From his previous appearance on the series, you’d have heard about how he extensively uses automation in his PPC campaigns. Together with outsourcing business tasks, John has given his affiliate marketing business more room to grow.

During our discussion, John mentioned:

• His strategies to test out keywords (as many as 30,000 at a time)
• Keyword research and harvesting and the tools he uses
• How you multiply and permutate your keyword list
• Live example of constructing a keyword list
• PPC campaign optimization tips
• His new Keyword Grouper tool and it’s “intelligent keyword grouping” features

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• John Hasson’s blog
• Keyword Grouper
• Simple PPC
• John’s Twitter account

During our conversation, Zac spoke about:

• How he comes up with ideas for his marketing campaigns
• The facts and reality of the Internet marketing industry
• His most successful website venture to date
• Current projects he’s in the process of launching
• His upcoming presentation at Affiliate Summit West 2009

Tune in to this week’s Friday Podcast below:

Links:

• Zac Johnson
• Earlier Friday Podcast episode (May 2008)

Amit’s is gaining a reputation as the $2.4m super affiliate and a regular speaker at events like Affiliate Summit and PPC Classroom.

Anik is founder of Affiliate Classroom and AC Certified, and recently ranked #2 in Business Week’s “Top 25 under 25” article.

During our podcast, we discussed:

• How Amit’s affiliate campaigns differ from other marketers
• How to build your income to 4 figures a day
• Steps you can take today to put together successful campaigns
• The importance and how you can incorporate long-tail keywords in your affiliate campaigns
• Whether there’s a conflict of interest between a merchant’s in-house SEO/SEM efforts and the efforts of affiliates
• Amit’s “Hybrid Model” that he’s currently testing and will be teaching in PPC Classroom 2.0
• Details of PPC Classroom 2.0.

Tune in to the Friday Podcast:

Links:

• Amit’s Super Affiliate Mindset blog
• Amit’s previous Friday Podcast interview
• PPC Classroom 2.0
• Anik Singal’s AC Certified program for affiliate managers

Which is a little surprising, given how successful he is as a PPC affiliate.

If you haven’t checked out his site yet, you might like to read his posts:

• How I Quit My Day Job
• Breaking the $1,000 Per Hour (Earnings) Barrier

Doubtless his creativity and work ethic have played a part in feats like hitting the top 10 affiliates from CPA network Azoogle (now a division of Epic Advertising) 6 months after he started up his PPC -> affiliate campaigns.

His blog at CDFNetworks.com contains a treasure trove of PPC strategies, tips and case studies.

Since he already blogs in great detail about his tactics, I wanted to get a better idea of how his business system operates.

During our discussion, we covered:

• How you can get started as a PPC affiliate
• How Chad approaches his marketing campaigns, including a number of key techniques
• Chad’s recommendation on learning resources, especially if you’re a new affiliate
• Evaluation criteria on deciding which affiliate offer to promote
• How you can increase earnings from your PPC efforts
• How and why building destination sites will help grow your business

Check out the podcast below:

Earlier this year, I had a great Friday Podcast session with Jeremy and invited him back for another chat.

He’s recently launched 2 new projects (one of which isn’t officially launched yet).

During our conversation, we talked about:

• Generating long-term income from your affiliate sites
• Creating “thick” (as opposed to thin) affiliate sites
• How to invest in your niche to maximize your success and profit
• How to create sticky and compelling sites
• And too much great stuff to list here…

Here’s the podcast link:

Here are the resources Jeremy mentions:

• Black Ink Project 2
• Black Ink Project – project site
• Optimize My Site (no longer available)

It takes a lot to get me out of bed early in the morning, but Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project kicked off to a great start today.

Jeremy talked about his start in affiliate marketing and the niches he’s in (dating, web hosting, music downloads, VOIP, online marketing), as well as criteria for shortlisting and testing viable niches.

More importantly, he also talked about a number of niches he “failed” at and eventually dropped.

If you’re not already generating a 5-figure income from your affiliate marketing efforts, you ought to sign up for Jeremy’s 20 session, free (yes…it’s free) training at the Black Ink Project.

I’ll be presenting content later in the series, and as the program picks up steam, I know that more than a few Super Affiliates are going to come out of this program.

The first week of training kicked off at 3pm PDT and continues the rest of the week.

Check out the full schedule and register at: Black Ink Project (limited spaces available).

The call recordings may be available 24 hours after the initial session.

Also, find out more about Jeremy Palmer’s strategies from his appearance on a recent episode of the Friday Podcast.

Note: US and Canadian BlackInkProject members have a toll-free number to call in. I made a long distance call, but it’s great to find out that webinar provider WebEx (a Cisco company) is providing real-time audio stream too.

Jeremy talked about his affiliate marketing strategies and gave tips for new affiliates entering the industry.

