I agree that with many free blogs, free forums and other free resource sites, having to pay something like $67 per month for affiliate marketing training at AffPlaybook seems silly.

It is, until you factor in that 90% of stuff posted online is based on “theory” and/or by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

So, yes, there are free sites where you can “learn” stuff. Take note that you will be paying with your time, especially if the ratio of quality to junk is low (ie: more junk than quality), and you ultimately will be paying with your money, if you read up on bad advice and try to follow it.

While I had been an affiliate manager before, I encountered affiliates who learnt blackhat stuff on various forums. A lot of them picked up spammy techniques, which would lead to:

1) A low traffic-to-lead ratio, meaning you would do a lot of work, but because very few leads converted, you’d get paid very little (and come to the conclusion that “affiliate marketing doesn’t work”).

2) Sending masses of low quality leads means that advertisers can see that you’re only getting 1 or 2 conversions out of 1,000 leads sent. That’s a signal that you should be paused or removed from their affiliate program.

3) Using questionable promotion techniques means that you could be kicked out of the affiliate network AND have your commissions zeroed (ie: you will not be paid for any leads generated).

So, in light of what you’re seeing above, it just seems short sighted, foolish and ultimately stupid to try to build a business based on questionable information from bloggers, forum posters of questionable knowledge.

I’ve been a member of AffPlaybook since 2010 and have found it to be a great source of information about the industry and the case studies and tutorials show you how to build your affiliate business on a solid foundation.

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To sweeten the deal, the site’s owner, David Ford, has recently launched a $1 membership. You will have access to a lot of the AffPlaybook starter threads, research and campaign management tools within the site. It’s a taster membership and will give you access to the site for 3 days. You can then decide if you want to continue and gain full access to all the content.

Note that with the trial membership, you will probably see about 5% of the total content on the site, for about the price of a cup of coffee. And it’s valid for 3 days, so spend those 72 hours reading everything within those sections that you can access. Then decide if you want to build your business on a solid foundation.

Here is the link for the trial membership (again – access to the starter threads, full access to the campaign tools and valid for 3 days) -> AffPlaybook $1 3-day trial

If you’re like to read my review of AffPlaybook, you can read about it here: (note that the review is for the full membership, so you’ll see much less stuff with the trial): AffPlaybook affiliate marketing training review

I also have a signup link which gives you a permanent $10 off each month off the monthly membership. Access it here: AffPlaybook discount code.

Whether you own your own product or be an affiliate, the principle of having a sales funnel and optimizing it applies equally to you.

What is a sales funnel?

It’s a process where you introduce your leads (also known as prospects) to your marketing message, with the aim of hitting your conversion goal, either a sale, collecting the prospect’s information or some other action.

Most marketers will aim for a single goal – the sale. If the lead doesn’t buy, then there’s no followup on the action. This can be considered arbitrage, especially if you have a single opportunity to get the sale.

To make arbitrage work, the following factors will help

1. Buying traffic at a low price
2. Buying high quality traffic that converts
3. Getting a high payout for the offer

Note that the above goals are usually mutually exclusive. That means you probably can’t buy high quality traffic at a low price, and you won’t be able to convert low quality traffic for an offer with a high payout. If you are able to find an offer that is brand new and hasn’t been picked up by many affiliates, or if you find a traffic source that few affiliates and marketers are using, you’d have the opportunity to capitalize on the market gap (at least until other affiliates start saturating your market advantage).

For your strategy to work, you’d also need to ensure that you have enough quota for the offer (eg: offer cap) and that the traffic can provide enough volume, else your income potential will be bottlenecked.

One way to work around these limitations is to improve your sales funnel.

You can do it by re-marketing to leads which have landed on your landing page.

The traditional way is to collect an email address on the landing page, instead of asking for the sale and market to the leads via a sequence of emails loaded into an autoresponder. A 5- or 7-email sequence works well with this approach, though it requires a different set of conversion and copywriting strategies versus asking for the straight sale. There’s a number of free resources online from Gary Halbert and other direct response copywriters to achieve this.

The newer way of marketing to these leads is to use an arbitrage-style landing page, but embedding a site retargeting cookie on the site, then chasing the lead as they go around the net, displaying your ad via Facebook ads, search engine results or banner/display ads.

In some projects for clients, I’ve seen cost-per-click of $20 and upwards for highly competitive verticals for PPC traffic. With the right keywords, the campaign will pan out. But when retargeting is added into the mix and displayed at a $0.50 to $1 CPM cost, you can imagine the high ROIs we are able to achieve.

The bottomline is that if you have multiple opportunities to market to the leads, your chances of achieving profitability and being able to scale your campaigns are significantly boosted.

As an experienced affiliate and now offer owner, Dan has generated revenue in the 8-figure range with Android apps.

