Affiliate By Night

Buying Twitter Followers – Is It Worth It?

With the announcement of Twitter’s new ad platform, lots of attention has been paid recently to making money through Twitter. One of the main things people focus on is the number of followers you have on Twitter, as the larger audience you have the more people will see your tweets, buy your products, click on your links etc. You can also charge a higher price per tweet for services like Sponsored Tweets with more followers.

That leads us to the question at hand, is buying Twitter followers worth it? What’s that you say, I can BUY followers on twitter? You sure can and there are a number of services ready and willing to give you followers in exchange for your money. You can do a simple Internet search for “buy twitter followers” and get a bunch of results. You’ll see places like:  BuyTwitterFriends.com, PurchaseTwitterFollowers.com, TweetSourcer.com and UnlimitedTwitterFollowers.com among others. Each has a different price per 1000 followers that you buy, and generally speaking, the more you buy the bigger the discount you get.

Depending on what you use your Twitter account for, buying followers could be very worthwhile for you. If you have a twitter feed dedicated to promoting your blog/brand and selling products and Sponsored Tweets then buying followers may be a good investment. You’ll get more eyes on your tweets and be able to charge more for sponsored ones, and you won’t have any issues with your tweet stream being flooded and unmanageable since you aren’t interacting all that much to begin with.

My personal feeling is that I am using Twitter to connect with people, have conversations, find interesting content to read and promote blog posts that drive some traffic. I love the list feature since it allows me to better manage my followers and engage more effectively in communicating with people. Having a bunch of untargeted followers I bought from a service doesn’t seem to further my goals. Additionally, I don’t like the idea of “paying for friends” essentially and would prefer to have people following me that are interested in what I have to say and not there because I paid them to be. I also feel like buying a ton of followers can create a false influence effect, whereas people become perceived as an authority due to a large following, even though they could have bought most of those followers.

In a nutshell, if you are looking for a fast way to build a big following and make some more money in the short term than purchasing twitter followers may be a good option for you. Otherwise, you may want to take a longer term approach and build your twitter following organically and have invested people following you.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Do It Yourself SEO: An Easy Way to Increase Rankings

There is a new program that has recently launched called Do It Yourself SEO and it seeks to help individuals and small business improve their SEO rankings in the major search engines. It’s a simple to use and relatively effective program that can help drive a lot of traffic to your blog, website, store or other online property and more traffic is very valuable.

What is SEO again and Why is it Important?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and by making some changes to the way you utilize keywords, get and give links and incorporate proper tagging on your site it seeks to improve your search engine rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Higher ranking = more traffic. More traffic = more users/visitors/customers = more money! It’s important to have your site optimized for search engines because the easier search engines can find your great content, the more relevant and authoritative your site becomes and it will move up the rankings. Getting free traffic is always great.

Sounds Expensive and Complicated

Traditionally, getting SEO service from a professional can be very expensive, especially to get quality work that will last and bring in useful visitors. Often the top SEO’s charge a monthly retainer fee that can run into the thousands of dollars for their time and effort. Many also include performance bonuses that escalate that monthly fee as your ranking in Google increases for each keyword. If they are any good at their job, that’s another several hundred to several thousand a month right there. SEO can be very expensive.

As for complexity, extensive optimization work can be very time consuming and for those who don’t have a good working knowledge of the web, or HTML, and are just looking to produce some blog content or make their company website sparkle a bit, it can be overwhelming.

Here is where Do It Yourself SEO can help

As it states on it’s website, the DIYSEO program is designed to provide “big business solutions at a small business price. Tap into the knowledge of renowned SEO experts at a low monthly cost.” For $49 a month the program will give you access to many of the tools used by top SEO’s who charge thousands of dollars a month and use them to analyze your site(s) for you. After analyzing your backlinks, checking your on page HTML, linking and keyword usage you will get a daily email with a simple step to take to improve your website. It will include easy to follow instructions on how to complete the task and shortly these changes will begin to raise your search engine ranking in all the major engines.

The best part is that to promote this product after it’s recent launch, they are offering a 7 Day Free Trial I’m a big believer in the free trial, as it let’s people who are on the fence about your product try it for free to see if they like it and if it will be useful to them. If the product is good enough, there is no reason not to keep it and pay after the trial is up and it lets the customer try it risk free.

