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.

Friday Podcast: Online Classifieds and iPhone Application Development with Brad Waller

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brad waller
Veteran internet marketer Brad Waller comes from an interesting background – with a degree in physics from MIT and 13 years in the aerospace industry, it doesn’t sound like the usual programmer/marketeter who wanders into internet marketer.

Together with his partners, Brad is one of the earliest marketers in the online classified space since 1993 and launched one of the earliest affiliate programs.

I invited Brad on the Friday Podcast to hear his thoughts on:

  • Getting started in the classifieds space and launching their affiliate program
  • How the classifieds model works and the user profile for those types of services
  • How marketers can use classifieds in their marketing campaigns
  • The pull factors drawing people to the site and the technology powering it
  • Best practices for marketing on classifieds
  • His new ventures in developing applications for the iPhone

Check out the podcast below:

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Links:

Released iPhone apps (you can find them on the iPhone app store):

  • iClassifieds
  • ClassifiedsPro
  • Craigs+ NY (NY Only Classifieds)
  • Daily Deals (was not mentioned on the podcast)

In process apps:

  • Craigs+ NY (New York Only Classifieds)
  • Craigs+ LA (Los Angeles Only Classifieds)
  • iReportGraffiti
  • PicFlippr

Affiliate Marketing Tips #9: Email Profits

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Up to this point, most new affiliate marketers will likely go the PPC (pay per click) or blogging route when starting up your campaigns, what will give your marketing efforts a boost is a pretty simple technique, but one in which many marketer screw up. Here’s some tips to emailing.

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This is a continuing series of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” posts to share marketing and promotion strategies for affiliate marketers. If you’re new to the series, you might like to check out the first in the series “The Industry and Getting Accepted”

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Unless you’re a weird technophobe, you will have an email account, likely at least 5 or 10 of them. So the concept of mass mailing prospect (people who land on your landing page/sales page) in the hopes of converting them into leads or customers will seem pretty intuitive – just send them the offer, then keep sending them the offer every 1-2 days until they opt-in, pass on, or report your email as spam and send you to the Spamhaus blacklist directory.

If you’re already getting very decent ROI from your PPC campaigns, you might wondering why you want to mess around with emailing, especially since it might “lower conversion rates” because of the additional hoop of jumping through an opt-in process.

First off, not every affiliate or CPA campaign will benefit from incorporating an opt-in into the process – you need to look at the campaign and see if it makes sense. Primarily because most of the email/zip submit CPA offers are already opt-in offers themselves (before the lead gets hit with 10-20 pay-per-sale/rebill offers).

Instead of being only offer-focused, think of the Continue reading →

Namecheap Discount Code September 2009

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In case you missed them, these are the Namecheap discount codes which work now:

  • Domain discount code: DREAMTIME
  • Domain transfer discount code: SWITCH2NC

If you have more than 50 domains in your account, the code that always works for me: GOLDDEAL

I haven’t used their web hosting as I like to keep my domains and hosting separate, but if you’re interested in their hosting packages, here are some codes:

  • SCHOOLTIME – 10% off any shared, business and reseller package
  • HOSTSWITCH – 15% off any shared package and business package
  • USE4VPS – 10% off any VPS package

As you’re probably aware, Namecheap is my preferred domain registrar.

Market Leverage Launches $3,000 Affiliate Contest For Travel CPA Offer

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New this month, affiliate network Market Leverage, has launched an  affiliate promotion for its exclusive travel CPA offer.

market leverage

The Park Royal Cancun travel offer requires the lead’s name and email address to be filled in, which is pretty standard for this type of offer.

To kick off this exclusive offer, Market Leverage is giving away 2 cash bounties to it’s affiliates:

  • $1,000 bonus for affiliates generated $0 to $4,999 in total August commissions
  • $2,000 bonus for affiliates who generated $5,000 and above in August commissions

Winners are determined by the most leads generated to the travel offer within their tier.

The offer has a payout of $1.65 per lead.

Contest details:

  • These contests run from midnight EDT on Sep 1, 2009 to 11:59:59 p.m. EDT on Sep 30, 2009.
  • MarketLeverage will announce the winner by 5:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 9, 2009.
  • There is a limit of 1 entry per Publisher.
  • To be eligible to participate in these contests, you must fall into one of the above tiers, be a Publisher on the MarketLeverage network, not be an affiliate network, live and reside in the any of the fifty U.S. states or the District of Columbia, and be 18 years of age or older.

Check out: Market Leverage

<img class="alignright" style="float: right;" src="http://whoisandrewwee.com/images/blog0810/Amit-Mehta.jpg" alt="amit mehta" width="150" height="188" />

Friday Podcast: A Strategy For Business Success With Amit Mehta

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amit mehtaI invited top affiliate Amit Mehta on to talk about some of the experiences of affiliate marketers whom he’s coached, addressing the question why many of them aren’t more successful than they already are.

Some of the topics we discussed:

  • What’s the difference between marketing success and failure and what’re the reasons behind this
  • What’s the major stumbling blocks that marketers constantly face and how do they break through them
  • If you’re an employee, how soon should you quit your job to go into affiliate marketing full time?
  • Techniques to increase your chances of business success
  • Why Amit has created a new Profit Swami blog, when he has a Super Affiliate Mindset blog
  • Upcoming developments at PPC Classroom

Check out the podcast below:

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Links:

URGENT: If Your WordPress Blog is Acting Strangely, Follow These Steps

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I checked my blog and the URLs looked malformed, with the following structure: http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/2009/09/03/unlocking-unconventional-traffic-sources-for-affiliate-campaigns/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/#comment-506929

If you notice something similar or weird with your WordPress blog, you might want to take the following steps:

  • Check the “users” tab from the WP admin interface
  • Remove any unfamiliar users, esp those marked as “administrator”
  • To prevent users from registering, I’d go as far as to remove wp-register.php (keep a backup and FTP it back in if you have problems)
  • Check all of WordPress’ PHP scripts, remove global “execute” privileges

Once you’ve secured the perimeter, look at the “Settings” and “permalinks” tab.

If you see some weird stuff like “%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/#comment-506929”, you’d want to clear that, and replace it with your original permalink structure, or look it up on the WordPress codex.

You can also check out this other blog post for more details.

Note: this issue seems to be affecting WordPress 2.6.x. Not sure to what extent it’s affecting version 2.8.x.

UPDATE: Matt Mullenweg from the WordPress development team has posted about the security issues if you’re using an older version of WordPress. Here’s a WP support forum write up about what might be happening.

You might want to upgrade to a newer version of WordPress. Just take note that some of your plugins/themes might not work if the developer hasn’t updated the plugin for compliance with the newest version.