Author Archives: Andrew Wee

About Andrew Wee

My name is Andrew Wee. I'm 32 years old, live in Singapore and am happily married with a 2 month old daughter. I've gone through a list of various occupations including: * journalist (for a business newspaper) * Internet content developer (for one of Asia's largest media group's Singapore Press Holdings) * trainer in entrepreneurship, business building, life skills * photographer/photojournalist * real estate agent * consultant * entrepreneur (I think that's enough for now...more later!) This is a personal space to express my goals, dreams and aspirations.

AffExpert review, AffExpert Discount Code and Lifetime Subscription Promo

12 Replies

Whether you’re a PPC affiliate or PPV affiliate, you’ll hit the wall and find some of the keyword and URL research tedious. Unfortunately this is the start point of any campaign and can be a major time suck.

I probably use the Google External Keyword Tool more than any other out there, though for pay-per-view traffic especially, it helps to use a scraping tool. A scraper goes through website or search engine content and harvests URLs and keywords for your PPV campaign.

It’s going to be a major disappointment if you think that just scraping this information and loading it into a campaign is going to get you a winner right off the bat. But if you’ve got the patience to let the keyword/URL targets gather some data, you’ll have the opportunity to cut the losers and keep the winners and possibly have a profitable campaign on your hands.

Firstly, you’ll need to get through the scraping element, which is where I like to a suite of research tools developed by Besmir Bregasi (whom I’ve also recently developed the SmartLinkManager.com link management/web analytics tool).

He’s just officially launched AffExpert (meaning it’s gone from a free beta, to a paid subscription model).

There’s a bunch of tools for both PPC and PPV marketers. The most useful of which are the scrapers.

You can head over to his page to find out more information about them. I wanted to do a brief walkthrough of one of the tools – a YouTube scraper. You’ve probably seen some news reports that YouTube has a torrent of traffic and has more searches than Google, etc. I wouldn’t get caught up in the details, but do realize that YouTube has replaced Google/YSM/Bing as a search engine replacement, especially for the tween/teen demographic.

The YouTube scraper goes through and compiles a list of YouTube vids based on your keyword criteria. For example, “Free iPad” threw up this list of videos:

