Affiliate By Night

Learning the Ropes of PPV Marketing

When it comes to Internet marketing, finding inexpensive traffic is the name of the game. When the end goal is always to have your Earnings Per Click (EPC) be greater than your Cost Per Click (CPC), wouldn’t it be helpful to have CPCs of a penny or two a person? Of course. And that’s exactly what you’ll find with Pay Per View (or PPV traffic).

I won’t go into too, too much detail as to what PPV traffic is. But essentially, there are dozens of PPV Networks out there which leverage traffic through Adware — a completely legal, 100% legit, spam-free traffic source, absolutely not to be confused with Spyware or Malware — and provide to the advertiser views. The way it works is, your ad or landing page is shown in a popup over the keyword or URL a user with the network’s Adware installed on their computer searches for or visits. Advertisers within each network bid on their keywords or URLs and the highest bidder at any given time, has their ad displayed. And here’s the best part for those of us on tight budgets, each of those “views” typically costs 1 to 4 cents (a FAR cry from the 40 cents to multiple dollars it can cost to target keywords in Google Adwords). Plus, direct-linking to offers is completely acceptable, and there are no bullshit Google Quality Score hassles to deal with. Just straight advertising. Pretty cool, right?

So no wonder affiliates everywhere are jumping off the Adwords band wagon and heading to the PPV networks in flocks. And you can count Nate and I among that group. Check back here periodically for updates on our progress as we learn the PPV marketing ropes, so to speak. And in the meantime, might I recommend checking out the PPV Playbook by David Ford. David’s book is not only priced right, but it’s definitely one of the best eBooks (on affiliate marketing or anything else) I’ve ever read. It gets right down to the nitty-gritty, isn’t filled with dozens of pages of fluff just to beef up the book, and is written in a way that any marketer, newbie or seasoned, will not only be able to understand and implement what David recommends right away, but anyone, no matter their experience level, will get something from this book. He also includes a number of videos with the book so you can really see each tactic put to practice; a great addition for the visual learners among us. Click here to check out the book for yourself.

David has also launched a coaching forum to piggyback off the book’s success which I am planning to join this week to really make sure I’m doing the damn thing the right way the first time. Again, when budgets are tight, there’s little room for error. And I’m hoping the coaching forum at PPV Playbook will help eliminate that error.

Wish us luck and if you decide to give PPV a shot, please feel free to report your experiences for all to gain from!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Getting Facebook Ads Approved

A lot is made about the how difficult it is to get Facebook ads approved. And it’s true, it can often be a pain in the ass and getting an ad reviewed can take hours or sometimes days and getting the ad approved can take try after try. And it’s not too terribly surprising if you think about it. Facebook is, after all, one of the largest traffic sources on the Interwebs and their advertising platform is one of the fastest growing.

So undoubtedly the advertising moderators are literally spending their entire day, day-in-and-day-out, sitting at a desk reviewing pending advertisements (occasionally taking a break to go back through old accounts and make sure all currently approved ads are still compliant). It must be a nauseating job. It’s also an educated guess that probably 80% of the ads they have to review are complete garbage.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that occasionally ads which really are compliant with the Facebook Advertising Guidelines still get disapproved, even just accidentally (I’m sure the Facebook employees get banner blindness too). Twice within the last month this has happened to campaigns Nate and I have submitted for approval. So what’d we do? Responded to the disapproval email asking why. I explained that I had reviewed their reasoning (which is usually just auto-generated in the email and a very generic quote of the guidelines) and was confident that both my ad and the landing page it pointed to were well within the advertising guidelines and I asked for advice.

