Following my last post, I felt that it was worth mentioning that when you create your Credit Report website, you steer clear of using the word ‘free’.  The FTC issued a press release on February 23rd that states the following:

Starting April 2, advertising for “free credit reports” will require new disclosures to help consumers avoid confusing “free” offers – which often require consumers to spend money on credit monitoring or other products or services – with the no-strings-attached credit reports available at AnnualCreditReport.com, or 877-322-8228.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Free Credit Reports Rule will require new prominent disclosures in advertisements for “free credit reports.” For example, any Web site offering free credit reports must include a disclosure, across the top of each page that mentions free credit reports, which states:

THIS NOTICE IS REQUIRED BY LAW. Read more at FTC.GOV.
You have the right to a free credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com
or 877-322-8228, the ONLY authorized source under federal law.

You can read the full press release at this link.

Consistency in any business brings stability. Stability is what allows self-employed business owners such as me go to sleep every night. With affiliate marketing it’s a challenge to find those certain campaigns that offer stability that is going to bring in consistent revenue day-after-day. Weight loss and diet campaigns have their seasons. As do Valentine’s Day, tax offers, St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. While these provide excellent, unique opportunities to cash in on, they sometimes do not offer the stability you’re looking for.

Credit reports, debt relief, dating, and toolbar installs are just some examples of campaigns that can be promoted year round and bring in consistent revenue. If you are having trouble stabilizing your Internet marketing business, follow this recommendation. I want you to create a website focused around the four niches I just mentioned. Here are some tips:

* Credit reports – develop a website that includes an ‘Obtain Credit Report’ button that links to your offer. Make sure that is above the fold in plain sight on every single page of your site. I would personally do this with a 300×250 graphic of some type. Your content should include all kinds of information for people looking to know their credit score. For example, you could have an article about ‘tips to purchasing a home’ or ‘how to lease a new car’. Write several articles all focusing on why people would need their credit report. Be sure to include a contact us, site map, and a privacy policy (these will help your SEO score).

* Debt relief – develop a review website on the top debt relief companies. I would display 3 – 4 different offers on my main page and give some info about each one. Don’t use false testimonials, but instead, ask your affiliate network to grab some true stories from their advertiser. Then load your site up with a lot of content about investing properly, saving money, how to start a Roth IRA, etc. Get creative and think about what people that are in debt would be searching for. Be sure to include a contact us, site map, and a privacy policy.

* Dating – develop a review website with your main page focusing on the top 3 – 4 dating websites online. Then develop sub sections that focus on particular niches (ie: Christian Dating, BBW Dating, African American Dating, Homosexual, etc.) While your main page will show the ‘top 3-4 overall dating sites’ you can develop multiple sections that display the top 3-4 Christian dating sites, the top 3-4 ‘Free’ dating sites, etc. Be sure to include a contact us, site map, and a privacy policy.

* Toolbar Installs – find a toolbar offer that’s been around for a while. Take Smiley Central for example. Provide page after page of content that offers smiley’s for social networking websites such as MySpace, emails, IMs, etc. Again, think of what people would be searching for that want free smiley’s and go from there. Remember, don’t promote content that you can’t actually obtain from the toolbar (as this will give the advertiser low quality) and don’t use any trademarked images without permission. Be sure to include a contact us, site map, and a privacy policy.

Take your time developing these sites. Don’t rush; put together quality sites that people are actually going to want to visit. Once you are finished with everything you are going to want to do some intense SEO research and be sure that you optimize your pages. If you don’t know anything about search engine optimization, I’m going to teach more, but that’s going to be at a later day. Work on your sites until I post more information.

Your goal is to get each one of these sites up to $100 profit a day without purchasing traffic. That would be $400/a day or $146,000 a year. That would put you at more money a year than the average American.  This is very possible and the thing about these offers, they are here to stay.  Ask your favorite affiliate network.  They’ll tell you these offers have been around since they started business and are still going strong today.

I just briefly scratched the surface with this, so stay tuned to the blog as I’m going to provide some additional information that will help you stabilize your affiliate marketing income.

