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.

One of the most frustrating experiences for affiliates is working with affiliate managers who don’t understand the affiliate industry.

With the turnover prevalent among affiliate managers in the industry, it’s not surprising to have an experienced affiliate manager be suddenly replaced by a brand spanking new affiliate manager who’s just a couple of weeks (or sometimes even months) in the job. I can’t vouch for the training that they’re received, although from the looks of things, I get worried when the affiliate rep has no clue what a SubID is, how a Postback function works, or what an “incent site” is.

If you find yourself assigned one of these managers, you could be in pretty big trouble. Especially if they’re nice (or at least trying to be).

You might have an affiliate manager who IMs you at the start of your day to ask how things are going, and maybe even tell you what they did after they got off work yesterday. In their minds they’re being friendly, or even “nice” to you.

It’s likely to be a deathtrap and probably fatal to your income and earnings, because they’re not helping you become a better (and more proftable) affiliate.

Real advice in my book comes in the form of tips or feedback about a feature you might not be aware of, or even recommending third party services that might be able to help you bring your campaigns to a new level.

In my past experience within and outside of internet marketing, the best advice I’ve received are from people who’re willing to give you the uncensored truth (which usually comes with a painful sting attached), but will ultimately help you become a better person (or affiliate).

It’s hard to find someone who epitomizes the approach than Convert2Media’s Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman.

Some will read his postings on the affiliate and internet marketing forums and think he’s a total jerk, who probably ought to keep his trap shut. He’s probably been responsible for more than his fair share of reducing wannabee super affiliates to tears after he’s given them a piece of his mind.

Take this nugget from Ruck’s recent blog post to the “secret” to being a successful affiliate:

Here it is, in all of its glory.

Take keywords related to your offer and put them into a search engine. Look at your competition. Dont copy them because that shit is seriously lame and the more this happens, the more our lack of creativity sinks to a level where people outside of Affiliate Marketing refer to us as “scumbags”. Look at your competition, analyze them. What are they doing that you could do better? Find that out about them, and do it.

The lesson here is this. Nobody is going to give you shit. Nobody owes you shit. If you think anyone in this industry owes you anything, you need a serious wake up call. Unfortunately for you, that wake come call will probably come later than sooner.

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So if you can “handle the truth” and you’re one of the “few good men”, you might be one of this blog’s readers who’ve mailed me to say they’ve listened to the Friday Podcast I did with Ruck multiple times. And it’s something they keep going back to because they get more out of every listen.

Having been an affiliate working the marketing spectrum from whitehat to blackhat, it certainly helps to work with an affiliate network who knows what they’re talking about, and more importantly, can give you not just feedback, but offer promotion ideas.

Convert2Media (C2M) delivers on those counts, with Ruck personally posting offer promotion strategies with the C2M forum, and having launched a coaching system through their coaching forum about a month ago.

It looks like they’re stepping things up a notch with a live video training conducted by Ruck personally through the livestream video network and in a recent mailing to affiliates, there’s mention that July will feature a number of new video training (this is Ruck appearing on screen, vs a bunch of camtasia screencaptures).

I haven’t had an opportunity to catch the previous video training session that Ruck conducted and it doesn’t appear to have been archived, so the best bet might be to sign up as an affiliate and make the time to attend the session.

Because there might very well be some golden nuggets in the upcoming session.

Links:

• Sign up as a C2M affiliate
• Friday Podcast featuring Ruck

http://whoisandrewwee.com/convert2media

Along with showing a couple of “tasks” posted on outsource boards with payout ranging from $5 to $100 per successful application (and part 2). What’s surprising/alarming is the number of “big name” affiliate networks on the list.

Ruck also opens up his affiliate application records showing a number of such seedy operations originating from less developed countries such as China (and part 2), Ruck has made it a personal mandate to expose fradulent affiliate applications, which ultimately hurt the networks, merchants and affiliates in their pocket.

What has impressed me about Ruck’s approach to business is that he pulls no punches and goes for the jugular every time.

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On other news, Convert2Media has gone off the DirectTrack platform to its own proprietory platform, which should increase earnings for affiliates.

Also the coaching programs which they were to have launched earlier (mentioned in the podcast) have been rolled back a couple of weeks till after Ad:Tech SF.

Stay tuned.

Links:

• Friday Podcast with Ruck
• Become a Convert2Media affiliate

A presence on multiple internet marketing and affiliate marketing forums, Ruck is a warehouse of knowledge, having been in the affiliate marketing trenches and having seen the good and bad parts of the industry.

Ruck’s known for his brutally frank, no-BS approach to speaking his mind. You either love his honesty, or in the same breath, hate him for showing the ugly side of things.

I’d been looking forward to talking to Ruck for some time and got him to share his thoughts during our call.

We talked about:

• How he got started in internet marketing
• His role in participating in forums and starting the CashTactics blog (now operated by Kris Trujillo)
• His views on the affiliate industry, especially on the recent FTC press conference
• How to look for hot niches to promote in affiliate marketing
• How to build your affiliate business
• Convert2Media’s recent adjustment in sub-affiliate recruitment incentives
• Important facts every affiliate needs to know about scrubbing and shaving
• Convert2Media’s upcoming coaching programs for affiliates
• C2M’s next evolution as a full service internet marketing agency

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Convert2Media
• Convert2Media on twitter
• Convert2Media blog

Since then, he’s published more posts related to PPC traffic generation and CPA affiliate marketing. If you’ll read some of his posts like his Questions and Answers post:

His reply to the question about what he should have known as an internet marketer starting out is frank and uncensored: “That 99% of marketers writing ebooks to sell to other marketers are nothing but forum slime who copy other peopleâ€s ideas and steal the glory to make a penny. Had I known that when I started I would not have wasted a shitload of money”

Instead, the foundation of how he determines what works and what doesn’t isn’t by reading an ebook, but by testing it out. And it’s not just posts about how he made big money either. In an update to his testing, he removed the entrecard and scratchback blog widgets because they weren’t performing.

One major lessons that internet marketers wanting to be successful from their efforts is to continually research, test, analyze new campaigns and products and services. “Failing” once does not put you out of the game.

The other point is that blogging about the experience (good or bad), helps you verbalize the lessons learned, and lock-in the success or failures (so you can repeat or do not repeat the experience as appropriate).

Since then, Ruck has gone on to set up Convert2Media, which focus on CPA affiliate offers. I’ve been fortunate to have one of his partners, Steve Howe, as my affiliate manager and we’re currently developing and testing new campaigns.

But back to CashTactics. With the possibility of selling the blog out of the picture, Ruck instead chose to pass the blog to his friend Kris Trujillo (right) (whom I interviewed a couple of weeks back for the Friday Podcast).

Kris is no slacker either, as a SEO consultant with his outfit Trujillo Marketing. In addition, he’s got a strong background using social networks for his traffic generation efforts.

CashTactics still offers a set of free reports, which include topics focused on Yahoo! Answers, article submission and list building (together with a number of free tools).

Kris is not standing still though, he’s recently recruited PPC affiliate marketer Andrew Payne to kick off a multi-part PPC case study on the blog.

From a branding standpoint, it’s smart for CashTactics to branch in 2 directions, one content stream focusing on PPC, while Kris leverages his SEO background to pump out content like how to get a PR6 backlink from the high traffic monster Apple.com and tips on copywriting and adding video to your pages.

With constant promotion via contests and promotion activities, the blog sets to grow, even as it’s changed hands. More importantly, the blog has seen a smooth transition from Ruck to Kris and the brand continues to see healthy growth.

If you’ve checked into an affiliate or CPA network control panel, you’ll typically see a “Super Affiliate” or “sub-affiliate recruitment” link with payouts ranging from about 1% to 2% of commissions generated and if you’re lucky, you’ll sometimes see 5% or 10%.

At those levels, is there any real incentive to go out and recruit affiliates/publishers for your network, aside from wanting to build goodwill and possibly a couple of bucks for a nice Friday night dinner?

I understand that margins can be pretty thin, especially since a number of CPA networks are the ultimate traffic arbitragers – they “buy” traffic from you at $1-$1.50 per zip/email submit lead, and attempt to upsell them into an affiliate offer or merchant-direct offer on the backend.

Granted, I haven’t seen the financials of one of these networks yet, but I’m wondering that if you are already relying on affiliates to generate your sales…why not go the extra mile and incentivize them to go out and recruit more affiliates for you? Especially with a decent payout. (we’re not even considering networks which pay you $3 or $5 to recruit an affiliate…).

By my estimations, one out of every 100 affiliates is a top performer (hence the term “top performer”), in this league, you’ll see guys like: Amit Mehta, Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman, Zac Johnson, Bobby “bluebobbo”, Jeremy Palmer, James Martell , Paul “Uber Affiliate” Bourque among others.

But I think the game of getting top affiliates is like going out on a fishing boat. You cast your nets and get a whole bunch of prospective affiliates, but you won’t know who’ll be a top performer until you haul in your catch and sort everyone out.

On that basis, the less-skilled affiliates will weed themselves out and a higher payout won’t matter anyway. On the other hand, a better performing affiliate will be motivated to go out and get results.

I think the bottomline is that in building a network with a long-term business focus, it’s inevitable that you’ll want to have your stakeholders – affiliates who are consciously producing for you, to go out there and evangelize for you too. And it’s going to take more than 1%, 2% or 3% to get them excited…

Oh and another thing, if sub-affiliate recruitment is a focus for any network, why aren’t sub-affiliate recruitment links included at the bottom of each mailing or offer update?

It’d seem like something easy to implement and would bump your recruitment efforts by an easy 5-10% with no additional marketing effort…

It’s natural to measure your achievements by how much you have earned, but I think a more important measure is how much you have learned this year.

Even a salaried employee can go through the year, earning a steady paycheck, with a fat bonus on top of it, and not learn much or be very much improved over the past year…not to mention an internet marketer or entrepreneur who spent all year reading, “finding their direction” and still not be much closer to their goal.

Look into the psychological mirror and take a hard look at the reflection, is the “You” on December 31, 2007, very different from the “You” on January 1, 2007?

What are 3 achievements you have made this year, and what are 3 achievements you plan to achieve next year.

In his book “The Magic of Thinking Big” author David Schwartz says if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person because it will get done. If you give it to someone with lots of free time on their hands, it’s likely they won’t get it done because they aren’t able to prioritize and take action. And action is where it counts, because ideas and thoughts are not active till acted upon.

In January, I’ll be:

• Developing and launching a membership site as part of the Super Affiliate Accelerator project I’m working on with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta.
• Interviewing Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds (one of the best speakers addressing issues in SEO).
• Launching a guerilla style PPC campaign which I’ve adapted from tactics my buddy Ruck has blogged about over at CashTactics.
• Developing a series of content creation tutorials over at Haiko De Poel’s ABestWeb affiliate marketing forum.
• Launching a contest on this blog with attractive prizes. (I have a $250 prize in the bag now and will aiming to get $1,000 worth by the launch).

And a number of assorted administrative and tax issues for a new Internet Marketing company which Amit and I formed about a month ago.

I can’t really say I’ll get the 8+ hours sleep per day that I’ve enjoyed over the last 2 weeks…

But it’s going to be one heck of a wild ride!

See you in 2008!

If you haven’t yet, take some time to read his “About Ruck” page and more importantly, his post “What Led Me To Believe I Could Work Online Fulltime“. It’s certainly worth spending some time reading the post, and more importantly archiving it for reference.

Are you an Iron Man?

If you were to look inside yourself, do you know if Internet Marketing is in your blood?

Or is it merely one of the hobbies like network marketing, forex, options trading, eBay that has recently come into your “biz op inbox”?

Here’s what the ebooks don’t typically teach you…

You need to have a driving force inside you. A little voice that pushes you on at 2am when you’re rushing to put a site up.

A hidden, subsconscious need to be the best, to be number 1.

If that’s lacking, all the goals you’ve written, to be a millionaire, to buy that dream home, to go on that trip around the world is just going to be a mission statement you’ve written on a sheet of paper that you carry around in your wallet all day.

It’s not what happens when things are easy that determine the path you’ve chosen for yourself, it’s what happens when things get tough…really tough…

What happens when the going gets tough?

When you encounter difficulty, are you likely to fight, take flight or freeze?

Do you say to yourself “How do I get out of this one?” or do you instead ask yourself “How do I overcome this challenge?”

The questions you ask yourself, determines the answers you will get, and ultimately the quality of your life.

Are you sitting in a cave alone in the dark?

It’s easy to forget that you have the most powerful tool, even greater than the most powerful computer in the world, at your disposal…It lies between your ears.

Creativity and imagination open up your options. It worked for Einstein and it’ll work for you too.

When you hear “mind over matter”, the reason why marketers fail is because their mind has given up before it’s addressed the matter at hand.

Sure, there will be skeptics who post pithy comments like “it won’t work” or lazy ones who ask “Why don’t you do a campaign from start-to-finish and post every step you take in detail”. If you did that, however, there’s no guarantee it’d work, much less get anything near the same level of results.

What the books, and what the courses don’t and probably won’t ever capture, is that fact that highly successful people will have the deep hunger to succeed. It’s something that might come naturally, it could be something due to environmental factors, but if anything else, it will be the biggest factor in your success…

If you are ready to be inspired by one man’s success, here’s a PDF I rendered of his blog post:

–> What Led Me To Believe I Could Work Online Fulltime by Ruck

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Iron Man movie images courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment