While I’ve been in the industry a little over ten years now, I’ve been able to experience the best-of-the-best and the worst-of-the-worst affiliate networks.  From companies that don’t pay  to companies that pay weekly (even some daily) I’ve seen it all.  Today, in somewhat of a rant, I want to talk about what I like to see in a network as an affiliate.

To obtain an affiliate…
- This is one of the hardest things for some networks.  How do you convince an affiliate to join your network over the next?  Are you offering a prize or a contest?  Do you have a rewards program?  What separates your network with the others.  Below are some of the things I like to see.

* First, the most important thing each network should do is treat every affiliate like they’re a ’super’ or ‘high volume’ affiliate.  I’ve personally known guys go from $5 or less one month to nearly a million the next.  Just because an affiliate is not pushing traffic to your network doesn’t mean they don’t have traffic or the potential to drive serious volume.

* Don’t annoy the affiliate to try to get business.  Approach them as a friend, make a personal connection.  Don’t block your number or call during dinner hour (you seriously would not BELIEVE what some people will do).  To get business, the best way is to send email updates.  Keep your affiliates in the loop of what’s hot and what’s not, and if something catches their eye, they’re going to contact you.  I personally don’t have the entire day to devote to just affiliate marketing (I own other businesses too) so I can’t always respond to an instant message or chat on the phone.  Send an email with hot offers, be down to earth, and business will come.

* Take advantage of Affiliate Summit, Ad Tech, and other conferences.  This one is big.  If you know an affiliate that you want on your network is going to be attending a conference make it a point to speak with them.  I cannot tell you how many networks just stand behind the booth and wait for business to come to them.  Find out who’s going to be there and personally go up to them.  How bad do you want that affiliate’s traffic?  If you want business bad enough you can get it.  It just depends how hard you work for it.

* Don’t make promises you can’t keep.  If you can’t make it for drinks don’t say you will.  If you can’t provide a certain offer, don’t say that you can.  I can’t tell you how many times my plans have been thrown off because I scheduled to meet up with a network for them to ‘forget’ to call.  I’ve also spent HOURS creating landing pages for campaigns only to have the network say they ‘don’t have that offer anymore.’  Ugh…

To keep an affiliate…
- Once you get an affiliate’s business it is essential that you take necessary actions to keep that affiliate.  This industry is cut-throat, and at the end of the day, business comes first.

* Customer service must be priority.  Many networks use Link Trust to track commissions.  While this is OK software, you can only place one pixel per offer.  This is the most aggravating thing in the world to me!  I seriously will run offers with networks that use Direct Track before Link Trust, just because I like to add/edit/delete my tracking pixels on my own time.  I don’t want to email anyone.  With that said, if you do use Link Trust, you MUST have an affiliate manager available 24/7/365 to place pixels.  There is no substitute, affiliate don’t like to wait.

* Pay on time every time.  No matter WHAT you must see that your affiliates are paid (as long as they are in compliance with your TOS) and paid on time.  If an affiliate earns commissions you have to pay them.  If the advertiser shorts you, that’s the risk you have to take.  If there is a bank holiday on the day you send out wires, be sure to notify the affiliate that their payment is going to be early or delayed.

* Don’t focus on one niche.  I don’t have to tell anyone that this business changes daily.  Campaigns are going to come and go but not affiliates.  Bring on multiple offers in multiple niches and keep several backups.  If one offer goes down, you better have another one ready to back it up.  If not, you are likely to lose that affiliate to another network.  Don’t just focus on re-bills and/or lead generation.  Have a mixture of all the top campaigns in various niches.

* Maintain open communication.  It is always VERY important to keep affiliates in the loop.  If you’re going to be re-directing an offer let affiliates know as soon as you can.  I personally like to have 12 hours notice, but I realize sometimes that’s impossible.  The absolute worst thing you can do though is redirect an offer without notice.

