A Tale Of 3 Young Malaysian Internet Marketers

Three young Malaysian Internet Marketers are raising funds for air travel and accomodation to the US to attend an Internet Marketing seminar, to achieve this aim, they’ve put together an Internet Marketing product firesale.

vince tan melvin ng gobala

(Left to Right: Vince Tan, Gobala, Melvin Ng)

Dubbed the “7 Day Super Firesale”, Malaysia-based Internet Marketers, Vince Tan, Melvin Ng and Gobala Krishnan have put together 100 products on topics ranging from product launches, blogging, traffic generation, product creation and product marketing.

If you’re a new Internet Marketer, you will find a number of these products can be very useful in helping you better understand some of the fundamentals of Internet Marketing. Granted, you can probably get most of this information from high authority blogs, forums, Wikipedia, Ask.com and Yahoo! Answers, but I think the value you’ll get is from having the information aggregated at one central location.

If you’ve been doing Internet Marketing for at least a year, and are generating a comfortable income from your efforts, you might Continue reading

What Happens When Merchants Don’t Play By Affiliate Marketing Rules?

As an affiliate marketer, I have to deal with challenges (or you might view them as opportunities) during the course of your campaigns, but when happens when you find out a merchant has been sticking it to you?

A case in point, I’d be promoting web services for a merchant through their in-house affiliate program. It paid about $60 per customer who signed up for their services.

And I discovered a couple of days ago that they’re running the same offer on one of the biggest affiliate networks and paying out $90 a customer.

Boy, I was fuming.

I can understand a $5-10 gap differential when the same offer is listed across various affiliate networks (the networks might be willing to cut out a chunk of their profits to give more to affiliates).

But when there’s a near 50% commission payout gap I feel it unconscionable.

There is an unspoken affiliate marketers’ code of conduct, but there isn’t a formal regulatory body which presides over affiliate networks and merchants.

In other words, who watches the watchmen?

Some might say that in a capitalist society, you are welcome to vote with your feet.

I tend to view business as a series of long term business relationships with real people.

I can only guess that:

  • The various marketing/ad departments within the merchant or the network aren’t talking to each other, such that you have a 50% gap in affiliate payouts.
  • The service provider faced some stiff competition and upped their payouts in real-time to remain competitive. But wouldn’t you be talking to your in-house team too?
  • Affiliates? Who cares.

For the purpose of this post, I prefer not to name the merchant, nor the network, nor the type of service and focus on the core issue instead: Trust.

So does that mean affiliates are going to Continue reading

$0.41 Backlinks To Build A High Authority Site? And Internet Marketing Innovation

Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue has an innovative strategy to get one of his sites ranked within the top results on Google for the highly competitive term “Bingo” and affiliate marketers can take a lesson or two or three from Keiron’s case study.

In “Easy method of gaining quality backlinks and building a database of users” Keiron has bypassed the traditional strategy of asking webmasters for backlinks or a link exchange, in favor of a premium giveaway.

bingo pen offer

The pens costing 20 pence (or about $0.41) each are a viral and guerilla method to gain a backlink.

He’s also engaged in using press releases to distribute his message/content and some viral marketing on forums has occured.

As the marketing is done partially offline (through the delivery of the pens), you’ll get the link love from a backlink, compared to a 2-way link.

At this point, some readers might be thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”

A key reason is many Internet Marketers are overly focused on:

  1. Technology: Trying to signup for some automated bookmarking/viral software that’s just been released.
  2. Following the advice of a guru who’s had a successful campaign (Note: once something has been done successfully once, it’s difficult to repeat it verbatim with the same level of success. Those familiar with Economics will know it as the law of diminishing utility).

Likewise, “value creation” is a buzzword in corporate circles, but to get more out of it requires people to do more than sit in a circle on Friday afternoons, chomping on doughnuts, sipping cappucinos, talking about improving work processes, but never doing anything about it.

I used to conduct entrepreneurship training focused on business building skills in the Singapore schools. It was particularly frustrating to sit in on meetings where it’d take 2 weeks to figure out who’d be a project manager and who’d form the team.

Then they’d be offer to conduct “research” for a couple of weeks and finally decided that there were too many obstacles, so they needed to find some other project (or niche in Internet Marketing speak).

They’d then bang into some other challenges in the midst of their “research” and give that up too.

Which kind of reminds me of what many new Internet Marketers do.

They start out with AdSense publishing, then maybe make a switch to eBay auctions. Then they decide it doesn’t work, and before you know it, they’d made a full circle of adsense publishing, affiliate marketing, product creation, online auctions, PPC arbitrage, CPA marketing, and somehow come to the conclusion that “nothing works”.

Is it due to the “Honeymoon effect“?

Maybe.

And it feels like old ground is being covered, like Continue reading

Eric Marcoullier Leaves MyBlogLog

Last Friday, blog social network MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier posted on the official MyBlogLog blog his “So Long and Thanks For All The Fish” post, announcing he would be leaving the company with the most commonly displayed blog widget, a company which Yahoo! acquired for $10 million earlier in the year.

Every MyBlogLog blogger will have some relationship with Eric. After all he’s the default “friend” when you join the network.

eric marcoullier

With Eric’s departure, will new MBL members be greeted by Yahoo! Community Manager Robyn Tippins?

It was just a little over a month ago that MyBlogLog ran their ad on StandoutJobs to hire two wickedly good developers.

eric marcoullier todd sampson

In the video ad, Eric, seen with MyBlogLog co-founder Todd Sampson were talking about the atmosphere at the young company, and it’s a pity to see Eric’s departure.

He’ll be gradually phasing to becoming one of the bloggers in the MBL community, creating the moniker bpm140 and will be blogging over at marcoullier.com.

I’m thinking bpm140 could be an abbreviation for Continue reading

PayPerClick Super Affiliate Launches Affiliate Radar

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’d know that PPC (or PayPerClick) generated traffic are the key to success toward Super Affiliate status (at least $10,000 a month in commissions), and it’s opportune that my friend and PPC Super Affiliate Mark Roth has launched Affiliate Radar.

Who’s Mark Roth?

He’s generated more than 1 million leads using Google’s AdWords PPC program.

mark roth google adwords

In the process of his PPC efforts, he had customized software and a management platform developed to facilitate his affiliate marketing and CPA marketing efforts.

With PPC and its associated databases of keywords and keyphrases, there is a significant amount of data management involved. While you can still track keywords on Excel spreadsheets up to about 1,000 keywords effectively, you’d be hard-pressed to go beyond that without automating your systems.

…Which is where Affiliate Radar comes in. Mark mentioned that it’s the same system he uses in his marketing campaigns. Here’s an overview of Affiliate Radar’s features:

affiliate radar

Affiliate Radar’s key feature is to manage your PPC and conversion tracking efforts from a central console. It currently supports Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter from a central interface.

Besides the ability to track Continue reading