Affiliate By Night

Make More Money By Having A Plan

As Luke and I are beginning to figure out as we get more and more familiar and comfortable in the world of affiliate marketing it is critical to know what you are doing 3 steps ahead of time. The landscape of hot offers changes at a very rapid pace and so it is critical to have a plan in place not only for whichever offers you are promoting at the moment, but also what your next couple of moves are as well. If you have a solid plan in place, you’ll always be working towards your next goal and generating income. Opertaing a rudderless ship like we were for a little while is a great way to see gaps in your income.

Making a Battle Plan

We quickly realized a few months back that income streams in affiliate marketing can be extremely variable. One week you are raking in money hand over fist, and the next week the profits all but dry up. This is the danger in having a limited number of modes for generating income and why we have started to diversify our earnings streams by branching out a bit. We were promoting a particular dating offer that was doing really well for us but the advertiser decided to pull the offer and we didn’t really have a solid back-up in place at that time leaving us with a serious gap in our earnings. We knew at that point that we needed to have a battle plan for our business and got to work hammering one out.

Divide & Conquer

Since the two of us work together but live in different locations and have different schedules, it made sense for us to divide up the tasks each of us will be working on and set dates to check in with each other on progress. This allows us to each be working towards our new goals over the course of a week and then when we check in we use some of that time to outline our work for the next week or so. As part of our divide and conquer strategy we also started to implement a lot more future planning so that we constantly have campaigns running and other ideas being developed in the background. Rarely do he and I work on the same project simultaneously so that we can have as many different opportunities developed to make money online as possible. We are hoping that this process of planning ahead will lead us to a very profitable and productive 2009.

Implementing your own plan

Many of you won’t have the advantage of working with a business partner right away, or at all, but that doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t make a plan for your online business. In fact, it is often even more critical to plan ahead when you are working alone since you are the only one holding yourself accountable. Making a weekly, monthly or even yearly goals list for yourself and then structuring your work around those goals is an excellent way to stay focused, productive and profitable since if you’ve planned correctly you’ll always have several streams of income working for you.

If you aren’t in the business of planning ahead, you should make an effort to start 2009 off on the right foot buy planning your online plan of attack for one month and see how much more productive you can be. My guess is it will cut down on wasted time, focus your efforts more and provide opportunities for self-evaluation and improvement. Good luck!

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Happy Holidays from AffiliateByNight.com

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Thanks for reading!
Luke & Nate

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Make Money Online Through Domaining

Just like in any business you get into, it’s always a good idea to diversify – diversify the ways in which you make your money and the places in which your net worth are scattered; just because you’re making money online doesn’t mean it should be any different. So, it’s with that in mind that Nate and I have recently gotten into “domaining” or the business of buying & selling domain names – in order to diversify where and how we make our money online.

Just like with any other “make money online” venture, domaining isn’t as easy as it looks! There is reading to be done, trends to watch, “tools of the trade” to discover and an entire industry to master. But there is definitely money to be made! In fact, just today it was reported that the domain SolarEnergy.com was just sold for $1.6 million!

Think of Domaining like the stock market

Buying and selling domain names is much like buying and selling stocks on the stock market. You build domain “portfolios” like you do stocks; generally you buy a domain as cheaply as you can, let it age and mature then, riding market trends, sell it when the time is right for big profits. So, if you have the money to spend, it’s definitely a good idea to build your domain portfolio and grow your net worth that way, just as you would with traditional stocks. Think of domains as stocks 2.0…

Tools of the Trade

I’ve listed a few of the domaining tools that I’ve discovered so far in our new “resources” section of affiliatebynight.com, so be sure and check those out but if you want to get started right away, I would recommend first heading to the forums at namepros.com and reading everything you can find there. It’s the best way to have a “crash course” in learning about domaining. If you want to see some of the domains out there you might be able to pick up and cash in on, I recommend starting with “dropped” and expired domains – some places to find the best dropped domains are freshdrops.net and godrops.com. You can also cruise the domain auctions at GoDaddy (the registrar we use to register all the domain names we pick up) and places like SEDO, SnapNames & Pool.com. Your first stop for trying to determine the value of the domain you’re interested in should be estibot.com. So check all of those out and good luck with your new found online obsession – I hope there’s money in it for you!

