Just take a look at the signs of the times:

• Implementation of stricter quality measure (eg Google Quality Score) to clamp down on “thin” sites. Especially hit hard are single page landing sites.
• The noose tightens. You can get somewhat around the QS issue with an about us, contact, privacy page and sitemap. But you can be sure that the quality control noose will continue to tighten.
• Expansion of the PPC and Affiliate market: Just like in the dotcom days, you’ll have fools rushing in, especially as PPC and affiliate marketing start to go prime time. Already, the “pseudo gurus” have shifted from pimping “Adsense in a Box” products to “CPA in a Box” products. [I’ve looked at a number of these products and the only person making anything from them, is the guy who sold it to you].

So is some “guru” out there going to exploit this market by issuing a free “Death of Affiliate Marketing” report?

If so, stay as far away as you can, because most expensive advice you will ever get is “free advice”.

I was reading Jim Lillig’s post “Performance Marketing Makes Sense” especially the part where he says:

“I believe engagement is to blame. The final frontier of advertising is to connect a product (and ultimately a brand) with truly interested consumers in a relevant, meaningful andlasting way at a time when they have the propensity to purchase or consider a purchase.“

In my opinion, it’s very much a “chicken and egg” issue.

If you’re promoting $1 or $2 zip or email submit offers, you’d be wondering what level of “engagement” you can work on, especially if you’re running at a 30 – 50% margin at best (or $0.30 to $0.50).

Granted some of us have the priviledge of getting Super Affiliate payouts which are double, triple or even higher than the posted rate, but what about the average affiliate?

You have a couple of options, and both aren’t exactly easy to take action on.

The first is to promote higher value offers in the $20 – $100 range. It’s typical to see something like a $1 zip have an EPC of $50 on the affiliate networks ($50 average commission per 1,000 clicks or 100 clicks depending on the network), while a debt consolidation/mortgage offer with a $100 payout has a $5 EPC.

Huh?

What I believe is happening is that affiliates are sending PPC or other traffic through a thin content site or scraped content site to the affiliate offer.

While a crappy content page might make a zip submit campaign viable (simply because the lure of a free Xbox360 or iPod makes the content redundant), you’re going to get killed with a high payout offer.

With a more sophisticated offer like debt consolidation or a high payout biz op offer, you’d need to construct a focused content page, and pre-selling may involve educating the prospect and motivating them to take action, rather than send them direct to the landing page.

So the first option is to promote higher value offers (and more importantly, understand the mechanics of closing the sale.

–

The second option is to go beyond the pay-per-view or pay-per-lead business models, and instead focus on business models which have a built-in incentive to continually engage your customer.

I understand that a number of CPM business models are coming into vogue again, and having operated web properties at one of Asia’s largest online content networks, have to say that it’s viable only if you have:

• A strong brand (prefably within the top 3 in your niche)
• Access to lots of cheap traffic in huge quantities

I’d probably stay away from CPM business models simply because I prefer the high value market, rather than the mass market.

So what business models are on the table?

Continuity-based business models, the likes of which marketers like Kirt Christensen and Ryan Deiss have developed. Membership-based models like my friend Rachel Rofe have introduced like her YayFood weight management membership site.

If you’re spending the bulk of your time building up the relationship in the beginning and putting in an incremental effort to maintain that relationship (and collect a monthly subscription fee), it gives you the resources to engage your customers.

“Hi Andrew,

I’m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads.

Lately, my sales have been stagnating…

How can I ensure more stability in my affiliate income?

Thanks.
Josh”

–

My answer:

Having worked with a number of Internet marketing veterans, I’ve noticed a couple of best business practises that I’ve seen these successful and experienced marketers use.

• The Micromanaging trap

There’s the Internet marketers “day trader” mentality that you’d want to avoid.

It’s something I used to do when I first started out – typically seen in behavior like staying logged in to your affiliate account all day and hitting the refresh button every hour to see if more sales have come in.

If you’ve looked at how stock day traders work, they’re like human rats sitting in front of their computers, waiting for the stock to go up (or down) 1 or 2 “ticks” (bids) and doing a buy or sell order. This isn’t any way to run a business and you’d be chaining yourself to your computer.

If it’s a new campaign, you might want to check in once or twice a day.

If you’ve planned a campaign well, you can set it to run on autopilot and tweak it every day or 2 days.

• Regularity and consistency

It’s important to distinguish between revenue generating and non-revenue generating activity.

Some marketers who spend more time writing ebooks than actually practising what they preach might give you advice that is highly suspect. Do your own testing and tracking.

