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!

Earlier this month I wrote a blog titled “How Much Is Your Time Worth?“  I gave some examples how working on projects that were worth lower than my time could end up hurting my productivity. This week, I’ve experienced first hand, the real importance in outsourcing and time management.

Sunday I decided was the day I was going to get one of our upcoming projects at least 85% complete.  The project had been worked on by a team we hired a few months ago.  With all of their steps complete, I decided to dive in and put the finishing touches on myself.  Big mistake.  Before long, I found myself spending over an hour getting a javascript to function properly.  Then it was three hours writing an if/else statement in php to direct scripts in the proper sequence.

After talking to John, we both came to the conclusion, that this was silly not to outsource.  Time I was spending working on javascript, php, etc could have been time spent developing new campaigns, working on other projects, etc.  I was not properly evaluating how much my time was worth and therefore I was severely limiting my earning ability.

Especially when you’re running your own business it is very important to keep track of each hour you’re on the computer and how productive that hour is.  Are you doing something worth your time?

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!

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?

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.

One of the biggest keys to my success as an Internet entrepreneur has been the utilization of one of the most-basic marketing concepts – brand awareness. Creating a brand has been very important in all of my projects, but especially my content-based projects. Unlike a lot of affiliates, I do not make 100% of my living “slingin da’ Berries” as a high-volume affiliate. It’s a large part of my career but I also spend several hours of my day managing other popular Web properties.

A lot of people ask me how to develop a “popular” website and while I can give them the basics – good information, easy to navigate and Search Engine Optimization – the most important thing is to make people remember you. Regardless if you are running a discussion forum, an online store or a content-based website there has to be something worth visiting. This concept is even important for affiliate networks.

Developing a brand is not easy and cannot be done by the lazy. You have to work at developing unique content that is interesting and makes the visitor want to “sink their teeth into it.” Once you have created a brand there are going to be people that love it and people that hate it. Both of these groups of people are what you are going for. What you do not want in developing a brand are visitors that do not care. If your visitors are indifferent when they visit your website, it’s unlikely they’ll return.

I’ve had my highs and lows out of all the popular websites I’ve developed but one thing has remained consistent – I’ve always created a buzz. I’ve created a buzz by developing a brand. There has never been a time where I’ve just “mailed it in” and thrown a website online without carefully considering my content. I always take it as a tremendous compliment when I am able to draw an emotional response out of a visitor. I don’t care if it’s positive or negative; if I am able to garner a response then I have gave the visitor a reason to return.

It’s what I try to do in all of my posts on this very website. I want to enhance the visitor’s experience by giving down to earth examples when comparing affiliate marketing to real life (“Have a safe flight”) while discussing the frustrations of life as an affiliate ( $100,000 A Day To Nothing Overnight – Welcome To Affiliate Marketing) and having some fun at the same time ( You Know You’re A Super Affiliate When…).

Becoming one of the “Super Affiliate Twins” is yet another brand I’ve added to my resume’ as an Internet entrepreneur. To be honest I’m not even a huge fan over the term “Super Affiliate” but people in the affiliate marketing industry are beginning to learn of the Super Affiliate Twins. If you’re thinking of starting a business outside of the affiliate world or just a blog about your life as an affiliate, you certainly want to create a brand and define it in your project. Once you have a brand the ways you can monetize it are limitless and it can provide you with not only a high income but visitor loyalty and career stability.

We learned a very valuable lesson over here today and this small mistake really made things hell.   If you aren’t going direct with your media buying placements then this is stuff you don’t have to worry about.  However, on this wonderful first day of the month we made this mistake and missed out on about $3,000 profit for this particular campaign just for today.   So technically it really didn’t cost us since we didn’t lose but something so simple is easily managable if you just get your ducks in a row ahead of time.

Basically when you go direct with a media buying source you have to have an IO contract to get things rolling. IO stands for insertion order and it involves both parties signing an agreement about the details of your campaign.  Your flight dates, your CPM, your campaign, financial information, and etc. is on this form. After your flight dates are up, then you have to start all over and do another IO for different dates that you’d like to run your campaign during.  Well, we waited until the reminders on our Zedo server told us that it was expiring before we contacted our source to renew it and due to ” new procedures” on their end, our campaign was not able to go up today.  It was approved, papers faxed back within the hour and everything but the red tape on their end took half a day yesterday and then the full day today.

I’m not blaming them at all, they are a great company.  If you think about it, why wouldn’t they want to push this IO as soon as possible?  We have been buying this inventory for a couple of months now and it’s highly unlikely that they would have sold it since we have such a good relationship so they are probably losing out on profits too!  (That’s the power of having good relationships with people you work with, you get priority sometimes!) In fact, we calculated that they lost around $6,000 revenue just because we were late.  It was completely our fault and really learned our lesson the hard way…

Moral of the story, folks, set your reminders to renew IO’s ahead of time if you know you are going to buy the traffic again.  Sure, you don’t want to sign one too early and be locked into a source that you thought was going to back out but ended up tanking.  If that did ever happen, a simple out clause will ensure your safety.  We really are preaching to just give yourself and your source a couple of days to ensure everything will go by smoothly or else both of you could be missing out on money! (Hopefully not as much as we did either…)

Today is the day a lot of marketers have been dreading as the revisions to the FTC guidelines regarding product endorsements go into effect. Beginning today, marketers that use blatantly false techniques to promote a particular product are breaking the law and are subject to fines, litigation and even jail time. The FTC announced the revisions on October 5th, giving marketers nearly two months to get their act together. So that brings up the question, are your landing pages compliant? If not, why not?

This blog, along with several other affiliate blogs online, offers tips in regards to building campaigns that can make you a lot of money as an affiliate. My tip today can save you a lot of time and hassle. If you are not compliant, get compliant. It isn’t that hard to make pages that are FTC compliant that still convert and convert well. Ryan, John and I have worked very hard in making sure everything we promote meets the new guidelines of the FTC. If you are struggling to get compliant, take the following tips into consideration:

* Build your campaigns from scratch. If you are copying someone else’s campaign then there is no way you are compliant. If you are taking testimonials from someone else and making them your own, you are lying. It takes a lot more time to build a campaign from scratch but it is well worth it in the end.

* Use the products you are promoting. If you do not want to use the products yourself, find someone that is willing to experience the product, tell about their experience and sign legal documentation that the claims they have made are accurate. Not only will using the products make you more familiar with what you are promoting, but it guarantees you original content to use for your campaign.

* Do not mention celebrities. Even after Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Oz went after affiliates this summer, there are still landing pages claiming that certain celebrities endorse certain products. Unless the celebrity actually endorses the product, do not make false claims. You can garner just as many conversions without using a celebrity’s likeliness.

If you do not want to work at getting compliant either stop promoting re-bills or promote offers that can be direct linked. If you direct link to an offer, any claims are on the advertiser and not the affiliate. You could always choose to risk it, but I do not recommend that. That’s no way to make a living or create a business model that is going to be around for any length of time.

Now get off here and go check your campaigns!