Our Domains

If you’re interested in checking out the domain names we’ve picked up so far in our as-of-now short-lived domaining careers (all of which are currently available for purchase), check out affiliatebynight.com/domains. Cheers.

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The Benefits of Contests

Anyone who is familiar with the top marketing blogs and make money online blogs around the Internet should be aware of the numerous contests that are always happening online. Later on I’ll go over some great opportunities for you all to get involved in some contests but first I wanted to talk about what the benefits of contests are and why you should spend a few minutes entering them.

1. Winning Great Prizes

It’s clear that actually winning some of the great prizes that are being given away online is a great reason to enter contests. In the brief time we’ve been a part of the affiliate marketing business we’ve been fortunate enough to win some prizes from several different contests, including T-shirts, bags, USB pens, and an iPod! You can’t win if you don’t enter, as they say, so why not take 5 minutes and give one a shot?

2. Entering is Very Easy

Another great feature of these contests is that entrance is usually very easy. The majority of contests that are out there operate on an entries system, and each action gets you another entry and the winner is picked at random. If you have 15 entries, you stand that much better of a chance of winning. Entering can often be as simple as subscribing to a newsletter or RSS feed, leaving a comment or making a tweet on Twitter about the contest – all things that take no more than a minute. Seems well worth an iPod, money, laptop or other excellent prize.

3. Making Connections

While many people focus on trying to win prizes or get visibility by participating in/hosting a contest there is another great benefit that often gets overlooked – making connections with others! If you enter a contest by commenting, tweeting or another similar method you can easily connect with other participants who have similar interests. Who knows you could form your next great partnership or get a valuable mentor in the process of trying to win prizes – not a bad deal at all. Commenting also gives you the ability to leave a link to your own blog, which can drive some traffic and net you some subscribers as well. In the online business world, having connections and people to bounce ideas off of is the greatest currency of all.

Want to Try and Win Some Prizes for Yourself?

If you are looking to cash in on some of the great opportunities that contests can provide here are some that are currently going on right now that you can enter. Hurry though, as many of them are ending soon!

• Market Leverage is at it again! Teaming up with a number of popular blogs they are having a “Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Contest” where users will choose a Market Leverage offer and share their secrets on how they would promote it. If you’d like to enter, head over to the JohnChow.com post about the contest and submit your entry.
• Over at AGreedyGenius.com he is running a contest for $800 in various cash prizes to promote the launch of his new book on eBay marketing techniques. There are 4 different tiers to the contest allowing you multiple ways to enter and multiple chances to win. As I mentioned above, entering contests can be realy easy and this is one of them!
• Ted Murphy, founder/CEO of IZEA, is giving away some cool intel swag on his blog. Multiple ways to enter here as well, and I recommend following him on twitter while you are at it – lots of good tweets

Those are just 3 great opportunities for winning some prizes, making some connections and building your online presence/brand trough contests. If you know of any other good ones going on right now, let everyone know in the comments or if you don’t want to miss out on any more that I dig up, follow me on Twitter yourself.

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Three Easy Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

In the world of affiliate marketing there are numerous mistakes and pitfalls that befall everyone. Many of them are ones that you learn a great deal from and make you a better affiliate in the long run – most mistakes should be a learning opportunity for you! Here are some easy mistakes we’ve made recently that you can avoid making to save you time and money, while still getting the learning benefit from our oversights.

1.    Proofreading is Essential

When creating a campaign recently, we had what we thought would be an awesome domain name for an offer we were looking to promote. We registered it, got a bunch of our content ready to put up and set up a PPC ad campaign to drive traffic to it. After looking everything over one last time to ensure it was ready to launch we realized that the only reason we got such a “great” domain name was that it had a big misspelling in it! Needless to say, while we could have proceeded with the improperly spelled domain name, it drastically changed how it tied in with our product promotion and we had to go back to the drawing board. Big waste of time there.