Hear from this veteran about on topics like:

• Tips to get started in affiliate marketing
• Should you promote offers from affiliate networks, CPA networks or direct merchant offers
• Take a look at some of Jeremy’s successful affiliate sites (FreeBudgetingSoftware, TrySuperPass and AudioBookHub)
• Why you should get a few seasonal campaigns up
• Sources to do your affiliate research
• And Jeremy’s soon-to-be-released BlackInkProject

You should also check out Jeremy’s Quit Your Day Job blog.

Check out the podcast below:

>>> The Black Ink Project

The first element is one that just about everyone is good at – The size of your network.

I say everyone is good at this element because all it takes to massively increase the number of friends in your MyBlogLog, BumpZee, YouTube, Facebook or other community is hitting the ‘add friend’ button and doing it over, and over, and over, and over again.

But here’s where it gets interesting, the fine line between social marketing and spamming is drawn when the relationship and more importantly permission and consensus are factored in.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve datamined someone’s email, cell phone from the net, your attempt to game the social network for personal gain falls flat on its face if you don’t have the relationship to back it up.

You might be wondering if this is merely ‘theoretical’ or ‘hypothetical’ or how well it works in real life…

Look at what happened to me last year…

I’ve been active on the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum for some time, giving advice on my pet area of blogging. So having been invited to be a ‘Blogging Guide’, I spend more time on the forum and create an instructional thread on “Blogging For Bucks”

And one day I read a thread on the forum about this new Super Affiliate’s blog, Super Affiliate Mindset.

And after talking with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta for some time, we decide to jointly work on a product, which eventually becomes the Super Affiliate Accelerator. (the site is being upgraded at the moment).

The project is intended to create a series of custom training to provide business strategies and PPC tactics to new and experienced affiliate marketers.

Part of the program involves inviting other established Internet Marketers in on some of the mastermind sessions we’re organizing.

So I ask my friend Wil Reynolds, founder of top SEO agency Seer Interactive, to join in on one of our upcoming calls.

And as part of my research, I watch some of Wil’s videos from Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit Seminar.

If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization, undoubtedly, Wil’s suggestions to check out 3 key blogs to keep you up to date on SEO developments will be intriguing.

What are the 3 blogs?

• SEOMoz: Seattle-based SEO agency, headed by Rand Fishkin
• Aaron Wall’s SEOBook
• Google’s Matt Cutts

Listening to Wil’s recommendations, I opened my copy of SEOBook I’d purchased early last year.

I’d glanced through it a number of times and picked up great SEO tips and subsequently listed it on my recommendations page.

Now, with the weight of Wil’s endorsement, I re-read it (all 350 pages in a 2 hour sitting).

If you have not read it yet, you will not know that it goes beyond SEO, to encompass Aaron’s copywriting strategies and even PPC management. More importantly, Aaron includes elements of his Internet Marketing journey from spamming links to creating quality white hat links.

If you haven’t yet, why not spend the opening days of this year, checking out Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.

So the question is “Was it worth a 20+ hour plane ride each way?”

Certainly a resounding YES!

I got to meet a bunch of great people and the stellar cast of speakers presented great content. Now it’s a matter of hunkering down and putting some of those ideas into practise.

The turnout was very respectable with the room filled to the gills…

It was great to hear how Anik took one of his info product sites, added CPA offers to it and have it generated $42,000+ to date this year.

Andrew Wee and Anik Singal

Just as you’re seeing a convergence of search marketing and PPC marketing, I believe the worlds of info marketing and lead generation/affiliate marketing are going to draw closer in the coming year.

Andrew Wee, Kirt Christensen, Greg Cesar

I look to Kirt Christensen as one of the pioneers in Internet Marketing, together with his partner, Terry Dean.

It was certainly illuminating to hear about his strategies for positioning yourself as a PPC management agency and it was pretty impressive hearing about some of the biggest Internet marketers he manages PPC campaigns for.

Greg Cesar is someone who’s in my mastermind and this was the first opportunity I got to meet him. It was refreshing to hear about some of his unconventional approaches to affiliate marketing, and he talked about how he uses one media channel (still untapped by almost all internet marketers) to go gang busters, especially on affiliate offers.

If anything, I am finding that the networking opportunity far outweighs the learning from the content sessions. I met Andre Chaperon who was top affiliate for the PPC Classroom promotion, Ryan Kaltman (AKA “Magic Ryan”, the Rich Jerk’s business partner). Ryan’s like a ball of energy and having him show gross YouTube videos during a posh dinner certainly breaks the monotony of it all. (plus some unmentionables which I’ll not go into here…)

After working on a number of projects, I finally got to meet up with my business partner, PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta.

Greg Cesar, Amit Mehta, Andrew Wee

If you have caught Amit’s Affiliate Summit East presentation, then you know that Amit delivers 110% on his content.

