Whether you’re banging your head against the wall, or merely looking at ways of reducing your traffic course, just stop and think for a moment: if you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you’re going to get what everyone will get.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll disregard going the:

• Media buying route (can be pricey for new affiliates)
• Private ad buys from small sites
• Social media ad programs like Facebook Ads and MySpace MyAds

This post is also not intended to list out the top 10 places to get/buy traffic, you’ll have to figure out the final piece for yourself.

Creativity and innovation are going to be the key to getting low cost yet quality traffic, there’re 2 ways of doing this:

1. Finding the traffic, then looking for a way to monetize the traffic
2. Having an offer in hand, and looking for pockets of traffic which suit your profile

In either case, I like to start off with market research to get an idea of the volume and quality of traffic available.

Use free tools like Alexa, Google Trends, Google Insights to look at key sights within your niche. But go beyond what many would do – which is just to type broad keywords – start going granular in your approach. If you can identify blocks of users which match your demographic, you could potentially have a winner in your hands.

content management software (CMSes)  like Joomla, vBulletin and open source social networking software found on directories such as Sourceforge, let webmasters cluster communities together easily. Especially since the bulk of these webmasters spend the majority of their resources on building out the site and increasing the userbase, leaving little time to cover their operating costs and/or generate income from their efforts.

Recognizing these communities and being able to work out an arrangement with the community owner can create interesting business opportunities.

There’re a number of marketers who’ve shared their experience in this space:

• Jeremy Schoemaker “Shoemoney” covered a case study for a local Chevy dealership including the creatives and analytics for the campaign
• “CDF Networks'” Chad Frederiksen covered some of the elements of a lead generation business
• Dennis Yu had a guest post by Gerald Neo “How to grow your SEM business in Asia“

Taking an example. If you got a $100-200 payout for a finance-related lead, at a cost of $30-50 in lead generation costs, which works out to a 275% margin. Which sounds attractive.

However, the finance service provider might make a commission/profit in the magnitude of $1,000 to $5,000 on the customer, about a 19,000% gross margin. Factoring in a 20% default rate and operating expenses of 30%, the customer value is a healthy $1,500 (assuming the provider manages their risks prudently).

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So if you’re an affiliate, would you prefer to make a $150 commission per lead or $1,500 per customer?

Just remember that a number of CPA affiliates who’ve tried to go down this route have given up because of the extra administrative and operational effort that is involved.

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I’ve been coaching a client in the real estate industry about the mechanics of lead generation and he recently spent $200 in a test PPC campaign, which generated 8 leads, and resulted in 1 conversion translating into a gross profit of $4,000.

Aside from his costs, his time spent was marginal, so he’s coasting at about 19 times ROI.

Note: this was a test campaign, so you should not go out and extrapolate a linear ROI from starting a $5,000 campaign.

However, he applied a number of points which led to the success:

• GeoTargeting to a specific location: Face-to-face business transactions are almost always more valuable than ones which you hand off to an Internet-based merchant/services provider.
• Highly targeted: The campaign was geared towards one specific demographic – income, value of real estate, position on the buying cycle.
• Pre-qualification: Even with the demographic locked down, he offered a paid informational report to pre-qualify the lead. This resulted in 8 prospects who had bought the report.
• Face-to-face closing: As he was in the same geographical area as his prospects, he met up with one individual and closed the transaction.

Note: unlike the example above, you don’t have to take on a local lead generation campaign from start to finish, and instead work with insurance agents, realtors, service providers to hand the leads off to. Contacting a local partner, having an agreement in place, and periodically auditing the process to ensure that all leads are being tracked accurately, can be a very profitable income stream to complement your existing efforts.

One line in the Dennis Yu guest post bugs me though “To many SEM specialists, this is a golden opportunity. But then, they have to realise that Singapore is a small market. And it cannot sustain their ROI, just by focusing on one market alone.”

Given that Singapore’s GDP is $240 billion (2008 estimate) and is ranked 46th in the world, with a stock of money rated at $52.57 billion (31 Dec 2008) [Stats from CIA World Factbook]. I can’t help but feel that guest poster Gerald Neo either is pretty naive, or didn’t do his homework. Hopefully, it’s the latter.

