldn’t. Nobody is that stupid. People who sell those $97 ebooks prey on people that can’t accept that.

2) Forget about Google adsense

Seriously, adsense is great for those interested in a few hundred dollars a month. If that’s all you want, fine. If you want a little more than that, forget it. Adsense sucks up too much time, resources and website real estate for penny payouts. The only contact you should have with adsense is as an advertiser.

3) Market something you are interested in.

I know this one should be included in the bullshit that doesn’t need mentioning above, but this one is really fucking important. How long can you market dating, green tea, glitter makers and ecards before you lose complete interest? I can tell you now, not very long. When you promote something you love, you don’t care as much when the market lulls and you can keep going regardless.

You became (or are becoming) an affiliate marketer because you want to quit your day job, the rat race and actually enjoy what you do. Marketing auto loans, ringtones and worthless clickbank products is EXACTLY the type of thing you were doing in your day job.

4) Have a fucking budget.

While it is very possible to get started with no budget, you would want to be one really REALLY hard working chump to get started with no budget. Seriously, sell your car and throw up all your old crap on ebay. Get yourself something nice to work with. I would not recommend starting with anything less than $20,000 if you are serious. I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this one, but that’s their prerogative.

5) Stay away from the usual suspects.

We’ve all heard of those who either got lucky or are making piss poor returns on those “major” affiliate networks. We’ve all seen those $250,000 checks but a lot of people fail to remember that those checks cost money! I have personally witnessed a $295k payout (seriously, who gets checks these days?) from one of the well known networks to an affiliate who would be ashamed to put details online because she spent almost $280k to get it! With these well known networks, because they are well known, you are up against so many more people competing on the same offer. Why not compete in a niche that has FAR less competition and MUCH greater returns like say, fiber optic test equipment *hint* *HINT*

6) Create something sustainable.

Seriously, when you eventually get bought out by a larger company or affiliate are what are they actually going to buy? A set of landing pages and a PPC campaign? Of course not. You need to create something of value. While there is indeed a lot of money to be made with fly by night CPA programs, having something that is at the mercy of Google’s quality score is completely retarded. Aim to build something that does not rely on Google at all. You’ll thank yourself when you see all those “Anyone else get slapped” threads in those gay affiliate marketing forums. Create something sustainable (for some reason Firefox and Google think that site is dangerous but it’s not) that you love, a good example is an affiliate product blog.

6) Learn PPC.

Affiliate empires don’t grow overnight. In the meantime, there’s PPC. Learn how PPC works. Become intimate with using PPC to generate traffic. Wall Street would kill (literally) to have the returns possible with PPC marketing. Don’t buy an ebook, use 80% of your budget on this one. While you are learning and losing money, read the affiliate playbook over and over.

7) Affiliate networks need you more than you need them.

Once you’re producing volume, either negotiate better payouts with your affiliate manager or go directly to the merchant. The step after this is selling your particular site to the merchant or better yet have multiple merchants bid against each other for your site. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve found out that I am a merchants single biggest source of business. That is a powerful position to be in.

Track your nuts off.

I know this sounds obvious but so many people either don’t do it or don’t do it right. Track ALL traffic down to source and individual keywords. If you don’t know what keywords are converting and what ones are not, your flying blind. Use network subid/customid tracking or use a pre-made solution. I cannot stress how much a difference granular tracking can make to a campaign’s success.

9) Just do it!

Get out of your comfort zone. It’s actually quite liberating once the irrational fear of losing the security of a job subsides. Ignore your family and friends, most of them don’t have a fucking clue what they are talking about. That’s why they sell insurance and work in retail You are GOING to lose money, but that’s the price you pay to get into the lifestyle you wanted in the first place. The easy life doesn’t come easy or free. This point has been beaten to death but rightly so. It’s the most important.

There, I didn’t even link to a stupid flip camera or ipod touch blog competition. I wrote this all by myself.

Note: For complete newbies, I would highly reccomend the black ink project by Jeremy Palmer. The “course” is completely free and the content is pretty much spot on. If he actually charged for this, I would still reccomend it.

** Edit: The Blcak Ink Project is no longer free but it’s still worth your while. Sorry, I don’t do affiliate links.

I am really looking forward to meeting other affiliate marketers. From my previous experience, the price of the ticket is made up ten fold meeting other “under the radar” affiliates and smarter affiliates at the bar. Those not swarmed by others trying to get their picture taken with some numbnut.

Remember, CPA networks are there for themselves, NOT you.

I”ve been following closely as some fellow affiliates explore some less mainstream traffic sources, mainly media buys. (Those blogs are well worth a subscribe by the way). Some affiliates are making some serious cash using media buys and have been for years.

The reason media buys can be so successful is because there is far less competition (PPC and SEO are only a small line in the traffic generation spectrum) and the barriers to entry are so high. For example, the minimum media buy for Tribal Fusion runs at $10k I believe. We spend more than $30k a month with them so this may have changed. Many affiliates do not have this kind fo money to simply throw at a “test campaign”.

The secret to making a media buy a success is being prepared and having the data before you jump in. What better way then to use your existing PPC test data? You have been running Google content network and Yahoo Publisher Network campaigns right? If not, no need to read any further.

Let’s use the Google content network for this example. Say you are running an offer for emirates (the airline). Your AdWords placement report should tell you not only which site you can target (for a private ad deal) but also what creatives generated the highest CTRs. Remember, you’re paying per thousand impressions, you want to make them count.

So assuming your highest CTR banner/creative is this one:

USE IT! Use it as a base to split test your other creatives. You know this has the highest CTR in the content network, this usually follows suit in larger media buys.

Hint 1: The banners and creatives provided by advertisers in say… Commission Junction can sometimes far outperform anything you could ever create and by the same token sometimes perform horrendous compared to your own creative. Test your own creatives with the creatives provided by the advertisers to get the real picture.

Once you get familiar with what works and what does not, the sky is the limit. You can sometimes strike gold getting clicks for cents on the dollar and believe me, it gets addictive. It can almost make PPC advertising not seem like the trouble it’s worth.

Hint 2: Many of the campaigns that you see being advertised through the larger CPM networks are not by the advertisers themselves, they are by affiliates!

As you can tell, I got a little bored about half way through this post. The point I am trying to get across is that media buys are not black magic. They are a natural progression. Once you start dealing with the larger numbers, it gets way more interesting. Assuming you are reinvesting everything back into your advertising campaigns, you should be able to afford a small media buy in months. $10k profits a month is not that difficult to achieve once you get momentum and media buys can have a significantly higher return on your ad spend.

I hope this has helped someone.

- VS -

I’d like to point out before I continue that I have no problem with Pepperjam. In fact, I think what they are doing is very clever indeed. But just because it’s clever, doesn’t mean it’s right. I would consider some affiliate marketers among the smartest in the world and the affiliate marketing industry as a group, a whole lot smarter in general. This is why I fail to understand their logic. My reasons being as follows:

1) An extra layer of complexity. They use the same tracking, why risk it. Traditionally, CPM network lose impressions through daisy chaining, why is this different? What makes you think that Pepperjam are not going to lose some of your clicks and earnings?

2) Shaving. All networks do it. Why would Pepperjam be any different? What’s stopping them?

3) No incentive to go with them. PJ ads? Make your own. PJ chat? What has this got to do with anything? What is the benefit of using Pepperjam to track your EPN performance?

4) The only reason people are pushing PJ is because of the $10 bonus. Seriously? A measly $10 for selling your soul? I don’t know about you, but my reputation is worth far more to me than $10.

5) With EPN, you are direct to merchant. This is the HOLY GRAIL of affiliate marketing. Most big affiliate marketers completely cut out the network and with that, the shaving, tracking issues. In return, they get higher payouts and more flexibility. Why would anyone go from an almost white label deal with a merchant back to the merchant which has given no obvious benefits?

6) Pepperjam are there to make money. End of story. Ever asked yourself why PJ is running the program? They are getting a % share AND because they are on a subaffiliate model, they are getting $10 for each ACRU you generate and 25% revenue share (assuming they are on the top payment tier, which they probably are because we are are we don’t have hundreds of affiliates in our “downline”). Do they tell you that? No, they don’t need to. If they did tell you, you’d want a piece of the pie for generating them so much revenue right?

7) PJ are an affiliate themselves. People seem to forget that. Quoted from coppings here:

“Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely NO problem with PJN. In fact, I emailed Kris and told him how smart an idea I thought it was. Think about it, they don’t even need to take a % cut from ebay (which they probably are anyway) and they are already making a fortune on the ACRU and commission tier differences. It’s borderline genius. If PJ has just 1000 affiliates generating at least ONE ACRU a day…. fuck me. Not to mention the data they are collecting. THEY HAVE ACCESS TO ALL ACRU INFORMATION and sites referring those ACRUS. Some people forget that PJN is not just a network. They are a “super affiliate” themselves. “

Pepperjam only supports US transactions. If your targeting outside the US, your fucked. About 40% of our EPN rev comes from countries outside the US. Including those countries that have invite only eBay programs. (Did you know that?).

Now, if I was to risk tracking and all the other downsides mentioned above, and I was a single “starter” affiliate, I would go with PJ if they offered me even semi-top-tier revenue. But they are not. Why on earth do some people think that tracking will IMPROVE with pepperjam when this is impossible considering all the additional variables.

Can someone explain to me why people think using Pepperjam over EPN is a good idea?

Jonathan Van Clute, what a douchebag. Does he think Google are not aware of the custom URLs for landing pages “trick”. It’s not a trick and I can confirm that Google DO manually review landing pages. This guy says that he invested his own money and that’s all they produced?

“I’m net profitable”

I mean, come on! Jonathan, you’re a really unpleasant person to watch. I just want to reach out and slap you. Reinforces my thoughts that most “super” affiliates are all talk.

As for the host, she is hot and I think she’s actually quite good. She probably didn’t get a lot to work with.

I feel a little sorry for her because she really has the voice and confidence to be up there but I’d be willing to bet my left eye that she’s being fucked about with script changes and structure changes. I know that I’d hire her.

That poor fucker that got eliminated first, they have him reading a script with “tips” on blogging? How sad. I would be totally ashamed and would have been happy at being voted off first so I didn’t have to remain a part of this farce.

I also have sympathy for Ian Fernando. Although he’s a total “wannabe” he realized VERY early on how ridiculous this show makes him (and all other contestants) look. Judging by his blog, he’s another one of those that wants to achieve “Internet celebrity” and while I have no problem with that (people like that entertain me) I believe that he knows deep down that this show is ruining that for him.

I don’t have much to say about the “Gurus”. We all know that John Chow would sell his mother into slavery for a few dollars, a referral or a subscriber to his RSS feed. Nothing new there. And Shoemoney, well, you can see he’s probably in the same boat as Ian Fernando. He realizes this is a complete waste of time and you can see it in his eyes, he’s regretting it. I know he doesn’t give a shit about his reputation, but I would give a shit about wasting my time that would be better spent working on my own business.

And as for Thor Schrock, I really wanted to bitch about him but really, he is the one I feel most sorry for. My heart really goes out to the poor guy. He’s a “fake it until you make it” kind of guy but he really failed on this one. Poor bastard will have to live with this atrocity for the rest of his life. I wont go into the poor production of the show, that’s not really an issue for me, the quality of the content and entertainment value is just disgusting.

Top affiliates do NOT have time to waste being part of something like this.

Seems like a lot of others have similar feelings about this.

I’d love to say I wont be watching any more of this show, but as I said earlier, it’s engrained in our culture here in the US to love watching this shit fail so horribly. Thor, please don’t change a thing.

Today, I am going to show you how I made OVER $95000 in two months using Google Adsense Referrals. What do I want in return? Nothing. Enjoy.

Before we start, I want to give a little background and some advice. What I am about to describe to you got my adsense account banned. I am not saying that you try this method, I am saying that you can use this case study as a source to base your own ideas.

Further to that, I would like to point out that even though my Google Adsense account was indeed banned, I did get the full amount of what I was owed. Google paid me every last cent that I earned with them. The only reason I am releasing this case study is because I have nothing to lose. Because I cannot compete in the space any more, it’s all yours

I am not going to start with any basics here. The basics of online marketing and affiliate marketing I will leave to those more interested in promoting shitty clickbank products and getting “+reps” on affiliate marketing forums. I come from a very heavily focused PPC background and I always have a large bankroll behind me for affiliate marketing campaigns.

Here is what I did:

1.) I took a look at the wordtracker top 500 keyword list. I am subscribed to the free weekly email report that sends the weeks top keywords. I noticed that every week without fail, in the top ten searched for keywords was “Google Earth”.

2.) I logged into adsense and found that Google Earth was part of the “Google Pack” which offered $2 for each successful install.

3.) I created a “mini site” dedicated to Google Earth. Into this site, I added lots of reviews, videos from youtube and of course, a page to download Google Earth.

4.) The download page was the only page on the site that had the menu removed, the logo/title unlinked and barely any content except for the Adsense referral unit to download Google Pack. The screenshot you see below is a page that was split tested about 35 times. This was the final, best performing “landing page”.

5.) I added to official Google favicon to the site. There are thousands of blog posts available on improving a page/site’s credibility. Read them.

The site was now ready to make money. The next step was to send traffic to the “offer”. Unfortunately, Google does not allow adsense users to “promote” Adsense referrals. However, as is usual with Google, their terms were NOT very clear. According to here:

Can I use online advertising to promote my referral ads?

No, you may not use online advertising to purchase traffic for the specific and sole purpose of generating conversions, unless you have the express permission of the advertiser and your site complies with Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines.

Please note that Google does not grant the use of online advertising for the specific and sole purpose of generating conversions for Google products and those of our Google Pack partners.

As you can see, incredibly vague. What exactly constitutes the “use of online advertising” ? Google’s loss. Anyway, moving on.

6.) I decided to send some PPC traffic to the download page. Unfortunately, when using adwords, Google automatically assigns a poor quality score to keywords and ads containing their trademarks. Bet you didn’t knw that did you? (This strangely enough does not apply to the word “adsense”). Sending traffic from AdWords was immediately out of the question.

7.) Yahoo to the rescue. I created an account with Yahoo Search Marketing and set up a single campaign. The “Google Earth” Campaign. Fortunately, Yahoo does not give a shit about quality score. I used a keyword tool to generate about 50 different keywords relating to “Google Earth” and “Download Google Earth” and set the campaign live with minimum bids of $0.10 (ten cents).

8.) Once the account and campaign and creatives were approved, the ad started displaying on Yahoo search. Because the $2 payout was only for the US and certain other countries, I limited the display of the ad to those countries (using different Yahoo accounts).

9.) The traffic literally flooded in. I was getting enough data to start split testing designs almost immediately. I did.

10.) I wont go into the process of split testing and landing page optimization here either, I don’t want to be part of the Internet marketing echo chamber. Needless to say, after a lot of testing and sleepless nights, I came up with the best performing landing page. The only metric that I had to work with was the CTR of the Adsense referral unit for Google Pack. That was enough.

11.) Because nobody else was advertising for the keyword “Google Earth” or related search terms, I was at the number one position most of the time and was only being charged my maximum bid of $0.10 a click. Because there was so much demand for the FREE product Google Earth, there was a LOT of volume. I was a very happy camper.

The Numbers…

• I was spending about $1600-$1900 a day on Yahoo Search Marketing.
• I was averaging about 17500 clicks a day to the download page.
• I had a little over 50% (ultimately, after testing) CTR to the Google Pack download page. That worked out at about 8750 clicks a day to download Google Pack.
• Of those that went through to the download page, 20% actually downloaded the bloated Google Pack product to get Google Earth. That worked out at about 1750 downloads of Google Earth per day.
• Because I was only targeting the $2 per download countries, that worked out at about $3500 USD gross revenue per day. After expenses, it was an average NET PROFIT of about $1750 Per Day.
• I ran this offer for exactly two months. Over the 60 days that I ran this, I made just over $95000. (There were a few bad days and a few really bad days which included server going down and credit card not being charged by YSM.)

After two months, I got the email from Google. My “promotion methods caused a significant risk to it’s adwords advertisers”. Right.

So there you have it. $95000 profit in 60 days and I’m not trying to sell you membership to my uber forum or personal coaching because I got luck with one campaign in my life (Yes that was a dig at that douchebag). Unfortunately my Adsense account got banned so I don’t have the “screenshot proof” to show you. Then again, I’m not trying to sell you anything so I don’t really need it do I? Try it yourself.

I have no idea if this method still works, especially since Google dropped the referral fee for Google pack from $2 to $1. Also, with the recent news that Adsense referrals are to be retired, even with $1 this method will not last very long.

Tips:

Those that use the Yahoo search engine are usually less tech savvy. In this case, they were not aware that Google earth could actually be downloaded as a stand alone application.

Promoting offers with low payouts can be as profitable as those with higher payouts.

Look at other places other than the usual CPA networks for affiliate marketing offers. They are EVERYWHERE and those making serious bank know that.

Don’t waste your time listening to those complete fucktards that blog about their dinner, make videos of their “cribs”, launch membership sites because they made bank with a dating offer once and especially don’t listen to the biggest frauds of them all… the ones who dress up as superheros and claim they are a big deal because they made a myspace layout site once. Go read the blog by Diorex, Eli, Shady, Smaxor and Nicky or even this blog. They seem to know their stuff and are as much against the self proclaimed bullshit as I am.

Feel free to steal the idea in this post. It is of no value to me anymore. Notice I didn’t call myself a super affiliate even once?

Phew… I made it. Not an affiliate link or photo of me holding up an adsense/azoogle check in sight!

I wont be revealing very much about myself at this time. You’ll see why in coming posts. Stay tuned.