Listening In On Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Yesterday was my best day ever for making money online! There are certainly discouraging days when nothing seems to be going right and the lastest experiment or initiative flops. After enough days like those, having a record day is a welcome confidence booster.

A big money making day can also be a good lesson. Once you analyze what brought that success and figure out how to replicate and repeat it then you’re on your way to further success.

Just wanted to say thanks to Colin McDougal for teaching me some of the things I learned that made a big difference in terms of yesterday’s profitability. Once the traffic and money started to roll in yesterday he made time to get on the phone with me and answer my questions about tweaking and optimizing the traffic.

I’d highly recommend signing up for the internet marketing mentoring he offers through his Fly on the Wall Club program. The information and mentoring he offers pays for the cost of coaching many times over. Thanks Colin!

I’ve been running a campaign for about a month now in an up and coming industry. The search volume is pretty low, but increasing, and I’ve been adding a few leads a week into my Aweber list.

Twice now I’ve logged into my Adwords account and noticed that my impressions had suddenly shot way up. Both times I went and checked under Campaign Settings and the Content network had been enabled, not by me I might add.

What is this Google Adwords ghost that keeps turning on the content network and dragging down my CTR?

Taxes are due tomorrow and everyone’s scrambling to get them finished. The tax traffic is pretty crazy tonight so I was looking for another affiliate offer to promote. I ran across one that had their toll free number plastered across the landing page in multiple places:

Why would I waste my time promoting their landing page when half the tax crazed people are going to pick up the phone to talk to a live person? I send them the traffic but it converts via phone instead of opt-in form and I don’t make any money.

Am I off base here or does anyone else think it’s not smart to promote an offer where the toll free number can steal the commission?

My recent trip to Affiliate Summit West was not only a blast, it was foremost an investment in my internet marketing business. So what did I learn at Affiliate Summit and what kind of return on investment will I see from the money spent? Below I share some of the highlights of people I met and things I learned.

Productive Party Under the Stars
At the ShareASale Party I met James from Marketing Punk who has grown his internet marketing experience working for InsureMe. A really nice guy, not only did meeting him remind me that you can make more money by making friends rather than enemies. He also demonstrates the importance of finding a good company/product and running with it. I tend to jump from one thing to another, his story reminds me I need to focus. Focus first and the money will follow.

I also met Joel & Karen Garcia from GTO Management at the ShareASale Party, a really nice couple. One of the challenges I’ve faced as I soak in the internet marketing industry is balancing family time, day job, and time spent on my business. They’re a great example of meshing internet marketing and real life and offered Colin and I some good marital tips for internet marketers, thanks guys! Anything that keeps you out of divorce court is definitely a money saver.

Networking to the Blue Man Group
Colin McDougall and I got to the Tao nightclub a little early for the Affiliate Bash, a good thing too since there was quite a line. Not only that, we were early enough to get seats and even be able to make it up to the bar without waiting an hour. While Colin was wheeling and dealing with another affiliate, Thor Shrock and his wife sat down right across from us. Having been impressed with his performance on the Next Internet Millionaire, I went over to say hi and had a nice conversation with him and his wife.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the performance by the Blue Man group but you can see a video over at John Chow’s site. (I was hoping to meet John in person but never got the chance). Anyhow, I learned two things from Thor that revolve around his upcoming affiliate show, Top Affiliate Challenge.

The first was the importance of coming to events like Affiliate Summit for face time. Thor had sent multiple emails to the affiliate networks for sponsorships for Top Affiliate Challenge with no response. Suddenly, he shows up at Affiliate Summit, talks to them about it face to face and they love the idea! Emails can be blocked by spam filters or overlooked but a handshake and an introduction have a much better conversion rate : )

The second thing I learned from Thor was the importance of leveraging win/win relationships. He showed the city of Lincoln, NE how the Top Affiliate Challenge would bring the city publicity which has resulted in good press coverage and assistance from the city. I’ll definitely have to keep this example in mind as I build my business and look for win/win relationships.

Affiliate Marketing is Spam Keynote
The keynote speaker, I won’t mention his name, no need to give him any more press/links than he’s gotten so far, shared his rather negative view of the affiliate marketing industry. I enjoyed Joel Comm’s take on the speech and learned something from it myself. (I got to meet Joel at his Text Cast Live booth and will be signing up as an affiliate to promote the product, it’s pretty slick). Anyhow, the keynote speaker ridiculed Shoe Money and Zac Johnson for showing off checks of money they’d earned online, saying it was uncouth in Silicon Valley, to talk about how much money you make.

After giving it further thought, I realized why no one in Silicon Valley wants to reveal how many millions of dollars they’re making. It’s because they’re dependent on employees to make their companies go. How pissed would the lead technial engineer of a startup company be if they saw a picture online of thier CEO flaunting a check for $25 million when the engineer is making $100K a year?

I was reminded by this of the ability of internet marketing to generate wealth for one person all based off of their work alone. That kind of potential for income without having to build a huge business and have lots of employees is what got me involved in affiliate marketing in the first place and will continue to motivate me towards success.

