Archive for the ‘Affiliate Business Development’ Category

Getting The Most Bang For Your Buck

It’s a new month full of new projects and new targets. Kids are about to go back to school and Christmas is looming in the not too distant future. If mindless seasonal fever does the trick for you, I guess you could say it’s a great time to make some money online. Same as it always was.

I’ve been speaking to quite a few virgin CPA marketers recently. One of the recurring questions I get asked is “If I have X amount to spend per month, where do you think I should invest it?”

Working with a limited budget is something that most of us had to deal with when we started. You’ve probably noticed how a lot of the top affiliates out there are young entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s. These are guys and girls who probably didn’t have fortunes to invest.

Personally speaking, I’d only just turned 21 when I first hit success. Besides the odd scrunched up tenner in my back jeans pocket, most of my money was…err, the bank’s money. When you’re crashing in to your overdraft on CPA campaigns, you kinda have to get the most bang for your buck. Or you’re metaphorically shagged.

I consider myself lucky that much of my initial investment was made at a time when you could rip out a CPA campaign and treble or quadruple your money overnight.

ROI is especially important when you’re just getting started. If you’re barely managing to break even on your campaigns, and wondering how the top affiliates manage to build up these empires – well – cheer yourself up with the knowledge that it gets easier. Everything gets easier. You just need to scrap away. Increase the size of your investment pot, by any means necessary, and get your cashflow sorted.

My life as an affiliate is a lot easier now that I can get away with running 25% ROI campaigns. I don’t really care if I blow a few thousand dollars in a day, as long as I’m seeing profit and enough of it to cover the risk and outgoings.

Let’s say you have a monthly budget of $500 after deducting what your wife’s blown up the wall to fill her wardrobe. It’s tough to pinpoint where to start. Do you go in to promoting car insurance offers on Facebook? Rebills on PPV? Maybe even gaming offers on the content network?

The way I see it, if you don’t have much money to invest, there’s no point in entering a market where volume is a necessary ingredient to survive. Thinking of slinging a dating offer to 25 year old guys in mainstream America? Forget about it. Even if you find a profitable campaign, the ROI is likely to be so slim that it’ll take you twelve months of waiting on cheques in the mail before your business has taken a single step forward. That’s the reality if you’re working with Facebook, Adwords or even POF lately.

If you don’t have a big budget, your mind should naturally be focused on cornering small markets instead. Now you’ve probably read this endorsement of scaling and placed your finger on the reply button, ready to call me a lousy lying hypocrite. Yes, scaling is what puts the finishing touches on a super affiliate’s new LA mansion. But without having money to invest – and lots of it – scaling is like climbing in to bed after too much tequila. Really fucking difficult and really fucking slow.

I’ve posted time and time again about laser targeting your campaigns; both on PPV and Facebook. This is the tactic I used regularly before I had the muscle to compete with other big spending affiliates on broad demos.

If you’re looking to promote dating offers on a small budget, make yourself familiar with the niche markets where it’s possible to make a killing with highly targeted, albeit low volume, campaigns.

Markets like Single Parent Dating, Black Dating, Jewish Dating, Asian Dating…these are all great entry points for the newbie marketer wanting to increase his capital with a high ROI. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re wasting an entire budget only to claim ten bucks of profit with Mate 1.

If there’s no logical micro-market for you to target, it’s just as easy to create one for yourself. Your network might not have a suitable offer for Midget Albino Dating, but that’s not to say your CTRs aren’t going to be through the roof if you decide to target them anyway.

The key to initial success is to sweep underneath the heavyweight affiliates. If you can’t compete with their budget, compete with the time and care that you dedicate to your campaigns. Pay attention to the details, the small print of the demos. Produce creatives that strike close to the mark.

As an affiliate who now works mainly with broad demos covering millions of people at a time, I can say that there are a lot of micro-markets that I’d love to scale in to and dominate – if only I had the time. But I tend to dedicate my resources to those mainstream campaigns where most of my money is made. And it’s the same for many high volume affiliates out there. Your best opportunity is to cover the ground that we don’t bother getting dirty with. Like a local politician going door to door while we can only put a sweeping ad on TV.

There are some campaigns that I had to turn down as a newbie marketer simply because they weren’t cost-efficient. And yet they might have been producing 50% ROI. That’s madness, isn’t it? Like your mum buying you a unicorn for Christmas only to slap her in the face and moan that you wanted something more mythical. Beggars can’t be choosers, but profit isn’t always the footprint of money well spent.

It’s important to make every penny count while you’re still dealing in small business steps. Forget about the rulebook that super affiliates abide by. They’re competing on a different playing field under different rules altogether.

The CPA landscape is dramatically different in 2010. It’s no longer possible to fill your boots with overnight riches by going straight for the kill in huge mainstream markets. You need to operate on the fringes, reap profit where the markets aren’t so saturated, and dig deeper to grow your business.

Judging The Size Of An Affiliate’s Balls

You can often judge the size of an affiliate’s balls by his willingness to keep scaling a successful campaign when he’s surpassed the amount of profit he was originally hoping to make.

A sense of vertigo can kill the desire of the “working class” affiliate. Maybe instead of raising the CPM bid to $0.50 and opening the traffic floodgates, he’ll settle for his slow trickle of leads at $0.45. When you’re profiting, and profiting well, you need to let go of your reservations about cranking up the heat and raising your costs. Spend serious money to make serious money. That’s how it works.

Your little friend, Volume, will make a 650% ROI micro-campaign look laughable when the powers of mass consumption are at work.

Yet many affiliates panic over the idea of bidding higher to capture more traffic, especially if they reach a level of profitability where the bills are paid and they’re living in comfort. Success isn’t just the relentless pursuit of optimized campaigns, but developing scaled campaigns that reach mass markets. A constant aching desire to increase revenue, the heartbeat of any successful entrepreneur, is why the super affiliates are wining and dining the girls you can only whack off to over Facebook in your mother’s basement.

If you want to live like a super affiliate, THINK like a super affiliate.

Don’t set yourself flimsy targets like “this month I’m going to make enough money to pay my water bills and then maybe splash out on some toys for my hamster”. If you aim low and succeed, you’ll be filled with a sense of achievement that you don’t fucking deserve.