Choosing one of the industries listed at the Economic Development Board of Singapore’s industry sectors, such as Aerospace, Petrochemical, Alternative Energy, Biotechnology, or Microelectronics can potentially be a business worth a couple of million dollars. That’s anything but a “small market”.

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Interested in lead generation? Check out my review of Chad Frederiksen’s Local Lead Plan.

The auction closes this Friday, August 28th, 1159pm. Some of the bid prices are ridiculously low at the moment, so if you put in a bid for charity, you’ll either get the product or service at a steal, or you’ll be doing your part to aim in breast cancer research and relief.

You can check out Missy’s fundraising auction post.

Here’re some of my personal top picks for the auctions:

• Two hours of consulting with Lisa Riolo: Lisa was formerly affiliate network Commission Junction’s senior vice president for business development and has had management roles at brick-and-mortar institutions like Bank of America and Peet’s Coffee. Besides the obvious affiliate marketing issues you might raise with her, she’d be pretty experienced in the operations side of running and growing a business too. The auction is currently in the $100+ region, and even if you were to contribute the retail value of $1,000, there’s no doubt that her advice would bring your business to the next level. (check out my Friday Podcast interview with Lisa R).
• Two hours of consulting with Lisa Picarille: Affiliates might know Lisa as the former publisher/editor-in-chief of Revenue Magazine, the performance marketing standard, as well as co-host of the Affiliate Thing and TheSpew podcasts. You may not know that she’s a wealth of experience with print, radio and online content publishing. Whether you’re a merchant, network or affiliate, you’ll be able to bounce ideas off Lisa which will help you on the media and content elements of your business. Again, the $100+ bid is ridiculously low, and even the $300 retail value is lowballing the potential benefits. I’d realistically value the advice you could get from Lisa at at least $1,000. (check out my Friday Podcast with Lisa P).
• Affiliate Summit West 2010 Platinum conference pass (Las Vegas): Gives you all-access pass to the conference sessions and trade show. If you network effectively at this event with merchants, networks and fellow affiliates, there’s no reason why your affiliate business won’t double or triple (at the minimum) from the networking you’ll be doing. In a number of cases, affiliate incomes have increased exponentially as a result of face-to-face meetups at the event.
• Thesis WordPress template/framework developer’s pack: Thesis is a SEO-friendly WP template that can be customized easily to replace other website publishing tools you’re currently using. I’m developing a new set of affiliate sites using Thesis and with the SEO features, it get much more visibility from organic traffic. Also, designer Chris Pearson has placed a strong emphasis on typography, so readability and usability are greatly enhanced. The lifetime upgrades and great support at the forum is worth its ticketed price many times over. Again, the bids are ridiculously low at this point ($30) on a $164 retail value. (read my Thesis product review for more information)
• Market Leverage A-List Experience: The highlight of this package is dinner at the Eiffel Tower restaurant at the Paris Hotel and Casino with Market Leverage social media manager, Dina Riccobono. If that’s not enough, you’ll also get coverage on MarketLeverage TV and be featured on JohnChow.com. With a little out-of-the-box thinking, this package can significantly boost your branding and bring a number of benefits to your business. (Disclaimer: I’m also bidding on this package). (Check out some of Dina’s tips from the Friday Podcast on videocasting and social media branding)

Although I’ve mentioned just a few of the packages up for auction, do check out the various packages available, you’ll be getting resources to grow your business and doing a lot of good for charity too!

Added to that, with Google AdWords Quality Score, the search network is a much harder game to play, compared to before.

While some of these “facts” have some truth to them, your success as an affiliate marketer mirror that of a brick-and-mortar entrepreneur. If every possible restaurant concept has already been created, why bother starting another?

If anything, this question is pretty self-reflective. If life is so hard, why bother getting out of bed every morning? There’s opportunity to be found. But only if you look hard enough.

If you’ve been studying the trends in CPA offers, you’ll notice that while ringtones might not be as hot as they used to be, the new class of IQ quizzes and mobile downloads for cell phones has expanded the range of offers available.

Ditto for weight loss, where Resveratrol (lots of typo traffic potential there) is coming onto the market (although still not quite near the red-hot demand for Acai).

