Alright, so I recently stumbled across what I consider a somewhat “hidden” productivity gem of GMail but before you start throwing rotten vegetables at me and saying, “Yeah this was cool in December 2008 when it was released you fucking moron…” just be aware that I realize it’s old but I don’t think it’s very well known.  After all, an avid user of GMail for 4 years didn’t discover it till last night…

This tool is especially useful as a type of cloud software that can be used from different computers as Ryan, Richard and I use it since we all share one email address for our company needs.  Previously we had just starred emails and as they gradually got buried by more and more affiliate network offer updates, we would forget about them.  Alas, our problems are solved with Google Tasks!

I literally worship to-do lists as you probably know if you’ve read a couple of my posts before so I was naturally tickled to death to find a to-do list application that could be shared between multiple computers with so much power and ease.  Here’s an example of a great way to use Tasks to benefit your productivity:

Step 1: Select e-mail for task you need to do.  In this case, I need to renew a GoDaddy domain.

Step 2: Click “More Actions” and then “Add to Tasks” in order to add it to your list.

Step 3: Voila!  It’s in your to-do list and whoever opens the email will see this list.

Step 4:  You can also click the arrows on the right and get section for notes and what not.  Super powerful stuff to keep employees/partners on the same page.

Saturday, August 28th I’ll be heading out to California to speak at the Orange County Meetup202 hosted by Habitat Agency. I’ll be discussing in detail Media Buying providing insights as to how the industry has evolved since the 90s and where I see the future going. From the types of offers that can be promoted via a media, to planning your media buy, International media buying, I’ll be covering it all! I’ll also be accepting questions at the end of my presentation.

I invite you all in the area to come out and hear what I have to say as I’m sure I can help both beginners and experts. The Orange County Meetup202 is one of the larger ones in the United States so I encourage you go ahead and reserve your spot as soon as possible. There is only 100 spots total. I’m very excited and honored to be asked by Habitat Agency to come out and host a presentation. It should be not only a very informative meeting, but a lot of fun for us all!

You can read more details on the official Meetup202 website at this link.

Since tomorrow I’m doing a video interview with Clickbooth I decided to test out my webcam by doing a video blog! Enjoy!

Tomorrow I’m going to be doing a video interview with Eric of Clickbooth discussing media buying!  If you have a question you want to ask me feel free to email them to Eric@clickbooth.com.

Considering I’ve never done a video interview before, I’m really looking forward to this!  I’ll be sure and post the video once it’s available!

This post is a bit late but it took a little longer to contact and hear back from everyone! Anyways, I’m proud to announce that two members of our Internet University as well as one subscriber to our Media Buying 101 list will be attending this year’s Affiliate Summit East conference at the Hilton in New York City later this month for free! Without further ado, here are the winners:

Winners Of The Two Complimentary GOLD Passes:
A gold pass includes: Admission to Affiliate Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions; access to all recorded session videos; PowerPoint presentations; and Affiliate Summit Social Network. Retail Value: $549

Mike Chiasson
In January, 26 year old Mike Chiasson made his New Year’s Resolution to earn $100,000 this year. Apart from his regular day job, he is largely attempting to complete that goal by leveraging affiliate marketing revenues. Mike started his blog MikeChiasson.com to talk about his various attempts at making money (online and offline) and hopes that his experiences can help inspire others and give them the edge they need to be successful.

Mike had the following to say about Internet University: “In January of this year I started my work in Affiliate Marketing. Needless to say it has started off slow and definitely isn’t the get rich quick scheme people would have you to believe. With the help of Internet University I have already been able to stabilize some of my campaigns and begin moving into niches and methods that I would’ve never even known about. I have no doubt that IU is the place for me to continue to grow and help me reach super affiliate status.”

Cody Low

Winner Of The Complimentary SILVER Pass:
A silver pass includes: Admission to Affiliate Meet Market and Exhibit Hall, Keynotes; and access to the Affiliate Summit Social Network. Retail Value: $249

Nuno Blanc

Nuno had the following to say about SuperAffiliateTwins.com: SuperAffiliateTwins.com is one of the few blogs I follow on a daily basis because the information they provide is gold. Not only they give tips and advices on all types of Internet Marketing – like SEO, PPC, PPV and Media Buying – but also post about their journeys, problems and how they actually solve them.

Congratulations to all of the winners, I look forward to meeting you all in just a few weeks! If you haven’t joined Internet University our competition officially kicks off tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. ET so it’s not too late to get in! This month we’re going to see who can generate the most net profit promoting email & zip submit offers with pay-per-view traffic.

Stay tuned to SuperAffiliateTwins.com as this is just one of many more contests to come!

With the recent sell of my first online business, I look back on the experience as a successful yet frustrating process.  There really is no better learning tool for selling a business than actual experience but the problem is… it’s usually not something you do everyday as an entrepreneur.  Here are five tips that I think will be most helpful in the event that you have to sell your business in my latest experience.

1. Cutting the emotions – If you are on the fence about selling your business for a long time, you probably are running way too high on emotions.  As I said, this was the first business that I started a 16 year old kid and this was my baby.  I nurtured it, I cared for it, I dumped thousands of dollars and hours into this precious business and now I’m going to kick it to the curb like it’s nothing?!  This business was my identity and my identity was this business.  However, I came to a point a couple months back whenever I was looking at financial statements, losing sleep at night, and dealing with other problems when I said that this just isn’t worth it anymore.  I considered my history with the business and how much success it has brought me and decided to make a strictly business decision that I’ve had a good run.  Once I cut the emotions away from the equation, it was an obvious answer to sell.

2. Announcing the sale – I spent a couple of days brainstorming potential buyers for my business.  I have never been a fan of putting sites up on marketplaces for just anyone to grab, especially if my identity was so closely tied to the business for so long.  You never know what the future owner will do with the business and if you have a contact list of potential buyers, you may not only be able to get the price you want but also the reassurance of an honest customer to take over the reins.  I chose to keep my sale private for this reason but also for the fact that it would make the users of my site more comfortable.  If they thought the owner was jumping ship and they had no idea it was going to someone trustworthy, they might jump ship as well; therefore leaving the business with even less active users than before and ultimately becoming less valuable.

3. Methods of communication – I found e-mail to be the most efficient way to negotiate the business deals for a number of reasons.  It was easy to document, proper grammar and spelling was frequent and the ease of being able to strategize your decision-making and negotiating was very important.  AIM or a phone conversation didn’t seem like the wise choice for me as I like to proofread and go over what I’m going to say a number of times to prevent confusion.

4. Never accept first offer – My father isn’t exactly a businessman but what he’s always told me when I spoke to him about selling my business was to never take the first offer. I’m not exactly suggesting lie to a potential buyer about having another offer but I’m sure as you may know it’s very frequent in sales.  Give good reason for the first offer to be rejected and offer a reasonable counter-offer that will make both parties happy.

5. Hire a lawyer – This is practically a no-brainer but I figured I would mention it anyways because even I’ve made a similar mistake before.  No matter how well you know the potential buyer or seller, ALWAYS get a lawyer to write up every little detail in a contract.  I’ve relied on handshakes before and it has cost me many hours and many dollars to fix these problems, and these handshakes have been with “friends” I’ve had for years.

Have you found any other essential tips to getting top dollar for your business? Sound off in the comments section.

Reflecting back on the last year I’ve noticed I’m spending a good amount of time optimizing my campaigns. Recently I’ve been asking myself ‘how much is too much?’ 99.9% of campaigns must be optimized before they can become profitable. But once they’re optimized and you’re seeing a nice return (100%+ ROI) how much more should you optimize?

During my reflection (while relaxed on vacation) I noticed I’ve sometimes spent upwards of three weeks focusing on one campaign just to squeeze a couple hundred more dollars a day. More landing pages, different calls to action, new creatives, multiple offers, etc, etc, etc (the list goes on and on). To add to my frustration, once an offer gets pulled or a traffic source limits the offers they’re willing to accept, it’s back to square one with optimization. Annoying!

Therefore I’ve decided to take a new approach on all of my campaigns. Once I begin seeing profit I’m going to set a goal to get to 100% ROI. So for every dollar spent I make a dollar in return. Once I reach this point I’m going to focus my time and effort on making another campaign have the same ROI. While essentially I may limit some campaigns I’ll end up with more campaigns.

How much do you optimize? Do you set a ROI goal?

Just returned from my trip to the beach with some family over at OBX in NC and finally feeling like I’m fully recharged after the last few months.   Every once in a while I’ll take a trip for a weekend but it’s really the week-long ones where I don’t think of anything involving affiliate marketing and do things I can’t do with the distraction of a computer in front of me that allow me to come back refreshed and ready to pound out hours in front of the computer again.  Finch over at FinchSells has always hit it home, in my opinion, with certain emotional topics like getting burned out with affiliate marketing and it got me thinking…

“The WickedFire mindset”, as he labels it, brainwashes us that we need to spend 24/7 in front of a computer in order to be that extra step ahead of competition.  Anyone who doesn’t or anyone who criticizes this mindset is simply labeled as lazy!  I was once under this mindset and sometimes I do still subconsciously think like that.  Sometimes I feel guilty when I go play golf or go sit by the pool for a few hours.   When I realize this feeling of guilt, I always step back and say, “what the fuck?  This is EXACTLY why you are working online, so you can do this…”

Here are a couple of things I have found to be effective in my 5 and a half years of working online in order to keep your sanity and your batteries charged, or at least making it so you don’t feel like you have to recharge your batteries every other week in order to keep yourself from bursting with rage.