So who do I recommend?
I couldn’t end this post without mentioning some of my favorite affiliate networks.  While no network is perfect, in my experience, these are the best!

* Eagle Web Assets

* Convert 2 Media

* Azoogle Ads

* COPEAC

* CX Digital

In conclusion, you can have the best rewards program or the sickest parties in the world, but if the above items aren’t fulfilled it’s likely your going to have a hard time getting or keeping business.  I’m not writing this post with any particular affiliate network in mind nor am I ‘calling anyone out’.  I’m fairly happy with every network we currently work with and have been very impressed with some of the newer networks that have came on.  I felt that this post would be an interesting post to share with other affiliates what we like to see with affiliate networks.

This past November at Ad Tech: NYC, I spoke with one of my good friends in the industry (and veteran affiliate marketer) about taking a holistic approach to affiliate marketing and online marketing in general.  It seems like now days a lot of affiliates are media buyers, pay-per-click guys, cost-per-view guys, emailers, SEO gurus, etc.  Rather than taking a holistic approach to their campaigns, they pick one ‘medium’, master it, and that’s all they run.

Honestly, it’s easy to fall into this trap.  For example, when media buying, you’re able to purchase your inventory, sign insertion orders, and have tons of traffic pretty much instantly.  You don’t have to wait to build an email list or for Google/Yahoo/Bing to index your site.  However, by picking just one medium, you are setting a ‘ticking time bomb’ on your campaign. What if the network you’re buying media on abruptly decides they don’t want your offers to run on their sites?  What if Google de-indexes your site?  What if someone comes in and out bids the crap out of you on your CPV platform?  What if Adwords slaps your campaign silly?  By taking a holistic approach to your affiliate marketing campaign, you’re not only setting yourself up for long-term revenue, you’re able to increase your profits immensely.

Yesterday, I decided to challenge myself.  I wanted to see how fast I could SEO a campaign and get it to making money.  While most of my SEO jobs take about a week or so to garner good positions, I decided for this campaign I was going to be extra aggressive but not use any blackhat techniques.  At 2:00 p.m. ET I registered my domain, put together the site, and by 5:00 p.m. ET I was ranking number 1 in Google for my target keyword.  SICK!  How?  Rather than being lazy, I didn’t leave the computer for those three hours!  I developed my website with tons of unique content, built up tons of backlinks, and really concentrated on my target keyword.

Once I was ranking in Google I began to see conversions.  I didn’t stop there.  I did some more research and decided to setup a pay-per-click campaign focused around some other keywords that looked profitable.  Then, I added an email opt in box to my site.  Rather than just seeing SEO conversions, I was getting PPC traffic, collecting opt-ins, and making a lot more money than I would have if I would have been lazy or just picked one medium.  As the night went on I became tired and lazy.  Today, I’m going to setup a CPV campaign in addition to my other mediums.  By taking a holistic approach I’m attacking my audience from several different angles and am able to make much more money than if I was to just pick one.

Are you taking a holistic approach to your affiliate marketing campaigns?  If you’re not, you’re missing out on a boatload of money.  Best of luck!

When I first got started promoting affiliate offers, people always told me to ‘think outside the box’ to make money.  They always said there is less competition and it’s much easier to see a return on investment.  While this seemed easy for them to say, I was always frustrated with what exactly they meant.

Now, looking back on my success over the past few years, I have come to realize what exactly they were talking about ‘thinking outside the box’.  Let me use a real-life example.  About two years ago it seemed like almost every affiliate marketer was pushing ringtones.  Every network I was a member of was pushing them hard and it seemed like anyone that was making a lot of cash via affiliate marketing had at least one profitable ringtone campaign.

The most obvious thing to do to begin pushing ringtones was to bid on keywords such as ‘50 Cent Ringtones’, ‘Eminem Ringtones’, ‘WWE Ringtones’, ‘American Idol Ringtones’, etc on every major search engine.  The problem with this method was the big fish with huge bank rolls were already perched up in the top 3-5 spots on every search engine and were willing to lose a considerable amount just to drive you out of business.  While there was definitely money to be made in these positions, this was thinking ‘inside the box’ and had a very high barrier of entry.