If you’re making money with a campaign, raise the click prices. Raise those bid prices. Expand your demographics to be as all-encompassing as they possibly can be while still making you money. The broader you can survive, the sooner you’ll thrive.

There are times where I look at my Excel spreadsheet and I see a campaign with 650% ROI. Boasting any kind of volume, I’d be ready to say screw you all, pack up my blog, bust out the sun-cream and spend the rest of my life in the Bahamas. But of course, 650% ROI doesn’t mean shit unless it’s sustainable and scalable.

There are marketers out there who will tell you that to be successful, you need to tap up tiny little micro-demos and blow hundreds of dollars testing down to the smallest detail. While this can often be the case, you should allow your campaign to develop naturally before you start piss-arsing around with the “DOES THIS PERSON LIKE GAMES & PUZZLES” attribute on POF.

Every additional targeting criteria you add to your campaign is one more hurdle you’re going to have to jump in the future if you wish to scale. The truly successful super affiliates have one of two traits:

1. The ability to profit from broad ads with mainstream appeal.
2. The ability to automate hundreds of targeted ads in smaller demographics.

I’ve written many posts referring to the potential of laser targeting your campaigns down to the smallest detail. But if you’re going to take this route, you need to be able to automate the process.

Too many affiliates scratch around hopelessly to come up with a single campaign using targeting that looks like this:

I’m sorry but there are only so many Hispanic chain-smoking crackwhores in Canada.

Even if you are making a ridiculous ROI, is it really worth it? If you’re not rolling out a dozen other campaigns with similar targeting, you’re simply pandering to a small crowd in a shadowy corner. Forget the bright lights of super affiliate success, you’re not going quit your day job while you’re loitering on the outskirts of micro-niches.

The energy you put in to your work should be reflected by the potential it has to grow in to something meaningful. And I’m sorry, but if you spend entire days plotting out campaigns that are born with the disability of being critically unscalable, you’re going to spend the rest of your working life in the trenches.

This all stems back to the mindset of the affiliate. Are you looking to make enough money to survive? Or are you looking for opportunities to get a really fucking big swimming pool and a wife like Jonathan Volks?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the example of targeting I’ve outlined above, but ONLY if it’s your launch pad to mass marketing.

Look at the main niches in CPA. What do they have in common?

- Everybody is concerned with how their body looks.
- Everybody wants the chance to make more money.
- Everybody wants the comfort of a relationship.

These are all qualities that appeal to the mainstream. So instead of sitting there and wondering how you can appeal to a tiny micro slice of the market, stop thinking so small! By all means get creative with your concepts, but have the persistence and innovation to scale them to wide and far reaching demographics.

The super affiliates out there, most of them, have recognized that it only takes one winning concept to get incredibly rich. Do you really think all of these guys are smart enough to keep pulling innovative campaigns out of the bag? No, it’s usually a case that they’re more efficient when it comes to scaling what already works. They have the balls to win big.

I think many affiliates are still stuck in the financial constraints of their day job mentalities. They have a fixed monthly wage they want to earn, and the second that figure is reached, scaling becomes irrelevant. Why push on in to the unknown?

Log in to your Facebook or POF account and I’m willing to bet you’ll find campaigns where you targeted micro-niches and made a profit. Was the ROI such a burning distraction that you never ventured in to broader markets? I’m guilty of the same mistakes in the past. But if you don’t scale, you’re like the hermit worker who doesn’t have the balls to ask his boss for a pay rise. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. If you don’t scale, you’ll never know.

The next time you’re laser targeting a campaign to a small crowd, ask yourself “How scalable is this concept?” If you can’t think of a way to take it mainstream, it’s probably not worth the bother. Save your energy for campaigns where there’s potential to earn big.

Don’t Buy Ebooks…Tell Me Your Name, Bitch!

Are you the kind of affiliate who shuns daylight, appears offline on AIM, never responds to emails and does everything he can to avoid conversing with the shadowy bastards known as his competitors?

We work in one of the most accessible industries imaginable. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re online. And if you’re a good one, your ego has probably exploded to the point where you’re not hard to find. I often wonder why newbies rush to buy ebooks from self appointed gurus when they could speak to those same gurus free of charge in the space of a basic AIM window.

Networking is free knowledge, ladies and gentleman. And yet it’s a subject that divides opinion for many marketers out there. Partly because it’s confused with the trait of time wasting, and those who do anything possible not to have to actually work.

For me, networking isn’t just a case of wanting to learn more about my industry. It’s an element of human interaction that I’ve missed since I jacked in my day job. While it’s pretty rare that you’ll find me piss-arsing my day away with idle chit chat on AIM, I do feel a regular need to speak to new people and to understand different paths that others have taken to find success in affiliate marketing.

But why is it important? Who would choose to spend an hour networking over the important split testing of their latest Facebook campaign?

If you’re the kind of tombraiding CPA urchin who makes his living through the constantly shifting dynamics of traffic arbitrage, then you definitely need to have an ear to the ground. Networking is your way of staying ahead. Much more so than the practical affiliate who develops long term projects with milestones stretching in to 2011 and a disregard for his daily ROI.

It’s tough for me to sit here and preach the importance of developing relationships. The popular word is that if you’ve stuck your weary eyes out of the rabbit hole long enough to engage in a 10 minute conversation on AIM, you’re simply not working hard enough. That’s bullshit. There can be no excuses for not taking a moment to integrate yourself with your peers, to seek out new business and to actually network with other like-minded individuals.

Oh and by the way. Some affiliates seem to preach to the crowd that they work 16 hour days, more or less Monday to Sunday. So they don’t have time to network. That’s real nice. But you do realize that just because you’re plugged in to the Internet and your modem is flashing, it doesn’t mean you’re actually working – right?

If your breakdown of a 16 hour day equates to 3 hours of keyword research followed by a WickedFire binge from lunch through to moonlight, then you’re probably not reaping the benefits that a dumbarse motherfucker “working” 112 hour weeks probably should. Your net working day can be established by subtracting “time spent chasing skirt on Facebook” from “hours spent building out campaigns”.