While I am already familiar with several aspects of mobile marketing, Dan shared a number of points from his presentation which are new to me and key to making a mobile campaign with a higher chance of success.

Here goes:

• While affiliates are very focused on traffic costs and conversion ratios, the offer owners are looking at different metrics. An affiliate might look at click to conversions in order to work out break even and profit points. An advertiser will look at mobile app installs to paid upgrades/in-app purchases.
• Dan showed live stats of what an advertiser will be look at on the backend and how he evaluates lead quality and whether to allow an affiliate to continue running the campaign or pause him due to poorly converting traffic (from the advertiser’s perspective).
• Importantly, he shows you what he is looking for and drops several nuggets on how to optimize your campaign and work towards situations where your payout is 3x or even as high as 6x the offer’s street payout.
• Conversion tracking and traffic optimization is key: If you’re running your mobile campaigns as if you were on a web platform, you’d be using a brute force approach that is possibly leaving a lot of money on the table. Dan shows you how analysing the stats for carrier and handset, plus getting info from the advertiser can make a huge difference between something that is breaking even and something that generates profit on a consistent basis.
• In one case, an affiliate built a strong campaign on the back of a large pool of data collected. When he came back after taking a break of 3 months, he was able to resume the campaign and continue to see 6-figure a month revenue from the campaign. Which incidentally involved one offer from one network from one traffic source.
• “The mobile marketing mindset”: The biggest takeaway from the video is getting insight into how and what a mobile advertiser is looking for. If you’re taking notes from his session, you’ll know the right type of questions to ask when working with a traffic source and advertiser.
• While Dan doesn’t give away the complete system, he gives away enough that a relatively intelligent affiliate will be able to work out a few steps and start testing to find something that works. With a systematic approach to choosing and running offers to test, it’s a matter of working the numbers till you find something that works and sticks for you.

To access the recording, you need to be an AffPlaybook member, and if you’re following the strategies that Dan lays out, your membership will be paying for itself many times over.

If you’re already a member, you can search for the thread “Behind the scenes private tour of mobile advertiser portal tour” (Yes, the title is a little redundant, but the content is good).

If you’re not a member yet, you can access my Affplaybook discount code to get $10 off per month.

You can visit Dan’s blog at kickassmarketer.

Ok, what are you waiting for?

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Would you pay for something that you can get free online?

Specifically training in online marketing, affiliate marketing and lead generation?

How do you compare a free Internet marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, Wicked Fire or one of the other free forums, compared to a paid forum, like AffPlaybook?

A simple reply might be “You get what you pay for”.

But let’s assume you don’t buy the “free is junk, paid is quality” argument and look at the facts.

When I’ve gone into one of the free sites, I’ve found that the content posted by members tend to consist mainly of jokes, casual chat, stuff for sale and tips.

What you get out of most Internet marketing forums?

Often the jokes and chat stuff takes up most of the bandwidth, with some members coming up with stuff or services to sell to other members. The stuff for sale could be good, especially if it’s a newer provider or developer who wants to establish themselves and do some beta testing, build up goodwill or collect customer reviews.

The “tips” you get are often very hit and miss. You might occasionally get a gem, but often it’s a miss, particularly if the person giving you advice is pulling stuff out of the air, or plain making up stuff or lying through his (or her) teeth.

So, I don’t have a problem with free stuff (heck, Wikipedia is free), what I have a problem with is the low signal-to-noise ratio. There’s too much noise (junk) for the signal (useful stuff) you get. It might cost you nothing out of your pocket, but it will cost you in time to go through the lot, trying to find something useful.

To put things into context: Time is a finite resource. Everyone, whether you’re Donald Trump, Elon Musk or (insert your favorite business person or celeb) is subject to the same 24 hours per day. If you’re starting out and money is tight, it seems like money is your biggest limitation. But time is ultimately going to be your biggest bottleneck in starting or growing a business.

So it’s important to see that in the bigger picture, time is your most scarce and precious resource.

Building your online business

When it comes to building your online business, I think most people will agree that making the best use of your time is going to show the biggest results whether you succeed or fail.

That’s one of the reason why I’ve been going for quality, even if I have to pay for it, rather than try to hunt for gold in the mud heaps of free stuff out there.

It takes time and it takes money to come up with a quality product, so yes, I believe in “you get what you pay for”. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve benefitted from my membership in AffPlaybook (formerly called PPV Playbook) since early 2010, and why I’ve been recommending it to new and experienced affiliate marketers and internet marketers since the time I’ve joined.

The site’s members consist of newer affiliates as well as veterans who’ve been in the business for 10 years or more.

AffPlaybook affiliate marketing forum review

In it’s current form, the site’s content consists of:

• Training in the areas of free and paid traffic generation consisting of video tutorials and detailed step-by-step guides.
• Webinars/conference calls with members who’ve already made breakthroughs in their business, eg: 6-figure revenue per month on a sustained basis.
• Follow along campaigns (FACs) where members run lead gen (CPA) or cost per sale (CPS) for a specific vertical, using a specific traffic source. As they document their progress, they list their learning and experienced members chime in with feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• Challenges: These are cooperative competitions where members might take on various projects/tasks to bring their skill/experience to a new level (and grow their online business too). It might involve launching one or more marketing campaigns a day for a period of time, or launched search engine friendly (SEO) sites for a CPS affiliate program.
• Community: Some of the guys I’ve known in the industry – whether affiliate, network owner, service provider – has primarily been through premium forums like AffPlaybook. We started at about the same time and five years on, we’re at a more experienced leveling, having encouraged (and sometimes given each other a kick in the seat of the pants) to get to the next level. Whether you’re in Singapore, Bangkok, London or Vancouver, you’re likely to find someone who’s near you and also working on growing their online business.

Here’s an idea of some of the discussion sections in the forum:

Quality training

As of writing this AffPlaybook review in June 2014, there are more than 12,000 discussion threads, 100,000 posts across the tutorials, traffic generation and offer conversion discussion sections and case studies, with an active membership.

Here are some of the major threads / case studies / training in the site:

• Teespring: If you’re not familiar with this site, it offers made-to-order T-shirts and combines parts of the crowdfunding element of Kickstarter, a strong affiliate program and the ability to create and upload your own designs like Threadless. Some affiliates are making a 4-figure profit per campaign and the better ones are generating profit in the high 5-figure range. The best thing is that they’re laying out the step-by-step systems that they’re using to achieve this, along with a healthy reality check that not every T-shirt you launch is going to be a surefire seller (else everyone is going to be a “teespring millionaire” which is not reflective of reality). You’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t and be able to launch a few of your own campaigns and see how it performs for you.
• Datafeed sites: Some cost-per-sale merchants, especially those with hundreds of items in their inventory, will publish XML product datafeeds. These are data files, similar to a blog’s RSS feed, which contain product information and which you can use to create affiliate sites containing hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of products. The tutorials include tips on doing research for your sites, which software to use and a system to get yourself up and running.
• “Dating offer domination”: One of the experienced affiliates is doing a step-by-step tutorial on how he researches, selects an offer, launches, then optimizes a dating campaign from the ground up. So even if you’re a total noob, you’ll be able to grasp the workings on how top affiliates get new offers up and running. Since it’s a forum, there’s a healthy amount of interaction – question-and-answer sessions, discussions – actively going on during the case study and the thread poster is actively answering questions. So if you’re following along or working on a similar campaign, you’re likely to see a boost in your results.

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Is AffPlaybook worth it? Will I see results?

The thing to realize about AffPlaybook is that you will get results only if you take action.

And by action, I don’t mean, launch one campaign and when it doesn’t show results immediately, then you give up.

Internet marketing and affiliate marketing are a long-term play. A principle that a mentor shared with me early on was “If you do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll get what you’re supposed to get”.

Some of that stuff out there that says “You can generate full time income in just 30 minutes a day” is flat-out hype. If you’re earning what you might earn in your day jobs, working 8 hours a day, in just 30 minutes a day, it’s likely you’re taking a massive short cut somewhere, or doing something less than ethical or legal. It won’t last.

An online business can be as “solid” as a bricks-and-mortar one. Look at Amazon.com. And it wasn’t built in a day. Neither can your online business.

So what does it take to be successful on the internet?

If you’re someone that gives up easily, then internet marketing, affiliate marketing are probably not a good fit for you. (Neither would day trading, options trading, forex or any activity that involves any risk, for that matter).

If you’re motivated to succeed, then focus on build up your online business.

If you lack ideas on how to get started, or want strategies and systems to bring it to the next level, then I think AffPlaybook would be a good fit for you.

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Oh, and there’s more…

So, you know how you hear that you need some keyword tool or research tool so you can do market research so you know how to better position or market your own product or an affiliate product?

The bad news is that some of this stuff can cost hundreds of dollars. That’s hundreds of dollars per month!

The good news is that AffPlaybook includes a suite of tools as part of its membership.

Aff Robot tools worth it?

Some might be wondering if these are some second-rate tools that have been bundled in to increase the value of the membership.

But before we get to that, here’s an idea of what you’ll be getting.

AffPlaybook Tools include ones dealing with PPC traffic, PPV (pop up) traffic, display/banner traffic, SEO analysis/optimization tools. Additionally there’s landing page buildings, page rotation scripts, which you will need to use.

In addition there’s other goodies like WordPress plugins, specially for internet marketers/affiliates.

Oh, and like I mentioned earlier, if you’re doing datafeed sites, there’s a datafeed script which you can use to create them.

But don’t just be impressed by seeing more than 20 tools for you to use. Many of the experienced members just use those tools along, without having to buy more $97/mth or $197/mth, to build their income to 5-figures per month or more.