We’ve received a lot of comments from visitors about how they enjoy our Media Buying 101 series of posts.  From beginner to expert media buyers, we’ve received numerous compliments on how our guide has helped them with their campaigns.  To complement our posts, we’ve decided to compile the entire Media Buying 101 series into one PDF document that can be downloaded, printed, etc.  This will allow many of you to actually take this guide ‘on the go’ so you can read it when you’re not sitting behind a computer.  You can download it for free by entering your name and email address in the below form:

This series of posts is still a work in progress.  As long as you’re subscribed to our email list, we’ll keep you updated with the revised version.  Affiliate marketing changes on a daily basis; therefore it is essential that revisions are made.  Below is the current table of contents:

Since joining forces with John Kirkpatrick in May of last year, we’ve been using our personal credit cards to fund our campaigns and large media buys (and invoicing when available).  Since our company was incorporated in July, we didn’t have enough credit history/trade references/tax information to get a company credit card until now.  While it has been nice collecting the reward points, it’s been an accounting nightmare.  Not to mention dealing with stupid restrictions on personal credit cards (American Express could never understand why I needed to charge $XX,XXX everyday).

In January I received an invitation from American Express to apply for their Centurion Card (black card).  While the card definitely has it’s benefits, it comes with a heavy initiation and yearly fee.  It’s also a personal card and primarily not used for business.  After speaking with a few people in the industry that either have or have had a black card, they recommended the Plum.  So that’s what we went with.

The Plum card is actually a ‘charge card’ and is more of a ‘line of credit’ (you have to pay it off monthly).  The card has two key benefits:

* If you pay your bills in full you will earn cash rebate

* If you pay a certain portion of your payment on time, you can defer your payment beyond the normal monthly grace period

Also like many other Amex charge cards, there is on pre-set spending limit and you get discounts at OPENSAVINGs merchants (such as Yahoo).  None-the-less this card is going to allow us to grow our business even more now that we don’t have to deal with making this work with personal cards.

Continuing my Media Buying 101 series of posts, I want to talk a little bit about frequency capping.  When purchasing banner inventory by CPM (cost per one-thousand impressions) a frequency cap saves you from spending your budget on a handful of users.  A frequency cap determines how many times a unique visitor sees your advertisement. Most advertising networks will allow you to specify the frequency cap of your choice as long as it is stated in the initial insertion order (you may want to check if it can be changed once you’re into your flight).

When paying a CPM > $1.00 I like to set the frequency cap to 2 views every 24 hours per unique visitor.  This means that a unique visitor (determined by IP address) will see my advertisement 2 times every 24 hours. This is a very important part to the optimization process, as we’ve also had some very successful media buys with a 4/24 frequency cap (some campaigns the visitor finally clicks after seeing the creative multiple times).

So before you give up on your media buy (thinking it won’t work or you can’t optimize anymore) I highly suggest you play around with the frequency cap.  I am amazed by the number of affiliates that don’t even know what this is.  Good luck!

When media buying click through rate (CTR) is your lifeline.  When you’re paying by the CPM it doesn’t matter if 1 or 1,000,000 people click your ad, you’re paying the same price.  Today, I want to share a little tip with you all.  The smallest change can sometimes have the biggest effect on your CTR.

One of my favorite things to do to garner a better CTR, is to take my best performing creative, and add a scroll bar to it.  This gets people’s attention as they think they need to ’scroll’ to get more information about what you’re promoting.  This prompts a click and has performed excellent for us time-after-time.  Just think of it this way: if people just view your ad and don’t click they have no chance of converting.  If they click your ad, you at least have a chance of converting them by selling them with your landing page.  To help everyone in their media buying efforts, I’ve included PSDs below of the three most common ad units.  Feel free to click on each image below to download these and use them for your own campaigns!

Click on each unit to download PSD

Leaderboard 728×90 (preview sized down to fit the blog):

Medium Rectangle 300×250:

Skyscraper 160×600:

Good luck everyone!

Update: I added scroll bars from a PC in addition to the Mac .

Second Update: One of our readers mentioned another blogger mentioned this CTR tip as well as a few other at this link. Good stuff

Over the last decade of working online, I’ve always ensured that sites I’ve done SEO (search engine optimization) on are located on a dedicated IP address.  I’m not sure where I picked up this tip, but it’s always the first thing I start with.  Whenever I conduct a whois look up on a site and see that they’re not using a dedicated IP address, I know they haven’t done a complete SEO job. In layman’s terms, a dedicated IP address is a group of numbers (ie: XX.XX.XX.XXX) that is unique to your website (no other site shares it). In order to have private name servers or an SSL certificate for your website, you’ll have to be on a dedicated IP.  These are typically around $1 per month from most hosting providers.  Most shared hosting plans allow several hundred or thousand to be hosted on the same IP (which can be a nightmare if the IP gets banned for SPAM). Enough with the hosting lingo, does a dedicated IP address really help your SERP (search engine results page) position?

