Archive of ‘affiliate marketing’ category
I didn’t realise that it’s been about 2 months since my last post.
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).
Although I haven’t been blogging as often in recent months, I’ve been receiving emails about getting your online business started and scaling your sales and profits. I’ve been responding to many of these emails and will probably post the most frequent ones here as many readers have the same type of questions.
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.
An update on PPV Playbook discount codes (save more than $100 per year).
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.
Besides getting this question often in my email, I see this regularly on affiliate marketing and CPA-focused forums, so it’s worth trying to answer the “What is the best niche/offer to promote?” question.
I’m assuming that you’re using some form of paid traffic, like PPV, PPC or media buys.
Rule #1: You need to have some form of tracking. So whether you’re using Smart Link Manager which I helped to develop, or CPV Lab, or the free Prosper202 script, you’ll have an idea how effective your marketing is.
There’s a quote attributed to American retail entrepreneur John Wanamaker that goes “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
If you’re not tracking the effectiveness of your marketing spend, you’re going to be in trouble.
Especially with the tools available with online marketing, if you have these tools in hand and if you’re not spending time to master conversion tracking and analytics, then you might as well be marketing blind.
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Rule #2: Pick a niche, stick to it, master it
Sure you’ll hear about $1,000/day campaigns, and maybe even campaigns that are multiple times that. And no, not all of them are BS.
What you’ll probably hear is that these are pretty optimized, after the marketer has run multiple split tests, incorporated elements that bump the conversion rate upwards, and scaled their traffic campaigns for this offer.
If you’re starting out, strive for break even. Then cut out the losing URLs, keywords, and optimize the winners.
You’re not likely to do this from the beginning. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that you won’t achieve this 99% of the time.
But if you keep at a niche/offer with some potential (talk to your affiliate manager or fellow affiliate about this), and specialize in this area (meaning you do your best to understand the leads’ behavior and how the offer works, you might eventually hit pay dirt.
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Rule #3: Network, take more action than you chat/read/post.
The best inside knowledge won’t mean a thing if you don’t take action.
So, get an offer up now. Set up traffic campaigns to your offer within the next hour.
This is not rocket science, but more than 50% of new affiliates drop the ball even when they have a step-by-step plan to setting up and getting their first campaign off to $100/day.
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The reality is that there’s no “best” niche.
You just have to pick your:
- high competition, high profit
- low competition, lower profit
- low competition, high profit (not easy to find)
offers and niches.
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You may also like to check out PPV Playbook (and save a couple of bucks with the PPV Playbook discount code)
I have a limited number of discount codes for what I consider to be the best paid internet marketing forum, PPV Playbook.
Why pay for a forum when there’re others that are free?
For one, there’re fewer trolls, the discussions tend to be more focused, and 90% of the posts aren’t in the “chat about whatever/anything goes/off topic” chat.
Secondly, David Ford has stayed very focused on the PPV/CPA/affiliate marketing space. It means he doesn’t pimp every big-ticket ebook/coaching prog out there. If I’m paying for something, I expect to get what I’m paying for, rather than be upsold on other stuff. The forum also contains great info on SEO, social media, media buys and other forms of traffic as well as strategy on organizing and scaling your business.
The forums straddle the range from newbie to advanced marketers well. There’s “Getting Started” and case study threads for those getting into the paid traffic game. The forum has achieved a critical mass of members who’re at the $100 – $1,000 per day range, so the mastermind and opportunities to network/collab with experienced marketers is there.
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I have a limited number of discount codes available.
If you’re interested, I suggest you check out the: PPV Playbook page.
Watch the walkthrough video.
If you’re serious about signing up, the discount code will give you a $10/month discount on your membership, which works out to a $120 discount per year.
Be sure to email me via the contact form to get your code. They’re available on a first come first served basis.
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UPDATE: I have a couple of codes left.
If you’d like a code, please use the contact form.