His keynote speech and presentation at PPC Classroom Live were no exception…

One thing that newer internet marketers fail to grasp is the mindset element, and there’s an overemphasis on the tactical elements (eg. landing pages, keyword lists, quality score). If you take a step back, you’d realize that the business systems and mindset are what makes you the mega bucks…

Simon Leung, Andrew Wee

Simon Leung’s changed his look from his avatar, so here’s how he looks now.

I was pretty jet lagged, so I had to crash during his talk.

Andrew Wee, Ros Gardner

It was my first time meeting Ros Gardner too. We had just missed each other at Affiliate Summit West earlier this year.

She did an interesting presentation, comparing her $1+ million earnings against Jeremy Palmer’s $1+ million earnings and doing an analysis on how their methods differ.

If anything, her disclosure that blogs are the main platform that she uses, ties in with what I’ve been hearing from other super affiliates recently.

David Bullock, Andrew Wee

Dave Bullock’s talk on Taguchi testing certainly raised my awareness on the specific details about Taguchi testing. It’s not something I’d do right now (split testing seems sufficient for now), but perhaps in the future.

Super Affiliate Accelerator Insider’s Breakfast

On Sunday, Amit and I hosted an Insider’s Breakfast for our Super Affiliate Accelerator breakfast.

It was great meeting up with the Super Affiliate Accelerator members and share some techniques to bring their business and their campaigns to the next level.

Affiliate Radar Rakeesh, Andrew Wee, Mark Roth

I’d spoken to Affiliate Radar creator Mark Roth a number of times and was involved in the launch of Affiliate Radar, so it was great to meet up with Mark and Rakeesh.

I also met Jay Stockwell who developed SpeedPPC.

And if you need proof of the Affiliate Classroom team’s dedication…

Rachel Honoway, Andrew Wee

Affiliate Classroom VP of Marketing Rachel Honoway lost her voice during the event.

After some googling, I discovered that “Vegas Throat” is common, and is mainly due to the dry desert air.

I’ve made a mental note to bring some “Pi Pa Gao” a Chinese herbal throat/cough mixture, so I’ll be fully prepared to speak at Affiliate Summit West in February.

Did you know that some entertainers (specifically singers) will not perform in Vegas due to possible damage to their vocal chords due to Vegas Throat?

Interesting…

After the event, we headed to the Voodoo Lounge on the 51st floor of the Rio, and here’s a shot of the skyline:

It was good to chill after the event:

Evelyn Grazini, Ros Gardner, Rachel Honoway

And here’s a pic of Anik and Ros getting jiggly with it…

So the next time I’ll be in Vegas will be in February for Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit West where I’ll be on the Media Panel, moderated by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille, together with Anik Singal and Valerie Stevens (Insight Magazine Online)

“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!

Containing various affiliate product analytics tools, spy and intelligence tools as well as PPC tools, Affiliate Elite looks poised to put another weapon into every affiliates’ marketing arsenal.

Rather than merely write about Affiliate Elite, I’ve created walkthrough videos and review videos capturing Affiliate Elite’s key features.

Here’s an introduction of Affiliate Elite, which consists of 4 modules:

• Affiliate Product Finder (for Clickbank and Paydotcom) / Marketplace datafeed analytics tool
• Google reverse search
• Analyze Adwords Competition
• Super Affiliate Finders

Here’s a walkthrough of Affiliate Elite’s features:



Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite Product Review Part 1


And detailed looks at: Affiliate Product Finder


Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite Product Review Part 2



Google Reverse Search


Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite Product Review Part 3



AdWords Competition Analyzer


Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite Product Review Part 4



Super Affiliate Finder


Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite Product Review Part 5



Overall, this could be a good addition to your affiliate toolkit and compliements similar tools such as WordTracker, SpyFu, KeyCompete and others.

PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta and I have put together a special Affiliate Elite bonus which will bring your affiliate campaigns to the next level if you get Affiliate Elite through us.

You can check it out at:

–> Super Affiliate Mastermind promotion for Brad Callen’s Affiliate Elite

Which PPC Ebook Should I Buy?

The first challenge, PPC marketers will face is the plethora of PPC ebooks (primarily focused on AdWords) out there. There’s a large number of PPC-focused forums and affiliate marketing forums with large PPC sub-sections.

So which do you choose?

Before buying anything, I’d suggest time checking out the AdWords Help Center and reading the Inside AdWords blog. (They’re both FREE).

As you know, I buy just about every Internet marketing product out there and a number of AdWords “Insider” ebooks merely rehash the content contained with the Help Center.

So save your $47 (use it for your PPC costs instead) and check out the resources, the Google AdWords team has provided for free…

Can I Test Google AdWords For Free?

If you’re new to using paid traffic, you might have a slight phobia as I did (as I’ve been using free social traffic generation methods to bring traffic to my sites). But here’s a way to get free adwords traffic.