With dating, the field has expanded beyond plain vanilla dating to include several sub-segments, eg: Asian dating, black dating, divorcee dating, etc.

Added to the fact is that using tools like Google Trends, Google Insights and keyword tools will show you a number of popular queries for which there isn’t a solution or offer available now. Which means you can either:

• Wait for someone to develop and offer and hope to be one of the early marketers to jump in on the trend
• You can join the moaners to complain about not being one of the “big boys” (a phrase recently used by a “guru” to indulge in self-victimization)
• You can spring the capital to develop the offer yourself and list it on one of the CPA networks
• Failing to have the cash yourself, you can find a partner who will fund the project, while you contribute the “sweat equity”

A friend once said “If you sit at the table of life, expecting success to be handed to you on a silver platter, you will be waiting a very long time”.

Now, get back to work.

Check it out here: Members Only Podcast

After reading Ian Fernando’s scathing review last week, I wanted to take a close look at Affiliate Jump for myself.

Filsaime is an experienced internet marketer and has created products like Butterfly Marketing, Viral Friend Generator, 7Figure Income and Affiliate Conspirary. Given that Mike already owns affiliate network PayDotCom (where he’s still president and CEO), why has he launched another “affiliate network” Affiliate Jump?

Besides the obvious make money angle (for Filasaime), the jury is still out on the value the new “network” provides. Here’s my take.

“CPA Affiliate network” – I think the term is used loosely here. For one, there’s a $200 entry fee. Affiliate Jump ranks as one of the few (and possibly only) affiliate networks that requires affiliates to PAY to join.

The real world equivalent might be if you wanted to sell your house, you engage a realtor to market your property. You then CHARGE the realtor for the right to market your property. On top of that, you levy a monthly recurring charge to the realtor for the right to market your property. That’s what Affiliate Jump is doing. Does anyone else see anything wrong with the picture here?

Of course, you might be discounting the fact that Filsaime has kindly thrown in $5,000 worth of his old products like Butterfly Marketing, 7Figure Income and Traffic Fusion. On top of that, he’ll be conducting webinars and providing AdWords training (I hope he covers YSM and Bing too) and providing free CPA offers templates and free webhosting (I assume your monthly subscription goes towards offsetting these costs). There’s also “free” tracking.

So, putting aside the marketing pitch for the moment, Affiliate Jump looks like and smells like a membership site trying to provide CPA affiliate marketing training. In that case, why not call a spade, a space, and call Affiliate Jump a CPA affiliate training site?

Because it doesn’t seem to make sense for a CPA affiliate network (like one of the other 300+ existing CPA networks) to start charging for something which has already been free.

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So even if you get over the mixed messages about the “Affiliate Network” that Filsaime has presented in his videos, let’s look at some of the messages that are being put across in the video.

Filsaime says CPA marketing is:

• A “big boy’s network, (it’s) hard to get in.” Citing that he’s applied to CPA networks, waited 7 days and got declined.

I don’t think I’m a “big boy”, yet I’ve applied to numerous CPA networks and haven’t had difficulty getting in. Some as early as 2006.

Even if you get rejected from a CPA network, did you try calling in? In the rare instance I’ve been rejected, there’s almost always a contact email or number to get your application manually reviewed or to speak to a compliance manager. It’d be pretty foolish and doesn’t make sense for affiliate networks to turn away experienced and skilled affiliates.

Filsaime also says “Many CPA networks will not approve you unless you live in the US”

I’ve lived in Singapore and applied to the networks and have been accepted. Again, did you list “hotchick4you@gmail.com” as your contact email? Or otherwise make it difficult for the compliance manager to review your application?

It’d be foolish for any affiliate network who wants to be in business to turn away experienced affiliates. Many of the top affiliates live in the UK, Australia/New Zealand, Asia and Israel. I don’t see how any affiliate network owner would make decisions that limit their business’ growth.

I have an issue with the fact that all offers are unlocked for all members. Just because you paid a $200 entry fee at the door and a monthly charge doesn’t mean you won’t do something silly that will lead to fraud leads being generated. Without due diligence and a screening process, advertisers could be paying for leads which don’t convert, and ultimately pull their offer. This affects all affiliates promoting that particular offer.