So Does it Work?

The interface is really user-friendly and presents the information in a very simple, understandable way. The program is laid out really nicely and is easy to navigate through, a huge plus. The simplicity of the step-by-step instructions is also great as it provides a simple task communicated clearly to you each day. As for the increase in rankings, it’s a little too early to tell exactly how effective it is. While I have some doubts about DIYSEO’s ability to drastically improve your rankings (especially for more competitive keywords) if you are an individual or small business looking to rank for a longer tail keyword or more niche phrase, then this product will definitely help you out. If you are looking to boost your ranking for something like “make money online” through this though, you may not see such dramatic results.At the very least, you’ll learn about SEO and get some sound strategies you could implement yourself in the future.

Try Do It Yourself SEO Free for 7 Days and see what it can do for you.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Twitter Announces New Ad Platform

Recently, news broke that Twitter will soon be releasing it’s new ad platform, Promoted Tweets. In the past we have seen a number of popular sites (Facebook, MySpace, PlentyofFish etc.) that have rolled out advertising platforms to huge press and early adopters made a ton of money there. With laser demographic targeting and a new viewing audience, these platforms gave affiliate marketers a ton of new opportunities – will this twitter ad platform bring the same? I certainly think so.

Here are the details we know so far, from the TechCrunch article breaking the news:

• As previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.
• Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. The Times piece notes that companies could use this to combat negative tweets (they can place a positive tweet at the top of the page)
• A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.
• One ad will be shown at a time



• Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo
• Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweet

As you can see, the platform is initially being limited to a few big companies, so no opportunities for us just yet as Twitter sets to test of the effectiveness of the new system. One of my main concerns is how this advertising opportunity will eventually affect SponsoredTweets, which has been a decent revenue stream for Luke and I over the last few months. Keep in mind that according Twitter, “In the next phase of Twitter’s revenue plan, it will show promoted posts in a user’s Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser.” Eventually, we will all be seeing ads in our Twitter feeds and this appears to be one facet of the monetization of twitter by it’s owners.

Regardless of how it plays out, I feel like there is going to be a lot of opportunity for advertisers once Twitter unleashes their new ad platform to the public so stay tuned for that announcement and be ready to pounce.

In the meantime, sign up for Sponsored Tweets if you haven’t yet already and start cashing in on Twitter. If you don’t want to miss any additional updates, take a second and sign up for our RSS Feed as well.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Facebook Advertising Policy Updates

At the end of last week, Facebook updated it’s advertising policies in it’s continuing effort to “improve ad quality and user experience”. While often times updates such as these can be minor, having little effect on your campaigns, the changes made this time were pretty significant so you’ll want to pay attention and make sure to make changes accordingly.

It’s likely going to have a big effect on the way many people are running a number of popular ads, such as ringtones, ZIP/E-mail submits, lead generations with misleading ad-text etc.

Here’s some excerpts from the update announcement:

Improving Ad Quality
Ad quality and user feedback have always been important considerations
for Facebook Ads, and are significant factors in determining which ads we
accept and display on the site. We’ve recently taken a close look at the ads
that drive the most negative feedback, and identified four key themes
behind ads that are detrimental to the user experience. As a result, we’re
strengthening our Advertising Guidelines in these key areas to ensure that
all Facebook Ads meet our high quality standards.

Unclear Recurring End Product
Advertisements must be clear and straightforward in describing any
recurring end product to the user. The advertised offer must directly
match the service being sold, and ads should provide the user with a clear
understanding of what he or she is purchasing.
Facebook Ads for products with recurring billing cycles
should not:
1. Focus on an advertised “hook” without disclosing the core
subscription-based service.
Example: “Take a quiz!” (for a service that includes ringtones, wallpaper, or other
undisclosed services)
2. Position a subscription-based service as a single product or
billing interval.
Example: ”Try now for $2.95” (for a service that includes monthly billing intervals)

Unexpected User Experience
Advertised products may not generate any unanticipated user experience.
This includes, but is not limited to:
1. Computer performance changes, such as the unexpected
installation of any secondary software or the overlay of
advertisements on the user’s browser or operating system
2. Unanticipated recurring charges
3. Undisclosed sale or distribution of requested user information.
Any distribution of user information must be confirmed through
user consent.