Both times, within a few hours, I received very apologetic emails from the Facebook team that my ads must have been mistakenly disapproved, so they were re-reviewed and approved. It’s important to remember that the folks on the other side of the advertising platform are real life humans and they make mistakes (especially when trying to sift through literally thousands of ads a day, most of which are BS) sometimes, so it never hurts to ask. Obviously if you’re running some Blackhat ad schemes or trying to sneak an Acai Berry Flog through their system, they’re never going to re-review it, even if you ask nicely. But if you have an ad that you swear meets all of their criteria and is still denied, send Facebook a message (you can do so from the link at the bottom of your disapproval emails) and ask why. If they don’t re-review and approve it right away, they’ll at least tell you what needs to be changed to make it compliant, which could save hours of aggravation.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Shoemoney System Launches TODAY!

As I mentioned yesterday, the Shoemoney system launches today at 2pm Central, 3pm Eastern time. I hope you got a chance to check out some of the videos I linked to and get a feel for what the system is all about. It opens today but entrance is limited to the first 500 students only! If you are at all interested in working directly with Shoemoney, learning his secrets to Internet Marketing success and growing your business, you are not going to want to miss this. Oh, and did I mention that all participants receive $2500 in FREE advertising from Facebook, Google, SponsoredTweets, Microsoft, Yahoo and many other companies?!

Right at 2pm Central/3pm Eastern click this link and sign up!

Best of luck, we’ll see you in there!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Shoemoney System About to Launch!

For those of you who don’t know, Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) is about to launch his awesome new Internet Marketing program The Shoemoney System. It’s billed as a chance for you to “See the story of an overweight guy with no job, no social life and no future going from a total slob to making $10,000,000 online.”

It’s a project he was working on for almost all of 2009 and promises to revolutionize the way people think about making money online. He has really put a lot of work into this project and it has tons of awesome benefits for everyone who signs up.

My favorite part is that he has tons of videos to help show you, step by step, the ways that you can make money online and to prove it he uses regular people who probably have less experience than you in his training videos. He has some videos already online that you can check out talking about: The 6 ways to Make Money Online, How to Kill it on Twitter and Facebook Advertising Walkthrough.

If you want to check out the videos, you can view them here and see for yourself how cool it promises to be. Also, be sure to stay tuned tomorrow for a special announcement about the launch of The Shoemoney System at 3pm Easten. You’ll want to act fast, our you’ll be one of the many people who waited too long and missed out. We’ll be joining in, and hope that you join us!

Again, check out his videos here and see for yourself

Popularity: 3% [?]

Overlooked Aspects of a Facebook Ad Campaign

Tons and tons of people use Facebook every day, giving the platform an awesome user base for those of us look to capitalize on all of those users. The sheer volume of users and the incredibly valuable demographic information they input can really help you, the advertiser, make good money advertising on Facebook.

We have been advertising in various niches on Facebook for quite some time and have seen some excellent campaigns that converted much better there then through PPC marketing. While it would be cool to go on about what type of money we made with these campaigns that did well, I think it is much more valuable to tell you about some of the things we did wrong and let you learn from our missteps. Hopefully this will save you valuable time and money and allow you to see increased sucess with your advertising efforts.

First and foremost – Pictures matter! Early on we had a few ads running without ads, or with really generic photos that were only loosely related to our product. Needless to say, the ads we had without good images did not convert well. The first thing you should split test with a new Facebook campaign are several images to find out which ones convert best with the same ad text. This is your chance to really think outside the box a little bit and grab the attention of users and get them to notice your ad, and then click on it. Don’t just use the first image of some dude working out for an acai offer, be creative. Use before and after shots, try using pictures that focus on different parts of the offer/ad text and see what works best. Once you have a good picture, you can move on to the next step.

Once you’ve got a good picture that is converting more than others you tried, then you move to split testing the ad text and trying to create several different calls to action to get users to click through and submit their email, buy your product or whatever it is you are looking for from them. Make sure to let them know what to do – users need direction. We often had trouble getting really good calls to action, and so we we get a lot of clicks but people weren’t often taking action once there. Adding in strong calls to action prime your audiences mind with what they should do next and that will help your conversion rates.