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AffPlaybook discount code?

So if you’re interested in building out or growing your online business, then you should check out AffPlaybook.

And to sweeten the deal, if you signup via the link below, it includes an in-built $10 discount every month, which will help you save more of your ad budget for your traffic campaign.

>>> AffPlaybook discount code signup

At first glance both words refer to a category or topic (like gardening, or finance, or games) that you hope to theme an online marketing campaign around…so it seems similar, but it’s not.

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A niche in time…

Let’s look at some examples: A niche (variously pronounced as “nitch” or “neesh” depending on which side of the pond you’re on, or maybe how many beers you’ve had) is something specialized. So the stuff on Clickbank tends to serve a niche. For example “low calorie recipes to promote hair re-growth for vegans” would be a niche. “Dog training for hearing impaired pet owners” might be another niche. These tend to be specialist products with interest from a smaller subset of the Internet audience. The key driver of why this product does well is because the user can’t easily get this info or service elsewhere. After all, how easy is it going to be to find a book on “501 woodworking project for someone with zero technical skill”? So the $27 or $47 e-book on clickbank tends to find a ready audience.

In most cases these niche products tend to top out at a couple thousand in revenue per month. So to bank with these products, you’d usually have to market several of these types of products. If the products are related or complimentary, there exists opportunity to cross-sell and cross-promote, so you can, to borrow a phrase, “stack that money”. You might do this be cross-selling a range of photography books (outdoor photography, fashion photography, shooting kids (taking their photos, not going at them with an AWP…)). If you upsold stuff, you might sell camera paraphernalia, like camera equipment, online photo services, photo events, confences, workshops.

The times I’ve promoted niched products, I’ve felt like a sniper, shooting at demand for long tail demands for which people are willing to pay to make the pain go away, or bring themselves pleasure, or a combination of both.

Generally, you’d need to promote maybe 3 to 5 of these types of products to generate a decent income.

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Going Vertical

When promoting offers such as CPA offers, you’d realize that these tend to address big markets – dating, finance, gaming, downloads, travel, fashion – some of Neverblue’s top verticals. With verticals you’re dealing with entire sections of a market – within the finance vertical, you’d have credit cards, insurance, credit scores, financial profiles, stocks, mutual funds, forex, etc.

So when you promote a vertical, you’re addressing a potential market of millions (instead of just thousands in the case of most niche markets). The promo style is different too, which is why most CPA affiliates favor paid traffic.

You’d probably hear the familiar refrain that CPA marketing is a volume game. The more traffic you buy, the more leads you generate, the more you get paid.

In contrast to more specialized stuff, the key is to become a dominant player with each offer you promote. While niche marketers might be content with generating $5,000 per month with a niche product, the CPA marketer might aim at $5,000 per day or more in revenue to make their business model viable.

The CPA marketer is often arbitraging traffic. If your commissions exceed your traffic costs, you’re in the money. In most situations, you’d want to go for the offers with the highest potential in terms of traffic (ie: demand), scalability (how big you can grow the offer) and importantly for affiliates who think of themselves as business owners – your bottomline (how much it will put in your pocket at the end of the day).

My advice for newer affiliates is to find an offer that has potential to scale to something big and aim and work towards at least $1,000 or more a day in revenue. It’s only when you make this a goal in your overall business strategy that you will experience bump in your business and your profits.

The reality is that everyone is subject to the same 24 hours a day, whether you’re Richard Branson or Joe Blow starting out.

Sure, you might say that an experienced affiliate might have multiple campaigns making a couple thousand a day and mainly running, except for an hour or two of tweaking and optimization each day, so he or she has time to do ‘lifestyle blog posts’ or tweet about the massive filet mignon that they’ve chowing down at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse or Craftsteak for lunch.

In my book, all this self-justifying, non-productive structured procrastination is what leads many affiliates to knock themselves out of the game. Imagined “high competition” and reasons that the industry/offer/traffic source is dying/saturated/overpriced/sees little or no demand, is all a bunch of BS.

Let’s look at this for a moment. I think you need to make up your mind. Is the offer “saturated” or is the industry “dying”?

If it’s dying, then it’s dying. But if so, how could traffic be “overpriced” and the offer be “saturated” at the same time?

Sounds like a paradox, and not one of those fun ones either.

I’ve been speaking a number of affiliate training workshops recently, some as part of my role in recruiting and developing Neverblue affliates, as well as for local Internet marketing groups.

The major challenge that most marketers face is a mental one. Not so much that you’re going crazy at the stuff you have to deal with in figuring out how to get started, but more a lack of self-belief.

Talk to a top affiliate and you’ll realize that confidence is one of the keys that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

Even if you haven’t mastered something yet, it should not keep you from jumping headlong to figure it out.