With the industry trend moving towards refining lead quality, it looks like Affiliate Jump is running headlong in the opposite direction.

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Some other “features” that Filsaime mentions “You don’t need to learn how to build a website” –

I won’t claim to be a skilled designer or programmer, but the bread-and-butter of successful CPA marketing is being able to analyze and optimize a campaign. This involves split testing, adjusting landing page/pre-sales page elements. It isn’t a sin to come into the industry not knowing how to build a website. But if you’ve been here longer than 6 months and can’t tell your HTML from your FTP, you’re going to be FUBARed.

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The other problem I have with working with a network that is hosting my pages is that there’s no firewall. You’re hosting your pages at the place where someone has a vested interest and can analyze your data? No comments, but I wouldn’t do it myself.

It looks like Affiliate Jump has a library of landing page templates – if you’re an aspiring affiliate, think about this. If you’re using the same template that hundreds of other affiliate have access to, how will that affect your conversions?

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Personal support: With the CPA networks I work with, I’m assigned an affiliate manager, who’s experienced in the industry. A number of them end up teaching me and giving me tips about platforms that I’m new to, such as PPV (pay per view) or Facebook Ads. This is one of the key criteria that helps me decide which networks to work with. Unless there’s scope for personal attention during the Affiliate Jump webinars, I doubt you’ll get very far with your campaigns.

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Conclusion: While there seem to be an overwhelming number of negatives against Affiliate Jump, there is the possibility that some new affiliates will be benefit from it. With an entry fee of $200 and monthly charges starting at $39.95, you should have a budget of $680 for the first year (excluding PPC costs and other costs involved in getting your CPA business up).

My recommendation though if you are new to CPA marketing is to look at the networks listed in my Affiliate Network Review section, and apply to them. At every one of them I have an experienced affiliate manager who’s a sounding board and gives good tips on my campaigns (they’re not there to teach you everything about affiliate marketing though).

If you’d like some free affiliate marketing education, you might want to check out my Affiliate Marketing Tips series.

In his new role as Affiliate Development Manager, Jason will be recruiting established affiliates into the network and helping them integrate affiliate programs from SAS merchants.

Jason also talked about:

• His intiatives to ramp up the affiliate education elements and a tutorial system he’s working on
• Enhancements to the SAS merchant’s product datafeeds
• Availability of new business models, such as Pay-Per-Call
• Updates on SAS’ Think Tank invite-only workshop
• FTP download capability for merchant coupons

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Jason on Twitter
• ShareASale News on Twitter
• ShareASale
• ShareASale Charity Stars

Jason’s IM details:
AIM: jasonrubacky
MSN: jasonrubacky[at]hotmail.com
yahoo: JasonRubacky

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This is a continuing series of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” posts to share marketing and promotion strategies for affiliate marketers. If you’re new to the series, you might like to check out the first in the series “The Industry and Getting Accepted”

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A WickedFire thread polled forum members about how much they were making in CPA marketing (primarily lead generation based offers). Some members were making $500/month in affiliate commissions a couple of months in the industry. While others were making $5,000 – $10,000 about 2 months in. Still others were making much more than that.

Soon, some of the members who’d been stuck at the $500-1,000 per month level were expressing doubt that those higher income levels were possible, given the short duration.

I known a number of affiliates who’re making 5 to 6 figures a month in commissions a couple of months into the industry, and noted that because the spectrum of marketers entering the affiliate industry is so wide, your success boils down to a number of factors:

• What you know coming into the industry (if you’ve got previous marketing experience and/or programming/automation skills)
• The amount of time and funds you have to spend working on your campaigns
• Your business model

If you’ve been a webmaster for a corporation before, you have a clear advantage. If you’ve been working on in-house search engine marketing for your employer, you’d have a better understanding of how traffic works.

If you’ve got time on your hands, and have a larger budget to test different forms of traffic generation, you’re at an advantage.

The biggest differentiator appears to be the traffic generation model you’ve using. Organic forms of traffic generation like social networking, blogging, search engine optimization may not generate large volumes of traffic like buying the traffic off the search engines or large established websites.