I have heard one highly experienced marketer suggest that you write and submit 20 articles to the major article directories and wait for the cash to come in.

From actual practise, I’ve found that it pays to submit enough articles to establish a presence in your niche area (maybe 5-10 articles), then drip feed another 2-3 articles every week. This ensures that your traffic is more regular. (imagine the analogy of subscribing to a newspaper and getting 50-60 issues in a single day, versus getting an issue every day…it’s pretty much common sense, isn’t it?)

• Testing and tracking

You need to be able to analyze the data your sites are generating and go beyond just gathering a bunch of keywords from Google Analytics, awstats, MyBlogLog Pro Stats, or whatever other analytics package you are using.

You need to intelligently put together a picture of your visitor profile, track where they’re coming from, and put together new traffic mechanisms, whether a new PPC ad group, to test that new channel.

If anything, I think a lot of new marketers fall prey to the idea that you can just set up a PPC campaign, let it run on autopilot, never touch it again and expect cash to come flowing in….nothing could be further from the truth.

–

So your success in affiliate marketing has to walk a fine line between getting the urge to micromanage and fiddle with your campaigns every 5 mins, and the other extreme of setting it up, never doing further follow up and expecting something of a miracle.

Following the mantra of “test, track, test, track” will bring your campaigns to the next level.

Yes it’s going to be a 24+ hour flight, and it’s during the peak season where it was absolute murder to get my ticket.

But well worth it…

PPC Classroom Live is the live workshop component to Anik and Jeremy’s PPC Classroom product.

Here’s a taste of the Super Affiliate lineup:

(Left-to-right) Mark Widawer, Ros Gardner, Greg Cesar, Anik Singal, Amit Mehta, Jeremy Palmer, Kirt Christensen, David Bullock

Certainly worth flying all the way there for a couple of days (the event is on December 1-2 in Vegas).

For some affiliates who’re new to the industry and trying their luck, affiliate marketing can be a gamble…

Especially if you don’t have a system in place and aren’t proficient at tracking and optimizing your affiliate campaigns…

But not if you can learn firsthand from the veterans.

There’re a number of tickets left at the promotional price of $297, and if you’re headed over, do stop by and say hi!

–> PPC Classroom Live!

“I’m a new Internet Marketer and like you, I plan to focus on blogging and affiliate marketing. I make about $500 a month now.

What’s the best way of doing this? I want to be the next Darren Rowse! I’m planning to quit my job by the end of the year after getting my bonus if this gig works out for me…”

My answer:

It’s great to hear you’re taking action on your goals, Ken, especially as you’ve found that the Internet lifestyle gives you more options.

I don’t think newer Internet Marketers can successfully master two areas, unless you’re very disciplined. You probably should focus on one area.

Between blogging and affiliate marketing, although the two fields are related, I’d recommend you focus on affiliate marketing as that activity directly generates income. With blogging, income tends to be a secondary focus (unless you’re highly skilled at monetizing your blog).

I’m more concerned with the fact that you’re generating $500 from your Internet Marketing efforts now.

Have you calculated your monthly expenditure?

It could be in the range of $2,000 (if you’re single and living in a small community) to more than $5,000 a month.

So you might want to hold on to your “Quit your day job” ambition till your income stabilizes to a level you’re comfortable with before taking the big plunge.

–

Every Monday I answer readers questions in the “Monday Question” series. If you’ve a question, you can send it in via the contact form.

Note: Due to the volume of emails we receive, we may not be able to answer every question.

SAA brings you Amit’s PPC strategies which help him generate more than $1 million each year in affiliate commissions.

It closes on Oct 31st, midnight EST.

To sign up, head to: Super Affiliate Accelerator now…

The Viral Super Affiliate System is intended to provide a viral turnkey solution for new and experienced affiliate marketers.

My development team and I have taken care to ensure that we included a comprehensive series of psychographic tools and techniques in this product.

As far as we’re aware, none of the major affiliate marketing instructional tools includes these components.

To avoid overexposing these techniques, I’m limiting the distribution of this product to only 100 sets. This package will be taken off the market once we hit that number.

You can check out the product information page over at:

>>> Viral Super Affiliate System

Let’s look at this scenario:

You’re a new affiliate marketer starting out, and you want to generate some sales. What do you do?

Maybe you could start a free blog at blogger or wordpress.com. If you’re smart, you’ll register your own domain and get your own webhosting, so you’ll have more control over your web property.