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But back to wealth building in 15 minutes…

If you’ve sat waiting for the subway, or have time between meetings, or maybe 15 minutes before going out for dinner, what do you do with that deadtime?

Are you spending it checking your email? Or watching youtube? Checking for Facebook updates?

If instead of doing all that, you spend that time looking at ads running on high traffic websites, running keyword searches, doing competitive research, reading up on promoting techniques, that would help you more than just blowing that time doing something that you’d probably forget two days from now.

Yes, I like watching/listening to motivational stuff about “how you can do it” as much as the next guy, but I try to limit that to listen to that while I’m in the toilet or taking a shower. Because it doesn’t require your full focus.

So try this out for a couple of weeks, make a commitment to spending your time more productively. Stuff CAN be accomplished if you have a pocket of 10 minutes or more.

And now I have to complete this 15 minute blog post. Ping it, then head to my next meeting.

While I doubt Ivan will have much time to do personal mentoring, I’ve arranged the next best thing – he’s agreed to a workshop that builds on and goes into greater detail on his strategy in promoting international offers.

You might be wondering why this might be a useful area for affiliates to pick up on. For one, North American offers, which comprise the bulk of offers in each network’s database still represents the lion’s share of revenue at most networks. If you’re a newer affiliate, this means you’re competing against established affiliates, whether they specialize in paid search, SEO, media buys or PPV. Being outbid or just being unable to run your campaign with major ad networks can be a major stumbling block.

With Neverblue’s focus on establishing a European and Asian presence, I’ve compared the offer database against other networks and am confident from seeing the offers and seeing how well some of my experienced affiliates are doing with the offers that I feel new and experienced affiliates stand to gain from either starting out promoting these kinds of offers or adding these classes of offers to their portfolio of campaigns.

For the upcoming workshop, Ivan will be presenting his system as well as showing campaign data from Europe and Asia campaigns, it’s my intention that attendees will be able to create a blueprint to similarly promote offers, which generally seem to have a higher conversion rate, and usually lower traffic costs across the board.

If you’re not earning the level of affiliate marketing income that you are aiming for, you should attend this workshop.

As it’s additional training by Ivan, it falls outside of Neverblue’s training.

Although there’s a charge for the 1-day workshop, Ivan’s offering a special rate to Neverblue affiliates.

If you aren’t already a Neverblue affiliate and would like me to be your affiliate manager, you apply to be an affiliate via my signup link. (Update: I’m no longer an affiliate manager with Neverblue, but if you apply with my signup link, drop me an email via my “contact” link and I’ll see how I can help you get approved).

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Note: You should be familiar with how affiliate marketing works. If you have run CPA campaigns previously, it will also help you get more out of the workshop.

Note: The workshop has been postponed due to Ivan’s commitments. You can still sign up for Neverblue here.

I often read of these new marketers having their affiliate application denied, especially at major networks.

Here are some tips to increase your chances of getting accepted.

“Interviewing” for your CPA network affiliate application: Just like interviewing for a job, it’s important to be prepared when you’re “interviewing” to get into a network. It’s not very encouraging to have an affiliate apply then say they don’t know anything about the network, or worse, say “I’m brand new and I’m not in any network yet, so I applied to everyone.

Some tips that will help you get in, especially if you’re newer.
1) Do your homework: Check here and on affiliate blogs on the profile of the network. It’s a 2-way street. How is the network’s offer selection? Payment policy? How helpful are the affiliate managers (AMs)? Are they “agency of record” for the offers they promote, or do they mainly syndicate offers from other networks?

2) Have a game plan in hand. This can be difficult if you’re not already in at least one network, but if you are in one network, you can surf through the offers and get an idea of what your focus will be on. If not, you can use offers202 or another offers search engine as a means of last resort (although you might not be able to see some of the analytics like CTR, EPC, etc) Figure out what niches do you focus on? What is your traffic strategy, what are your primary promo methods? If you can’t understand this, you might score lower on the network’s internal rating system (generally the lower your score, the more difficulty you’ll face in getting accepted), also depending on the network, you might have a smaller pool of offers to choose from.

3) Invest in yourself: A lot of affiliate marketing is knowledge-based. So be sure to trawl through the available resources and know what you need to know to run your business. If you don’t have all the tools and knowledge to be effective, it’s not likely that anyone else is going to do it for you. So this step is just smart business sense.

4) Follow up: There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can call the network after you’ve submitted the application, be sure to be able to answer questions about your background, experience, promo method, niche selection, etc. Alternatively, if you get in touch with someone from the network (either from the AM side or from the biz dev side), and have a conversation with them (tell them especially if you’re brand new), then you have a much better chance of getting in. Applications at the larger networks go through an automated screening process when you first submit and may be denied during this stage. If you talk to someone, they can flag it and the application can be prioritized. It’s more difficult to approve a denied application than to manually review an application that is in the pending pile.