If I have any codes left, they’d usually be emailed to you within 24 hours.
If you don’t get a reply, check your spam/junk folder in case the email ended up there.
UPDATE: (17 Dec 2010) I have a couple of codes left.
If you’d like a code, please use the contact form.
If I have any codes left, they’d usually be emailed to you within 24 hours.
If you don’t get a reply, check your spam/junk folder in case the email ended up there.
Up until the arrival of a new software package, CPV Lab, by Robert Matthew, if you were a PPV/CPV marketer, you choices for campaign management were:
- Prosper202
- PPV Dominator (which comes with Gauher Chaudhry’s PPV Formula course)
And new entrant, Bevo.
If you were willing to, there were enterprise-grade offering like Kenshoo, developed in Israel, and used by the likes of Zappos and Linkshare. Or you could opt for the affiliate-grade version, Buntai. This soution was primarily for PPC, although you could try to use it for PPV.
The ultimate though would be to hire a developer to code a custom solution which provides the functionality you need. Though this option would be beyond the budget of most PPV marketers. More importantly, they might not know how to spec out the job correctly.
A couple of months ago, Robert launched his CPV Lab campaign management script which is optimized for PPV (although I know of marketers who’ve been using it successfully to track media buys and PPC campaigns too).
What makes CPV Lab a cut above other scripts is that it has a lower learning curve compared to other scripts makes setting up campaigns easier and frees up some of the limitations that p202 users had to work under.
Also, with the inclusion of filters, you could include a degree of semi-automation into the campaign tracking/optimization element of your campaigns, something you’d otherwise have to export CSV files to your desktop and run an excel macro to analyze.
Without a decent campaign management script, you’re marketing blind and since a large part of successful paid marketing relies on collecting reliable data and axing losing keywords and url targets from your domain, a good script can make the difference between a profitable campaign and a loser.
At about $300, CPV Lab is one of the tools which will eat up some of your marketing budget. However, it’s pretty low considering new PPV affiliates will probably be on a $30-50/day or $900 to $1,500/month. The script will pretty much pay for itself by month 1, or month 2 at the latest.
I got a copy of the script and will be using it in campaigns which will be launched in the next week or so.
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Caveat: What CPV Lab will and will not do.
It’s primarily a PPV campaign management, analytics and optimization tool.
This means you’ll still need to scrape keyword and URL targets manually using Alexa, Compete, Quantcast or your favorite spy tool. And you will also need to make your own pop-up creative (if you’re not direct linking) or pay someone to do it.
The script will not help you if you’re merely doing unimaginative self-targeting or mindlessly cloning someone elses’ campaign. So if you’re hoping that CPV Lab is going to make you an affiliate millionaire with just “5-10 minutes of work a day”, you’re wasting your own time and maybe should invest in some e-gold or HYIPs instead….
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If however, you’re new to PPV marketing, especially to CPA offers, you’d find that CPV Lab can halve the time you’d spend in the campaign set up/management/optimization element of your business.
I’ve spoken to a number of PPV->CPA affiliates who’ve ditched their previous scripts to using CPV Lab exclusively.
Once I get more data, I’ll detail some findings and tips to using CPV Lab more effectively, so you’ll see a fuller product review down the road.
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Let’s go over my tips for getting started with PPV marketing and/or moving to the next stage if you’ve already got some experience.
1) PPV Playbook: A great community of PPV marketers. The forum also covers other forms of traffic generation, including PPC, media buys, SEO, social media). Here’s my PPV Playbook review, and a PPV Playbook discount code.
2) Research tools: PPV Playbook had a tie-up with AffPortal so you get access to those. My friend Besmir Bregasi owns AffExpert which also has a number of PPV-specific tools (check out his trial and lifetime options. Both are great value).
3) CPV Lab.
4) Lead Impact (formerly Zango), a PPV network, informally #2 after TrafficVance and CPV Lab are doing a conference call and will have some great info. Check it out here.