I am certainly not one to knock the hard working affiliates who strike through their to-do lists whether the wife has gone in to labour or not. It takes commitment and great discipline to stay focused on your goals. But without keeping an eye on your peers, you’ll never know how relevant those goals are to business success. Simply put, we work in an industry that evolves too quickly to be out of the loop.

Christ, I took a two week break not too long ago and the first thing I did upon rebooting my Mac was to Google search “is affiliate marketing still for real?”.

Networking and sharing knowledge means you’ll never have to buy another ebook in your life. Why? Because it puts you in touch with the REAL people of this industry. The people making money every day. The people making money before the lame ebooks have been outsourced for creation.

I like to think of it as a spider building his web. Broadening your horizons and spinning that web might not reveal any immediate benefits. You might even feel like you’re wasting your time while you could be out chasing after riches. I’ve certainly felt that sensation while aimlessly discussing Cheryl Cole’s sex appeal with Andrew Wee in the past. But when a knowledge bomb drops, when tomorrow’s big niche lands, you want to be there to catch it. And if you don’t make an effort to integrate yourself with real affiliate marketers, to reach in to every corner where opportunity might land – well…

You’ll be a hungry spider?

Yeah fuck that anecdote, it’s been a long day.

My point is that somewhere on the horizon, chugging towards your doorstep, is the same kind of gravy train that most of us were too slow to capitalize on in 2008 when it was loaded with acai berries. My excuse for missing out was simple. I didn’t really know about it. And by the time I did know about it, I was too late.

If you can establish working relationships with the right people in the right places, you WILL see that next gravy train coming. Whether you jump on for the ride is probably a matter of how intuitive you are.

The next time you find yourself stargazing at the promises of Mr Guru McBullshitsalot’s latest ebook, stop and think for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of buying a book that this smug bastard dreamed up six months ago when his methods actually worked…you could talk to him now and find out what he’s currently doing?

And there lies the power of networking with real affiliates. You will learn far more by simply being connected with the right people than you will by purchasing their products or reading their blogs. Make an effort to establish actual business relationships. Without them, you’re simply the pawn they’re trying to sell to or the sheep us bloggers like to write to.

Affiliate Marketers Are Experts At Nothing

What’s up, affiliasphere?

Business Protip for the day: If you’re going to take a break and spend 6 days camping at a festival without email access – remember to tell your affiliate managers. It seems as if some networks are quick to pronounce me dead if I stop running traffic for more than 24 hours.

Unfortunately I’m not dead. But I am severely tanned with sun kissed balls, and ready to get back to the grind again. Glastonbury Festival, for those of you who haven’t been, is the sugardaddy of all musical events. You need to go. I still feel pretty partied out but I’m going to do my best to address something I’ve noticed that affiliates seem to get wrong. All the time.

If you’re a full time affiliate working from home, what’s the one thing you have that a part-timer doesn’t? It’s time. Complete control of your hours, and the ability to be as productive or as unproductive as the day is long. Nobody chomps your balls for strolling in to the office at 9:06 and if Brazil vs. Holland tickles your fancy, the to-do list can always wait a couple of hours, right?

How many marketers actually take the time to nurture a talent or to learn something new? It sounds pretty irrelevant. You’ve got all that split testing to do, those new offers to rig up to fresh campaigns. Christ, I’ve got a thousand tweets in my face telling me that snoozing is losing.

An affiliate marketer is more often than not a middleman. You can be a complete retard and still make good money if an advertiser has a good product and an audience has a strong need. But it doesn’t give you any kind of asset. You have no market value. That’s unless you develop websites that stand on their own two feet.

We basically seize the loopholes of traffic brokerage and exist in a state of limbo where our main talent is to capitalize on opportunity. That’s rosy and sweet, but it’s pretty fucking moronic to not have a Plan B. If you’re not designating an hour of your day to nurture a talent, you’re wasting the one freedom you always dreamed of when you jacked in your day job.

Real businesses exist to be the best at something. They provide real solutions. All the truly great businessmen of our time have a talent that puts them above their peers. The problem with affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to be the best at anything. You can be merely competent and still pay the bills.

But that shouldn’t be your attitude. In the worst case scenario that affiliate marketing gets nuked in the morning, we should all have been busy developing our assets to a point where we can say that we’re the best at something…anything. Being an expert at affiliate marketing isn’t enough. How many real life human beings give a shit if you’re the smartest handler of EPCs? It adds no value for anybody.

If, however, you decide today that you’re going to focus on improving your copywriting, for example, that’s an investment worth so much more than any late night split testing binge. If you can become an expert who writes the best damn copy in the business, you’re going to be in demand.

We have so many hours on our hands and if we’re not striving to improve, we might as well go back to the 9-5.

For me personally, my main passion is writing. You might accuse me of being just another marketing blogger with his dick up his own arse and willing to push any second tier referral he can throw your way. But actually, this site is like my CV. I could devote all my hours to painstaking research of new offers, but it doesn’t add any long-term value to my business. Whereas this blog will remain here long after my bizopp campaign of the week has faded.

More affiliates are soon going to appreciate the need to develop websites that provide genuine quality content. Because there are enough passionate people out there to drive you out of business. Soon we will need to put the quality of our content first and THEN worry about monetizing it.

How far do you have to look for proof? Just look at the search engines. Google is backhanding websites it deems to be “bridge pages” from the sponsored listings. I can only imagine that if this is their outlook, it will soon translate more heavily in to the organic listings too. If you don’t offer your own unique commodity, you’re dispensable.

This blog is an example of how I like to monetize. I’ve never offered sponsored content and I’ve never accepted payments to endorse networks or products in my posts. The main appeal is the writing style and the trust that I’ve managed to forge with readers. It’s a site that I’m happy to put next to my business name because I trust in what I’ve published here.

Too many affiliate websites are built on flimsy foundations. With $10/articles outsourced to so-called experts who know jack shit about the subject matter despite what they state in their Elance proposals.

The next time you focus on a micro-niche, don’t make your first question “How can I monetize this concept?”. Think first to satisfy the needs of the target audience. Be an expert in your field. How can you produce something outstanding that shows more than your ability to rank in Google?

Quality content will always stand the test of time. And so will your business if you drive it forward and become the best in a particular field.