But do you stop at just one blog or website?

Not if you want to have massive success in your affiliate campaign.

What’s to stop you from creating 5 or 10 blogs or websites promoting the same product?

It’s not only an opportunity to occupy multiple positions on the SERPs (search engine results pages), but you will edge out your competition if you push them off page 1 too.

Bear in mind, I’m not asking you to post 10 mirror image copies of the same website. That would be very foolish.

Instead if you can generate content easily, tightly focused around that specific niche, for example, weight loss, you’ll create a virtual fortress centered around the product.

The guys on the Wicked Fire affiliate forum have announced the June discount code for domain registrar NameCheap.com where I’ve been buying the bulk of my domains from.

Domains also come with free privacy protection (so your details aren’t easily available).

Here’s some advice regarding domain names:

.com domains aren’t always the most desirable.

If you are creating a content site, a .info or .org could be equally useful and in some cases be more effective.

If you provide content on a .info site and collect the visitors details, you could easily direct them towards your .com affiliate site later and close the sale. People also tend to place more trust on .info and .org sites because there is a perceived belief that these types of domains are less commercial than .com domains.

At the same time too, there are spam marketers who create .info sites filled with spam.

What you can do instead is create a genuine content site with 10-20 pages of content on a .info site and drive traffic to the affiliate sales page through an autoresponder sequence from aweber or getresponse.

You’d be surprised how much higher your conversions will be.

—

I’ve registered a number of new domains just a short while ago and will be pointing them at my Bluehost webhosting account which now comes with hosting for unlimited domains.

It’s a shared hosting account, so I get live chat and prompt email support, compared to reseller hosting accounts which support multiple domains, but the tech support tends to be lower grade.

—

Resources:

NameCheap domain registrar (coupon code: junebugz)

Bluehost: $6.95 per month webhosting, hosting unlimited domains

Speaking to an affiliate or super affiliate (generally referring to someone who makes at least $10,000 in profit from affiliate marketing) is hands-down the best way. You get to ask your question, get an answer, ask a follow up question and get an answer almost immediately.

Another solution is to gain information via an information product. This being Internet Marketing, your first inclination might be towards ebooks, but take note that this category also includes videos, DVDs, audio CDs and printed magazines and books. The depth of information might not be as comprehensive as talking to someone face-to-face, or maybe over an instant messenger or email, but what you lack in personalized attention is more than made up by the breadth of information available.

A third avenue is through forums and blogs. It can be a mess out there, sorting out the good forums and blogs from the great ones. But typically if the site has many visitors, a high PageRank (indicative of a good number of links and backlinks) and most importantly the reputation and buzz about the place, it’s likely to be a good source of information.

As forum and blog posts tend to be fairly episodic and ‘bite-sized’, you will have to spend a little more effort in pieceing together the information.

But taking all 3 methods in tandem, you’ll find your knowledge increasing rapidly.

The most significant factor in your development as an affiliate marketer lies in your ability to put your knowledge into action. Knowing is not enough, it’s the doing which brings in the dollars.

If you’re looking for a forum with a condusive atmosphere with a helpful administration and moderator team, you should check out the: 5 Star Affiliate Forum

If you’ve listened to the past episode in which 5 Star founder Linda Buquet was featured, you’d know that she’s a great resource and I was pleasantly surprised that she posted a reply to my forum post within a couple of minutes (It was about 2am her time I think).

Check out the: 5 Star Affiliate Forum

You can check out Linda’s Affiliate Forum Blogging Contest and decide if you meet the criteria and take part in the contest.

I’d first heard Linda on the Shoemoney Net Income radio show.

If you missed it you can listen to the podcast here:

Download audio file (NI100306.mp3)

I remember Linda gave a few nuggests of affiliate marketing advice on the show.

Let’s look at contests for a moment.

Are they worth taking part in?

For experienced affiliates $400 will seem like chump change, but the big payout comes in the form of the intangibles that come with participation.

Let’s look at the spinoffs:

• Visibility: By virtue of participation, you’ll have visitors checking out your contest entry. If you have compelling content, great presentation or better yet a combination of both, you’ll stand head and shoulders above the competition. You’ll build a following, especially from those who haven’t been to your blog yet.
• Social Linkage: Contests, memes and writing projects lend themselves to leading to interaction, particularly among participants. If you don’t already know the big players in your industry, this is a good opportunity to build some bridges.
• Building Social Goodwill: Any community only survives as long as people are willing to help each other. If you are actively helping someone, or being helped, it pushes forward the vicious cycle of kindness. You’ll want this cycle to be as big as possible.

