If you weren’t observant, you probably wouldn’t notice Kyle Irwin, who does by the nickname “xkyleirwinx” on the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum.
As a programmer, Kyle’s approach to affiliate marketing involves a great degree of automation and he’s been able to roll out a successful campaign on MySpace’s MyAds network promoting CPA offers. The project involved the mass creation of advertiser accounts about half a year ago.
During his time on the Friday Podcast, we talked about:
How he got started in affiliate marketing
Tips on PPC strategies and how to incorporate automation in your affiliate campaigns
Campaign organization and an example of demographic targeting in a live campaign
How to manage your time effectively, especially if you’re married and have kids and how to stay in shape
Kyle gives his uncensored, in-your-face take on starting and building your affiliate business.
One of the questions that came up recently has been the long running nature of the Friday Podcast (which started in mid 2007) and elements that help keep it growing in terms of it’s brand and readership. I distill it to a couple of simple components.
#1: I Enjoy What I’m Doing
Let’s face it, even if you are doing well (refering to income) from something you do, but find it a chore, repetitive, boring, etc, you’d bound to Continue reading →
As mentioned before, Convert2Media goes beyond just being just another affiliate network because it’s founders and affiliates take the time to provide guidance (note: this is not the same as handholding) to optimize and refine your affiliate campaigns. To give a boost to newer affiliates, C2M’s head boss Ruck got in front of his webcam last Saturday to answer questions affiliates had sent in.
You can check out the recording from the hour long session: (Note: the volume was increased after a few minutes)
I mailed Ruck a bunch of the most common questions I receive on the blog and he answered all of them during the session.
Some highlights from the session:
PPV (pay per view) traffic: The majority of users are targeting on a domain level. If you spend some time thinking through, a keyword-based bidding strategy might work. (Especially since some affiliates are doing $1 million off of that approach)
Getting started with PPC (pay per click): Go with Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), Microsoft Adcenter if you’re new. Use features like YSM’s bulk upload and Adcenter’s upload features to save time. Also look at image ads, as the competition is lower in most cases
Keep at your campaigns: Unless you’re lucky, most affiliates will lose money on a campaign before it breaks even or turns a profit. Then again 95% of affiliates quit before their campaign becomes profitable. The difference is at C2M, the affiliate managers are ex-affiliates themselves, so they can give you feedback on refining/optimizing your campaigns. (note: you should have worked on your own campaign and brought it as far as you’re able to before talking to your affiliate manager. Going to your AM and asking them to handhold you from start-to-finish is likely to get you yelled at or labelled a “noob” in their books)
Becoming a sucessful affiliate is a process and you need to work your way there. Although you may hear the advice to test 3-5 offers, note that these should be within the same niche (ie: dating, weight loss, biz op). Trying to cross into too many verticals at the same time is likely to burn through your budget.
Focusing on a single vertical and testing/rotating multiple offers within the same vertical will give you a better idea of the performance/behavior of the vertical and move you towards building a proftable campaign.
There’re more coaching sessions scheduled this month and possibly a couple of “spur-of-the-moment” sessions coming up.
In addition, C2M maintains an active coaching forum and the affiliate managers are available for consults over instant messenger.
Their compliance efforts to weed out fraud affiliates also means that new affiliates might have a hard time getting in.
If you’re a new affiliate, you might find the “Affiliate Marketing Tips” series useful for getting started. I’ll be continuing to add new content to the series each week.
CashTactics.net’s head blogger and an experienced affiliate Kris Trujillo stopped by the Friday Podcast to give his opinion and insights into issues that affiliates might face as they work on their campaigns.
Some of the issues we discussed included:
Kris’ affiliate wishlist for CPA (cost-per-action/cost-per-acquisition) networks
Terrible domain name aside, Technorati, one of the benchmark of blogging success, looks like it’s attempting to crawl back into relevance with the launch of a new service aimed to bridge the worlds of blogging and Twitter.
The new site, Twittorati, looks like a mashup of twitter updates from top Technorati users. The site looks like quite a mess, and with most Internet users looking at twitter updates via clients like TwitterFall, TweetDeck or the web interface, is going to a third-party site relevant to the process?
Affiliate marketers can benefit from some of the trend information the site offers, especially if they’re keen practitioners of demographic profiling.
Looking at some of the hot hashtags:
I’m a little surprised that #MichaelJackson isn’t on that list.
If you weren’t observant, you probably wouldn’t notice Kyle Irwin, who does by the nickname “xkyleirwinx” on the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum.
CashTactics.net’s head blogger and an experienced affiliate Kris Trujillo stopped by the Friday Podcast to give his opinion and insights into issues that affiliates might face as they work on their campaigns.