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.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #4: Successful Affiliate Marketing with Convert2Media’s Ruck

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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.

You can check out:

Ruck’s next webinar is scheduled for 8pm CST today (NOW)

You can also check out the Affiliate Marketing Tips series.

WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge End of Phase 1 Update

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Phase 1 of the WhoIsAndrewWee.com (sponsored by the Market Leverage affiliate network) ended on July 7th with unexpected results.

One of the risks in running a contest that’s specific to only one country (in this case, Singapore), is that you might end up with 0 participants.

In this case, due to compliance procedures by the applicants, none of them made it past round 1 to get their campaigns up and running.

So the $175 in gift cards will not be given out this round.

–

Phase 2 is ongoing until 7 Aug, with a mini laptop and gift card going out to the winners.

You can check out the contest details.

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.

Friday Podcast: CPA Marketing Tips With Kris Trujillo

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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
His top picks of CPA networks (including the top 2 – Convert2Media and Market Leverage)
CPA offer databases (including CashTactic’s new branded offer database in conjunction with Offers202)
How to get the most out of your relationship with your affiliate manager
His recommendations for affiliate campaign management software (Tracking202 and Prosper202)
CashTactics’ plans for Affiliate Summit East
A teaser for his upcoming project with Ian Fernando

Check out the podcast below:

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Links:

Affiliate Marketing Tips #3: Direct Linking vs Landing Pages

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Now that you’ve conducted your research into your niche, narrowed down some offers, the next stage is deciding whether to direct link to the offer or drive the traffic to your own page. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each approach.

Note: This is a continuing series of affiliate marketing educational posts, if you haven’t yet, you can start at the beginning of the series.

landing page

Direct Linking: Involves linking to the merchant/advertisers page.

I’ve known some new affiliates who literally link to the merchant’s signup page (without going through their affiliate URL). Think about this for a moment, if you’re sending traffic to the offer signup page, and it’s not being tracked to your affiliate account, how’re you going to get paid?

The one key you need to figure out is make sure your affiliate ID is embedded in the URL you’re sending traffic to.

Having said that, some experienced marketers frown on direct linking. The reason being that you:

Aren’t fully utilising the traffic you’re generating
Not building an asset (an email database/list)

Here’s the arguments:

Not fully utilising traffic: If you’re getting a 1% conversion on leads sent to the list with the one-time exposure to the offer, would a second exposure generate another 1% conversion? Or even a 0.5% conversion? In which case your net profit has gone up by another 50% or 100% (1.5% conversion or 2% conversion compared to the 1% baseline conversion sending them direct).
You’re not building an asset: One of the reasons why the heavy hitters are able to reduce their cost of business is because they’ve built up lists of 100,000 or 200,000 prospects in some niches. Think of the list as your leads or prospects who haven’t found the right affiliate offer yet. There are a couple of additional ingredients you need to make the emailing strategy work (this can be highly profitable and will be covered in more detail in a later session), you need “bait” (an incentive to get them to sign up – a report, a book, a video, a consult session, etc), and you need to keep the list “warm” (you need to keep the list alive by engaging the members, continuing to send them more information, incentives, etc). Sending an occasional alert to the list, telling them to sign up for an affiliate offer is a good way to irritate them, and get them to quit the list, or even worse, hit the “Report as Spam” button on their email provider, and drive your email deliverability rates into the dumps.

With those negative points, why bother direct linking. Here’re some possible Continue reading →

Friday Podcast: Lessons Learned From Launching An Affiliate Network

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Jim Lillig is a colorful character – in the best possible way imaginable.

Having been involved in brick-and-mortar businesses, operating mature entertainment website MrSkin.com, speaking multiple times at Yanik Silver’s highly rated Underground workshop series, operating seafood retailer Lobster Gram, and finally launching his own affiliate network, Offeratti.

It’s hard to imagine Jim as someone able to sit still. He rarely does, and just like the last time he came on the Friday Podcast in January this year, Jim was chatty and gave a number of great tips to both affiliate marketers as well as lessons from launching his own affiliate network.

Here’re some of the topics we talked about:

6 months on – lessons learned from launching the Offerati affiliate network
Combat affiliate fraud – how to work towards “zero fraud” on your affiliate network
How international affiliates, especially from Asia and Europe can increase their chances of getting accepted by affiliate networks and CPA networks
How Offerati’s MONKS system improves conversion rates for affiliates and how it works
Tips for new affiliates launching their first campaigns
Why and how you can incorporate predictive keywords and demographic targeting into your campaigns
Plans in the pipeline for Offerati