If you’ve followed these two steps you should have improved your ad’s click through and conversion rates a good amount and probably taking a campaign that wasn’t profitable or breaking even into the black. Once you have gotten this far, make sure to re-visit your demographic targetting and make adjustments based on the data you’ve gotten from your split testing clicks. Using the data from your split testing and adjusting based on that is the only way to sustain profitability with these campaigns. Often tons of affiliates are promoting similar products and once you’ve got a solid picture and ad text, you want to put it in front of the users who are most likely to take action. If you aren’t making these adjustments, you’ll be leaving money on the table.

A final word of advice, these tips will hopefully help improve the Facebook ad campaigns you are running, but there may come a point where even an optimized campaign will start to see diminishing returns. Potentially, this is because tons of people have already seen your ad, and are becoming blind to it. To combat this, you can do a few simple things like changing pictures or altering the title or add a bright colored border around the ad to draw a little extra attention to your ad.

Good luck out there on Facebook!

Popularity: 16% [?]

3 Ways to Take Advantage of Holiday Shopping Season

As we all know, the holiday shopping season kicks off with Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving. Virtually every brick & mortar store open at absurdly early hours and boasting tons of extreme doorbuster sales. Now, I would imagine many of us do not own any physical stores but there is still plenty of opportunity to capitalize upon through a number of different avenues. The first of which is through the Cyber Monday craze, the Monday after Thanksgiving where online retailers offer deep discounts and run tons of promotions. Taking advantage of both of these shopping holidays is a great way to kick start a strong holiday season from a making money online standpoint.

Granted, those days have both passed but I am here to tell you that there is still plenty of opportunity to be had out there, as studies have shown that online shopping has increased 11% over last year this holiday season. With more people looking to shop online you should view all these people as potential customers. How can you connect them with the best deals, discounts and products possible while getting a nice reward for your time?

There are a number of ways to accomplish this goal, but I am going to tell you about 3 different ways to capitalize on the increased online shopping this year.

1. Bring Customers to the Discounts

If you can find a way to connect the customers looking to buy with some great deals, you can earn a nice commission. One way to do this is to set up a coupon aggregation website. While this is something that is a little time intensive, it can be a long term money-maker for you, even after the holidays. Setting up a coupon site provides you with a way to connect customers with great deals on products they are looking to buy and a number of networks provide coupon codes to affiliates (For example we’ve used both Linkshare and CommissionJunction) With a little time put into a good web design and some solid SEO you can have a strong money earner month after month.

2. Bring Products to the Customers

Instead of trying to create a website and connecting online shoppers with discounts, connect them directly to the products themselves. Become an affiliate of major companies, like Amazon, and you can turn your website, twitter feed of Facebook page into a portal to the hottest holiday products people want to buy. The best part about using this method is not only does it save you the energy of creating and maintaining a website, but it can also be very lucrative. Not only will you get a commission on the product they clicked on the get to Amazon, but any additional products they buy there as well. Pretty neat way to increase those earnings!

3. Give Customers the Information they Want

The third great way to ramp up holiday sales and generate some extra income is to review products people are looking to buy, providing them with some useful information about the items they are shopping for. By giving them an honest opinion of the products (generally works best if you or someone you know has actually used said products) they can make a more informed decision about if that item is for them or not. A simple product review blog is a great way to accomplish this and the best part is, even if you have a less than stellar review of a certain product you can always suggest better alternatives for them to buy. Include your affiliate links to the products you are reviewing and just like that you are generating some easy extra income.

Hopefully you all have a productive holiday season making money online and that these helpful tips can boost your income and help you end the year on a high note! If you have any other holiday tips for boosting income, feel free to share in the comments section.

Popularity: 29% [?]

How to Make a Profitable PPC Campaign on a Budget

One of the more difficult things to do when you are trying to make it in affiliate marketing on a budget is figuring out how to best allocate what money you have. Is it best spent testing out ad copy and keywords for one campaign? Should I be trying more campaigns and then running with the most promising one? Would it be best to spend some of this money on a coaching course/e-book/plug-in to take my skills to the next level? It’s hard to decide what makes the best use of your money when you are constantly trying to make the best investment decision with it, or else.