There’s a number of free AdWords coupons out there (so you can have a free PPC trial if you choose to).

You can google for “$25 AdWords Coupon”, “$35 AdWords coupon”, “$50 AdWords coupon” and “$100 AdWords coupon” (which seems to be the denomination that these coupons come in).

They aren’t always available though, but your web hosting account normally comes with some credits.

Ok, The Traffic Has Come In. But Not The Profits!

Now here’s the challenge for new PPC marketers:

• Not bidding on enough keywords: It’s great to have a precision, sniper-like approach to PPC, trying to aim for the 5-10 successful sales-converting keyphrases when you’re starting out. But you’re unlikely to know what they are unless you test sufficiently.
• Bidding on too many keywords: I applied a number of Amit’s techniques and generated a keyword list containing 2,000 keyphrases. As I sorted them out, I realized that I put in a number of terms which might not convert, so I had to go back and remove them. But then I’d created other problems for myself…

One key realization that PPC Super Affiliates are using (and that I’m starting to get a handle on) is to have a detailed game plan in mind. Among the points, your “PPC business plan” needs to contain:

• What type of traffic you’re planning to attract
• What specific keywords and keyphrases will attract that traffic profile
• The ads which will get them to click
• What action they’re supposed to take once they’ve clicked to your site
• What will motivate them to take the action
• How to create an incentive or motivate them to come back again (so your lead generation cost for the 2nd and subsequent visit is marginal or cost nothing)

As you can see, the strategy is more important than the action in any PPC Campaign.

The problem is that most new PPC marketers will logon to AdWords and “figure things out”, typing whatever comes to mind, rather than have a set plan.

That’s just like going to war without a game plan and shooting at anything that moves…Good luck…

If you engage in pointless actions, like submitting a 50,000 keyword list which is irrelevant and untargeted to your traffic, it WILL NOT convert, even if you’re paying $0.01 per click.

Having a game plan is very essential or having someone show you their game plan is critical to your success.

Having worked with Amit on a marketing campaign recently, which generated more than 700% ROI on our PPC spend, it’s very clear that our Super Affiliate Accelerator project is going to yield some interesting results.

Here’s my response to this Monday Question:



Monday Question - PPC Vs Blogging And Free Traffic - The best bloopers are a click away


While blogging and free traffic continue to generate 90-95% of the traffic (with SEO traffic making up the balance), like any business owner, I’m looking at ways to grow my business and increase sales and profits.

PPC is certainly a good prospect, which is why I’m promoting PPC Classroom. It comes from 2 credible Internet marketers, Jeremy Palmer and Anik Singal, and I’ve had a chance to take a look at the product. The next phase is putting it into action.

That’s one of the reasons I’m joining together with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta to work on a number of PPC projects.

Besides PPC, I’ve been exploring eBay as a source of traffic and monetization, as well as a SEO project with former blackhat SEO-turned-Web2.0 specialist Howie Schwartz. More on that later this week.

In response to customer requests, PPC Classroom now offers a 3-installment payment plan of $187 each. This should make this groundbreaking product within the reach of new affiliate marketers.

I have heard that sales are either approaching or have broken the 1,000 mark, ranking this among the most successful product launches.

Not to be left behind, Amit Mehta and I have launched the Super Affiliate Accelerator program as a bonus for our PPC Classroom customers.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• PPC Zero to Hero Coaching: a 9-week hard hitting coaching program, where you’ll see how a PPC campaign is developed from the ground up, researched, launched, test and tracked, and optimized. You’ll have the skills to replicate the campaign.
• AM^2 Toolkit: This is a set of strategies and tools that Amit uses in his own campaigns. He’s not shown them to anyone, except his consulting clients. Here’s your chance to get access.
• Affiliate Mind Meld sessions: This is a series of sessions where we’ll interview leading figures in the affiliate industry and gain a better understanding of each person’s techniques. Even better, we’ll teach you how to apply them in your own campaigns.

PPC Classroom Bonus: Amit Mehta And Andrew Wee’s Super Affiliate – The best video clips are here

Not enough?

For the next 12 hours (from Friday noon EST to Friday Midnight), Amit and I will be adding on a 2 hour LIVE coaching call. We’ll go into specific super affiliate techniques that you can apply immediately, have Hot Seats lined up where we’ll analyze and optimize PPC campaigns in real time and take your most burning questions. This session will have very LIMITED capacity.

Note: Outside of this promotion, the Super Affiliate Accelerator is not available. Take action now to avoid disappointment.

To get these bonuses, you need to sign up for PPC Classroom NOW. (from the link to the left).

To claim your bonuses, send your payment verification to enquiries(at)whoisandrewwee<dot>com before Friday Midnight EST. NO EXCEPTIONS.