So take part in the contest?

The prize is always compelling, but the payout from participation could be much, much bigger.

If you’re planning to take part, good luck!

• Blogging
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Traffic Generation

I get lots of feedback on general posts, but here’s a chance for you to pose questions and get answers in a future post.

To make things a little easier, here’re some of the foundation between each of the areas I cover, so you can better “get” me and pose a question which might best help you:

Blogging

I see blogging as the next generation of web publishing. It certainly beats the HTML I was bashing out on a text editor in 1997 when I was managing web portals.

The introduction of RSS and Social Networking/Bookmarking widgets means you can easily get a blog from the starting point to more than 10,000 uniques in less than 6 months after starting.

Someone might say, “Sure, I can do that in a single day by getting my post listed on Digg or one of the other big bookmarking sites”, but what I’m refering to is a consistent stream of traffic, as in a consistent 1,500-2,000 page views per day. Not 50,000 page views today, and 200 page views tomorrow.

The underlying philosophy here is that I am (and I hope you are) building a solid business. Although it’s based in the online world, and by definition virtual and intangible. The business I’m building here is as solid as any brick-and-mortar equivalent out there.

—

Affiliate Marketing

My approach is different from many affiliates out there.

I adopt a customer-centric point of view, thinking about questions like “Why should I submit my email/zip code/buy this product/service”.

Value creation is a key here. And the law of fair trade applies.(well, somewhat).

If I spend $1 and get “value” worth $2, I’m certainly a happy camper.

If I spend $1 and get “value” worth $0.10, I’m going to be a very unhappy camper.

The specific mechanics of this will be covered in a product I’m currently developing.

—

Social Traffic Generation

The fundamentals of traffic generation I subscribe to is based on “human relationships” more than search engine alogrithmns.

Coming from a social/organizational psychology background, it’s quite easy to see how relationships still form the basis of interaction on the Internet.

If I like you, I will visit your blog/website, leave comments, buy your products/service, do joint ventures with you.

But the virtual world being vastly different from the physical one, there is a huge difference in how you accomplish this goal to get people to ‘like’ you.

That’s where my whole social traffic generation system comes about.

—

Now that I’ve laid out the foundation of the systems I practise, go ahead and list topics or questions you might have in the comments below.

People keep asking me why I say that 90% of Internet Marketers drop out of the industry within 6 months.

The truth is I don’t have a fixed answer, but on bad days, it seems like everyone else who started out about the same time as me has moved on to:

• Network marketing
• Taken up a 9-to-5 job somewhere
• Doing the “financial trading cycle” which typically involves day trading or forex or options trading

The sad part is that they inevitably hit a brick wall, then look at what I’ve achieved in the last year and comment “Gee, you’re lucky”.

That kind of stings, considering the amount of effort I’ve spent in Internet Marketing, determining a path, building bridges to other Internet Marketers (sometimes taking a 20 hour flight each way) and taking on more than what others would normally do because I want to move along the road further.

So when I hear about the aspiring Internet Marketer who hasn’t taken action because he bought a new laptop and couldn’t figure out how to use it, and didn’t know how to configure his email, it makes me sad. Very sad.

In 2 minutes I informed him that he ought to call Dell and his ISP’s toll-free number and get his problems fixed by the next day.

Allaying blame on an inanimate laptop is tantamount to scolding the gas in your car because you got into an accident. It doesn’t quite add up.

Is it a catchall and a generalization to say marketers fail because they are lazy?

I think it’s more than just laziness, however, it’s a fundamental disconnect between your current reality and your long term goal.

If you knew you were destined for greatness, and you spent the day futzing around (maybe playing online chess, or IMing your friends), who’s to blame?

And if you have $127.05 in your affiliate marketing commission account, can you truly blame the ‘system’ because it’s rigged?

Why not start looking into the mirror, and take a cold hard look.

If you’re truly doing your best and your best isn’t good enough, it might be time to consider other options.

But if you’re putting in 30 minutes a week, and loudly yelling that the system doesn’t work, then you might eventually become part of that 90% dropout statistic.

Should it be time to kick your Internet Marketing efforts up a notch?

Like they say: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”

Here’s why: The whole system of Internet Marketing profits is based on effort and engagement.

Witness-

Web advertising (text links, banner ads, Adsense) has a back-of-napkin payout of about 1-10% against your time and resorces.

Comparatively, CPA (cost per action) marketing where you’re rewarded on leads taking an action (filling in a form, submitting an email address or zip code) pays about 5% to 30% return on your effort.