It’s not easy, but you know what is easy? It’s easy to set aside one hour in your working day and learn something new. Ask yourself what you can be the best at, then go out and be it.

Building An Affiliate Business With $0 Investment

That’s right, I’m sniffing for linkbait again.

When I use the term “Super Affiliate”, what image springs to your mind? Is it the picture of a top baller, sprawled across a sunbed, dripping Armani, and occasionally snapping his fingers to make more dollars fall from the sky?

Is it the eternally vivid image of Shoemoney wedged between a flock of scantily clad wenches at the Playboy Mansion?

Part of the reason why most marketers will never get close to that super affiliate lifestyle is because they’re looking at it from the wrong angle. They only see the rewards, and never the groundwork that the smug bastard covered to build his platform to brag from.

Behind most successful “super affiliates” is a sound business plan. One of the things I hear quite often from new marketers is the complaint that they don’t have the money to invest, or the freedom to spend enough money to attain this super affiliate state of luxury. Have you taken the time to look at the background of most top affiliates? The only shared quality is a desire to be successful.

Some people start with $10000 to invest. Maybe they’ve tucked away their savings and prepared mentally (or read a shit ton of blogs) to get started like a virgin mountaineer would at the foot of K2. To achieve something out of nothing. To reach the summit with knowledge in their head of what lays ahead, but no real experience of handling it. These are the marketers you probably hate if you’re built in the same mould that I was.

I had zero cash to invest other than the leftovers from my monthly pay packet. I’d guess that many aspiring affiliate marketers are in the same boat. You want to make it, but you just can’t fathom a way to generate income out of so little. I think it’s perfectly possible to build an affiliate business with a lack of start-up investment, and I believe that because I managed it myself.

How do you get visitors to your site without money? How do you generate leads organically without having the spending power to use paid traffic?

Get your thief on, we’re going hunting for coupons.

It’s always perplexed me why so many affiliates fail to see the appeal of coupons. I don’t use them anymore, but I would never be sitting at home scratching my balls right now if I hadn’t sniffed them out and used them as my “risk free” assessment of paid traffic. If you can plug a $50 voucher in to your Google Adwords account, you have a very rare situation where it’s possible to make what I’d call a “return on virtual investment”.

I was lucky enough to stumble across a campaign that was making me 300% ROI on Google Adwords when I was getting started. With the money I had in my bank account, it simply wasn’t possible to spend more than $200/month without having to jump London’s Oyster barriers or steal my lunch from the back of a van. But with coupons, ANY money you make is a profit.

If you’re from the UK, and I can’t believe I’m about to recommend this…but fuck it. Get down to your local WHSmiths. Search for a magazine called .Net. Look inside and you should find a free voucher worth £40 on Google Adwords. Jack that shit and clear out the pile. By the time you get back from your lunch break, you should have an Adwords budget of £200. And it isn’t even your money. I did this and with a 300% ROI, I was technically making £800 from…zero.

I should use this opportunity to thank .Net magazine. The secret to Internet riches, quite clearly. Or a criminal record if it goes wrong.

I have my tongue in cheek, thank God. There are ways to get your hands on free advertising coupons without stealing. Check out both Digital Point and the Warrior Forum. You can probably buy a $75 voucher for 10 bucks from some dude with no better business idea than to steal them from WHSmiths (ahem).

The point is, when you have no money to invest, you have to be looking for opportunities like this to give yourself the launch pad to start spending your own money. It didn’t take me long to use coupons to get on to weekly payments and to generate enough revenue to be able to re-invest it in to my business. But obviously that wasn’t the only opportunity I saw along the way.

There are two free traffic sources, right under your nose, that have incredible potential for making money without investing a penny. Only the currency of your time. Those traffic sources are classified sites and Yahoo Answers. Now as I understand, it’s a lot harder to make money on Yahoo Answers these days. But do you see why it was an open gold mine?

People asking questions, people looking for specific solutions to their needs…Christ, if you’re in the business of lead gen, your eyes would water at how simple it could be to game the system in to huge profit at no expense of your own. There is easy money out there if you expand on Yahoo Answers and look further afield for similar opportunities.

Classified sites were an enormous boost for me when I was assembling my cash to invest in the early days. I’m not going to venture in to detail about how you make money on sites like Craigs List and Gumtree. But any straight thinking affiliate should be able to smell opportunity like Justin Dupre outside the gates of an all-girls Thai college.

There are many ways you can jump from having zero money to having $10000 in as little as a few months – without ever spending a penny of your own on paid traffic. But the most important leap of them all is that you realize this thinking can only ever be temporary. Once you’ve established money to invest, it’s important to shed your fear of spending it.

I doubt you’ll find a single super affiliate who hasn’t yet overcome that fear of spending money. It’s necessary to grow your business. Don’t get caught up by the fact that the gurus are dropping six figures a day on their favourite traffic sources. You will never compete with them from day one. It’s your job to scrap and hustle, to seek out opportunity, to establish your own business that gives you a chance to scale in time.

It’s a lot easier to operate CPA campaigns with enough money in the bank to be able to run on 20% ROI. The job gets easier in that respect. I like to use the mountain metaphor. If you try to catch up with the top guys at the summit, without building your base camps along the way, you’re probably going to get blown off the mountain altogether. To get to the summit, you have to grow your business in stages. And at each stage, you’re going to have to acclimatise to the new pressures and the new risks. Because the distance to fall gets a little greater every time.

It’s a slow process, and I could slap every guru out there who preaches otherwise. But even if you’re sitting at home with nothing. Zero, nada, a pint of water and Pot Noodle for lunch. All is not lost. There is opportunity EVERYWHERE for those who are willing to seek it out.

An Affiliate Marketer’s Guide To Site Flipping

Time and time again you’ve heard me rattle on about the need to build long term assets to survive. Traffic brokering is a volatile gap-market to be working in, and if you’re not setting some time aside to expand in to other ventures, you’re going to run in to a brick wall at some point.

Site flipping is something I’ve never posted about before, and yet it’s probably one of the most interesting areas for an affiliate marketer to work in. It’s a chance to leapfrog your way to those long term business assets without needing the creativity, time or technical know-how to build them yourself. It’s the art of investing in a good concept. Something any self respecting entrepreneur should be able to appreciate.

And it’s a very simple concept to get your head around. There are many websites for sale on the net. Some of them are untapped goldmines of potential revenue that a lesser webmaster simply hasn’t thought to monetize properly. As affiliates, we’re typically a long way ahead of the average website owner when it comes to finding ways to drive profit from a site.

By scouring various online marketplaces, it’s possible to buy websites that have already been developed with outstanding content. We can then choose to apply an affiliate’s touch. Hopefully to raise the revenue being generated by the site with a view to selling it on at a greater price – “site flipping”, if you will. Of course, you can also choose to bag the redeveloped website for yourself and keep it as one of your long term business assets.

Nothing says “well diversified” like an affiliate with a few dozen automated and high-quality websites earning him a few hundred dollars each every month.

Unfortunately site flipping is one of those areas where if you go in unprepared, you’ll end up getting mislead in a market where there are 1001 tricks that a seller can use to artificially inflate the true value of a website. This post should hopefully warn you against a few tricks of the trade.

Ten Commandments For Successful Site Flipping

Behold:

1. Become a dirty great cynic. – Whenever I visit a website marketplace, I’ll make sure I’m already feeling cynical. Maybe I’ll play Radiohead in the background and pound myself in to a state of doom and gloom. The reason being because there’s simply so much bullshit that a site seller can attempt to get more money for his creation. If you go looking to buy a website with the attitude that you’ll snap up the first bargain you find, prepare to be burnt. Be super cynical and don’t be afraid to ask for whatever necessary data you need before agreeing to a sale.

2. Don’t trust the seller’s traffic stats on face value. – So you’ve stumbled across an excellent looking website and you’re salivating at the thought of 65,000 unique hits/month in a high profile niche. With a 1% conversion rate, that’s 650 sales, right? Don’t be such a retard. You need to know exactly where that traffic is coming from, the countries of it’s origin and whether the traffic will be sticking around after your purchase.

I’ve seen websites for sale boasting 20,000 unique visitors/month, but what the seller isn’t keen to disclose is the fact that nearly all of them are triggered by a pop-up on his own high traffic site somewhere in Ethiopia. Oh, and that he’ll be removing the pop-up after the sale. Get smart about it. If the seller is currently driving a shitload of low quality traffic through PPV, for example, you can pretty much disregard any value he attributes to the current traffic levels.

Assess the website as it’s own little standalone business. Is it well diversified with organic traffic being driven from a number of different sources? That’s what you should be looking for.

3. Adsense is for amateurs. – If a website is boasting Adsense as it’s main source of income, your little affiliate ears should be standing on end. Adsense, with a few exceptions, usually means that the webmaster is pretty clueless when it comes to monetizing his site. Why would you plaster ads over your website for OTHER affiliates to use your own high quality content for their own gain? Remove the Adsense, replace with your own banners, and you could flip a profit in the space of a lunch break.

4. Look out for licensed software platforms. – I got duped by this trick last year. I purchased a website built on the CubeCart platform, but I failed to check how the long the license would last. Contrary to our agreement, the motherfucker deactivated the license after a month and I ended up having to pay more than I set out for the actual site just to renew the license.

If you’re buying a website built on licensed software, make sure you nail down the terms of the transaction so both parties are clear who owns the license, how long it has left to run, and any other bullshit escape clause a slimy dealer might use to shaft you over. This includes the site domain.

5. Ask what has been spent on the site so far. – Of course, you want to know what percentage of the site’s traffic is being delivered from paid traffic sources. Otherwise you could just build the same damn site for yourself. But it’s also important to find out if the seller has paid for any banner placements, directory submissions, classified listings…anything that you might potentially have to replicate to maintain the current levels of traffic. If it’s not free, and it’s not automated, you need to know about it.

6. Is there any work required to maintain the website? – If the site involves distribution of any kind of physical goods, you need to be considering the implications of what an actual “brick and mortar” business involves. Basically, asking yourself “Am I too much of a lazy motherfucker?” If the website is selling something, make sure that the sales funnel requires absolutely minimal processing at your own end, or ideally none at all.

I only bother investing in websites selling virtual goods. You should be careful not to end up site flipping your way in to a position where you’re responsible for a dozen small businesses that each require your time and care. Automation is key, and it will dramatically increase the number of potential buyers if you choose to sell the project on.

7. What are the hosting requirements? – If you’re purchasing a very bespoke website, it may come with specific server requirements. These can be a Grade A pain in the jacksy. Nothing will frustrate you like having to purchase a brand new server to recreate a specific hosting environment for a site that currently only makes $47/month. Make sure you can handle your new baby, or that it shows enough potential to merit such an investment.

8. What are the reasons for the sale? – This sounds petty. Well, I’m a petty man. I like to know exactly why a website is being sold. My logic being that if there’s a reason for selling, there’s probably a reason for not buying. In cases of turnkey sales, my mind rests a little easier. But if a seller is boasting an automated website providing $500 of profit per month. Why would he sell it for $800? He only has to wait 6 weeks to match that ROI by keeping it. Explore the reasons for selling and compare them to your own reasons for buying. Don’t get stuck looking after somebody else’s wobbly dying donkey.

9. What do I know that the seller doesn’t? – I specifically like to find websites that are developed by passionate fans of their chosen niche. Firstly, it guarantees a level of excellence in the content. I like value that a marketer wouldn’t be able to replicate without outsourcing. But secondly, by targeting these kind of websites, you often have a raft of knowledge for monetizing the project that would dramatically increase the website value. I like to use forums as an example. Most forum owners create and develop their communities because they like to play God. Their ROI comes in the form of members and posts.

If an affiliate marketer can get his dirty hands on hours of work where the content really is king, his task of monetizing it becomes a whole lot easier. Look to buy what you cannot build overnight.

10. Sleep on it. – Hey, listen. It’s better to miss out on a promising looking website than it is to jump the gun, buy it now, and end up waking in the morning with that bitter taste in your mouth. You know, the “why the hell did I just buy a website about the culling of trees in the Amazon rainforest? Oh yeah, just because it mentioned acai in the footer” kinda taste. Yes, site flipping is a competitive business. But there’s plenty more competition for being a retard with a bunch of failed investments in your portfolio. Think before you buy, eh?