youtube.com/watch?v=PCTYwEu8gIg/
youtube.com/watch?v=W1uP6QNt3yE/
youtube.com/watch?v=AapxatFAmlk/
youtube.com/watch?v=–vueWNrR8o/
youtube.com/watch?v=wf-YgyNpwWA/
youtube.com/watch?v=z_BshfWGQos/
youtube.com/watch?v=0f-EYf3REOY/
youtube.com/watch?v=jzhFiC9vsZQ/
youtube.com/watch?v=p1EaAlFxfpU/
youtube.com/watch?v=9UWW9pnSaUQ/
youtube.com/watch?v=6sZLfWq1B6A/
youtube.com/watch?v=OAAx8gDVEB8/
youtube.com/watch?v=5sWvtb8JTJM/
youtube.com/watch?v=z_-LjPyk028/
youtube.com/watch?v=NPZzbktBuq4/
youtube.com/watch?v=Uwd9nbr-RJc/
youtube.com/watch?v=KT2H28pun7Q/
youtube.com/watch?v=khSDYPRxWDg/
youtube.com/watch?v=okqP2xRgl3k/
youtube.com/watch?v=oLutLap65tE/
youtube.com/watch?v=aeaqY70HXnw/
youtube.com/watch?v=zOPXJcp5wbs/
youtube.com/watch?v=XDE_LAAZlrE/
youtube.com/watch?v=PsA_GoyVpSU/
youtube.com/watch?v=9Nv0MVPesk4/
youtube.com/watch?v=CtOYF6LPaFs/
youtube.com/watch?v=hKOlFCukHMU/
youtube.com/watch?v=GH5wHRRKpIA/
youtube.com/watch?v=wS_U_3GgmZU/
youtube.com/watch?v=xyJHLrY8hkI/
youtube.com/watch?v=1AeQchNicA0/
youtube.com/watch?v=BsUQt8vdE6Y/
youtube.com/watch?v=kvCeePJJUQs/
youtube.com/watch?v=cWRvZ4xeNZc/
youtube.com/watch?v=BOzUqheoLKU/
youtube.com/watch?v=VN6mBk-auy0/
youtube.com/watch?v=Z1WmQTw2peA/
youtube.com/watch?v=V1qMXxJuTHw/
youtube.com/watch?v=4vLJyF0zlUI/
youtube.com/watch?v=nvxwVtxXNpU/
youtube.com/watch?v=FTzhXMbOWHE/
youtube.com/watch?v=BVJFLzaMOx0/
youtube.com/watch?v=JkYV7B6MX1A/
youtube.com/watch?v=F_IboXHyBsY/
youtube.com/watch?v=MwQpMMSCyDc/
youtube.com/watch?v=PtsStUbjTJs/
youtube.com/watch?v=UwPDuU9cBOE/
youtube.com/watch?v=J8NOMrel5DE/
youtube.com/watch?v=oLq38EsMcRo/
youtube.com/watch?v=Kw3sczDZY2g/
youtube.com/watch?v=Sxq3pANdgNo/
youtube.com/watch?v=dbRp913rh7E/
youtube.com/watch?v=HuE-XYP-Fms/
youtube.com/watch?v=R2uF0H2oCfA/
youtube.com/watch?v=1LzcpeNbJs8/
youtube.com/watch?v=lp_Xa_GTBYo/
youtube.com/watch?v=_KyZdxt_59s/
youtube.com/watch?v=_GSiSj97p-k/
youtube.com/watch?v=P-gzT6EN6_g/
youtube.com/watch?v=NayiKd4mgis/
youtube.com/watch?v=afBzXWWFHkY/
youtube.com/watch?v=GfvUIE9o0qY/
youtube.com/watch?v=SDhlTHUZMPE/
youtube.com/watch?v=OXDbXW6YN1I/
youtube.com/watch?v=OQ6gk6jaQws/
youtube.com/watch?v=ACfcIEUWO-U/
youtube.com/watch?v=ncw3aQXxdfc/
youtube.com/watch?v=X-CgujQLW-k/
youtube.com/watch?v=-_LWYnfwAkk/
youtube.com/watch?v=biayrX6Toz8/
youtube.com/watch?v=kCJ__TElX2U/
youtube.com/watch?v=ZYUibicEMPM/
youtube.com/watch?v=q12NEgmkXEo/
youtube.com/watch?v=0mkeyGWcav0/
youtube.com/watch?v=pL-PvUI7lMs/
youtube.com/watch?v=KolNoeRN92Q/
youtube.com/watch?v=Z-jmv-oTxSk/
youtube.com/watch?v=iEOYykWMSMA/
youtube.com/watch?v=n0wdhXmBhYs/
youtube.com/watch?v=HTVw9jER4sg/
youtube.com/watch?v=0rAW_n_smOY/
youtube.com/watch?v=111TdKoge1w/
youtube.com/watch?v=2NsJwwT79Lg/
youtube.com/watch?v=MP2LuTdaFkY/
youtube.com/watch?v=KS6mZaksmIs/
youtube.com/watch?v=-3cqzbxSzwI/
youtube.com/watch?v=TUbmFRL049A/
youtube.com/watch?v=6MKuRT_cM74/

If you were to manually scrape these, you’ll spend quite a bit of time.

The videos are quite varied, from 5,000 views to 1.8m views for a couple of them.

Don’t waste your time watching them now. Just load them into the URL targets campaign for your preferred network (pop-ups for trafficvance and media traffic might be a good place to start), then use an offer rotater (free for AffExpert members) and check out which URL targets stand out.

Incidentally, I’ve been using the rotater (self-hosted on yr own hosting account) since Besmir started coding it. Works like a charm and you can setup the rotation ratios (eg: 50% to offer 1 and 25% each to offer 2,3, etc). It works fine as a standalone script, or you can integrate with Prosper202.

Back to the idea. So if you loaded 4-6 free iPad submit offers and popped them over “free ipad” videos on YouTube, you might have a winner on your hands.

If it doesn’t work, then select a different offer (eg: giftcard submits) and test it out.

I’ve got word from affiliate managers that some CPA submit offers scrub more brutally than others. Some advertisers are known to even shave. It helps if an offer is newer and the advertiser has a fairly decent rep (again, check with your AM).

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But there’s more! So AffExpert has a bunch of other tools and I might go through them in this new project I’ll be announcing shortly.

The good thing is that in addition to the monthly subscription, he’s just released a lifetime subscription, which could pay for itself in a month or two if you actually use the tool.

I’ve also got some AffExpert offer codes you can use:

The monthly plan starts with a 7-day trial for just $1 and goes to a $39/month subscription.

You can use the AffExpert discount code: “BETAUSER” or “SPROMO” (depending on which is valid) to get it down to $29/month.

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If you prefer to get the lifetime subscription (expect to get upgrades to the tools as Besmir improves them).

It’s $347 for a lifetime subscription (or if you use the code “50off” you only pay $297 for lifetime access).

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Both plans and discount codes are valid via this link: AffExpert discount code promo

Earl Grey – MVP blogger 2010

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If FinchSells was the breath of fresh air in the internet marketing blog space in 2009, then I think Earl Grey (owner of the syndyk8 black hat SEO forum) is in the running, together with MrGreen for most useful blog in 2010.

I’d heard of syndyk8 (reminds me of that old RTS PC game where you move 5 gangsters around the screen and blow people away) at WickedFire since about 2006, though I’ve not joined the forum. At the moment it’s set to admin-approval, so it might not be the easiest to get in.

But you might like to check out the blog, especially since Earl’s making a go at blogging every day for the past week. I’m guessing each post is about 30-45minute of effort and the fact that he’s blunt and in-your-face is a which is a welcome break from some of the other blogs you might read.

Although it’s labelled a blackhat SEO blog, I read it more for the biz management/strategy elements he shares. (I’m making an assumption that Earl is a guy).

Whether it’s by default or design, blog comments require user registration before posting a comment is allowed, which in my experience reduces interactivity.

Wondering where to start? I thought the fact that he places a monetary value on his communities, has an exit strategy in mind, places him ahead of many webmasters who’re only focused on immediate arbitrage opportunities.

So check out: “Building your business or community on facebook? No you aren’t, dickhead” (may not redirect correctly because of his secure HTTP cert. In which case, scroll through his blog entries).

I don’t think building a community on a third-party domain is a good idea, unless you can get an opt-in or get some control over sending communication to your followers, which ties in to the idea of building your own asset, rather than merely grow Twitter or Facebook’s userbase.

Getting Organized, Making Bank

5 Replies

It’s hard to imagine but it’s been almost half a year since I was in Vegas for Affiliate Summit West. At that time I had been working on about 5 projects. At the moment I’m working on 4 projects, although 2 of them are from the original 5 I had been working on.

The one thing that sticks out from ASW was at the Meetup202, er, meet up, was where Dr Ngo got on stage and talked about being focused. In his case he was refering to becoming a specialist in a couple of niches, rather than try to run hundreds of offers successfully.

Likewise, I’ve found that whether in online gaming or in my business, I get the best results from focusing on one or two tasks, rather than try to do many more than that.

In affiliate marketing terms, by all means test 5 to 7 offers at a time. But once you find one or two potential winners (profit or marginally in the red), you also need to focus on making them work. Else you could be locked in a permanent cycle of testing offers.

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I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focused on launching a major upgrade to one of my sites. If all goes well, you should see it by the end of the 1st week of June (if not, in the next couple of days). It’s the result of focus again. Just like it’s usually easier to make $1k/day consistently from one offer, rather than $500 each from 2 offers, I’m also placing most of my eggs in one basket with this new project.

Here’s one of my recent game changing moment: Track your time…ruthlessly.

For those of you who might have been or still are lawyers, accountants, consultants, you would be familiar with time sheets, especially if you’re charging clients on a per-hour basis. I’ve heard of stories where lawyers have sat on the toilet, doing their daily business, thought about a case and charged that time.

But, no, I’m not talking about charging THAT kind of time.

I’m refering to brutally counting how much time you spend on your business each day, doing something that will get you towards achieving your goal (you have a goal, right?).

So time spent reading email, AIMing, checking stats doesn’t count. Setting up new campaigns, optimizing an existing campaign, rotating creatives, whatever that makes your business more successful counts.

Since my experiment started, I’ve been updating my time usage on a Google Doc spreadsheet and the results weren’t pretty early on in the experiment. I was averaging 30mins of productive work on some days, and about 2 hours on other days.

Note: You have to be extremely brutal about whether you’re doing something “productive” to make this experiment work.

A research study shows that the average American exec probably clocks about 30mins of productive work for each workday (8-hour block). In efficiency, this is 30mins / 8x60mins = 6.25%. Terrible.

Upping how you use your time might make the difference between success and failure, especially if you’re slogging at a day job.

The way I see it, you can either become “educated” and aware about every offer out there, every new network, read a lot of blogs and forums to “know everything”. Or you can become really focused and bank.

Any questions?

Best Paid Affiliate Marketing Forum? A PPV Playbook Review

156 Replies

Update: to get a discount code for PPV Playbook, click here: PPV Playbook discount code (Limited quantities).

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Over the years I’ve joined multiple paid internet marketing forums. I was among the earlier members to the Warrior Forum’s “Marketing to the Herd” paid section, then later the “War Room” (you need to be a paid member to do most of the useful stuff there now), then later Gauher Chaudhry’s PPC Formula and PPC Classroom.

