Charles Ngo, better known as “Dr Ngo” (after the James Bond villain), flies low on the public radar, even though he’s a successful affiliate. I had an opportunity to invite him on the Friday Podcast to share some of his past experiences in building up to his current level of success, as well as techniques to grow an affiliate marketing business.
During the Friday Podcast, we talked about:
How Charles got his start in internet marketing
How to work around and deal with cashflow issues as you’re building your business
The importance of networking within the industry and key affiliate events to attend
Being able to effectively generate awareness for your company and your products/services is important, regardless of whether you’re a merchant,business owner, affiliate network, or even internet marketer.
I had the opportunity to invite Ali Croft on the podcast to share public relations strategies to enhance your business.
Ali leads the public relations consultancy at Just Drive Media, a PR and online marketing agency. She has about 10 years experience in the industry and most recently had been PR manager at auction site/marketplace eBay, where she led the team to a Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Silver Anvil award for excellence in PR.
During the podcast, Ali spoke about:
What public relations is and why it’s important
Tools for monitoring your online reputation (with tools like Radian6)
Tips for reputation management and building your authority status online
How to effectively communicate during a crisis
Keys to building and maintaining awareness with your core audience
Internet marketer Josh Smith who blogs at AffiliateFamous.com, has a unique background, having operated an online retail operation while he was still in school, before dabbling in affiliate marketing in 2006.
In 2007, he divested his retail businesses, taking the plunge into affiliate marketing.
Along with his experience in operating a business, he’s also skilled at copywriting and has done a number of offline promotion campaigns to generate leads for his affiliate marketing efforts.
I invited Josh on the Friday Podcast to talk about his strategies in building up his retail business which sold products on eBay, Liquidation.com, Overstock, Amazon, and even flea markets.
Having to deal with physical inventory has taught him the importance of managing his cashflow and he shares a number of these techinques during the podcast.
He also talks about the business management aspects of starting and growing your online business, together with the related topics of his copywriting influences and various offline promotion campaigns he’s worked on (which he affectionately calls “Chaos Marketing”).
Jason Akatiff, most well-known by his online moniker Smaxor, is a former blackhat SEO affiliate turned CPA network owner. With his experience as an affiliate and owning and operating the Ads4Dough CPA network, Jason has a wealth of experience in helping new and experienced affiliates succeed.
As a self-taught programmer, Jason had one of his first websites hacked into and as he studied what had happened, he picked up blackhat SEO skills, which eventually led him to learn to dominate search engine results for various keywords, using techniques like cloaking and auto-generated pages.
About a year ago, he bought struggling affiliate network Ads4Dough off the Sitepoint forum and has grown the network successfully within a year.
I invited Jason on the Friday Podcast to share some of his experience as an affiliate and creating a successful network run by affiliate managers who are in most cases, successful affiliates themselves.
We talked about:
Why affiliates should learn a programming language and resources they should check out
Why and how he’s switched his business model from building sites to buying traffic for his websites
How affiliates can use his “project partners” strategy to grow and scale their business
Why money management is an important issue and how to better manage it
Understand how and why CPA offers are cross-publishing and syndicated across multiple networks
What is a CPA “exclusive offer” and the type of development that goes into it
Ads4Dough’s focus on affiliate development and an update on their earlier announcement to look at a 1-week training workshop in San Diego
Should you be concerned about affiliate managers looking at and copying your affiliate campaign?
Ads4Dough’s shift to a demographic-targeted marketing approach
I’d invited return guest Rachel Rofe on the Friday Podcast to talk one of her most effective traffic sources – article marketing.
Besides covering the basics of article marketing, Rachel also talked about some of the intricasies of:
How you can use the “useful, but incomplete” strategy to get high clickthroughs on your resource links
An update on her weight loss membership site which had received publicity as the cover story of Woman’s World magazine (more popular than Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and Forbes)
The benefits of article marketing and how you can get more bang for your buck for each article you publish
Recommended article directories, article submission services, article analytics and social bookmarking strategies to enhance your profits
Incorporating press release strategies into your marketing campaigns
Going the multimedia route to further boost your traffic generation efforts
Geordie Carswell was formerly CEO of affiliate network RevenueWire and a panelist on the “traffic generation and monetization tips for affiliates” at this January’s Affiliate Summit. Besides an expertise in PayPerClick strategies, Geordie’s a well-rounded marketer, using a variety of techniques to generate traffic and rank well in the search engines.
Having left affiliate management, Gerodie’s focused on his new venture as an affiliate marketer and actively oversees and manages several properties with his business partners.
I invited Gerodie on the Friday Podcast to get his insight on:
Techniques on setting up and optimizing PPC and SEO offers
How your AdWords account history can impact your PPC campaigns
PPC bidding strategies
His perspective on spytools and analytics services
How to continually keep yourself motivated to succeed and scale your business