Thinking outside the box, I thought of other ways I could reach that same demographic, but for a lot cheaper.  I decided to go against the regular search campaigns, and setup campaigns on the content networks of Google, Yahoo, etc.  Instead of bidding on keywords like ‘50 cent ringtones’ I’d bid on terms such as ‘american idol news’, ‘hip hop news’, ‘50 cent girlfriend’, ‘kim mathers’, etc.  I’d then create a ’squeeze page’ that would push the traffic from these terms to ringtones.  I was hitting the same demographic, but for a lot cheaper.

This way I was not only able to make as much money as the ‘big guys’ bidding on 50 cent ringtones, I was able to do it without an intense bidding war.

Ryan’s Golden Tip: Affiliate marketers that ‘think outside the box’ are able to gain a considerable competitive advantage on other affiliates.  While, ‘thinking inside the box’ can still lead to a substantial income, it also comes with a lot more stress, slimmer margins, and higher-risk opticals.  Affiliates that succeed in thinking ‘outside the box’ are able to create more stable, more profitable, and more long-term campaigns that can lead to astronomical revenue.

When creating your next campaign, keep my image in mind (there’s more cash outside the box).  Good luck!

When I first began to make a good deal of money working online my grandfather asked me what my time was worth per hour.  Honestly, I never even thought about what my “hourly rate” was, I was more concerned on the overall numbers at the end of each month.  That day he asked the question, I did the math and figured out what my time was worth per hour.  I then applied this to my overall working schedule and was greatly able to improve my productivity.

In affiliate marketing there are certain tasks that can be very time consuming and are better left to be outsourced.  For example, I’m pretty good at creating designs in photoshop and coding them into HTML.  The bad thing about this, it can be very time consuming especially when you’re a perfectionist (like me).  I’ve spent countless hours working on designs, and while they do come out looking good, sometimes my time could have been better spent researching other campaigns or working on other business.

My father and grandfather owned a business together.  He use to reference many times that some people “work with their back” while others “work with their head.”  This is another interesting way to evaluate time/your daily duties.  While the person that spends all day using a shovel to dig out a ditch works extremely hard, the executive that owns the construction company is making a lot more money sitting in his air-conditioned office pasted to a leather seat.

The next campaign you setup, evaluate the amount of time you spend on the entire process.  How long does it take you to setup your landing pages (if you don’t split test at least 5 you’re more-than-likely missing out on a lot of money), create ads, install tracking software, get the offers together, etc.  If you find that you’re spending more time creating a nice looking landing page than you are using your creativity to discover converting sources/unique ideas, you may want to begin to outsource.

You can find designers, coders, and other employees to help you out on numerous websites around the Internet.  One of my personal favorite ones is oDesk.com.  While the entire outsourcing process can be an entire series of blog posts alone, you want to keep your hourly rate in mind.  It wouldn’t make much sense to pay someone more than your hourly rate (duh)!

In conclusion, I was once asked by a family friend to design them a website and put it online.  I spent HOURS getting everything from logo design to flashy mouse over navigation.  At the end of the project I sent the customer (and family friend) a bill for a VERY modest $900.  He called and the tone of his voice was almost like he was shocked it cost that much for a website design.  After I went back and looked at the time I spent on the project, I realized I should have charged him at least $5,000.  Valuable time wasted.  Now enough reading about time management, get to work on your campaign and remember to evaluate your tasks!

A couple days ago one of our readers, Alysia, asked a pretty common question amongst beginner media buyers. The question is as follows:

How do you try to figure out if what the site is asking for is a decent rate and if you will make a profit? For example, someone just told me for 110,000+ impressions, I’ll pay $300 on a particular site for a 728×90 banner at the top. This is site wide, but excludes the home page. If you could do a part 3 posting on determining if the asking rates are fair in different situations, I’d certainly appreciate it.