So a solitary affiliate using article marketing, blogging, video marketing will find it hard to generate as much traffic as another affiliate using paid forms of traffic promotion.

That’s not to say that you will have to choose one form or another. You might look at the analytics from your content sites, datamine the keywords bringing in traffic which converts and set up a paid traffic campaign focused on these keywords.

Alternatively, you might look at your top converting keywords from a paid traffic campaign and develop content that features those keywords and related terms.

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The truth may hurt – despite questions like “what’s your top offer?” and “what’s your best form of traffic?”, you should not be too disappointed about not getting a straight answer, unless the campaign has taken place a long time ago, the affiliate is a good friend, or drunk/in a good mood.

Offer conversion data and traffic quality is obtained through a test, measure, test, measure process, which takes time and funds to work through. If someone’s spent a fair bit of pocket change, finding the top traffic sources, landing page setup and conversion strategy, how is he or she obligated to share it with everyone who asks?

It doesn’t seem like an astute or wise way to run a business.

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The bottomline: the “secret” to being a successful affiliate has to rest in looking at yourself with blunt honesty – if you’re deficient in some area – whether marketing or technical expertise – be sure to have a decent understanding, even if you’re roping in employees or freelancers to help you out.

Despite what you may think or may have heard, skilled affiliates aren’t created overnight.

During the call, we talked about:

• How Todd started his own CPA network
• His experience in using the HasOffers affiliate network software
• Strategies for offer selection and promotion for new affiliates
• How to get accepted by CPA networks
• A walkthrough of promoting CPA offers via polls

You can check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Josh on Twitter
• TriFoxMedia CPA network

This is a continuing series of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” posts to share marketing and promotion strategies for affiliate marketers. If you’re new to the series, you might like to check out the first in the series “The Industry and Getting Accepted”

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In a recent post, Brandon Adcock (AKA MajorBTA) wrote about how he’s reduced the number of hours he’s worked on his business and yet increase his income.

Some of the ways he’s achieved this:

• Shift his traffic generation to less time intensive methods – specifically to media buying, from search engine optimization before. Media buying is more macro in scope, compared to the resources that SEO typically requires
• Consolidation to focus on 1-2 verticals vs 4-6 before
• More focus on his own campaign, compared to a broad “knowing what everyone else is running” approach to competitive intelligence

While it’s worked for Brandon, will it work for you?

Likely if you’re at his level, although for newer affiliates, you might do better with this approach.

• Understand the fundamentals

It’s surprising how many affiliates spend time, money and effort on their business without having read the FAQs/guidelines/free webinars/training videos provided by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft/Bing and instead spend their time buying products, attending workshops, reading blogs/forums and getting the information secondhand.

If you want to be good, you can develop your own strategy and optimize it. If you want to be great, you can learn the basics from the service providers/platforms you’re marketing on, develop your own strategy and improve on it.

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• Paying your dues

Face up to the fact that you’ll be investing time in the beginning learning the ropes. The “best” experience you’ll get is when you fail at something. If you’ve lost a chunk of your capital working on a failed PPC campaign, you’re more likely to remember the lesson, especially some of the key reasons why you failed.

If you’re consistently launching new campaigns, massively outspending whatever you’re earning and not understanding what’s happening, you should probably take a step back and understand what and why your campaigns are failing. (Maybe bidding on “Payday loans” at $20 a click wasn’t such a good idea…).

• Log your thoughts / share your experience

The art of keeping a diary is probably an alien thought in the internet age. Many successful day traders and stock investors keep logs of trades they enter into, their reasons for entering the transaction, and post-trade, they log the outcome of whether the trade turned a profit or dipped into the red and why.

Online marketers have access to tracking and analytics software, but few will go back to look at their most profitable traffic sources and tweak their campaigns to turn up the tap on that source, or to find similar sources.

While you will be working hard at the beginning, it doesn’t mean you can’t work smart too.

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For a list of my preferred affiliate networks, you can check out the Affiliate Network Review.

Peter has been an affiliate since 2000 and has a variety of different experiences in the internet marketing/affiliate industry since then, using a variety of different strategies to generate traffic to his sites.