Sure, I’ve been a member of free forums too like wickedfire, digital point, sitepoint, Linda Buquet’s 5-star affiliate forum and assorted internet marketing forums.

In general (there are exceptions), paid forums have given me more bang for my buck. You don’t have freebie seekers posting misinformation, and 90% of the chatter isn’t in the off-topic or general discussion forum.

I took up David Ford’s offer of a PPV Playbook membership a couple of weeks ago and was impressed by the quality of content there.

In case you’re wondering, it’s more than just a PPV forum, there’re sections for SEO, social media and other forms of traffic too. Content-wise, David has been regularly been posting tutorials and video lessons for various traffic networks, CPA/affiliate marketing conversion tactics and invited various experienced marketers to post regularly on the forum.

But what makes a forum great is the community of members. Seeing both new and experienced members post their successful and ongoing campaigns as well as talk through the strategy behind the campaigns has provided a couple of idea for implementing in my own campaigns.

I decided to post one of my projects – to build a high authority content site which aims to generate $10k/month consistently by end Nov this year – in the case study/follow along campaigns section. I’ve also invited my partner, Clement, who’s handling parts of the project to post updates as the site goes up too.

Here’s an excerpt from the case study:

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One of my backburner projects had been to develop a high authority, rich content site, which would be sustainable, and fetch a nice acquisition price if we decided to go the M&A route at some point.

So why do I think this might be a good project to work on?
#1 I’ve been doing a fair number of arbitrage-type projects since i started in 2006, but have been moving towards developing/owning/operation community/subscription/continuity type sites. And the world of coupon/datafeed sites has been interesting.
#2 some of my friends like Scott Jangro have focused their efforts on building one big site (Costumzee.com – one of the biggest halloween costume affiliate sites online and ranks for many terms like ‘spiderman costume’)
#3 going public with it here will force me to put more time into it, especially since i’ve put a target income goal ($10k by end nov) in the title!

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Project kickoff
Finding the right partner is key. So I found someone local to me, who’s good at SEO and a number of different paid traffic networks.

My contribution is working on the strategy, marketing, and managing relationships with CPA and CPS merchants.

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So what’s the demographic?
I’ve not specifically focused on the female demographic, so this might be an interesting focus group.

I’m segregating the demographic with 3 characteristics
#1: Age: 25-45
#2: Kids or no kids
#3: working or staying at home

So if you visualize this as a matrix with 3 axes, or a graph with x-y-z axis, the 8 possible permutations are:

#1 female, 25-35, kids, working
#2 female, 25-35, no kids, working
#3 female, 25-35, no kids, not working
#4 female, 25-35, kids, not working
#5 female, 36-45, no kids, not working
#6 female, 36-45, no kids, working
#7 female, 36-45, kids, not working
#8 female, 36-45, kids, working

the demographic are important because the content, pre-sell LPs and offers will be tested to find the best converting combination for each demo.

Unless I get enough mass (or the site is established), I’ll use A/B split testing, rather than multi-variate/taguchi.

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Offer selection:
The only safe assumption is we don’t know what will convert. So I’ll test everything.

Cost-per-sale, Cost-per-action considerations.
I’m planning to build a long term site with sticky visitors, and incorporate emailing into the mix.

This means that a mix of CPS and CPA might give the best results.
I’m particularly concerned about not promoting rebills, which would ‘burn’ the list.

Some of the possible shortlisted offers include:
1) as seen on tv offers like the slap chop, sham wow
2) pet stuff (including Mr Green’s favorite pet snuggie)
3) finance
4) career/edu
5) health

By having a basket of offers to present to the demographic, there’ll be less offer fatigue, compared to just a colon cleanse/acai campaign.

I’m planning to do offer rotation:
1) same offer across different networks
2) different related offers across the same and different networks

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LP strategy:
The site will take on an expert advisor/review/ranking format to pre-selling offers.

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Traffic generation:
Likely a combination of organic/social, and paid traffic.

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My plan is to post updates 1-2 times a week, depending on which part of the cycle I’m at. I’ve got some good feedback from my friend, Hannah McIntyre, who’s also a member on the site, along with other PPV Playbook members.

If you’d like to follow along the case study, why not check out PPV Playbook now?

-> PPV Playbook

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Update: to get a discount code for PPV Playbook, click here: PPV Playbook discount code (Limited quantities).