This is one of the questions you really have to ask yourself before you buy a media buy placement based on your CPM, payout cost, expected CTR.  I know you are asking mainly about the rate but before you even look at the rate you have to ask yourself about demographics.  In Ryan’s second post of the “Media Buying 101″ series, he provides a number of tools to use whenever looking for a potential successful media buy placement.  Basically, you have to start testing and finding a site that works your particular offer.  Then once you have it, you then ask yourself how it works by looking at the particular demographics.  This is certainly no foolproof way but your demographic is very important in order to putting together a successful formula. If you can match the original demographic to the second one, that’s one way you can increase your chances of being successful.  You can use Quantcast for comparing and obtaining demographic information.  If you are advertising an education offer aimed at dads, then of course you are going to want a majority male audience that have kids.  The very first step if you are starting completely from scratch is to say, “What is my target audience?”.

After you’ve done your homework demographic wise, you now want to consider the actual rate.  If you have a pretty good connection between the audience of the site and your offer, you can obviously afford to pay more.  In your specific case, let’s calculate the CPM first: (110,000 impressions / 1000) / $300 = about $2.73 CPM.  This is fairly low but it totally depends on the quality/response rate of the traffic to your ad.  Without knowing the amount you are paid per action, it’s a little hard to weigh the CPM and the action payout but you should be able to do this on your own.  Can you afford to pay that much per 1,000 views?  You won’t truly know until you test but estimating and calculating risk can be done.

Additionally, it sounds like this is not the traditional kind of media buying advertising with an insertion order so the opportunity of out-clause looks out of the question.  If you are able and you are billed by the CPM rather than a large upfront amount, then definitely exercise that ability as it’s always a good idea.  Also, test a couple of banners in this instance with different styles to ensure you get a good CTR.

Overall the answer to your question can be found by…. testing. It’s impossible to take a quick look at something and determine if it will cost without using previously obtained data like demographics and experience.  Calculate your risk using demographics, set up tracking and test.  Collect the data that will help you replicate this campaign if it’s successful and if it’s not successful hopefully you can figure out what went wrong and learn from your mistake.

I want to open by apologizing for my lack of updates this month.  December has been very busy month for me and unfortunately my blogging responsibilities have suffered as a result.  Today I want to talk about New Year’s Resolutions.  A big part to the success I’ve had from working online for the past eleven years has had to do with setting goals and doing all I can to reach them.  To have success in Affiliate Marketing you have to set goals.  Without them, you run the risk of running an unorganized operation that is not built for success.  New Year’s Resolutions are obviously goals that many people set for the New Year.

I always get a laugh at how busy the gym gets at the end of December into the beginning of the New Year.  Usually when I go to the gym early in the afternoon, it’s just me and the retirees that are walking on the treadmill at a brisk setting of 2 (I actually run at a setting of 6.5 for a mile but whatever).  On Monday when I went to the gym it was covered up with people trying to shed the holiday pounds and build some muscle.  Obviously the gyms use this to their advantage with membership specials, but how does this relate to affiliate marketing?

For one it gives us a very clear picture of what niches need to be exploited in January.  Any campaign that deals with a New Year’s Resolution is a perfect campaign to get the ball rolling.  One thing is for sure in New Year’s Resolutions – people want to do better.  They want cleaner diets, whiter teeth, to stop smoking, etc.  Have you considered the campaigns you want to run in the New Year?

Ryan, John and I have already put plans in place and signed Insertion Orders for several media buys for our New Year’s Resolution campaigns.  Our New Year’s Resolution is to capitalize on other people’s New Year’s Resolutions.   We have built our company for success going into the New Year.  We’ve spent countless hours developing plans and strategies to get everything going.  I hope you have as well.  If not, you better put the champagne up and get busy for the next couple of hours!  Don’t let this profitable time of year pass you by.  Holidays are big for marketers and the New Year is a great example!