Ok, that was long, but hopefully it’ll give a better idea of what happens during the account application and review process.

If anyone has any questions, especially about applying to Neverblue CPA network, you can read my earlier post: “I’m looking for a few top Neverblue affiliates”

Alternatively, you’re also welcome to email me.

Since the first affiliate summit I attend in 2008, I’d been talking to the affiliate networks about establishing a presence in Asia, especially with the growing number of affiliates in this part of the world.

So it was a great opportunity earlier this year when I started talking to Neverblue senior network manager Samantha Brachat about establishing a presence here, especially since Europe and Asia are the major growth areas for the network.

A Neverblue Asia office was set up earlier this year in Hong Kong and in October I took on the portfolio of Affiliate Consultant, responsible for recruiting and developing affiliates, with a focus on Asia.

So I’m happy to announce that Singapore will be playing host to a Neverblue Interact event later this month, in conjunction with the launch of the company’s Singapore presence.

It’ll be a training and networking session on Dec 15 (Thurs) from 6pm to 10pm at Singapore Management University in downtown Singapore. (suggested attire: smart casual).

If you’re a Neverblue affiliate or if you are not, but interested to find out about affiliate marketing, do come down for the Neverblue Interact event for an evening of training, networking and fun!

I’ve invited three top affiliates who’ll be sharing their experience of growing their online business and strategies for building a profitable business. The three affiliates are:

Ken Lee who’s one of Neverblue’s top affiliates and one of the winners of Neverblue’s recent Out of Bounds competition. Ken lives in Malaysia and rarely speaks at events, preferring to work on his business and this is one of the rare occasions he’ll be speaking.

Ivan Ong who’s a successful Singapore affiliate. He’s blogged about his PPV strategies and tips for a successful campaign at his blog.

Eddy Kuah, an experienced Malaysian affiliate who’s based in Singapore.

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The evening will kick off with a light dinner before the speaker’s take to the rostrum.

If you’d like to come with a friend, do indicate it in your reply.

Be sure to register your attendance at the Facebook event page and drop me a mail via my blog contact form.

I had a great discussion with Neverblue senior network manager, Samatha Brachat, when she was in town for AdTech Singapore a couple of months ago and after discussion, I’m working with Neverblue as an affiliate consultant to help grow the company’s affiliate business.

What will I be doing?

The role will have some similarities to an affiliate manager – to help recruit and develop affiliates. Although I’ll be focusing on the Asia markets, I’ll also be bringing in affiliates from North America and Europe.

You might be wondering why I’ve stepped into the affiliate management side of things after working as an affiliate and advertiser – it just seemed like the logical next step after about 14 years in the industry.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with various affiliate managers and network owners over the years and I’ve found the most effective AMs tend to be:

• Knowledgeable: It first starts with being familiar with the offers on your networks, being up on what the best performing offers and the most appropriate offers for an affiliate’s method of promotion. An understanding of your network’s platform, facilities like pixel placement and API are key to help your affiliates too. That’s the baseline expectation of a decent AM. The great AMs are the ones who are up on what’s happening in the affiliate space – what’s being discussed on the various IM and aff mktg forums, how various traffic sources/networks perform and how to integrate a campaign with a traffic source. Although tracking and analytics are outside of what some AMs might be familiar with, they’d be important for any affiliate to know what’s working and what’s not.
• Responsive: Getting back to an affiliate’s query in a timely manner helps them get their campaigns up in a prompt manner. After all, if they do well, you do well. So why not help them get started as soon as possible.
• Bringing value to the table: Going beyond what you see when you login to your affiliate account is probably one of the biggest advantages to the table. Beyond just a “how are you doing?” and “here are a few hot offers on our network”, a great affiliate manager will want to understand your business and your goals and work with you to achieve them, not merely push a certain offer. I see myself bringing ideas to the table that go beyond affiliate marketing, on operating and scaling a business if the affiliate wants.
• Following through: Simply, if you promise something, delivering on it.

If you’re not a Neverblue affiliate yet, you can apply here and drop me an email, so I can help you get started.

If you have been inactive and you’d like me to help you grow your business, do drop me an email.

Let’s assume you’re suffering from tunnel vision and just see the $99/month price tag. Is it expensive? Heck, yeah.

Anything’s going to be expensive if you only look at the cost side of things.

Disclaimer: I don’t know Jordan that well, aside from a brief email exchange where he asked if I wanted to submit a picture of myself with my car for a blog post on StackThatMoney.

I then asked him, if he wanted me to pose with my regular weekday drive-the-kids-to-school car or my sports car.

No, I’m kidding, I politely declined and said that I felt it’s a little lame to feel like you have to prove you can buy (or probably lease) some $40,000 car and brag about it online so you can feel better about yourself.

