August 2008 archive
I first met PPC affiliate John Hasson at ShareASale’s “Party Under The Stars” party at Affiliate Summit West earlier this year. We were eating a heartattack-inducing tiramisu/ice-cream concoction and talking about our businesses.
John spoke at the “Meet The Experts” session chairing a table on PPC affiliate marketing. At the recent Affiliate Summit East in Boston, John presented a session on PPC marketing.
During the course of our discussion, I was pretty amazed at how John’s brought his programming skills to automate and employ leverage in PPC campaigns.
We also talked about:
- How John got started as a programmer early on and his first experience at generating $600 a day through PPC arbitrage
- How he made his transition into affiliate marketing
- Tips to succeed in PPC affiliate marketing
You can access the Friday Podcast below:
Note: John was travelling as part of a project he’s working on and the line dropped a number of times and the connection wasn’t the best. Listen in for some great tips though.
You can visit John’s blog at JohnHasson.com
A new update for the Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16 browser has come out, Firefox 3, which promises several enhancements.
The question is whether you should take the plunge, especially since reviews like the one done by Cnet seem to give it a glowing review, mentioning spectacular increase in loading times. Firefox 3 sports a shiny Web 2.0 style user interface.
BUT if you’re a marketer and you use Firefox plugins in your daily work, you will want to hold off on the upgrade.
A number of my existing Firefox add-ons (ie plugins) were deemed to be incompatible with the new version of Firefox and I’ve lost the use of them (on my secondary machine).
Depending on the developer, it could be a few days or a few weeks before a compatible version is available.
If passing on the upgrade (for now) means that you will be able to do your work, it might be a better option for now.
In the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to 3 top PPC (pay-per-click) affiliate marketers. More than that, I’ve had the opportunity to gain insight into how they operate their businesses as well as set up and fine tune their PPC campaigns.
Although I shouldn’t have been that surprised, still it’s quite amazing how different their approaches are from each other. Which goes to show that there are multiple avenues to achieve your goals with PPC and affiliate marketing.
Note: I’ll be painting in broad strokes here, so expect some generalizations.
(left-to-right) Jeremy Palmer, Amit Mehta, John Hasson
Jeremy Palmer is a name that comes up often, especially if you’re a Commission Junction (CJ) affiliate or if you attend the Affiliate Summit. I’ve found that Jeremy and I use a similar approach in looking at offline research avenues, including books, magazines and reports to research niches, and develop deep, content rich sites.
Given his experience as a web developer, I guess it’s not surprising that he tends to build sites from the ground up. Also, having presented and watched his Black Ink project unfold, I’ve seen how Jeremy uses a systematic approach to building his campaigns.
You can check out Jeremy’s appearance on the Friday Podcast.
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Amit Mehta has spoken at the past 3 Affiliate Summits, and given his background (more…)
Amit Mehta who speaks regularly at events like the Affiliate Summit is a true internet success story.
Starting out $20,000 in consumer debt a couple of years ago, he stumbled upon affiliate marketing and later PPC and owns a 7-figure-a-year business today.
On the Friday Podcast, Amit shared:
- How he got started in Internet Marketing
- How he overcame the challenges that all new marketers face
- His success strategies for building his business
- The “inner game” mind elements and strategies he uses.
- His upcoming projects
Amit delivered a ton of content on this call.
Check out his blog: Super Affiliate Mindset
Just released: PPC Classroom 2.0 (product review)
One thing I’ve noticed in talking to peers and new internet marketers recently is that although both categories of internet business owners will build similar types of sites, the way they build their sites are radically different.
I’ve had experience in construction and I’ll use some building analogies here.
New marketers tend to build like houses (ie businesses) in a pre-fabricated fashion. They tend to use templates that a thousand other website owners are using, tend to use the same cookie cutter techniques that’re mentioned on blogs, forums, ebooks, (even high-end coaching programs), yet their results are below expectations.
What’s happened?
I call this the “DryWall” or “SheetRock” mentality.
When I lived in a rural Ohio, I rented a duplex for $275/month. The house was nothing to write home (literally) about, being a wooden frame with drywall (essentially a higher grade plaster-of-paris that kids use to make ‘clay sculptures’) on the inner and outer wall and with fiberglass stuffed in between as insulation.
In the summer, the heat went right through the walls as if they weren’t there. And in the winter, aside from the biting wind and the snow, we got almost the full effects of the cold Ohio winter.
How’s this relate to internet marketing?
New marketers will build their businesses like a pre-fabricated house – assemble a wooden frame, hammer some drywall together, slap on a quick coat of paint, and start doing business.
Although this might work well for some quick cash, it doesn’t (more…)
At the recent Affiliate Summit, Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds and SEO veteran presented some of his latest techniques in optimizing your website rankings in the search engines.
Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.
From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.
Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.
Knol pages have ranked prominently (more…)