Happy New Year everyone – thanks so much for your support in 2009.  This year has been a great one for myself personally and our company.  We’ve grown leaps and bounds and hope to continue that success into 2010 and well past.  I want to thank all the affiliate networks, other bloggers and people in the industry that have worked with us in making us a success!  I hope you experience success in the New Year as well!

While at Ad Tech: NYC this year, one of my long-time good friends in the industry asked Richard what we were doing SEO-wise to our campaign websites.  Richard explained to him that  a lot of our campaigns were promoted via media buys, pay-per-click, and other mediums, but weren’t structured for long-term.  Therefore, besides the basic SEO needed to obtain a good quality score, we neglected an intense optimization.  This immediately prompted some re-structure in the way we conduct business as an entire company.

While there is nothing like getting a landing page together, testing, optimizing, and driving traffic to make a quick dollar, there is definitely a timeline on that campaign from day one.  Without a long-term strategy in place from day one, you’re going to be limited to a campaign roller coaster.  If you’re just focusing on one product/set of products rather than an entire niche you are extremely limiting your campaign’s potential.

For example, Acai Berry is a product in the weight-loss niche.  If we decided to promote a certain Acai Berry product, designed our entire campaign around that one product, we’re going to be limited based on how long that advertiser decides to run.  Whereas if we designed the campaign focused around the entire weight-loss niche, we’re able to promote a variety of products based over a much longer time period.  We could not only obtain traffic via media buys, pay-per-click, etc. but could also garner a good bit of organic traffic by focusing on quality over quantity.

The downfall to setting up campaigns this way, is it takes time and patience.  Sure, you’re able to still drive traffic instantly, but if you’re thinking long-term you are going to want to take more time to focus on the quality of the website.  Rather than a quick squeeze page, you’re going to want to inform the visitor, maybe capture an email address, and gain their trust before deciding to pitch them a product.  The good thing about this method, is you’re able to operate your campaign for a much longer time period and are able to make more money consistently.  One of our main goals in 2010 is to make every single campaign we run, long-term.  How are your campaigns structured?

This Doesn't EVEN Do It Justice

This past Friday I made attempted the drive home for the Holidays. Once I was 20 miles away from where my family lives, snow began to come down faster than I’ve ever seen it before. With my new car being rear wheel drive, with racing tires, I didn’t stand a chance on the treacherous roads! Since my car wouldn’t go, I had to pull over on the side of the Interstate and call Mercedes Benz roadside assistance which informed me it was going to be 3 hours before I could get towed off the road! I eventually “wiggled” my way off the Interstate into a parking lot where my car would sit for the next 2 days and be covered with more than 25 inches of snow! Since then, I’ve moved it to another parking lot, but there is still no getting it home until the roads get clear! What a hassle to the beginning of my Holiday week!

That being said, the Holidays can be a weird time for conversions on your affiliate campaigns. Some campaigns perform better, some perform worse, some stop all together. It is important to keep a close eye on things as if you try to go on “auto pilot” you may be surprised at the losses you can incur. We’ve set some of our campaigns on pause and have scaled up some others.

In another interesting note, I recently made the transition from my old Dell laptop to a MacBook Pro. For those of you who are using a Mac you understand how much better my life is! At first, it was certainly a change, as the simplest task of using a FTP client was hard. But once I continued to work with things I realized that my new Mac was a lot faster and easier to use than my old Dell! I definitely recommend it!

If you’re traveling this Holiday season, I encourage you to check the weather and plan ahead so you don’t get stuck in a situation similar to mine. There is nothing more powerless than not being able to drive!  Please be safe and remember to keep check on your campaigns!