I’m here to tell you that what we’ve found to be very successful is what I am going to call “winning small”. What I mean by this is we have adopted an approach where we start very small, laser targeted campaigns that seek to capitalize on very niche markets and a large group of interested parties. For example, running a campaign around the time of the Super Bowl, targeting 21-55 year old men and focusing on the beer commercials is the general idea of what we are doing. For the baseball fans out there, we are basically playing small ball and trying to manufacture as many runs as we can through sacrifice bunts, stolen bases and hit & runs. Essentially, we’re the LA Angels.

Basically what we do is hope to capitalize on some natural traffic, have a great ad with a couple strong keywords and ride that for a short period of time. If we play our cards right, we’ve gotten a lot of cheap clicks that lead to a solid number of conversions and a hefty profit. Think along the lines of spending $25-$50 to make back $200-$300. We certainly aren’t hitting it out of that park and making 5 or 6 figures a day, but for what we’re after (which is efficiently using our money to make as big a return as possible) it’s working out great.

As with most everything though, there is a downside to this method. Unlike a more traditional approach to a PPC campaign, where you may pick an offer and try to scale that campaign up over the course of months or longer, these types of campaigns often have a very short shelf life. You will find yourself constantly making new campaigns and having a very high turnover rate. Also, if you don’t have the a solid ad copy or great keywords to go with it, the campaign will not be as successful, which hurts your bottom line.

That being said, it’s a good way to make a great ROI (often 3-6 times your investment) and build up some solid cash. At AffililateByNight we’re all about making realistic money online in your spare time, and this has been a great way for us to achieve that goal. If you find yourself in a rut or looking for a change of pace, give this method a shot and let us know how it worked out in the comments section.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Don’t be afraid to take risks – It Pays!

One of the biggest hurdles I think people new to this whole making money online thing have to get over is the mindset of doing things you have never done before. To those who aren’t currently making money online, the mere concept of using the Internet to make a living seems either absurd or really easy. Those are the two main reactions I get when talking about it with other people – “You can actually make REAL money online?” or “So you just slap up some blog posts, Google ads and maybe make a few tweets, right?” WRONG!

Making money online doesn’t have to be inaccessible, impossible, or even that confusing but it does require work. It is much more than slapping up some blog posts with ads and waiting for the money to roll in. It’s also something that can be a reality for many people, as you see stories about people making it big online all the time. You just have to be willing to challenge that conventional wisdom and not succumb to the pressure of others.

As Luke and I found out, when you start out in the business you are going to fail, and fail a lot. You need to be willing to accept that there is a learning curve and you will not be a millionaire overnight. However, once you get the hang of how to set up a good PPC campaign, connect with your audience and make some connections in the industry things will improve and you will start to see results. The problem is most people can’t get over the initial assumptions many have that Internet marketing is easy and when they meet some adversity, they give up and walk away. Don’t be so quick to throw in the towel.

We struggled a lot in the early going to make campaigns that would break even in PPC, didn’t have a good sense of what niches we wanted to work in and were constantly changing which offers and networks we were working with. This left us with little practical knowledge of any particular vertical, no strong relationships with any affiliate networks or affiliate managers. After regrouping and really buckling down and focusing in on more specific areas, we found our campaigns slowly improving and began developing relationships with various affiliate managers. As Luke alluded to in his previous post, if you need something, ask for it – and if you’ve built a relationship with someone, they’ll be more willing to help you out and give you some great suggestions to build on.

Now that we have some contacts in the industry, other opportunities for collaboration are opening up and we are starting to see some really positive growth in our online endeavors. So don’t give up at the first sign of trouble, be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom and make sure to build relationships through AIM, Twitter, blog comments and other means to give yourself a support network to power through the tough times. You’ll be surprised how successful you can be if you give yourself a shot.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Continued Twitter Leverage – Contests & More!