Also, when hurriedly throwing up an ad copy for an offer we were promoting, we didn’t put the destination URL in properly (again another minor typo) and were prepared to send traffic to the wrong site!

Luckily we were able to catch both errors before too much financial damage was done, but we should have been more careful from the get go and avoided any issues from the start. Make sure you look everything over twice before you have it go live to avoid these embarrassing and potentially costly mistakes

2.    Proper Tracking is a Must

As mentioned above, in the rush and excitement of getting new campaigns going we ran into several spelling errors that could have cost us big time had they not been caught. This next mistake was one that DID cost us because we didn’t set up our tracking correctly on one of biggest campaigns. Due to improper tracking, the statistics that would have told us which keywords/ad groups/demographics were performing well and which weren’t so we could optimize didn’t record. We didn’t pick up on it for several days and so while the overall campaign was still profitable we weren’t able to weed out the underperforming keywords for days and it dragged down profitability because of our error. Now we are always sure that our tracking is set up properly with the requisite links and proper spelling.

3.    Budgeting is Critical

While budgeting is critical to the success of all affiliate marketers, since no one want to be wasting their money or missing out on profits, it’s even more important for those of us with tight budgets and lower margins for error. This applies to not only budgeting for what you can afford to spend on affiliate marketing in general, but all the way down to your individual campaign budgets as well.

One big area where we were missing out on early was being afraid to use most of our budget on our most successful campaign in order to keep testing various other offers. Had we adjusted our budget for that one campaign upward and scaled back some of our other ones we would have gotten many more clicks, conversions and ultimately profit from it. When you have something that is working, make sure to capitalize on it immediately because the longevity of a campaign is not infinite and it’s important to budget properly in order to maximize your return.

As you can see, these were pretty silly mistakes to make, but ones we’ve clearly learned from and implemented procedures to make sure we are more careful and diligent in our work. We’ve grown a lot since we first started in this business and will continue to grow more as we gain experience and additional income to invest. Make sure to learn from our mistakes so that you can save yourself a lot of precious time and money.

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Viral Networks – Social Networking meets Internet Marketing

One of the biggest challenges for anyone owning/operating a blog is finding a way to market your content and get a subscriber base to follow you. It’s one thing to have all the great content in the world and have all these slick monetization techniques prepped and ready to deploy for your site, but if nobody ever reads what you are writing than what’s the point?

A really popular way to try and grow the following of blogs has been through social media and networking sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Plurk, Facebook etc. where users can follow one another and share their content with a wide array of different people in the hopes of getting some more traffic. A great new way to accomplish this task and to earn some rewards for yourself at the same time has presented itself in the new Viral Networks social networking site.

Viral Networks is a new social networking site that allows users to sign up, use the provided promotional tools to promote their blog/site and create a “downline” of followers all promoting their content to a broader and broader audience. Due to the way the site is structured, it is set up to allow you to promote your site and your content in an almost exponential manner, depending on how aggressive you are.

In addition to promoting your site, you can connect with other like-minded marketers through the forums, sharing videos, adding friends, promoting bookmarks and other content all the while earning credits for each of your actions. The more active you are, the more credits you earn. The number of credits you earn goes towards determining if you qualify for a share in the Revenue Sharing Program where a portion of the sites revenue will be given out to it’s members! That’s a pretty cool bonus for promoting your business right there.

The way the network is set up to go viral (hence the name) is that you also get credits for referring new members. If you refer a new member, you earn 10% of all their credits, and the multi-tiered referral system goes down 5 levels as well, so you earn 10% of the credits from each of those new members too.

It’s a really creative way to get people to contribute to the community and have the network, and it’s content, go viral. They are also running contests pretty frequently to reward members for getting referrals and being active in the community. Its just getting started so now is a great time to sign up!

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Putting it All In Perspective: Set Realistic Goals

If you find yourself frustrated with your affiliate marketing endeavours, it’s always helpful to set some goals and put everything into perspective. But make sure those goals are obtainable. Think about it like this:

Sure it’d be awesome to make $100k/month, and maybe some day your affiliate marketing work will get you to that point, as it does for some. But setting a goal for a six-figure month at this stage of the game isn’t practical. You’ll only be let down. But maybe a steady $100/day profit is an obtainable goal.

“Only $100/day?!”, you say. “That doesn’t seem like much!” And you’re right, in affiliate marketing $100/day really isn’t much (or doesn’t have to be) but when you break it down, one hundred dollars a day profit will result in a job that pays you $36,500 a year! When you think of it that way, it suddenly sounds like a pretty good chunk of change. In fact, $36k is more than the national average for an entry-level job. And that doesn’t include the fringe benefits associated with affiliate marketing, like working from home, not commuting, being your own boss & setting your own hours – where in the “real world” working world would you find a job like that?!

So next time you find you’re getting down on yourself about your marketing efforts, re-examine your goals – make sure they’re realistic and obtainable. Then go out and earn yourself a $37,000 salary!

[image via cnn.com]

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What We’ve Changed to Suddenly See Profits

Today marks Nate and my third straight day showing a decent profit, which is a first for us since we began our jouney into affiliate marketing. So I wanted to take a minute to reflect on the four main components we put into practice to start turning a profit. Now of course these aren’t the end-all, be-all of success, but they’ve certainly helped us turn a very large corner to where we’re now seeing profits of $100+ a day. Those “secrets to success” are:

Content is King

One of our major turning points was to learn, if you’re working in Google Adwords, to stay away from search. I know this sounds weird, but on the content-only network there is no quality score, no required minimum bids and much, much less competition. While it’s nearly impossible to get into the top 5 ads in search for competitive niches like dieting, dating or ringtones without an incredibly optimized landing page, all it takes in content is a good minimum bid and a good click-thru rate. Give the content network a shot today!

Crowded Niches are Crowded for a Reason

There’s money to be made there! Sure some people can get lucky with niches that are high in traffic but low in competition but those are tough to find. Just like there’s a reason why there’s a lot of competition in profitable niches, there’s a reason why there isn’t some competition elsewhere; those niches just don’t convert as well. If you’ve got a limited budget and you absolutely need to make money if you plan to go any further, why not spend that money somewhere when you know there’s money to be made?

Bid High, Budget Low

One of the biggest mistakes we were making was setting our bids too low. We were afraid of losing money — as most n00bs are — so we set our bids at 10, 20, or 25 cents a piece and paused any keyword that went over that. While we didn’t lose a lot of money, with bids that low our ad didn’t show nearly often enough and thus – we didn’t make any money either. If you have a limited budget of only $100 or $200 a day (or less), set the budget for your campaigns low when you’re testing a niche so that you never lose a whole lot of money if your ad doesn’t do well. But you’ll never know if your ad does well or not if you don’t pay enough to find out. You’ll get better data, better conversions and better be able to optimize a campaign if you have a $200 and spend a dollar a click than if you spend 3 cents a click.

Find a Mentor

Not everyone is lucky enough to find someone in affiliate marketing who can really help them out. Someone who has been successful themselves and is willing to share their secrets (as I’m sure you’ve discovered, as we did, most people in this industry and pretty tight-lipped). For us, we met someone at Affiliate Summit East whom we befriended and were able to learn a lot from. Without his guidence, we definitely would still be floundering. Of course finding a mentor is easier said than done but if you can, take full advantage; it might be the secret step you need to finally turn a profit!

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Our Reactions to Affiliate Summit East 2008

Well, it’s been a few days since we’ve returned from Affiliate Summit East on the shores of beautiful Boston Massachusetts and I figured it was time to reflect a bit on my initial reactions to the summit.

The Good:

• Met a ton of great people; both from affiliate networks and merchants and other affiliates themselves. Everywhere we turned, there was another opportunity for networking!
• Lots of free food and drink. From companies having kegs and cocktails in their booths during the expo, to drinks from affiliate managers and during the many company-sponsored parties and happy hours. Sunday night (the first night of the summit) there was even a party on a yacht — sponsored by Share-A-Sale — which featured an open bar and an open buffet of oysters, crab legs, and more.
• Lots of other fun free stuff. I brought home so many pens, t-shirts, bags, and all sorts of other trade show trinkets, I’m still trying to find places (and uses) for them all.
• Helpful Hints Galore. I think maybe people are more willing to share their secrets (or helpful hints at least) in person then they are over the Internet. We got lots of hints and suggestions from both affiliate managers (or would-be managers) and fellow affiliates. Some of them we’ve already put into practice with what looks like it will be good success.
• Had a Expo-Only pass. I know this sounds weird but I think the expo-only pass is definitely the way to go. As has been stated all over the place, the full-conference pass seems to be a waste of money (and it’s a LOT more money than the expo hall pass) and doesn’t really include any information you can’t find on the top affiliate blogs. As everyone else seems to be saying — and I agree — all of the important networking and deal-making happens on the expo floor anyway. I’m glad we didn’t waste our precious and limited resources on the full-conference pass!

Things to Improve for Next Year:

• Network More! While we did meet a lot of good people and go to a lot of good parties — especially being Summit N00bs not knowing fully what we were doing — I definitely wish we could have met some more people, especially other affiliates and bloggers. If you’re reading this, make sure and introduce yourself next year!
• Plan ahead. This is a two-part improvement; first, we need to plan ahead for what to do during the day. We need to set up specific appointments with managers and companies ahead of time so we have have more one-on-one time and have a plan of attack for everything else during the day so we’re not wandering around confused and wasting time. Part two: find out ahead of time where the parties are. While it was pretty clear what was going on on Sunday night, Monday night was left very up in the air and, since we didn’t plan ahead or firm anything up, we were left high & dry for a good chunk of the night.
• Stay on site. Since the conference was in Boston and Nate lives in a Boston suburb, we were able to save a good amount of money by crashing at his place rather than at the Seaport Hotel (where the Summit took place). And don’t get me wrong, it was great to save money but I think we missed out on a good bit of the “atmosphere” of the summit by not staying on site and having to trek back across town at the end of the night. And, most importantly, not staying right there left us without a place to nap during the day (doesn’t sound like that much of a hardship but if you’ve been to Affiliate Summit, you feel our pain!).

In Conclusion:

Affiliate Summit was definitely a great time and definitely worth it. I know we’re fully expecting to attend the 2009 East version of the show and I’m already excited for it. It also serves as a great goal (time-wise) because we know how much we’re making right now (not much… yet) and how much we want to be making a year from now. So it serves as great motivation for putting in the duediligence and getting our profits up there for next year.

I would absolutely recommend going to Affiliate Summit to whoever can make it out; I think it’s a great resource for newbies and experts alike (maybe Newbies most of all). Hopefully we’ll see you all next year!

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Affiliate Summit East

Coming up faster than we thought it would is Affiliate Summit East. It’s being held a week from now in Boston at the Seaport Hotel August 10-12 (that’s Sunday – Tuesday) and features a huge lineup of vendors and companies that will be represented there.

It’s  great opportunity to network with other affiliates, your affiliate managers, and the networks that you are already using as well as getting to know some of the other innumerable options that are out there. There will be numerous speakers/events/presentations in addition to the booths that are set up so there is A TON of stuff to see/do. Check out the agenda to see when exactly everything is happening and make a rough plan of what things you want to check out. For more information about the event, it’s location or those companies that will be present be sure to check out the conference site and make sure to check their blog for the latest updates.

We will be in attendance on Sunday and Monday for sure, so make sure to follow Luke and myself on twitter and send us a message if you are going to be in attendance/want to meet up for drinks or look for us out on the floor and say hi if you see us. Hope to see a lot of you out there!

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