Affiliate marketing with payouts on completed transactions gives a payout of 10% to 90% (depending on whether it’s a physical product or digital one).

And the big kahuna is product creation with payouts of 20% to 100%, and you control the highway toll booth so to speak.

The higher payouts are proportional to customer engagement, and your efforts to profile and understand them.

With that equation clearly in mind, why would you choose to focus on lower levels of engagement with a limit to your time and resources?

I understand the often heard sentiment from new marketers to start out with “something easy”.

It’s good to wade in baby pool at the beginning of the journey, but choosing to stay in there for long periods of time, even when people have graduated to blue oceans is beyond me.

And just in case, you’re wondering about the guy who operates 1,000 blogs running adsense on them. I think the branding associated with being a super affiliate or owning your own product, far outstrips the guy with 10,000 made-for-Adsense blogs.

That’s my personal view.

The key is to have a game plan when starting out, and following the plan.

Your comfort zone and your mindset will set the pace for your eventual success in this field.

What’s a “web revenue blog”? Pat defines it as:

Blogs that focus on affiliate marketing, display advertising, contextual advertising, and actually helping people generate revenue in these ways by running their own site

Pat’s compiled a list of 28 blogs and as an inaugural participant, landed in a #10.

The top blogs include the usual suspects like:

• ProBlogger Darren Rowse
• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
• JenSense
• JohnChow
• Linda Buquet’s 5 Star Affiliate Blog
• Shawn Collins

As well as other notables like WickedFire malcontent Jon “aojon” F, Jon Warass, Scott Jangro, Carsten Cumbrowski, Sam Harrelson, TylerCruz, Andrew Johnson, Stuart (Earners Blog).

Awards are nice, though I don’t place much emphasis on going out to land them.

The publicity always helps if it bring more people who might get something from the content I post.

Peer recognition is something I value above all else.

Ken’s used 2 metrics that I’m not familiar with: Compete and Quantcast. Getting better rankings would likely involve inserting tracking code and optimizing content for traffic from those sources. At the same time, inserting more tracking code will slow down page loading for visitors. So it’s a trade off.

Do check out the other quality blogs on the rankings.

If you’d like to view the raw data, you can check it out: here

I’ve had the chance to talk to a number of aspiring Internet Marketers (aspiring because they haven’t started yet) over the past couple of weeks and frankly, I’m shocked at some of the expectations.

“I want you to set up an online business, which will make me lots of money on a long term basis, and I don’t have to do anything. Oh yeah, and I’m not willing to pay you much for it”

I don’t know about you, but some people are seriously out of touch with reality…

If there are expectations that someone would spent time and resources creating online businesses which generate huge, long term income and do it on the cheap, there is a major disconnect with reality.

And we’re not even talking about the 15 minute worth of setup for niche research, traffic gen and monetization efforts Kris Jones alluded to during Elite Retreat which I mentioned in “PepperJam’s Kris Jones Dishes Out Super Affiliate Marketing Tips” yesterday.

The expectations I am talking about are to have a complete, turnkey, self-sustaining business where all they have to do is to sit back and count their profits every day.

If you’ve every had these thoughts, or even worse still harbor them, please note, you could be setting yourself up for business suicide if these are your thoughts about Internet Marketing.

There’s an adage that goes:

If you do nothing, nothing will happen.

If you do something, something will happen.

“Something” may not always be what you want, or even what you expect, but “something” goes beyond earning your first $10 off an affiliate marketing, CPA or adsense campaign.

“Something” often translates into cold hard experience, which goes beyond what any ebook, system, seminar, workshop or coaching program can give you.

Obviously it’s helpful if you’ve a guide like the Internet Millionaire Code to help you along the way, which is where finding the right mentor, or the right group can help shorten your learning curve.

If you have the opportunity to spend time with someone who’s already achieved what you’re aiming for, take the next step to study how they achieved it.

Some make the mistake of “parroting” their mentor’s campaign. The honest to goodness truth is that if something has already been done, there’s a diminishing return if you do it again. There’s a “lifespan” attached to techniques and strategies and if you keep doing the same thing (or repeat what someone else has done) over and over again, eventually you’ll reach the point where you literally get nothing for your efforts.

Which is why the strategies in products like the Internet Millionaire Code will shorten your learning curve.

The biggest challenge facing new Internet Marketers will not be a financial one, nor a technical one, but rather what I outlined in “Why 90% of Internet Marketers Fail“