Finally, here are some marketplaces to check out for site flipping galore:

• Flippa
• Website Broker
• Deal A Site
• Digital Point’s Websites For Sale Forum

The Super Affiliate Secret To Success

I know. What a trashy linkbait title, right?

Your bullshit-o-meter is probably looking for one good reason to close the page so I’ll cut to the chase. Scaling a successful campaign is the secret to success. And it’s not even a secret. But you’re here now, so allow me to continue.

One of the questions I get asked a lot, normally by non-affiliate friends, is “How much do you spend on advertising in a day?”. If you haven’t trained yourself to fire back with “As much as I can”, then there’s something fatally flawed in your mindset.

A key reason why some affiliates fail to take their earnings to the next level is simply a lack of ambition. A willingness to settle for X/day and not re-evaluate targets when they’ve reached them.

I have to admit, I was guilty of this same flaw when I first started marketing. Back when rebills were as common as the sun rising in the east, I was milking a cash cow for more money than I knew what to do with. But not everybody has the instinctive “super affiliate” trait of chasing the maximum profit. You have to think big to win big.

I was trapped in the salary mindset. I saw that if I continued to earn X/day, I’d have made X/month. And that figure, being a mind-blowing leap from my work wages at the time, was enough to kill my ambition. I didn’t look to scale my campaigns any further than I was already happy with. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

A lot of marketers end up frustrated or beating themselves up over their failures to match the success of higher earners and bigger ballers. Maybe this is you. But I can guarantee one difference in their attitude to yours. They never stopped redefining their goals. They never stopped looking to scale their campaigns.

Great ideas do not run on tap. A winning concept isn’t going to slap you in the face over morning coffee every day of the week. So when you find something that works, you have to make it work big. One successfully scaled campaign will pay for months of failed concepts. And this is how many super affiliates operate. I’m elbowing myself in the balls at every mention of the term “super affiliate” here, because it’s a fucking joke and a definition invented to keep the Warrior Forum ecosystem alive.

How many times have you had a successful campaign producing profit that you’re happy with, looked at your options for scaling, and dismissed an idea because it’s too much work for too little return? You’re happy with what you’re currently earning, right? That satisfaction can kill ambition. And it will kill your ability to grow your business.

There are several steps to scaling a campaign, and I’m going to outline my usual thought process when I’ve found an idea that’s making me money. Note that these points are catered more towards social traffic. If you’re a PPC player and you can’t think of a way to scale your campaign, you’re a retard.

1 – What other age demographics can I incorporate?

I have one dating campaign which is producing 200-300% ROI. It all started with one ad targeting American 30-40 year olds. One week on and I’ve now adjusted the copy and images to target Americans of all ages from 21-65. I could have lived quite comfortably off the original campaign. It required research in to different offers but the concept was a winner.

2 – Can I develop the same concept for the other gender?

Many of you running dating ads are guilty of this. The majority of affiliate marketers are male. We have this nasty habit of targeting males as an instinctive step towards what we know we can relate to. Are you settling for 50% of what you could be earning if you opened your mind to targeting the fairer sex?

3 – What happens if I raise my bid prices?

Are you one of the many marketers who starts bidding low and slowly raises the price until you’ve reached a level of volume you’re happy with? If you’re producing 100% ROI, you have absolutely no excuse not to raise those bids a little higher and test the results. Don’t settle for the lowest bid that hits your magic profit number. If you have the luxury of bidding higher and staying profitable, DO IT. Basement bidding will only work until somebody comes along with an equally good concept and the balls to pay more for the traffic.

4 – Can I take the campaign in to English-speaking international markets?

Do I even need to stress this one? CPA offers don’t have to be restricted to the United States. I know affiliates who earn crazy money and haven’t generated so much as a single lead in North America. If you have a winning concept, it should be common sense that scaling in to other English speaking countries is likely to raise your profits. Look for similar offers and bring your campaigns to Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa. With the right offer, you may even be able to hit Asian markets with large numbers of English speakers.

5 – Can I be bothered to get my creatives translated for non-English-speaking markets?

Now this is where you’re going to start shaking a lot of your competition. Only a small percentage of affiliates make the effort to translate their campaigns in to foreign languages. It just so happens that the small percentage usually consists of some of the smartest and most profitable marketers out there. With cheaper traffic and much less competition, I think you already know that you COULD scale internationally if you wanted to. It’s whether you can be bothered to take those extra steps.

6 – Can I take my successful campaigns to other similar traffic sources?

This is the final step to successful scaling as far as I’m concerned. You’ve maxed out the age demographics. You’ve adjusted your offers and creatives for different international markets. What next? It’s at this point where I take a moment to glance over the test data that I’ve accumulated in the time that it’s taken me to expand a campaign as far as I already have. I’ll take the best performing creatives – those with the highest ROI – and I’ll use them as my test barometer for new traffic sources.

To take a classic example, let’s say you’ve got a PPV campaign producing the kind of profit margins that keep your bed wet at night. You’ve optimized and developed a list of URL targets that produce consistent results. Where can you go from here? I’ve been in situations like this before where I’ve explored the URL target a little further and noticed that it actually has Content Network placements on the same page.

Easy money!

Even without content network placements, if you’ve found a really obscure URL that drives converting PPV traffic to an offer – can you get in touch with the webmaster? How about paying for a single banner placement on that page? When you consider that a large number of the visitors don’t actually have Vomba installed to spring your pop-ups, a banner placement is likely to catch the rest of the traffic. I’ve said it over and over again but there are many ways to skin the cat.

Once you learn how to successfully port your campaigns across various traffic sources and advertising platforms, you’ll begin to realize that it doesn’t take a million great ideas to be a super affiliate. One good idea, developed and scaled as far as it can go, will usually put you ahead of your peers.

I’d recommend you check out this extensive list of traffic sources for ideas of where to scale your campaigns. Scaling isn’t just the secret to earning more money. It’s the secret to a stable and well diversified affiliate business. If you’re working in this industry without ambition, it won’t be long until somebody jacks your good ideas and buys a new yacht with them. Make every winning concept count.

I’m An Affiliate Marketer, Get Me Out Of Here

How many of you have seen The Wire?

There’s a character called Stringer Bell who fronts a Baltimore drugs gang (Ask Cakes for details), and slowly becomes disillusioned with the shady shit he has to deal with on a day to day basis. In a bid to escape the wrong side of the law, he uses the gang’s drug money to invest in property and real estate. Ultimately it all goes wrong and he gets shotgunned down for his sins.

If you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about – or why – it’s because I’m feeling the strong urge to pull a Stringer Bell, leap out of this shady industry and throw my money at something that doesn’t make me blush when I explain the mechanics of how it produces profit.

Affiliate marketing is full of so much bullshit and unnecessary drama. You can do everything in your power to avoid the drama, but when networking is such an integral part of your business, the drama becomes a lurking fixture of your day. Staring in awe at a cyber shitstorm over nothing in particular. None of the time management tools in the world can fully isolate you from an industry which regurgitates endless shit like no other.

I’ve been thinking about how I can limit the negative aspects of affiliate marketing. How can I cut down on the bullshit and learn to see through the lies without wasting any more of my time than I need to?

It’s a very shady space to work in. Some of the things I see affiliates doing – some of the things I engage in myself – would certainly rank low on the list of “topics to discuss with the grandparents over Sunday roast”. You can say that it’s a dog eat dog world. But one look at WickedFire and I’d change that to “dog eats dog while cheered on by pack of starving wolves”.

You people love drama. And as a guy who blogs to the exact crowd that love it most, I would be a colossal hypocrite to sit here raising a white flag and begging for mercy.

Instead I’m thinking about how I can adapt a business model that allows me to sleep easier at night. Most of us who’ve been doing this for any length of time appreciate that there’s a system in place. I haven’t promoted rebills for so long that I’ve convinced myself they’ve gone out of fashion. But even working with dating, gaming and a bunch of other CPA offers – I’m still riddled with the guilt that making money shouldn’t be this easy. So much of marketing is about creating false positives and selling a user what deep down you know they don’t really need.

I’ve made a personal effort to promote reputable offers and steer well clear of the continuity market. But it still bothers me that my working day involves tapping in to consumer weaknesses and surrounding myself in these negative energies. Negative energies? Yeah, I had a curry for dinner. I’m pretty fucking full of negative energies right now.

At the moment, it’s fine.

Affiliate marketing is an addictive circle to be working in. It can be so incredibly lucrative. I speak to guys who are millionaires in their early 20s and it’s all thanks to an industry that anybody can excel in if they have their fucking nuts screwed on.

But are you planning on doing this forever? Or do you have an exit strategy?

Last week, Nickycakes took a backlash from some of the WickedFire community for releasing a product that allegedly clashed with some of the rants he’d written in the past. I noticed a few posts mentioning how he obviously couldn’t be making as much money as he once did if he was willing to release a relatively low margin product in comparison.

This is such bullshit, I can barely believe I’m even writing about it. I’m not leaping to Cakes’ defense by any means. I’ve never met the guy and I’ve never tried his product. But are all affiliate marketers expected to live and die by the arbitrage game for the rest of their careers?

Whether Nick’s product blows or not, it’s pretty irrelevant. Escaping the “buy traffic to sell traffic” trap is something that I think any affiliate would be a mug to ignore. I don’t see how all of us can possibly get away with exploiting something that is this lucrative forever. Especially if affiliate marketing continues to grow at the same rapid rate.

I’ve been mulling over my own options and thinking about what I want to do. How can I use affiliate marketing as a launch pad to a stable long term business that reaches beyond basic CPA arbitrage? Well, I’ve been posting recently about building long term assets, and there’s a lot more to come there.

For me personally, I don’t plan on sticking in this industry for long. I’ve seen enough of affiliate marketing to know that while I’m enjoying it now as a 22 year old with no family of my own to support – I don’t want to be riding this horse for any longer than I need to be. I have my eye on property investment as an exit plan.

Make enough money as an affiliate to finance the kind of investments that would go beyond what the average 22 year old is capable of laying down. Every day is a constant drive to increase profits and give myself that flexibility sooner rather than later.

Do you have your own exit plan? You might be making money now, but how are you going to keep making money if the tap ever runs dry?

Taking Your Christmas Bonus Next Week?

Since I posted about potential Valentines Day campaigns, I’ve spoken to a few marketers and the consensus seems to be that although it would be nice to profit well on a Valentines Day campaign, it isn’t a long term recipe for success. So a lot of marketers don’t bother.

I think a couple of the people I spoke to were trying to schmooze me over having read the previous posts about focusing long term. There’s a difference between focusing all your profits on the short term, and understanding the consumer cycles that exist to be exploited.

“Why should I bother with a Valentines Day campaign when I can only get two weeks of profit out of it?”

It’s a fair question. But let’s say you DO make the effort to put together a profitable Valentines campaign. You may only get two weeks of hard profit from it now, but you’re also safe in the knowledge that you’ll have a campaign to roll out next year, and the year after…and so on. It’s a short term campaign that delivers long term results.

As affiliate marketers, we aren’t blessed with working for large companies that can hand out Christmas bonuses when December rolls around. We have to make our own bonuses.

If you were the manager of a high street store, would you neglect Christmas festivities on the basis that it’ll be January soon? No, you come up with a marketing strategy and you use it to take advantage of the current consumer mindset.

When people talk to me about building long term campaigns that can profit all year round, I don’t see that as a bad thing. I just see it as an opportunity lost. Valentines Day isn’t going to disappear from the calendar anytime soon.

Neither will Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving Day, New Years Day, Guy Fawkes Night…

You can choose to ignore every single one of these events on the principle that you’re happy with your stable campaigns and don’t want to rock the boat. Okay, but are you simply turning down the equivalent to your Christmas bonus?

If you were to turn each of those events above in to a profitable seasonal campaign – and they can be extremely profitable – you will have done a lot to boost long term profits. Why? Because we know that they’re going to roll around in 2011, 2012…there’s no expiry date in sight. High street shops and online retailers know this. They adapt to whatever current event is being pushed on the consumer and they increase their sales accordingly.

I’m not only talking about seasonal campaigns. Most of us have had a profitable short term cash cow on Facebook at some point. You know? The kind’ve campaign that delivers three straight days of super high profits and then nosedives in to a loss. Is this sort of campaign worth ignoring?

I don’t think so personally. I like these campaigns because I can slam the Pause button, leave it for a month, then cream another couple of days of profit. It might be a short term coup. But it’s a long term option to have. The more of these campaigns you can have at your disposal, the larger your reach becomes and the more flexible you are.

I’ve made a big song and dance about focusing your efforts on the long term, and I don’t back down from that at all. But it genuinely surprises me how many marketers are happy to neglect seasonal opportunities. Tapping in to the current consumer mindset is vital. Just as it’s important to be able to produce consistent stable profits, it’s also important to predict those consumer cycles. You don’t think an actual marketing agency would let you ignore them, do you?

I remember reading a post recently about focusing efforts in to one niche and adopting tunnel vision to stick with it until it succeeds. While this can work, I don’t see it as a sensible decision unless you’re getting closer to owning a product, or at least having a long term asset in that niche. If you’re simply doing CPA lead generation, you NEED to be aware of what’s happening around you. Especially if you’re working at the volatile end of the market where products can disappear overnight.

My job is made easy when I’m selling what a consumer is actively looking to buy. If there’s one thing that definitely isn’t a short term gamble, it’s that Valentines Day will be just as culturally significant in 2011 as it is 2010.

So are you going to adjust to the seasons? Or carry the same message all year round?

Building Long Term Assets In A Short Term Industry

This is going to be the first in a series of posts about long term business development for affiliates. One of my biggest regrets of 2009 was that I spent 8 months working for myself and didn’t come close to developing the number of fixed assets that I should have done. Too much of my energy was spent playing with fire on campaigns that were raking in the money one minute and draining my wallet the next. This year is different. I’m not thinking “how can I make more money than I know how to spend?” I’m thinking long term stability.

Yeah, if you’re wondering, I’m wearing slippers and smoking a pipe while I write this. Next stop: feeble retirement. But it reflects how I feel about the business right now. I’m not interested in banking astronomical profits just so that I can go on WickedFire and be a dick posting about it (like the majority of members over there, sorry but you’re lame). Money isn’t my incentive this year. I worked my arse off through 2009, made a lot of cash, and you know what happened? I never got chance to enjoy any of it. I want to live in comfort, not chained to my dedicated server incase a small wind knocks it offline and motherfucks my media buy.

2010 is going to be all about working smart.

It’s interesting how when I broke in to affiliate marketing, the niche that set me on the road to riches was the Google bizopp. And yet one year on, the goalposts have shifted so far that I’ve returned to where I started in terms of how I value my work.

When I quit my day job, it was in disbelief that so much money could be made through such a simple process. Set up a landing page, plug in some keywords, and line your pockets with money. I’d lost interest in the kinda “small fish” web projects that I’d spent my previous career undertaking. Instead of developing long term assets that would stand the test of time, I was happy to tear through more .info domains than you could fit in your economy shared hosting plan.

One year on, I’ve grown tired of living on the volatile edge. I gave up rebills a long time ago. But even now, I’m still shifting my campaigns to more long term geared strategies.

You should know how it is. A part time affiliate marketer can afford to tap in to whatever’s hot or converting at the time. Those of us doing this shit as a full time career need to move forward with slightly broader mindsets. To live comfortably, we need to develop long term assets. Or face the hair receeding bitch that comes with the pressure of producing profitable CPA campaigns week on end. I’m not joking. If I had to live 2009 several times over, I’d be bald by the time of London Olympics. There’s times where I feel myself physically molting at my desk.

When I look at the affiliate marketing landscape in 2010, I see a lot of opportunity. But I also see a lot of challenges on the horizon. Especially for those who deal in short term crash and burn arbritage and nothing else. Not to say the ballers are going to fall by the wayside, because they won’t. But the time is now to build some long term assets. Something that an Adwords slap or an offer outage can’t touch.

What are your options? Well, that’s what I’m going to bring myself to type shit about over the next few posts. But to give a basic overview:

Developing an email list: You’ve heard it over and over again. But have you actually bothered to take action? Building an email list is one of the single most effective methods of adding value to the traffic that you’re purchasing. Instead of popping a lead once, why not keep the prospect and hit them with several offers over time? Most affiliates shy away from this route because it involves sacrificing some of the immediate ROI. I’m aware of this so I’m going to outline a method of building an email list and scaling it to thousands of opt-ins without spending a single penny. It’s surprisingly easy.

Building an authority site: If you spend forever digesting the clusterfuck of information on how to get your site ranked using SEO – well, good for you. I personally hate SEO with a passion. The only time I get any kind of thrill out of SEO is when my ninja optimization skills take me to the top of the SERP for terms such as:

Shag my wife
Kiss my balls

…and various finch birdspotting phrases.

This blog receives a lowly 3% of it’s traffic from the search engines. I don’t like spending any more time than I need to optimizing for Google when The Big G could flick a switch and erase me from the search engines completely. So, I take that attitude in to every affiliate site that I develop. Yes, it’s nice to reap free traffic. But the intention should always be to establish an authority, an identity.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not impossible to blend in to a niche as an “expert talker” while pushing your own sordid commission driven agenda. Just look at John Chow. I believe a good brand is worth a lot more than a first page search ranking. But to migrate in to new niches and build long term assets, you’ve got to know your market and know your audience. It’s why I portray myself as such a cynical bastard on here.

Be first on the scene. I can’t remember where I heard it, but it’s definitely true. You don’t always have to be the best, or the funniest, or the cleverest with your marketing message. Sometimes, just being the first can be the only competitive advantage you need.

I guess I’ve learned from my year in affiliate marketing – having originally made money by recycling campaigns that were everywhere – the innovators will always find a way to get paid. If you can seize opportunity and be the first to jump on an offer or a new demand, you will make money. It’s as simple as that.

The main difference between my mindset now to how it was when I started is that I’m not looking for a fleeting campaign in today’s hottest niche. I’m looking for a long term investment in tomorrow’s new craze. I believe that’s what separates entrepreneurs on the web from those who are always chasing the seeds of what successful affiliates have already built.