Well yet another stupid mistake cost us twins $1,026.47 (60% of the price of my new MacBook I just ordered). Let me explain what happened. About two weeks ago I loaded up four new campaigns on Google’s Content Network. These campaigns were all niches we were already in, but we were doing some advanced geo-targeting to try to explore some new areas to expand. Using a combination of image and text ads, I had thousands of keywords and the campaigns setup just the way I wanted them.

Right off the bat three of the four campaigns started getting impressions/clicks. I let things ride and the very next morning I woke up to the famous “Google Slap.” I really wasn’t expecting it this time, as all of the sites had established page ranks as well as tons of unique content. But that’s Google for you; a slap for no logical reason at all. I went ahead and paused those three campaigns and decided to “clean up the mess” after I finished another list of projects. However, I forgot about one thing. The FOURTH campaign… I assumed it was slapped from the beginning as it just continued to get a $2 – $5 trickle everyday from the beginning. Rather than pausing it, I decided to let it run to see if it would ever garner traffic.

Busy with all the new projects we have coming up (some exciting stuff btw), I honestly forgot about that one campaign. Of course, I logged into my Adwords account daily, but it was always that $2 – $5 trickle. Yesterday, it was about 50 degrees here, so I decided to take a quick one-hour break and wash my car. When I got back home I noticed traffic FLOODING into our tracking system. Honestly, we have a lot of stuff going on, so it took me a few minutes to discover the culprit. Once I logged into our Adwords account my heart SUNK. Since I wrote that campaign off, I had removed that landing page from our server. So we had thousands of clicks going nowhere.

This made for a very frustrating day due to a stupid mistake on my end. One simple click on ‘pause’ would have saved us this money. I’m not going to continue to cry over spilled milk, but I did want to type this post to let you know, amateur, professional, or newbie, we’re all human and we make mistakes. We must learn from this and move forward even stronger!

Well, we’ve all been there.  Whether you are a big or small affiliate there comes a time when you have to pull the plug on a campaign.  It varies from campaign to campaign how long the life is but one thing is for sure – all campaigns have a lifespan.  Obviously the most disappointing campaigns are those in which a considerable amount of time is spent on, only to have them fail and fail quickly.

Last week I spent a considerable amount of time building out a particular campaign that was compliant and well done only to have to pull it within six hours of starting it.   While I don’t want to get into the specifics, I spent several hours building an original landing page that not only looked great but sent a considerable amount of my bought traffic to the offer.  In fact, the landing page was sending over 20% of the traffic that clicked my ad all the way to the offer.  The thing was – the offer was not converting.

This was very frustrating because I felt like I had done all I could do to make things work and while I could have tried to split test different landing pages, ads and traffic sources I felt like I had sent a large amount of my traffic all the way to the offer and determined it had to be the culprit.  I actually did split it with another offer and amazingly enough, the other offer had just as crappy of a conversion rate.  My EPCs were terrible and my CPA left no room for optimization.  Like my Affiliate Manager said – you can’t win them all.

It’s hard for me to accept defeat and had it not been for John and Ryan I would have probably dug myself into a real deep hole to start the month.  I didn’t want to give up but the numbers didn’t lie.  While I thought the offer looked good and I heard other people had success, it didn’t work for my particular situation.

When you have had success like we have had it’s extremely difficult when a campaign doesn’t work out.  This particular campaign was especially hard on me because I thought it was going to blow up big.  It ended up blowing up in my face and sending me back to the drawing board.  I guess this is why I don’t like the label “Super Affiliate” because if I had superpowers I would have been able to make it work.

There was nothing “super” about me with this campaign and it was an all around humbling experience.  Of course that wasn’t the first campaign that had to be yanked in the beginning and it won’t be the last but it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.  I wasn’t even concerned with the money I lost as much as I was to admit defeat.  I hate to lose at anything.  I love a good challenge and hate when it doesn’t work out.  When a campaign hits on all cylinders, the successful experience is almost as gratifying as the pay.