But Lorenzo and Besmir I’ve known for some time and I was a little surprised that they posted the offers and campaigns they’d been running. They had told me about these campaigns confidentially over skype/AIM and it was surprising to see them appear as case studies on the forum.

Now before you break out your paypal account or credit card and start signing up with dollar signs in your eyes, just wait a sec.

Some caveats: Obviously if 100 affiliates (newbie or experienced), start cloning the offer, landing page, keywords, url targets and run it on every single PPV network they can get their hands on, the offer will probably tank. It will go from 50% ROI to maybe 5% if you’re lucky.

The best way to benefit from the forum is to study the techniques being demonstrated and see how they might apply to your existing campaign, or better yet, adapt and combine two or more techniques to get an even higher response/conversion rate.

The best tool any affiliate can get isn’t one you can buy online, or even in the store. It’s the one that lies between your ears. Joining a forum can help spark an idea or introduce an element that brings your campaign to a new level.

“Is the forum any good?”

That’s a bit of a silly question in my opinion. Since the forum is brand-new and its three owners are focused on building the brand and bringing in the members, they’re not holding anything back. The case studies contain a lot of detail, the owners are frequently online and replying to questions. Short of calling any of them on the phone, I think the forum is the next best thing.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for at least a month, spend at least a decent amount of time following along and setting up your own campaigns and see what you’ve learned and more importantly, how you can benefit from it.

And there’s an opening offer:

$99/month promotion, goes up to $149/month later.

Check out: StackThatMoney for more details.

1) Click to go to the Affiliate Summit website. (opens in a new window)

2) Click the “Register now” link.

3) At the registration page, use the discount code “ASE11WIAW” (it’s good for 10% off silver, gold, platinum or diamond)

PS: The prices for early bird registration end May 20th (Fri). If you’ve been procrastinating or waiting for some reason, perhaps the increase in price after May 20th may motivate you.

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Ok, let’s look at some of the details for Affiliate Summit East 2011 (also known as ASE2011).

The upcoming conference is back in New York.

• When: August 21-23, 2011 (Sunday to Tuesday)
• Where: Hilton New York

I suggest flying in or getting there on Saturday and taking it easy during the day and meeting up with friends or arranging meetings that evening.

Some affiliates have been known to party hard on Saturdays before the conference begins, then have to nurse a pounding hangover the next 3 days. Generally, not very fun.

New York is generally more expensive than Las Vegas (where Affiliate Summit West is typically held).

The turnout tends to be smaller than ASW – this means you have more time to meet up with your advertising or CPA network reps, and have more time to networks with other affiliates.

Vegas seems like a flurry of parties and non-stop meetings, so the pace at New York might better suit you if you’d like to turn things down a notch.

Having said that, ASE2011 will feature 4 keynote speakers – I’ve heard Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds speak a number of times and he always delivers great stuff. I had a look at the other 3 speaker’s bios too and they looked pretty interesting, even if you’re probably not going to follow their business model.

As always, be sure to check out the Meet Market on Sunday, even if you might miss some workshop sessions.

The conference sessions look interesting, although the speakers aren’t all listed yet (I believe they’ve probably not submitted their speaker agreements yet).

I’ll post more about the sessions as more info become available in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, you might like to get your ticket.

Which one to get?

If it’s your first time, you might like to get the Diamond or Platinum pass which gives you access to all the workshop sessions. They’re kinda like “all access” passes.

The gold and silver passes are good if you’re mainly there to check out the tradeshow and have meetings, cos you won’t have access to most of the workshops.

Here’s the registration info again:

1) Click to go to the Affiliate Summit website. (opens in a new window)

2) Click the “Register now” link.

3) At the registration page, use the discount code “ASE11WIAW” (it’s good for 10% off silver, gold, platinum or diamond)

PS: The prices for early bird registration end May 20th (Fri). If you’ve been procrastinating or waiting for some reason, perhaps the increase in price after May 20th may motivate you.

I’m working on a Facebook-related project at the moment. Some of you may know what it is, though the formal announcement will only be coming out in June. It doesn’t have anything to do with e-books, FB Ads, CPA offers, lead gen on Facebook (not directly anyway). So I’ve fallen behind on the blogging. (The fact that tax season has started probably isn’t helping either. Although I hope you have got your tax brain and tax-related campaigns fired up).

My top recommendation for an Internet marketing resource remains PPV Playbook.

Don’t let the name PPV make you think that it’s only Pay Per View related.

The other sections on social media, PPC, media buys are pretty active.

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I’ve also been giving out probably 100 discount codes till I ran out of them.

I have a couple of new ones. Like the other codes, they give you a $10/mth discount off the $67/mth subscription. It likely won’t make or break the bank, but having an extra $120 per year to do more testing is always a nice sweetener in my book.

Try it out for a month and see what it does to your earnings and your business (especially if you take action).

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For various reasons, people are not able to contact me via my contact form, nor receive my emails.