Recently, I was working on a website in a hurry, and decided to go against a dedicated IP.  With our recent server problems, I have all of our available system IPs assigned to various websites, therefore I didn’t have any free, and didn’t want to wait to purchase one before setting this site online.  Given this, I’ve had the hardest time getting this site to rank, even for low volume search terms.  Remember recently when I got a website ranking number one within hours?  I was using a dedicated IP address.  I’m going to switch this site over to a dedicated IP and see how big of a difference it makes in Google’s indexing process.  I’ll keep everyone posted on how the results pan out.  Remember, if you’re thinking about switching your site to a dedicated IP address, you may incur some down time as the change propagates (usually within 48 hours).

Last week I let you all in on our horror story of people unable to access one of our servers.  While I got many of you paranoid, this is something that can be prevented.  Below are some steps we’re taking now to ensure our servers are accessible from every single location domestically and internationally.

* Install Google Analytics on every landing page
- Google Analytics is free and literally takes 2 minutes to install.  This way you can compare the number of unique visitors to the number of clicks you sent to see if there is a big discrepancy.  You’ll also have the added luxury to see more visitor data, such as geographic information, time spent on site, exit pages, bounce rate, etc.  After a few weeks, use this data to scale your campaign up to even more traffic.

* Check your server from multiple proxies
- Proxy4Free.com has a pretty large list of domestic and international proxies.  This is one of the tools that helped us find our problem.  Try your server IP, landing page, etc. on multiple proxies and make sure it loads.  If it doesn’t, you’re going to want to investigate why.

* Use Prosper 202
- Many affiliates already use this, but if you’re not definitely check it out.  Prosper 202 is a free, self-hosted tracking platform that can be used on all of your campaigns.  We’ve even tweaked this so it can be used on high volume media buys.  Using Prosper you can compare the number of clicks on your advertisements to the number of people that reached your landing page.  However, you will want to be sure to ‘display all clicks’ and don’t ‘filter out clicks’ to get an accurate number.  You can also use their ‘Spy’ feature to get a live view of visitors interacting with your landing pages.  I seriously watch this all day!

* Inspect DNS on your landing page
- As I’ve already stated, DNS was NOT our issue.  However, when receiving errors such as ours, this is the first thing you’re going to want to check.  intoDNS.com is an excellent free resource to do so.  Simply type in your domain name and check for errors.  If you see any, notify your web hosting immediately!

* Hire a third party monitoring/server administration team
- Most dedicated server providers provide a limited amount of ‘managed service’ support.  Some are better than others (RackSpace rocks) so it is always my recommendation to go the extra mile and hire another third party group to manage your server.  I recommend Platinum Server Management as they answer tickets promptly and are very affordable ($29/mo).  They also only hire level 3 technicians which ensures you don’t get a hold of a 15 year old working out of their bedroom.

In conclusion, none of these services will do any good unless you use them daily.  Don’t just install Google Analytics and wait for a problem.  Check over your data each morning when you’re looking at the previous day’s stats.  It is likely you may see minor discrepancies but if you notice something major, investigate as soon as possible.  This will save yourself much stress, time, and money.  Let me know if you have any questions on any of the above resources!

What I am about to tell you all is without a doubt the worst thing that has ever happen to me in my 11-year business career. This problem has cost us money, time, and severe mental stress. If you don’t get anything else out of reading our blog, please get this. It will save you from having to go through what we have. Without further ado, let me get to explaining.

For as long as I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing I’ve had a very powerful dedicated server housed at The Planet in Dallas, Texas to run our campaigns on. It is monitored by The Planet, a third party security group I hired, and has been provisioned to not only run extremely fast, but with one of the most hardened operating systems online (secure). I used to own a web hosting company, so I’ve had my ups and downs with dedicated servers. I understand Red Hat Linux just as well as I do the English language. I consider myself highly advanced and a seasoned Internet veteran when it comes to servers. Given all this, what could go wrong with our server that would cost us money? I know my stuff… Don’t I?

Assuming in affiliate marketing is one of the worst mistake you can ever make. Don’t EVER assume that your server is working fine. For the past five months we’ve noticed some inconsistencies in many of our campaigns. Some would go from being very profitable one day to the exact opposite the next. As any affiliate out there, we just assumed it was scrubbing/shaving or some other external variable. We would normally turn to another offer, change up a creative, and forget the problem. We remained profitable and just assumed that’s what was going on. Our landing pages loaded fine on my office computer in West Virginia, my home computer in West Virginia, and on John’s computer in North Carolina.

As 2010 hit, the inconstancies in all of our campaigns became even more noticeable. While this industry does change daily, we found it odd when we would see these severe inconsistencies on two or more completely different campaigns (i.e. one lead gen, another per sale offer). They weren’t even limited to our United States campaigns. Our international campaigns were also having inconsistencies. What the heck could be the problem? Surely EVERY campaign out there wasn’t like this?