Best Breakfast of the Week
I was running late on Tuesday morning, dashing in to grab breakfast before heading to the “Ask the Experts” session when I saw Andrew Wee, Amit Meta, and Wil Reynolds having a late breakfast together. I quickly decided to skip the session and grabbed a seat at their table. I had missed Wil’s SEO session the previous day, here is a recap by Ms Danielle and a video clip, and wanted to meet him in person. Having gone through Amit’s Super Affiliate Accelerator and a regular reader of WhoIsAndrewWee I thought I’d probably learn more from these guys in a small group breakfast than at the session.

I picked up some good tips on landing pages and how to outsource them as well as hire article writers during our conversation. I got to ask Amit about optimizing some of my adgroups that have a low CTR but high conversion rate and learned something from Wil’s approach to teaching others SEO. Basically, the importance of focusing on the analysis of the industry you’re in and how to stand out in it. Focusing on small details like meta or h1 tags is counter productive, become an expert at what you do and the links will come.

Super Affiliate Tips
After the breakfast I headed to the Super Affiliate Strategies session featuring Zac Johnson, Amit Meta, Kris Jones, and John Chow. One thing they were all in consensus on was that the marketing opportunities on Facebook are huge right now, they all seem to have their finger in the pie. Here’s what I learned from the presenters:

Amit - Create a business process for entering and profiting from a niche, anyone can steal your content but it’s tough to replicate your process. Here’s a video of Amit’s answer from the SOB Affiliate (Second one down, after John Chow’s comment). Making quality sites will not only result in good organic results but help your quality score. Content heavy sites are more immune to Google changes than thin sites. In terms of PPC, conversion rates are better at MSN and Yahoo than Google, probably because google users are more sophisticated.

Zac & John - From these guys I learned it’s all about the content. They both put a lot of effort into generating a lot of useful content, Zac with MySpace Now and John with JohnChow.com, and they’ve both reaped the financial rewards. I’ve picked up some useful information from Zac Johnson’s site over the last year and, even though I didn’t win his free Affiliate Summit ticket, I was able to thank him for it in person after the session and ask a few Facebook questions.

Kris Jones - After the session a few people were hanging around up front asking questions and Kris made a pretty good point about leveraging seasonality and the media. He gave an interesting tip I thought was pretty valuable, won’t share it here because I want to try it myself : )

After the session, I got to meet an up and coming super affiliate, Paul from Uber Affiliate. I’ve learned some useful stuff from his site and just stopped by to tell him thanks. He emphasized the power of networking and relationships in this affiliate interview from the conference.

Relationship Building
Although I picked up some useful tactical tips from Affiliate Summit the biggest ROI had to be the relationships I formed. I met some really cool people who gave me in one way or another some pretty good advice. Probably the most valuable was the time I spent hanging around Colin and getting to know him better. We just had an Affiliate Summit post-mortem last night and he’s helping me focus my affiliate efforts towards a profitable market that’s a good match for me, thanks Colin!

So in summary, yes Affiliate Summit will definitely help me make money. In fact, they had Affiliate Summit East tickets half price during the conference so I went ahead and bought mine for the one in Boston in August. If you’re on the fence & trying to decide whether it’s worth your money, go ahead and whip out that credit card, it’s worth every penny.

I’ve been keeping up on tips for preparing for Affiliate Summit West this weekend, right now listening to Andrew Wee interviewing Shawn Collins. Here are some of the things I’ve done to get ready for the conference:

• Loaded up some blogs with posts for a few days while I’m gone
• Exchanged phone numbers with people I want to meet
• Printed out the session schedule & and Affiliate Meet Market floorplan
• Bought 500 business cards
• Bought a new laptop battery

Next on the list is to refresh my memory on what conference expenses are tax deductible. I’m going to the listen to the CD again on Travel & Entertainment deductions from the “Tax Strategies for Business Professionals” series by Sandy Botkins. I’d definitely reccomend this course to anyone that has a home based business, it will pay for itself very quickly.

Thanks to the forum of Teaching Sells, I’ve been alerted to another survey tool that addresses my complaints about the free version of Survey Monkey. Apparently SurveyGizmo.com is a great option that addresses the downloading of data and the thank you page. It also integrates well with Google Adwords for conversion/signup tracking.

It’s nice to be a part of a great resource like Teaching Sells, helps keep you up to date on the latest tools and strategies. They’re in the middle of a new course called “Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites” which has been very useful. Check out their free report entitled “Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online (And Start Making Some)”.

If you’re looking to survey prospects, subscribers, or customers you might be interested in the enhancement that Google made to Google Spreadsheets that turns it into a free survey tool.

There are existing services, such as Survey Monkey, that already offer a free alternative but I noticed two things the Google Docs enhancement offers that you don’t get with the basic Survey Monkey version.

Offering Incentives
Whether you’re sending current subscribers or prospects generated by paid traffic to the survey, you can always increase the survey response rate if you offer something free in return for taking it.  I wanted to send people from my last Survey Monkey questionnaire to a free report if they took the time to fill it out but Survey Monkey wanted me to upgrade to a paid version to offer this feature.

In Google Docs, after you create your survey you can select the “Custom confirmation message” checkbox in the Preferences section to turn on a thank you message.  You can enter the message you want people to see once they’ve completed the survey and point them to whatever free item you promised.

Data Download
In SurveyMonkey, you can look at each individual survey response or you can look at a summary of total answers but you can’t download all the responses into a spreadsheet for further analysis unless you upgrade to a paid package.  With Google Spreadsheet all the responses are easily available for analysis or download.

Basic Service
You do get what you pay for. The survey form interface is very plain for Google Spreadsheet so you can’t customize it with any of your own graphics or different color schemes.  In addition the survey functionality is not as sophisticated as what Survey Monkey can offer with some of their packages.

However, if you’re just looking for a basic, quick & easy tool that’s free, Google Spreadsheet should do the trick! Thanks to Aweber for alerting me to this market research tip.  Check out their video demo.

Does success followed by a question mark really mean success? I guess it depends on how you measure success.

The good news is I launched my first profitable pay per click campaign about a week ago, the bad news is I’m only up 3 bucks. Here is my earnings report from Neverblue Ads:

I don’t have very many keywords at all, this is really just a test to figure out how things work. I used what I learned from Zac’s Guide to PPC Marketing, Paul’s Uberaffiliate Marketing Guide, and the Super Affiliate Accelerator run by Amit from Super Affiliate Mindset to put together a basic campaign to learn the ropes.

Observations

I only have two adgroups A & B, and A brought in 5 out of the 6 conversions. Ad group A’s keyword statistics are shown following my observations:

The keyword with the highest number of impressions has brought in the highest # of conversions, which makes sense. However, its click through rate isn’t fantastic, I should split test more ads on that keyword to increase CTR.

The keyword with the third highest impressions has one of the poorest CTR’s, I need to optimize that ad as well. It has brought one conversion due to the high number of impressions, better ads should hopefully result in higher CTR -> conversions.

The ad group not shown, B, has more than double the cost per conversion as the adgroup below, A. If I had not been running adgroup B, expenses would be 29% lower and profits only 16% lower. Needless to say ad group B is not profitable.

Ad group B avg CTR is 1.9% while Ad group A avg CTR is only 1.35%. Yet the conversion rate for Ad group B is only 4% and the conversion rate for Ad group A is 10.20%. They both point to the same landing page, my ads for Ad group B must promise something other than the landing page offers. It may be that those keywords don’t convert as well for this offer. I’ll add more relevant ads to see if I can improve conversions.

CTR of 1.28% and up gives a Great quality score, anything less only has OK quality score.

The average position for ad group A is 4.4 and for ad group B is 2.1. I could consider dropping my current bid on some of the keywords by about 30% to lower my costs and see what effect it had on conversions. I’ll hold off on these changes until I’ve optimized my ads so I know which changes are actually having an effect.

So how am I going to improve my ad copy? Upon the recommendation of Amit, I bought the book, Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples and am part way through it now. I’ve picked up some great information, I’m going to use some of the formulas from the chapter on writing headlines to improve the ads I’m using.

When the sun sets I start my double life. The full time software engineer, husband, and dad disappears and aspiring internet marketer persona takes control.

There never seems to be enough time to get everything done so I’m usually at the keyboard until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. Then I usually hit the floor for a few hours sleep. If I’m lucky, I wake up early enough to get a little more done before the family wakes up and my daytime identity takes control.

Last night I was on a roll and was able to stay up the entire night, with a little help from caffine of course. Around 5 AM I noticed Colin was still online and messaged him with a question which eventually turned into a phone call, luckily I changed my cell plan a while back to get cheap calls to Canada : )

I shared some of my frustrations with him about how some of my projects were going and he offered me some pretty good advice. We talked for a while before I had to sign off to go start my work day. We agreed to finish our conversation when we get together at the upcoming Affiliate Summit.

I struggled to stay awake on my way into work but as I drove I processed what we’d talked about and couldn’t help but to feel lucky to have access to someone with so much experience in the field and so willing to share his knowledge with others. I really do think my membership to the Fly on the Wall Club has been the best investment I’ve made in my affiliate marketing “learning on the job” process so far.

As I’ve said before, internet marketing experience is worth its weight in gold!

How much money did you make as an internet marketer over the last 8 months? What if I told you that over the next 2 months you could make double that entire amount and the following three months you could see your income grow by another 4 times?

Would you believe me? Sadly, I’m not telling my story but the tale of an UberAffiliate who used determination, testing , adaptation, & networking to do exactly what I just described.

Check out the graph he shares on his year anniversary post. What if he would have gotten discouraged and quit after that 8^th month? Thanks to Paul for sharing his journey, a great example of how persistence is key to success. My latest affiliate promotion was rather unsuccessful, Paul’s post has reminded me to learn from the discouragement and press on.

If you’re looking for a little insight to his success, he shares a lot of the resources he’s used in his affiliate marketing guide. Nice work Paul!