CPA Marketing Shenanigans and What You Can Do About It

2 Replies

I was talking to Josh Todd earlier today and was asking him about the practice of networks asking their affiliates to set up a 2nd affiliate account and bypass the affiliate who referred them. It was probably one of the inspirations for his post “Are your referral commissions being shaved?”

Having been an affiliate manager in Josh’s TriFoxMedia CPA network for a time as well as having helped a couple of CPA networks refine their affiliate recruitment and development strategies over the years, I have some insight into how network works, the margins they work on, the cash floats (the difference between what they pay out to you and what they are owed by the advertiser) and some of the dirty stuff that goes down.

Still, it’s one thing to be aware of this, and another thing to have an affiliate manager be all friendly and appear to be a buddy, then know that behind your back they’re asking the affiliates you’ve referred in to set up a 2nd account and go direct with the network.

I get the point that some networks are working on a 5-10% margin and the 1-2% payout they’re making to you can make a difference in the bumps they’re able to give.

At the same time too, I’m investing my time to talk to my buddies who’re already doing big volume with their existing network and are happy. So getting them to add your offer to their rotation takes some convincing. If you’re undermining my time and effort within days of me referring them to you, my questions to you are:

Do you think my buddies wouldn’t tell me what’s going on?
Do you think you can get away with this?
Do you think I will ever send you another referral?

The answers aren’t that hard to figure out.

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Here’s another “funny” incident. Another buddy was generating $1,000 to $1,500 per day off a particular rebill offer. In the last couple of weeks his earnings have dropped to $100-$200 per day. He probably shouldn’t have been relying on this one campaign for 90% of his income. So now with a family he’s got to tighten his belt quite tightly.

If anything he’s boosted his marketing budget, optimized his landing pages, added more pop-ups, just everything short of throwing the kitchen sink at the campaign.

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Yet another story. An AM I’ve known for about 2 years and talk with regularly was pulling offer sheets, bumping payouts for me last week and asking if I’d be at ASE because it’d be a good chance to meet up. I get an email that she’s decided to go back to school and I have a new AM assigned. “Go back to school”? Is that affiliate marketing code for something else?

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In short, I think CPA marketing is exciting because you get a bunch of curveballs thrown at you every which way. Being able to adapt to changes is part of the game.

At the same time, if you’re not setting up your own business or offers and shifting some of the control back to yourself, some of the changes can hurt. A lot.

Getting Yourself Organized

4 Replies

In my books, you’re either planning/thinking/administrating, or you’re out there busting your butt/launching campaigns/optimizing campaigns.

If you’re the planning/thinking type, your stuff is probably well-organized.

If you’re constantly hustling, your paperwork is going to be in a mess.

Although I have the feeling that guys like Chad Frederiksen and John Hasson are both well-organized and ruthlessly efficient in their business.

I probably lean towards the messier side of marketing and as my wife might tell you, I sometimes have difficulty keeping track of schedule.

It’s probably too convenient for many marketers to claim they have ADD (attention deficient disorder). In fact, it’s almost a badge of honor to claim you have ADD. But if you check the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual) published by the American Psychiatric Association, you’d see clear-cut definitions. Not some pop culture nonsense that some sitcom hack penned into an episode of Seinfeld which has since spread into pop culture.

The upshot of this is that there’s a sub-culture of products, services and courses to cater to people who are disorganized and can’t get their act together. Stuff like time management and goal setting courses from the likes of Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, reminder services like RememberTheMilk, scheduled email reminders may just add to the complexity of your life without solving the underlying problems.

The solution to being able to get shit done lies simply in getting your shit done.

No amount of writing love notes to yourself or giving yourself a pep talk as you stare in the mirror is going to launch another campaign, nor get your testing done for you.

Do the most important thing first thing in the day before you go to your day job (if you have one), or before you login to xbox live or WoW (if you don’t).

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I’ll be the first to confess that one of the main motivators for creating Smart Link Manager was that maintaining spreadsheets with multiple tracking links, sub IDs to track campaigns across multiple PPC and PPV networks was getting to be too much of a pain in the ass. One of the reasons why I started pulling a number of CPA campaigns.

Smart Link Manager might not have conversion tracking now (go ask yr AM about pixel misfires sometime. I just use subIDs to track) and not have link rotation now. But what it does, it does well.

Between me and my bank balance, we’re both doing well.

I have to get back to completing the June updates for the Internet Marketing Cookbook.

But go check out Smart Link Manager now.

Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation | Internet Marketing

BizExcellerated Internet Marketing: Achieve mastery in blogging, affiliate marketing, social traffic generation at Andrew Wee