During his time on the podcast, he shared a number of comprehensive tips to use video hosting networks such as YouTube, Metacafe, Revver and others to generate leads for your affiliate offers.

He also shared some business management tips which he’s used to grow his own business.

Besides his role as a VIP coach for the PPC Classroom program, he consults for clients on their internet marketing strategy, and has recently launched a new training site, AffCoaches, targeted at new and experienced affiliates.

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Peter on Twitter
• Peter’s blog
• AffCoaches

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Knowing how to promote a lead generation (ie CPA) offer effectively means knowing how the advertiser/merchant generates income from the lead offer. By matching the advertisers business model with your own, you have a higher chance of monetizing the traffic and leads you’re generating.

Here’re a couple:

Zip/email submit offers: Typically in the $0.50 – $2 range, these offers require a name and email address or zip code. Some form of bait is usually involved, such as a gas card, gift card, xbox, iphone or other item. Although it sounds like almost any lead will be able to get the prize, do note that they’ll have to complete the offer conditions to receive the prize. This might involve filling in a series of other CPA or pay-per-sale offers.

If you’re familiar with incentive sites, you’ll find that leads you send to a zip/email submit offer will be completing offers with an average payout of 2x the value of the “freebie” they’re receiving. If they’re getting a $350 xBox, they’ll likely need to fill in offers with an aggregate payout of $700 to receive the prize (or about a 100% margin for the advertiser).

While some marketers might have success in getting the same lead to fill in multiple email/zip submit offers, do note that because few of them might actually complete the offer and won’t be able to get the prize, you might face some unhappy users.

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Request for information/quotation offers: Offers like payday loans, real estate financing, credit repair lead generation offers might have payouts starting from $20, upwards to hundreds of dollars.

The leads that are generated might eventually be sold to a mortgage bond agency, realtor, financial institution or medical professional (depending on the offer), for a multiple of the bounty/commission payable.

Since a payday loan customer could be worth thousands of dollars to a loan agency (excluding the lender default rate for the moment…), the $100-200 commission paid per lead to the affiliate is an attractive proposition.

Besides going through a CPA network, some affiliates also negotiate directly with merchants/agencies for this type of lead generation arrangement. If you work on this level, you should ensure that you have paperwork in place, and (highly advised) a lawyer on retainer to protect your interests.

For newer affiliates, it’ll make more sense to go through a CPA network, unless you’re pushing enough volume (probably equivalent to a small CPA network) to justify the effort of doing the negotiation yourself.

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Subscription/Rebilling/Recurrent offers: This is sometimes a gray area in which you have fly-by-night merchants/advertisers operating in. A couple of bad apples can spoil the market for the rest of us.

Especially for CPA offers in the business opportunity (BizOp), cell phone ringtone/mobile download and weight loss niche, you’ll find fine print that states a customer will be billed $49.95 or $99.95 every month 14 days or 30 days after they receive their trial sample of business opportunity material or weight loss product sample.

In the light of this business model, the $20 – $50 payout looks like a bargain for the merchant, as the total rebilled amount to the customer can be upwards of $1,000 or more per year.

And before you write off this business model as unscrupulous, take note that several services you are already a customer to, like your internet service, cell phone contract, cable/satellite TV, power/water/gas utlities, newspaper, magazine, webhosting, domain names already function on a subscription/rebilling arrangement.

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Some affiliates will look at the business models listed above and ask “Which is the best type of offer to promote?”

There’s no best, only what works best with your own business model.

I tend to promote a mix of products that best suits my leads/prospects needs. I’ve a number of subscription-based products that I personally used that I recommend to others too.

Take a close look at the offers you’re promoting and do the necessary due diligence. As Brandon Adcock AKA Major BTA mentioned in a Friday Podcast, you should look at the sales funnel for offers you’re promoting, ask your affiliate manager to send you a product sample, or you could sign up for the offer directly from the merchant (don’t go through your affiliate link as it’ll be a fraud lead).

If an offer feels bad, or you don’t personally like it, you can pass on it and choose from the thousands of other offers in the marketplace.

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If you’d like to look at some of the affiliate networks I work with and like, you can check out my Affiliate Network review.

Assuming you’re researched a niche, selected an affiliate offer and chosen to either direct link or create a landing page, your next step is to decide on your traffic generation method.

While some might see this as a toss-up between paid methods vs free methods, I suggest looking at the real costs of “free” traffic.

It doesn’t cost you a dime to write and publish an article/press release/blog post, create a googlepage/hubpage/squidoo lens, use a social bookmark service like delicious/stumbleupon/digg. Well, that is unless, you count your time cost.

You need to figure out your opportunity cost and the “real” cost of engaging in free traffic generation.

If your expected monthly income is $10,000 a month, and you’re spending 250 hours per month working towards that goal, then your hourly rate is $40 ( $10,000 divided by 250 hours).

So if you’re spending 2-3 hours per day hanging out in a forum or reading tweets on Twitter and retweeting “interesting” tweets, you’re “spending” $80-120 per day (or more if you work fewer hours or have a higher income target).

Over a month, you’re spending at least $2,400 ( $80 x 30 days) of potential income working the free traffic route.

If you do an audit, you’ll find that you’re achieving parity if your $2,400 of effort generates $2,400 in affiliate commissions. But then again, it’s not better that working a regular 9-to-5 job (sans the health care benefits, 401K savings plans, annual paid vacation, etc).

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In order to maximize the effort you’re putting into your business, you need to increase the income you’re getting from the time, investment and resources you’re putting into your business.

Doing this may mean using paid forms of promotion to test out your niche – whether you’re using one of the major PPC advertising engines like AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or the recently rebranded Microsoft Bing search engine, or one of the alternative platforms like Facebook Ads, MySpace MyAds, AdBrite, AdSonar, Media Traffic, Traffic Vance, etc.

Matching the demographic/profile of users that the paid platform reaches out to, to the form of marketing you eventually plan to do will give you a good starting point to test the potential traffic and the conversion ratios within the space.

While we’ve moved beyond the days of doing $5-10 traffic tests, a more realistic budget might be $100-200 to get at least a 100 clicks (on a PPC advertising network) or possibly a couple of thousand impressions (on a pay-per-view network) and looking at your conversion ratios.

The major stumbling block that holds some new marketers back is the expectation that they’ll be able to find a winning traffic source with their first trial campaign. Unless you’re in the minority of affiliates who finds a winning, high conversion traffic source with their first trial, you’ll likely have zero or a few sales, although your traffic costs will greatly outweigh your affiliate commissions.

Being able to isolate the factors which cause the campaign to be unprofitable can make the difference between dropping that traffic source, or choosing to optimize the campaign further.

If you’re losing money because:

• You had a large number of losing adgroups in your PPC campaign
• One offer in an A/B offer split test failed to convert
• Traffic generated during one time/day during your campaign (eg: during the work day, or after hours, or over the weekend) had poor conversions
• Specific states/cities had poor conversions

You’ve an opportunity to remove the losers and possibly turn the campaign into a winner.

If on the other hand, you’re not able to isolate the losing factor in your campaign, you might like to test a different traffic source.

A paid campaign can go live within a matter of minutes and give you valuable feedback on whether you should proceed or look at alternatives.

Owning your own affiliate networks sounds like the perfect gig to many new affiliates – you sign up a couple of merchants/advertisers, find affiliates from blogs and forums, then recruit them, matchmake affiliates to offers and collect the difference. That is, if you can afford the $10,000 or so that it takes to get started on an affiliate tracking platform like DirectTrack.

Unfortunately, things aren’t as simple, especially since there’s a whole lot that goes on behind the scenes than just emailing/calling advertisers/affiliates and signing them up.

And on the affiliate network platform, there’s a new player on the scene, Adapp (which is a sister company of the Tatto Media affiliate network), which has developed an affiliate network tracking software, HasOffers.

HasOffers has 3 tiers of service, from a free solution to an enterprise grade solution costing $799 per month (as of the time of writing).

At least one affiliate I know, Josh Todd, has built his affiliate network, TriFoxMedia, on the HasOffers platform.

HasOffers Service Offers

Here’re the 3 grades of offers:

• Free

Up to 250,000 Clicks per Month
Free Subdomain (ie: yournetwork.hasoffers.com)
Chat and Email Support
99.5% SLA guaranteed uptime

• Pro ($99 per month)
  

Up to 500,000 Clicks per Month
Access to all features within HasOffers
Custom Application Domain (ie: http://www.yournetwork.com)
Custom Tracking Domain (ie: yourtracking.com)
Custom Branded Layout
Chat and Email Support plus 5 Phone Tickets
Data Migration of offers, advertisers and affiliates
99.8% SLA guaranteed system uptime

• Enterprise ($799 per month)

Unlimited Click Volume
Unlimited Access to all features within HasOffers
Unlimited Chat, Email and Phone Support
Advanced Data Migration of Offers, Advertiser and Affiliates
Custom Application Domain
Custom Tracking Domain
Unlimited Storage Space
Custom Branded Layout by our Graphics Team
Dedicated Server Resources for Increased Performance
Increased Storage Limits
99.8% SLA guaranteed system uptime

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Although the 250,000 clicks that the free solution may seem like a lot, you can expect to see your network hit it’s quote pretty quickly, especially if affiliates are promoting offers on social media, PPC, PPV or media buying. A fledgling network with a handful of experienced affiliates would likely hit the clickcap within a week or maybe two.

If you’re new to this, probably the free version is a good option to test drive the platform, and you’ll eventually find yourself upgrading to the professional or enterprise version as your revenue justifies the expenditure.

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So what does HasOffers do?

If you’ve used other affiliate management software, you’ll find the Web-based HasOffers to be an easy software to work with. The software has a distinctly lead generation/CPA-slant to it, so if you’re inclined toward CPA affiliate marketing, this could be an ideal solution.

With a couple of mouse clicks, you’ll be able to add affiliate offers, create offers, recruit and manage affiliates. The interface has a number of features which makes it easy to work with advertisers you recruit, or if you choose to, to cross publish CPA offers from networks, with features like loading an email suppression lists and loading tracking pixels to offers.

The stats reporting options are pretty robust, with the ability to track stats on an hourly and daily basis, as well as letting you keep tabs on referrals, conversions and commissions.

In terms of paying affiliates, HasOffers is able to generate reports, which can then be uploaded to PayPal’s MassPay system, allowing you to pay hundreds (or even thousands) of affiliates easily.

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Who’s the Ideal HasOffers User?

While marketers planning to start their own lead gen based business will find HasOffers to be a comprehensive tracking platform, they might also want to consider getting an email communications tool, such as a self-hosted or third party email service provider, to communicate with affiliates in their system. Also as the network scales, PayPal might not be the ideal payment provider, as making large numbers of payments via PayPal might trigger an “account review” process by the payment provider. Eventually, you might need to set up a merchant account with a offline or online bank such as Wells Fargo.

In recent weeks, HasOffers has beefed up its geo-targeting functionality, allowing network owners to blocks affiliates from specific offers or advertisers. This can help maintain lead quality within the network.

The HasOffers team seems to be continually developing the platform, having released an advertiser API (application programming interface) so advertisers can pull their stats from the system. Affiliates already have API access.

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Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney had earlier posted that one possible “out of the box” use of HasOffers could be to syndicate/cross-publish offers from one of the major affiliate networks to their own HasOffers network.

Why do this?

If you’re getting higher than street payouts on an offer and you’re offering street payouts to your affiliates, you could potentially profit from the arbitrage (or gap between your higher payout from the network and the lower commission you make to the affiliate).

While such as scenario is possible, you’d have to be vigilant in accepting and monitoring affiliates in your HasOffers network. I don’t believe any network will take kindly to your sub-affiliate violating terms of service accidentally or otherwise. Worst still, providing bad leads on a mass basis, could be grounds for the major network to freeze or even terminate your own affiliate account.

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So the likely scenario is for aspiring affiliate network users who have the time and resources to effectively monitor their affiliates who’ll be the first movers and users for HasOffers.

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Check out: HasOffers

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:

• Convert2Media
• Ruck’s previous appearance on the Friday Podcast

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

You can also check out the Affiliate Marketing Tips series.