Last week I talked about using Twitter, through Sponsored Tweets, to bring in some extra income quickly and simply. Hopefully you took advantage of the opportunity and have signed up for Sponsored Tweets by now. If not, I have another reason why you might want to consider joining up – contests for awesome prizes!

Izea founder Ted Murphy (the people who developed Sponsored Tweets) has held two great contests using his platform so far, giving away a Dominican vacation and a Canon OES Digital Rebel 15.1 Megapixel Camera Kit so far. Now they are having a contest for a cool $1000 in cash, and this is open to International as well as US entrants this time.

All you have to do to win (once you are signed up for Sponsored Tweets, of course) is be the person who refers the most new members before November 16^th. Winner gets to send out a $1000 tweet and you can withdraw that money and do whatever you want with it.

Contest Rules:

• All referrals must be Twitter accounts over 120 days old

• Entrants must be 18 Years of Age or older

• Any use of Twitter bot spamming, or other spamming, will render you ineligible and will result in suspension of your account.

Sign up, start referring and good luck!

If you are in a contest mood, Jonathan Volk is running a Twitter contest on his blog (see how valuable Twitter can be!) with some cool prizes – first prize is dual 22” monitors! Check it out here.

You earn points for tweeting his blog posts, following him on twitter, subscribing to his newsletter and RSS feed, becoming a fan of him on Facebook and making a blog post about him or the contest.

All of these things are really quick and easy to do, and each gets you a chance at some cool prizes that can really help further your online endeavors. While you may not win every single one (or even many of them) it’s a good way to leverage your online presence for the benefit of your business. For example, you could win the prizes, but assuming that you don’t there is still value in referring new Sponsored Tweets users to earn referral income, getting your name out there and building relationships with other like-minded people. That’s one of the main reasons people like Jonathan host these contests is to build their brand, so make sure that you take advantage of the opportunity to do the same.

Popularity: 32% [?]

If You Want Something From Your Network, Ask

When you’re just starting out in this business, a lot of the success of your affiliate career can depend on your relationships with your affiliate networks and managers. They can tell you what campaigns are doing well, what niches are hot, and where (and how) other affiliates are seeing success. All great things to know. However, if you want or need something from your network and your manager, it’s important to remember to ask.

The fact is, no matter how much cash you’re making, affiliate networks need you. They know that there is the potential for you to make big money down the road if you’re just starting out and they also know that the majority of their offers are available on dozens of other networks out there. So they need to and want to treat you better than the competition.

For instance, say you like working with Azoogle and want to promote a certain offer, but you know that Convert2Media has the same offer for a payout of $5 more. Well, don’t just sit there and grumble that you’re not being paid fairly – ask your manager if they can match the c2m payout (and tell him you’ll switch your link if they can’t). You’d be surprised at how often it works.

Nate and I put this very principle to work last week. We were making pretty decent coin with a network and had two campaigns that were doing very well. However, our budgets are severely limited by credit card limits, so we don’t have a lot we can spend at any given time. However, we were pretty close to the network’s minimum requirements for weekly payouts anyway.

So I wrote a long and detailed email to my affiliate manager explaining the situation and what was currently holding us back from making serious income. I then promised to reinvest everything we make for the rest of the year to be able to pay down our credit card and get a increase on our limit so that we can be spending some serious money (and thus generating some serious money) after the new year. Lastly, I promised to continue to run each campaign with him after we are able to scale them up and make them HUGE.

Those things alone were enough to make him advocate for our cause with the network’s accounting department and low & behold we’re now on weekly payments and are able to spend more (since we don’t have to wait for net 30 payments before we’re paid next) each week, able to make more each week and will soon be making serious chedda. haha.

So the moral of the story is, if it’s higher payouts you’re looking for, help choosing a niche or an avenue of promotion, or even something as serious as an increase in payment frequency, if you can make your case wisely and give something back to the network, chances are they’ll throw you a bone. If they won’t, find a network who will and it will pay off in the end. Good luck!

Popularity: 28% [?]