- Find an physical stress reliever. I’ve always played basketball and soccer but after high school I didn’t really have a place or time to do it between school work and affiliate marketing.  I’ve turned to working out this summer as I have the past few summers and running 2-3 miles a day.  This has helped me immensely and I instantly feel less frustrated afterwards.  I’ve noticed on days that I don’t do this, I literally want to smash my keyboard and burn my credit card after every snag in a campaign.   The trick to helping me the most is doing it in the morning before I do much more than check e-mail.  Setting off in the right mindset in the very beginning of your day helps me the most for me because if I’m frustrated doing something it’s hard to go back to doing that same task with a completely new mindset after working out.

- Music. This one is pretty obvious but again starting music as I shower and get ready for the day is the absolute key.   A lot of people claim they just can’t find music they like, for those people I suggest checking out Pandora.  It’s amazing how many people know about it but don’t use it.  I literally don’t turn off my music from the time I get up to the time I sleep.   Right now I’m a big fan of Lupe Fiasco, Wiz Khalifa, Drake, and Curren$y.  (All of which refer to making money ironically… )

- Limited Sacrifices. This one is a big one for me and one that I only recently stood back and realized.   Everyone always says that you have to make sacrifices to succeed, that’s obvious.  However, you have to draw the line somewhere or else you are going most likely going to be miserable at the end of the day.  I am extremely busy as I try to balance college and affiliate marketing and during the first semester of college I sacrificed a lot of college time in order to spend time on my affiliate marketing work.  I would literally answer emails while a girl was sitting on my lap begging to watch a movie or whatever.  It sounds so pathetic/embarrassing but it’s true, she would get so mad at me for prioritizing the computer over her.  I just never knew where to draw the line and a lot of people have this same problem.  I’ve never turned down a party on a Friday/Saturday night or anything but there have been many times when I’ve turned down a game of poker or something of the like because I would much rather refresh my stats or work on getting this media buy live before 2:00.   I guess this line is for you to decide but stepping back and saying, I’ll never be able to experience this again and this campaign or blog post can wait is so crucial.   If you have a family, you should see many of the same type of circumstances.  Sacrificing your personal time is what will lead you to success, sacrificing a unique time you could be spending with others will almost always be regrettable in my opinion, even if it means dollar signs.

- Enjoying the Fruits of Your Affiliate Marketing Labor. I’m not a baller and I never will be with my spending.  I have a taste of disgust when I look on Facebook and people I know in affiliate marketing are flashing their pictures of their new cars, watches, houses, and etc.  (Birdman is the exception for various reasons, heh) It’s important not to be a tightwad, and regrettably I have been for the past couple of years.  I have trouble shelling out money for anything that I don’t feel is “necessary”.  Perhaps it’s because I used to spend like a madman when I made chump change as a kid, and always would get scolded for it.  (Cue the Jewish jokes) One thing I don’t have a problem with spending are experiences.  Being able to drop everything and spend $500 on a plane ticket to New Orleans or NYC is an awesome power to have that I may never have for the rest of my life.  Exercising this opportunity on a regular basis with friends is one of the best fruits of affiliate marketing labor!

- Making a Routine. This one is kind of strange to think of because of the fact that affiliate marketing is probably one of the hardest things to make a routine to follow.  The constant changing and inconsistency of campaigns is very aggravating but if you are experienced in a certain area, you can at least develop a routine to-do list habit the night before and nail things down.  I’ve found getting a piece of paper out and doing a to-do list every night increase my productivity immensely.   There’s something a routine does for me that keeps me sane and less mentally exhausted because otherwise I try to do a million things at the same time and spend the whole day just thinking of what I have to do instead of actually doing it.

These are the practices that I’ve figured out the hard way through working online for almost 6 years now.  What types of things keep you sane?

For those of you generating your affiliate marketing traffic via pay-per-view (or cost-per-view) I want you to look at your stats right now and notice where the majority of your ROI (return on investment) is coming from. Nine out of ten chances your conversions are coming from keyword/URL targets that have very low clicks but high conversion rates. Since starting Internet University I’ve noticed a lot of people fail with pay-per-view traffic because they all want to bid on the same targets/keywords as everyone else.

A bidding war can be one of the worst things for you campaigns and even if you win the ‘war’ chances are another affiliate is eventually going to challenge you again. There are literally hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet. To be successful driving traffic via pay-per-view you need to take the time to go out and find where there is NO competition. Notice the below screenshot:

(I apologize I accidentally ran the report with another campaign that’s why the first two rows are black)

I took this from one of my Prosper installations yesterday. I setup a campaign just for this blog post to prove my point correct. Notice the target with 1,041 clicks. It has 1 conversion (0.10%). This traffic was around $0.01 per view. The offer I was using pays $1.50 so I lost $8.91 on this particular target. Notice the target with 8 clicks (views). Paying just $0.08 for these views I generated $3! 3650% ROI! This is what I like to call the ‘hidden gems’ of pay-per-view. This is where profitable campaigns come from.

The pain with this, is it takes many hours to find targets that everyone isn’t bidding on. This is one of the main reasons you’re not going to get rich over night. Campaigns take days, weeks, sometimes even months to build. The harder and more creative you work to find these targets, the more generous you’re going to be paid. So next time you’re setting up a pay-per-view campaign or when you’re looking at scaling your current campaigns keep this post in mind!

On a side note, I announced yesterday in Internet University that soon we’re going to be holding ‘competitions’. This is where everyone will work on a particular campaign together and we’ll all share ideas/landing pages/etc. We won’t share sensitive information such as particular keywords/traffic sources, but rather our ROI and campaign status. In my opinion this is going to create a new ‘hands on’ way to learn how to make money online. If you’re not signed up you may want to get in before the first competition begins (most likely the first week of August). You can do so at this link.

While on vacation I received a quite alarming email from Google. It read the following:

Subject: Final Warning: Your Google AdWords account has multiple violations

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account is at risk of being suspended due to multiple violations related to our Advertising Policies, including the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. Below is a list of example display URLs of the sites in violation of these policies. Please check the existing ads in your account to ensure that they comply with these policies. Please be aware that this is your final warning, and any additional violations of our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines will lead to immediate account suspension.

Customer ID: XXX-XXX-XXXX

superaffiliatetwins.com

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted poor quality landing pages that do not comply with our Advertising Policies, including the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines, we reserve the right to take account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted.  Further, advertisers are prohibited from promoting certain types of sites, which include, but are not limited to:
*  Data collection sites that imply delivery of free items, etc., in order to collect private information
*  Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
*  Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
*  ”Get-rich quick” sites that make unrealistic promises
*  Sites that are deceptive
*  Sites that distribute malware or spyware
*  Extremely misleading/unverifiable or inaccurate claims

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted multiple sites that merited poor landing page quality evaluations.  Advertisers that have a history of promoting poor quality landing pages are subject to account-level disabling.

Pausing or deleting an ad or ad group that advertises a site will not affect or improve the site’s landing page quality. The only way to improve poor landing page quality is to correct the site according to our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines; after you have done this, please contact Google AdWords support by replying to this email so that we can re-evaluate your site’s landing page quality. Once a site’s landing page quality has markedly improved based on these guidelines, ads associated with the site should also see an improvement in Quality Score as it relates to landing page quality.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs and http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675.

In addition, our FAQ about Disabled Accounts can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786.

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

Are you kidding me? Since we launched our Internet University we’ve been driving traffic with Google Adwords targeting keywords where people are searching about how to make money online.  No funny business, simple ads that promote the service we’re offering.  They also note this as our ‘final’ warning, but this is the first email they’ve sent. I replied to them six days ago but have yet to receive a response. To avoid compromising our Adwords account I went ahead and paused our ads.

I’ve always been VERY careful with Google. I’ve never cloaked anything, I’ve never ran a re-bill or an uncompliant offer on Adwords. I feel that it is essential to keep a good relationship with Google to be able to grow in the future. That is why I’ve been ‘overly’ compliant when submitting campaigns. Now that they don’t like Internet University completely baffles me. We don’t promise a ‘get rich quick’ program. We don’t hide any terms as far as the subscription goes. In my opinion we’re not violating ANY of their advertiser guidelines.

It seems to me as they’re classifying us as a typical ‘flog’ and not even reading our content. Sadly this is what happens when a company becomes so big they lose focus about there entire business model as well as keeping customers happy (I can’t even begin to tell you how many millions I’ve spent with Google). To make things worse it’s been six days and they can’t even write a simple reply with more details as to what they don’t like about our site!

What’s your thoughts on this? Is anyone from Google reading this?