I suspect it probably has to do with hotmail, yahoo and sometimes gmail arbitrarily filtering email into the “junk” or “spam” folder (but when they themselves are selling you their own products it ends up in your inbox. Neat, huh?).

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So to make sure you get your code, you can friend me on facebook at: http://facebook.com/whoisandrewwee and put “blog reader” or “PPV Playbook discount code” in the comments.

I’ll get in touch, typically within a couple of hours and send you the info on redeeming the PPV Playbook discount code.

So the 3 steps are:

1) drop me a friend request at http://www.facebook.com/whoisandrewwee , include “blog reader” or “ppv playbook discount code” in the comments.

2) send me a private message requesting the discount code.

This should not take more than a couple of hours, or a day at the most.

3) prepare to win…

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In case you’re new to PPV Playbook, here’s a link to a review I did last year (but follow the process I’ve listed in this post to get a discount code).

Here’s a recent one on getting started, especially if you’re:

• new to internet marketing
• struggling to generate a profit, if you’ve been trying out stuff for some time.

Here goes:

Advice from friends/how to get started: Does PPV work/is it tricky?

Before taking anyone’s advice, I would look at my friend’s internet business to determine how credible he or she is.

In most cases I will ignore how long they have been doing it for, and instead get a feel for how successful their business is.
Are they making $100/day? $1,000/day? $10/day? $10,000/day? $1/day? $0/day?
That would be my first guide to how successful they are and whether I should follow what they say.

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Using free vs paid traffic:

Everything has a price.
Paid traffic requires capital.
“Free” traffic requires time investment.
You need to know the value of your time.

If your hourly worth is $x/hour, that means each hour you work – whether at McDonald’s, at a 9-to-5 job, working on elance/odesk, etc, you could be making $x/hour.

So if your internet business is making $1/hour, and you could be making $6/hour at McDonald’s, you would probably be better off working at Mickie D’s.

The exception is if you’re able to scale your online business from $1/hour to more than $x/hour within a reasonable timeframe, you should focus on your online business instead.

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How to grow your earnings from $x/hour (your current income level) to $y/hour (your intended income target).

You could:
1) read blogs, forums (usually free)
2) buy ebooks
3) buy courses
4) purchase a subscription to a membership site
5) attend workshops
6) invest in coaching (Marketing expert Jay Abraham has coaching programs costing $250,000 per year, plus a percentage of your revenue)

The options I’ve listed above are listed in order of cost, from lowest to highest.
Sometimes, you could get high quality training from a cheap source, like a blog like Mr Green or Finchsells.

A lot of time, you will get parity on your investment (ie: you get what you pay for).

My recommendation for the past 2 years has been to invest in PPV Playbook, a paid membership site. (be sure to check out the PPV Playbook discount code if you might be interested)
Although PPV Playbook’s focus may seem to be on PPV marketing, the paid forum also has comprehensive sections on SEO, PPC, media buys, social media. It also has other sub-forums focused on growing your business, managing your time and business assets.

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Is PPV Playbook for everyone, including newbies?
Probably not, if you’re not serious about your business, you probably won’t take action anyway, so you probably will have difficulty growing your business anyhow.

If you’re broke, you will probably struggle to find the time or cash to do anything effective, my advice is to build your capital.
In starting any offline retail business, you’d probably need at least $50,000 of operating capital to get started – fitting out a retail shop space, purchasing inventory, rent, utilities, etc.

So while an online business is low cost, to say it will cost nothing, in terms of time or investment, is not being entirely honest.

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PPV Playbook has a series of tutorials (including videos) and is constantly being updated.
It also has case studies and members share tips and strategies to help you set up and optimize your campaigns.

The focus is on building a long-term profitable business.
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Affiliate marketing training: the bottomline

I take a look and have gone through most of the products and training in internet marketing and affiliate marketing.
Everything from $10 ebooks, all the way up to high ticket coaching programs.
I’d put PPV Playbook among the top resources for these types of products.

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I can’t say that EVERYONE will benefit, but if you’re serious about generating online income (especially if you’re tried for some time and aren’t getting the results you desire), you might like to try PPV Playbook for at least a month, and get some campaigns up within 7 days of joining (not taking action is a recipe for failure too.).

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Interested in checking out PPV Playbook?

Be sure to mail me for a discount code.

I still have a few left.

However, some who have emailed in from their hotmail/yahoo/gmail accounts are getting my emails filtered into spam/junk folders or getting them deleted before it arrives at their inbox.

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I’d strongly suggest emailing from a gmail account or better yet, your own domain, with a request for the discount code.

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Alternatively, you can put in a friend request at Facebook (http://facebook.com/whoisandrewwee), put “blog reader” in the personal notes.

And drop me a personal message regarding the PPV Playbook discount code and I’ll mail it to you.

Read more about PPV Playbook here.