Unsubstantiated Claims
Ads must not include unsubstantiated claims. Ads must clearly represent
the offer, company, product, or brand that is being advertised.
Unacceptable claims include, but are not limited to:
1. Unrealistic prices or rates.
Examples: “$0.50 LCD TVs,” “$10/month health insurance”
2. Use of current events or news reports to create false associations
with the advertised product. Political events or images may not be
used for an irrelevant commercial agenda.
Example: “Breaking News: Great car insurance rates”
3. Use of false qualifications to create a sense of relevancy
Example: “If you are right-handed, you qualify for low premiums”
4. Implication of dynamic ad content
Examples: “7 minutes remaining,” “only (3) available”
5. Implied knowledge or passing of user data
Examples: “See who searched for you,” “you have been chosen”

Unacceptable Business Models
Ads will not be permitted in cases where a business model or practice is
deemed unacceptable or contrary to Facebook’s overall advertising
philosophy.
Unacceptable business models include, but are not limited
to:
1. Lead generation offers which sell or distribute a user’s
information to larger extent than indicated by the landing page
2. Offers that require a user to complete several hidden steps or
make additional purchases in order to receive the promised product
3. Offers that require the input of user information for complete
access to offer or product details
4. Ads promoting deceptive recurring billing services
5. Downloadable software that may affect the user’s computer or
browser performance in unexpected or undesirable ways

As you can see reading through that list, a lot of popular affiliate offers will be affected by the changes. This doesn’t mean you have to stop running them, you will just need to be very clear in your ad copy what the offer really is. It should go a long way towards clearing up scammy offers and have a serious effect on re-bill offers as well. You’ll certainly have to be much more straightforward with your ad copy and being creative will be important in making your ad stand out and get approved as well.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Why Taking A Break Can Improve Your Work

Over the holiday weekend I didn’t really do any work. I didn’t look at campaign stats, I didn’t write any posts and I didn’t do much tweeting or other work related activities. I took a short vacation from making money online/affiliate marketing efforts and tried not to think about anything. Today, I feel re-energized, re-focused and ready to rock on all fronts.

So what benefit did taking a break have? For one, I was able to relax a little bit and not get caught up worrying about the day to day affairs of having an online business. Secondly, I was able to take a step back and this gave me some excellent perspective on the things I had been working on. Things that I wasn’t able to see because I was so engrossed in all the things that I was doing.

It’s this gaining of perspective that I want to talk about for a second, because I think it’s an overlooked aspect of being a successful person. Lots of people think that working as hard as they possibly can all the time is going to unlock the keys to success, fame and fortune for them. While I am a huge proponent of hard work and dedication, I think the ability to work hard most of the time comes from the ability to occasionally take a step back, relax, and reflect on the process you’ve taken to get where you are.

Using a weekend, or mini-vacation, to take an overview of your work or get away for awhile can let you see your projects in a whole new light and could take you past a stumbling block. Spending an afternoon with family and enjoying the weather allowed me to realize a silly mistake I was making with a Facebook campaign. I shifted some variables around and made a new ad today that combined the picture from one with most of the text from another. I should have put them together in the first place but for whatever reason I didn’t originally. After looking at it with fresh eyes, it just clicked for me.

So next time you find yourself frustrated with a campaign, or affiliate marketing in general (we’ve all been there) maybe think about taking a brief break and seeing if you can get some fresh perspective when you leave it all behind for a bit. Who knows, it could open up your next big break!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter 2010 everyone! Just wanted to take a second to wish everyone a Happy Easter and hope that everyone had as great a day as I did. It was sunny and 75 degrees out and I spent some quality time with family enjoying a nice meal and relaxing in the beautiful weather. We hope that you were able to take a little time and do some of the same. In the mean time, enjoy the LOLcat.

Oh and for those of you who are into beer and baseball – Sam Adams Summer Ale is on tap (a personal favorite of mine) and it’s opening night for MLB baseball with the Red Sox taking on the Yankees! Quite a day!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Struggling to Create Blog Content? Buy it from ArticleMe!

As the saying goes: “Content is King!” When running a blog one of the biggest factors in attracting and more importantly retaining readers is having unique and interesting content. While you may have a lot of great content on your blog, what happens if you are running out of ideas for new posts? What if you are going on vacation and need a few fill-in posts while you are gone? Now you can purchase blog content from an excellent new source ArticleMe.

What is ArticleMe, Anyway?

The way the sites works is as a marketplace for bloggers and writers to connect and exchange professional content. If you are looking to get some fresh content for your blog, website or newsletter you are provided with a secure place to find and inspect the content. As a writer, you can find a wide audience to pitch your writing to and make some money for your efforts. There is no cost(!) to list your articles, although ArticleMe takes a 30% cut from any sale. However, payments are made the instant the sale is made.

When looking to buy content through ArticleMe you get to inspect the content, check for quality and secure payment securely through them. They include plagiarism checks and allow you to request content as well should you not find what you are looking for, which is pretty useful since quality is important.

Different Licensing Rights

When using the service, you are also given the option of choosing your license type for the content you publish. They offer three distinct license options.

• Usage License: This allows the content to be used by the buyer, but it can be sold to other buyers.
• Unique License: This license allows the content to be sold to only one buyer, however that buyer cannot resell that content.
• Full License: This license gives the buyer full control and ownership of the content, allowing them to use, publish or resell it however they see fit.

The costs are going to vary for each license type and you will need to decide which is best for your situation. I would recommend at least a unique license, because having content that has been sold to other people and used by them as well could open you up to a Google duplicate content penalty.

Get Paid $3,000 for Writing

As a new service (created by Levi Thornton, founder of Doggyspace.com and Wordze.com) they are looking to make a name for themselves and generate some articles in their marketplace. Therefore, they are hosting a $3,000 dollar contest to find a cover story for the site. If you make a post about ArticleMe and it’s chosen as the winner, it will be the front page story on the site and you will get $3,000. Not bad for a little article, eh? Of there are rules:

• You need a blog
• Your cover story must be ArticleMe
• You have a link to ArticleMe.com within the cover story
• You can only enter in 3 stories in the contest and they must be published 3 months apart
• Once your story is published you need to submit it on the site within 24 hours to qualify for the contest

It’s that simple, and you could win 3k. Not a bad deal for a little effort.

Personally, I like writing my own blog content so I don’t think I will be purchasing much content from them. However, when I have some spare time I may consider writing up a few articles and posting them for sale on the site. It could be a good source of revenue for an efficient and effective writer and a good way to diversify your earnings. Could be better than freelancing, that’s for sure.

For more info on the service, you can check out their introduction video on their main site.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Do You Know How Much Time You Are Wasting?

As I sat down at my computer today, I settled into my normal computer routine. After I got through most of the stuff that I usually do before settling in to really get some work done, I happened to glance at the clock and realized that almost 2 hours had passed. 2 Hours!? What the heck was I doing? And that’s when it hit me – I was just wasting time in a big way. And as we all know Time is Money.

The thing is, I bet all of you are wasting a bunch of time doing things you think are “important” and “necessary” but actually, once you step away from them leave you with A LOT more time to get other stuff done. This could be working on writing more blog posts, doing more SEO work, tweaking a Facebook campaign or AdWords campaign or any numbers of things business related. It could also be a bunch of other really great stuff that you wanted to make time for, but didn’t know how – spending time with family, exercising, taking a course, or in my case, reading.

Here’s my routine that I’ve been in for awhile now when I sit down at the computer, and I’ll highlight the areas where I feel I am wasting a lot of time.

Check Email (5-15 minutes)

Google Buzz (2-3 minutes)

Check Google Reader (10-40 minutes)

Use Twitter (15-20 minutes, usually 2-3 times a day)

Read FanGraphs (10 minutes)

Check Fantasy Sports Teams (15 minutes)

Various other web browsing (5-30 minutes)

That adds up to anywhere from one hour to as much as two+ hours a day of obligations, before I even start getting stuff done online. I could be so much more efficient and get so much more accomplished if I had known how much time I was wasting on these things.

Take a look at the list – you are probably doing some of the same stuff I am am may not realize how quickly an easily you could recapture a good chunk of your day. I am going to cut down my number of RSS feed subscriptions, streamline my twitter use and spend a lot less time randomly browsing the web. That should save me about an hour or more a day in which I plan to do more reading (of, you know, actual books) and potentially get in a little more exercise/outside time as the weather gets nicer.

What more could you be doing with your day and how easily could you make it happen?

Popularity: 1% [?]

A PPC Ad Pricing Guide

One of the trickier aspects of building a PPC campaign can be finding the right price for your ads. Obviously you want to get it as low as possible, but still giving you good visibility and click rates. Finding the right balance can be difficult, especially when you are just starting out. I thought I would go over how I try to find the “sweet spot” of ad pricing, where I feel I am maximizing my return.

Step One: Know Your Niche

The first thing to remember is that different niches are going to carry different costs to get the ad placements you are looking for. For example, if you wanted to run a dating campaign on Google, it’s going to cost you a lot more per click for popular keywords than if you were to run an IQ test on Google. Knowing how competitive, and thus, how expensive a given niche is is critical for both effectively pricing your ads and maximizing your budget. Researching a niche, and the associated cost to advertise in it BEFORE you start a campaign is a great plan and is a very common mistake made.

Step Two: Work Within Your Budget

Another critical step, especially for those of us working on a budget on part-time. You want to get the most out of your advertising dollars so make sure that you set a daily budget big enough to give you some valid testing results. If a click is costing you. 75 in the dating niche, a $10 a day budget won’t get you very good info as to how successful your campaign is going.

Step Three: Getting Valid Data

One of the biggest things we did at the start was abandon campaigns too quickly. If we hadn’t seen conversions in the first 100 or so clicks for the entire campaign (ones with LOTS of keywords, mind you) we would get discouraged and think that ad/offer/niche wasn’t working. I feel that you should try to get a solid bank of data per keyword before deciding if it is worthwhile or not – 50 or so clicks per keyword is usually a good sample. Other people like to spend 2 -3 times the offer payout before deciding if a keyword is worthwhile or not, it’s up to you.

Step Four: Making Adjustments

Once you’ve researched a niche, set a useful budget and gotten some test keyword data you can now go in a lot of different directions to make your campaign more profitable. You have data now, and this is the key to making smart, profitable decisions. If certain keywords aren’t converting well, replace them with some new ones. If you have keywords that are converting well, adjust the bid on them (either up or down) and see how that effects conversions through another 50-100 clicks. Since you you always be split testing your ads anyway, if one is performing a lot better than the other, replace the weak one with a new ad copy and see what happens. Data is your friend as it lets you know what keywords, what times of day, what people are converting well for your offer. If you track well, you will profit.

Step 5: Scale the Campaign and Repeat

After getting your test data and making adjustments, you’ll know if your campaign is paying off for you or not. If it is, increase your daily spend to get more exposure, maybe up some really hot keywords bid and always keep tweaking looking for improvements. Then, it’s back to step one with a new offer, maybe a new niche and seeking those profits again.

If you are looking for good tracking software, tracking202 is a great free resource for tracking your PPC campaigns if you aren’t already.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Affiliate Marketing Calculus

Affiliate Marketing an Making Money Online is very much a numbers game.  You need to know the answers to questions like: what’s your conversion rate? Click-Through Rate? ROI? CPC? CPM? On an on and on. It can get overwhelming at times trying to keep track of all these numbers and still make blog posts or manage campaigns. This is doubly true if you are only doing affiliate marketing part-time.

For a great refresher, or introduction to, what the simple math behind all of those terms above you should read Daniel Scocco of Daily Blogging Tips newest post – Basic Mathematics for Internet Advertising. It provides a detailed breakdown of CPM, CPC & Conversion Rate with some great examples. Puts all those potentially irksome numbers in perspective for sure.

The basic calculus that I like to employ when looking at the big picture of making money online is pretty simple:
Does Time Invested = Monetary Return + Enjoyment? When taking a look at the basics of working online, if the time I am putting in isn’t getting me a satisfactory amount of money and enjoyment, then I probably shouldn’t spend my precious time doing it.

Your values for those variables in my equation can be whatever works for your situation. Some people may be happy spending 10 hours to make $1,000 and hate every second of it ($100 for every miserable hour). Others would need to make more for that to be worth it, or would want to enjoy it more and perhaps make less for it to be worthwhile.

Take a second to think about what your Affiliate Marketing Calculus equation looks like and see if you need to make some adjustments.

Popularity: 1% [?]