This past weekend I was in Beckley, West Virginia visiting family. During my visit I noticed I was unable to access any website on this server or the server itself (eliminating a DNS problem– what EVERYONE tries to blame it on). I contacted my third party monitoring group and they began to investigate. I logged into my office computer (in Huntington, West Virginia) via a remote connection and noticed I still couldn’t get the server to load. Finally, my third party techs said ‘try now’. I was able to access the server fine from my remote office connection but still not at the location I was in Beckley. I assumed it was their Internet Service Provider and dismissed the issue.

Once I returned to my office on Sunday, I noticed everything was working fine (I thought so at least). I didn’t think much of it and continued my work as normal. As this week began, I thought more about this issue, and attempted to access this server via numerous proxies. On about 80% of the proxies I was unable to access any site on this server nor the server itself (via the IP address direct). This made me more concerned. I submitted a ticket to The Planet and explained to them what was going on. The technician from The Planet attempted a trace route from my server to the IP address I was on this weekend. The connection timed out and they said it was a problem with their Internet Service Provider, Sudden Link.

I assumed the C Class IP address this server is on had accidentally been placed on a SPAM blacklist (we don’t use mail on this server, just the web server). I proceeded to contact Sudden Link’s NOC Director who quickly began to assist. After multiple trace routes from various locations we discovered the server was able to connect across the Sudden Link network. The problem wasn’t contained to just one Internet Service Provider. I then took to my AOL IM list. I messaged about ten or so people asking them if they could get sites on this server or IP addresses on this server to load. Everyone was in various locations all around the world (London, Canada, California, Virginia, etc.). Only one person couldn’t get my server to load. This person is another Internet marketing veteran and someone I trust. He was using a dedicated AT&T fiber connection in his office in San Francisco. So the problem defiantly wasn’t limited to ONE Internet Service Provider.

Next, I decided to review some numbers. We track everything on our campaigns, however there is one number I had neglected to look at. The number of people who clicked our ads as compared to the number of people who saw our landing page. While this seems like an obvious thing, it’s something we normally don’t monitor on a daily basis. I pulled a report from one of our media buys last month and compared it. Out of 53,000 clicks on one creative our landing page was only viewed 33,000 times! That is 20,000 clicks that went NO WHERE! While the majority of our traffic (60%) was being sent to landing pages, 40% were being sent to a ‘Cannot Find Server’ page. I felt like someone punched me in the stomach. I should have been watching these numbers more closely. Problem is, you don’t really notice this on a daily basis. Even though this number was off around 700 daily, I NEVER NOTICED IT.

There you have it. For however long (I don’t even want to think or look), we’ve only been getting 60% of our purchased traffic. OUCH. I’ve yet to come to a resolution with this server. Still at the moment, I’m unable to access the IP address from certain locations. The Planet continues to dismiss it as a DNS issue (which is impossible given I cannot access the IP address).

So what the heck is the problem here? I honestly have no clue. One Internet veteran I spoke with suggested it was a problem with The Planet’s 3rd party bandwidth they’ve purchased. Another says there is something not getting through the firewall at The Planet. Some, still say it’s a DNS issue. Fact of the matter here, no one really knows the reason why.

Where do we go from here? We’ll first, we’ll never put everything on ONE server anymore. We’re going to be purchasing separate dedicated servers for our unique, high-volume campaigns. Next, we’re going to be keeping a close eye on the number of clicks compared to the number of landing pages views. Finally, I’m going to QUIT assuming. If I see an inconsistency, I’m going to get to the bottom of it. No matter what. So for all of you out there reading this, please learn a lesson from this HUGE disaster. I can’t just blame The Planet here, because I should have been watching my numbers more closely and should not have been assuming my server was reaching everyone.

As promised, I’m going to be providing some solid SEO (search engine optimization) information on this blog.  Please note that I will not be discussing (nor do I condone) any blackhat techniques.  I want to help you get lots of quality traffic for many years to come, therefore blackhat is irrelevant.  With that said, I want to share an excellent free resource with you.

For the last several years Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, Propeller.com, Fark.com, Reddit.com, etc. have provided many sites with high quality backlinks that get your site listed in Google within minutes!  While they are very effective it is time consuming going through and submitting your link to each one.  SocialMarker.com has actually developed a solution for this.  From their website:

All you need to do is simply drag this button to your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, in order to create a submission bookmarklet. When you are on a website that you want to socially mark, simply select the text and click the SocialMarker button to pre-populate the submission form with the selected information.

Here is a brief video demonstration: