With prizes like gift cards and mini laptops on the line, there’s been a long line of applicants to Market Leverage in order to participate in the contest. (Note: for this specific contest, you have to be Singapore-based in order to qualify).

The sticking point has been getting approved – to date, there’s only 1 eligible contestant in the contest.

One of the “risks” in making this contest only for Singapore-based affiliates is that there might be zero participants in the contest – not because there’s no interest, but because international affiliates in general have to take number of additional steps in order to get their affiliate applications approved, compared to their US counterparts (a point I highlighted during my appearance on Missy Ward’s TheSpew Episode “The SpewGirls Go Global” ).

Here are a couple of tips to be successfully approved as an affiliate on a CPA or affiliate network:

• Avoid using a free email provider like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. If you need to, set the services up so that you have pop3 access to your own domain and send email via your own domain.
• For your website, setting up a Blogspot blog or Squidoo lens, writing 5-10 blog or content posts and submitting it as your website has the same problem with using a free email address. There’s effort involved, but likewise, a potentially fradulent affiliate could do likewise in hopes of getting approved.
• Proactively follow up on your application. In 2006, I signed up with my first affiliate network. I filled in the application, called the customer service number, got myself verified and my account was approved immediately. If you’re an international affiliate, you’ll incur a long distance call charge doing so. But if you’re looking at affiliate marketing and internet marketing as a business, it’s a minimal expense.
• Your domain should be registered using your name or your business name and contain accurate information. If you’re applying saying you’re a Singapore affiliate and your domain name says the contact person is based in Libya…chances are you aren’t going to get approved.

The bottomline in getting approved as an affiliate is showing that you’re a real person. Affiliate networks have a compliance team which reviews affiliate applications and rejects those that seem dubious.

To avoid that hassle, spend a little time filling in the application and following up. Better yet, head to the tradeshows like the upcoming Affiliate Summit East in July in New York City and meet the affiliate networks yourself.

Check out the WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge, sponsored by Market Leverage

For the record, the US is on DST as of March 9 and go off DST on Nov 2.

Singapore which is in a GMT+8 timezone is now 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time (EST).

And you’ve been reminded, so showing up an hour late for a voice conference will not be so cool now that you’re aware…

The panelists included:

• Bernard Leong (Thymos Capital partner, and session moderator)
• Leonard Lin (TYLER Projects managing partner – developer of Facebook application BattleStations!)
• Kien Lee (Senatus founder – an investment holding company which owns more than 100 Facebook applications)
• and myself (through my work on the $uperRewards monetization system for Facebook applications)

Facebook Application Monetization Panel: Leonard Lin, myself, Bernard Leong, Kien Lee

I had my MP3 recorder capture most of our panel discussion and you can access the recording below.

For more coverage, check out:

• ThinkingNectar’s live blogging post of the panel discussion
• Nicole’s live blogging post of the panel discussion

The session moderator Bernard Leong has posted a kickoff post: Marketing and Monetization of Facebook: Prologue

If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.

Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.

These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…

A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.

Let’s break this down for a moment…

An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.

$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…

–

Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.

I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)

With an average of 100,000 daily active users that’s an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $1 per user per month.

Which is going to be hard to achieve if you’re using “traditional monetization” routes like CPM (pay per 1,000 impressions) or CPC/CTR (pay per click) methods like most applications are doing.

Some of Jason’s findings:

Based on the BEST case scenario for a CPM payout of $2 per 1,000 eyeballs, that’s going to take a lot of churning to reach that level.

Adsense and other CPC measures could perform even worse with a $0.05 pay per click payout (with a clickthrough rate of sub-1%).

Here’re 4 other “traditional” monetization systems:

You can pretty much expect all these to underperform because using these website monetization media to try to monetize off a dynamic application is like putting a motorcycle engine into a Ferrari…the $*#&@ thing just won’t fly.

Among the reasons why it doesn’t work…

• Banner Blindness
• Irrelevant ads being served up
• Horrible CTRs
• Zero marketing support
• Low trust

The key factor is that these systems are prime examples of interruptive marketing.

Most application developers will shove these ads and banners at the top or bottom of their app as an afterthought…

So if your clickthrough rate is 0.05%, you’ll know why…

Instead to construct a commercially viable Facebook Application, the monetization systems need to be integrated into the application design. Do the equivalent of product placement where you see the BMW automobile or Omega watch in a James Bond movie. You can’t really do a Tivo timeshift out of that, can you?

Better yet, integrate your monetization system into the heart of your game logic and development process…

If completing an offer is part of the application, you’d be able to see the 75% CTRs that have formed the foundations of $uperRewards payouts…

The above stats for $uperRewards applications $10-50 earnings per 1,000 daily active users. CPM of $50-300. CPC revenue of $0.15 – $0.20 with CTR of 75%.

For more information, visit: $uperRewards

The event is sponsored by Microsoft and the National University of Singapore.

Here’s a snippet of the panel:

If you didn’t already know, a number of the hottest Facebook Applications are coming out of Singapore, including BattleStations! which I play, developed by Singapore’s TYLER Projects (co-founder Leonard Lin will also be on the panel).

Here’s a screenshot from BattleStations:

In addition to the technical requirements to developing a Facebook application, I think the concept, game logic and game balance are critical to the success of the application. I’ll do a comprehensive follow up post before the event.

If you’re in Singapore and would like to attend the event, you can check out the:

• Facebook Developer Garage RSVP page
• Facebook Developer Garage Wiki

The event is free to participants and dinner is included. Be sure to RSVP soon.

Apparently, the response was so overwhelming the event organizers needed to move the event to the Suntec Convention Center.

The session will run from 9am to 1pm and will be conducted by Jim “Griff” Griffith (right), Dean of eBay University.

He’ll be conducting half day eBay University seminars in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and also meet with the local eBay community!

Bring your digicams if you’d like a pic with Griff.

Registration has closed and the event information is located here: eBay Explained seminar

That’s because the NTUC Auditorium at Marina Boulevard in the heart of the city will play host to the Inaugural Internet Money Secrets convention.

The event is intended to focus in on generating Internet Marketing income through two revenue streams:

• Google Adsense
• Affiliate Marketing (my favourite!)

Beyond just the knowledge, I’m looking forward to the great networking opportunities.

Just imagine, 350 Internet Marketers all gathered in one place, exchanging ideas over two days, with the possibility of teaming up and forming joint ventures.

I’m looking for more joint venture partners and Internet Money Secrets will be THE place to scout for motivated and powerful partners.

You may have seen the publicity in the Singapore papers over the last couple of weeks and we’re now in the final lap.

My buddy, Stuart Tan, says there’ll be one, maybe two more preview seminars before prepping for the big event.

Internet Money Secrets is intended to equip new and experienced Internet Marketers with more skills and strategies to kick their business building and income monetization to a new level.

Whether you are a newbie or an experienced Internet Marketers, I’m confident you’ll pick up a whole host of new skills from the host of Internet Marketing gurus involved in the project.

Hot off the press, I got the brochures for the event.

Here’s the lineup:

You’ll get a whole truckload of strategies dealing with traffic generation, search engine optimization, Google Adsense strategies, affiliate marketing and automation strategies.

I saw the investment for the seminar and stopped for a moment.

I don’t know about you, but Stuart’s price seems a little wonky.

Granted, it’s the inaugural year.
Granted, he wants a huge turnout.
Granted, he wants to grow the Internet Marketing community in Singapore.

Ok, it IS wonky.

Still, to charge less than a third of what the other gurus events are going for?

It’s a little nuts.

Ok, very nuts.

Oh, and you may have read about the $2,984 worth of bonuses.
Here’s what you get:

• a 10-hour MP3 suite covering Internet Marketing strategies
• a set of tools to build SEO-friendly websites (there’re 2 of them and I believe the value’s something like $500 or so. I’m looking forward to using them!)
• a number of SEO tools and other guides

plus a number of insider secrets bonus audio courses on SEO and traffic generation. I think it’s about 3 hours worth of solid information and strategies you can apply immediately.

But wait! That’s not all (cue sell-a-vision music… dum dee dum dee dah!)

I think the best part about it though, is that you will get something that no other Internet Marketing seminar has done so far.

You will get the entire mp3 recording of the seminar, so you can listen over the speakers presentations long after the event is over.

I know during seminars especially, there’s a lot going on.

So this will be really useful to be able to listen to the presentations again.

So if you’re up for it, you can head over to http://www.imoneysecrets.com and go for possibly the last preview next Wednesday , 4 October, 7pm to 930pm.

Stuart’ll will go into some Internet Marketing fundamentals as well as cover recent Internet Marketing case studies (yes, they involve Asians and Singaporeans, so it’s not some pie-in-the-sky case study).

Since there are limited seats, attendance is only confirmed via pre-registration.

ps: by the way, as one of Stuart’s marketing partners, I have some special incentives to offer, plus I’ll include some DigitalKeiretsu.com strategies too.

If you’d like to register through me, you will qualify for another $300 worth of bonuses.

You can fill in the ContactMe page, including your name, email address and contact number, and I’ll get in touch with you.

I’ll see you on the inside.

I have been checking Google News for any news on this, but can’t seem to locate any items.

In the meantime, my link for SecretBlogWeapon.com seems to have some difficulty connection, though my Malaysian Internet Marketing counterparts don’t have a problem (the server is based in Malaysia).

Having this happen in the midst of an Affilate Marketing campaign throw a bolt into the machinery.

It’s expected to cause a delay in the set up of the Keiretsu Internet Marketing group too.

In the meantime, leave a comment if I can assist with your implementations and I’ll be in touch with you ASAP.

PS: as of now there’s about 12 confirmations for Keiretsu Internet Marketing group. Take up either the Ultimate Affiliate Weapon or Secret Blog Weapon to reap the benefits now.