Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing Idiots’ Category

Why Successful Young Affiliates Grow Up Fast

I won’t lie. There’s something incredibly satisfying about sitting on the train and listening to some suited twat big himself up on a Blackberry, all the while knowing that you’ve got the capacity to earn more than him and you don’t even have to get out of bed to do it.

Living in London, I invariably find myself in bars full of yuppy tossers and “touch base” talking clowns who’ve let the Christmas bonus go too far to their heads. Affiliate marketing is still such a young industry and it’s very rare that we get the respect we deserve for the hours we put in. But this is probably because affiliate marketers generally represent a very young demographic of businessmen and entrepreneurs. The business studies curriculum hasn’t yet had to suggest that we exist.

I was reading in the comments to the last post that much of the arrogance and drama in affiliate marketing can be attributed to a young crowd with more money than it knows what to do with. While we’re blessed with great opportunities, we have to find the discipline to ensure that they lead to long term success. For many marketers in their early 20s, like me, this is one of the biggest hurdles you’re going to face.

I think it’s great that a young generation has broken out from the academic ranks and found a successful alternative to degrees and 9-5s. Let’s be honest. Most of us in this business are stubborn individuals who want to succeed or fail on our own merit. I never enjoyed working for anybody other than myself. I think most affiliates are the same.

Thanks to the Internet, we’ve got the perfect platform to show those skills in an arena where you can’t be discriminated against because you can’t be seen. Only the output of your creativity is there to be judged. That was the huge appeal of the industry for me. A learning curve that keeps on giving.

But at the same time, if you’re a part of this younger generation, you need to think long and hard about the practicalities of what you’re getting in to. I’ve seen so many affiliates making huge profits and somehow blowing it up the wall and staggering back to their day jobs within the year. To reap long term results, you have to learn to channel the positive energy of being young, creative, and web savvy – to overcome the challenges of sudden responsibility and dealing with money. You also need to stay humble.

Why humble? Who gives a fuck about humble when you’re stacking dollar bills to the sky?

There are affiliates out there who are quite happy to boast about their earnings, shove screenshots in your face, and build up a personal brand that suggests only following their every move will take you to the riches. While I occasionally drape this blog in the necessary arrogance that it requires for a cynical crowd to take notice, it’s never a good way to run your business.

One of the most important things you can be doing as a young affiliate – or simply just a young businessman – is to learn, learn, learn and learn. It doesn’t mean shit that you’re earning crazy figures today. The second you let the money go to your head and sap away your desire to become better at your craft, you’re flirting with disaster.

There is always somebody better than you, always somebody earning more. If you forget to carry yourself with a humble willingness to learn and to listen to what other people are doing, you will completely toast your long term prospects of surviving. Or certainly achieving what you might have done in this industry.

There’s times where I browse WickedFire and it completely blows my mind that such a collective bag of dicks could ever have the social or diplomatic know-how to sustain good relations with a single network – let alone the far reaching contacts necessary to run a proper business.

I know there’s a lot of “front”, and many people will talk shit simply because they’ve established a net vBulletin post count of 10,000 in the noughties where faceless web bashing has become the norm. But sometimes, people will judge you by the only face they can see. There’s a lot more to be gained by carrying yourself with respect and actually giving something back to the community rather than shitting on it.

I often get asked what it’s like to be working for myself so young. I always answer the same: incredibly stressful but always worthwhile. I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of the boozy shipwrecked Friday nights on the lash that I used to enjoy week in week out. Not because I feel financially restricted, but because I’m carrying the weight of my own expectations on my shoulders. And I expect a lot from myself. If I’d allowed my ego to dictate my life, I would have crashed and burned long before now.

One of the drawbacks of being part of this younger generation of web entrepreneurs is that some of us simply aren’t ready for it. Teaching yourself discipline, motivation and the ability to plan ahead is not always easy when your first taste of success is as simple as refreshing stats. So many of us enter the industry full-time starstruck on the back of initial success. It’s a good idea to remember where you came from, and how your success can be as fleeting as the time it takes you to fall. Don’t let your bank balance go to your head and don’t book a worldwide cruise on the back of a good month’s work.

Networking with other marketers and sharing your knowledge is probably the single most effective way of gaining experience as an affiliate. We all have our own successes and failures to talk about. I can always tell when I’m talking to a young egomaniac with his head up his own arse. And I never share anything useful with these people. If you act like a lone riding dick with a chip on your shoulder, people will treat you like one.

There aren’t many industries where you can be so successful in such a short space of time. I hate to say it, but just because you’re making money, that doesn’t mean you’re great at what you do. I think many young affiliates will drop out of the business as competition becomes more fierce and the road to riches becomes harder to negotiate. Those still standing will probably be the ones who haven’t spent all day living the jet-set affiliate lifestyle they took for granted and thought they’d always have.

So you’re young and rich. That’s a notorious recipe for ending up old and lazy. Working hard through the good times, staying humble around your peers, and helping others to succeed. These are all qualities that are likely to work in your favour at some point. The riches for young affiliates are mind boggling. But you’ve gotta grow up fast to enjoy them.

Stop Thinking Short Term, You Stupid Fuck

I apologize for the inevitable tantrum that’s about to unravel. If you’d spent the last several days battling with Linux viruses and Chinese fucktard organizations, you’d be equally pissed off and ready to go all Scrooge on the world.

This is something that has been grating at me for a while now. It’s quite common that I’ll be emailed a simple question like, “Have you tried pushing acai on Facebook?”

Yes, I have. And yes, I stopped.

Not so long ago, I was talking to an affiliate manager of a network that will go unnamed. I was told that Offer X in the acai niche would sell really well if I cloaked it and ran it through Facebook. I’m not stupid enough to do something like this personally. I have actual campaigns that are profitable on Facebook which I would rather not lose. More to the point, I believe in the theory that you’d be an absolute retard to burn all your bridges to chase a few extra dollars of profit.

What really concerned me was the idea that affiliate managers are actually pushing this advice on their publishers. Are you out of your fucking minds?

It’s easy for a network to sit there and tell a publisher to go compromising a personal account by selling a prohibited product through Traffic Source X. But it shows a massive lack of respect to the naive affiliate who’s trying to earn an honest wage. What happens when the affiliate gets shut down? Sure, there’s some personal responsibility attached. But I’d be tempted, knowing what I know, to tell any affiliate manager who pushes advice like that on me to go fuck himself. Which is, ironically enough, exactly what I did.

What I’m trying to say here, is that if you’re a hard working affiliate, you need to look out for yourself and take what a network throws at you with a pinch of salt.

I’m forever opening my inbox to see messages that read like this:

“Well, why don’t you try Offer X. It’s really taking off and seeing big volume right now.”

Network wide volume means jack shit to me. Profitability is all I care about. I couldn’t honestly care less if an offer is blowing up and seeing thousands of leads per day. I would much rather push through one lead that gives me a return on investment that I’m happy with. This is where networks will try to fuck you over and fill your inbox with false promise.

But, hey, you can’t hate on the networks for doing their jobs. The more experienced you get at this game, you better you become at being your own judge of an offer’s viability.

What really gets on my tits is the outrageous attitude from certain affiliate managers who believe that because they’ve been placing your pixels for five minutes, they somehow know what’s good for the long term success of your business. Telling an affiliate to go and try acai on Facebook is no better than Google turning around and saying “Thanks for the money, now go rot in a hole somewhere.”

Or “We appreciate your leads…while they lasted.”

“Teehee, motherfucker. This is the sound of us banking on your banned and blacklisted ass. Refer us to friends though, right?”

Before you ask, no I haven’t been banned from Facebook. But I’ve heard a lot of stories from people who’ve suffered that fate. Much of the blame must rest on the publisher. I’m not for a moment suggesting that a network is responsible for an affiliate going out and breaking the terms and conditions of a traffic source. This is more of a rant against stupidity.

Let’s say you decide to push acai on Facebook.

It’s profitable and there’s big money to be made there. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read that much. With some simple targeting, a cloaking redirect and a slice of luck – you can probably ride the fat loss waves well in to 2010 making some good bank. But there is your problem.

You might not make it in to 2011 with Facebook account in tact.

We’ve seen the backlash from Google and we’re seeing a similar backlash from Facebook. It’s possible to get a new account after being banned, but it’s about as pleasurable a process to follow as a gentle fist up the jacksy.

You can enjoy a few great months of addictive profit and life changing ROIs, but when the screws come unhinged, you’re left without a Plan B. And whatever Plan B you might have had is going to be severely compromised by the fact that Traffic Source X now has you blacklisted and wants nothing to do with your business.

Is that the way forward for an affiliate marketer?

Some of you are crazy sons of bitches who will simply ditch the wife, change your birth name, move to Alaska and open up a new advertising account. Whatever puts the notes in your pocket, right? That’s one way to do it, I guess. But you’re going to be forever searching for loopholes while I would rather be kicking back on a sunbed and enjoying a legitimate long term business growth.

Here’s the greatest catch of affiliate marketing. You don’t have to be clever to make money. Any affiliate with balls the size of Texas can bend the truth far enough that it lines his pockets with the dollars he craves. But at some point – today, tomorrow, maybe next year – you’re going to have to deal with the hand you’ve been dealt.

I’ve spoken to some truly shady black hat Internet marketers in my time. Not just affiliates, but “entrepreneurs” who will completely reinvent the rulebook of what’s acceptable if it’s financially suitable to them. You know what nearly all of these guys have in common? They all WISH they could have the same success on the straight and narrow.

Many of them are incredibly smart and more than capable of carving a long term business. But they get blinded by the short term riches and choose paths that I’m sure, in many cases, will eventually come back to haunt them.

You can base your business decisions on what will line your pockets today (slinging acai on Facebook, pummeling bizopp on Google)…or you can keep a level head and try not to burn all of your bridges in a few short months.

When you come back down to earth and realize that affiliate marketing is a full time career and a full time responsibility, it’s probably going to dawn on you.

You’ve got work to do.

Giving Away A Facebook Campaign

Finding The Entrepreneurial Spirit To Succeed

One of the comments posted on my piece about Investing In The Future With Affiliate Marketing has gotten me thinking recently.

It was Conv3rsion who made the comment:

“One thing being an affiliate marketer can teach though is that there is always opportunity out there. You can always out hustle someone else and get some of the pie. If anything, this life style breeds life long entrepreneurs. I don’t think I can ever have a job again where I’m not the boss.”

Life long entrepreneurism.

That’s pretty much what this game is about if you plan on remaining an affiliate until retirement. But it also got me thinking whether all affiliates actually possess the entrepreneurism streak that’s required to succeed. And is that what separates the top earners from those chasing the coat tails of more successful affiliates?

One of the things that I always stress very heavily to people looking to jack in the day job is that affiliate marketing is a career change – not a retirement plan.

It doesn’t matter how many successful campaigns you have up and running. You could be earning 10K a day and it still doesn’t mean you’re prepared for life as a full time affiliate marketer. Not unless you possess the mindset that will keep you ahead of the pack.

I like to look at my current situation in affiliate marketing using tomorrow’s stats as a marker.

Zero clicks. Zero conversions. Zero profit.

It’s simply no good to assume that your success today will see you through to tomorrow. You have to be constantly visualizing those zero columns and using it as the incentive to find new ways to build your income.

When I quit my day job, I made what had to be one of the most reckless decisions of all time. All of my earnings were wrapped up in two traffic sources stretching across a handful of offers. Within weeks of going full-time, those traffic sources had fallen out on me and I’d been forced back to the drawing board. Many affiliates would go up in flames at this point and never produce another profitable campaign.

So one of the first things I had to do as a full-time affiliate was stare at a list of zero columns. To rack my brain for new opportunities, new ideas, new ways to pay the bills. I’ve managed to rebuild my business on much sturdier legs now that I’ve felt the true vulnerability of the industry. But Conv3rsion is right with his comment – one of the qualities that distinguishes successful affiliates is the ability to seize on opportunity and grab success. If you want to quit the day job and never go back to it, you really need to find that entrepreneurial spirit.

How many affiliates are suffering from banner blindness? I say that with tongue in cheek, but it’s a genuine question.

If you ask an affiliate where he makes his money, you’ll probably get an answer along the lines of Adwords, Facebook, media buys or PPV. Too many affiliates do their research, learn about these well known methods of making money, and draw a line under them. That’s all they want to know about. But if you’re truly in possession of an entrepreneurial streak, you don’t stop there. You should be using your eyes and ears.

Opportunity is everywhere on the web. How many times have you been browsing a site, seen an Ad that caught your eye, written it off as a media buy and not even bothered to check the bottom of the page for an “Advertising” link?

The reality is that a smarter guy was there before you. He saw an opportunity to reach a demographic, jumped on it, and now you’re sitting nodding your head in retarded approval.

Spending so much time on the web, I see dozens of different ways to generate income every single day. I don’t always see immediate use in them for myself, but it doesn’t stop me bookmarking the pages, taking some notes and storing them in the memory bank for later use.

Here’s a tip. You never know what you’re going to be working on tomorrow. So pay attention to great marketing and keep on learning. It might just give you a headstart over your equally retarded competition when it comes to brainstorming your next campaign.

Just because a piece of great marketing doesn’t fit in nicely with your niche, that’s no reason to turn a blind eye. This is what I call banner blindness for affiliates. The ability to gloss over incredibly profitable opportunities. When money is made in every corner of the web, why are you only looking out for good keywords and good dating images?

Are you one of those guys who opens up Adwords and thinks to himself “What can I sling today?”. Maybe you make money, maybe you don’t. But I much prefer to let new campaigns come naturally to me. Find a market first, target the need, THEN decide the best method of promotion. It might be Adwords, it might be PPV, it might be some long ass email to the webmaster begging for a banner tenancy.

But if you’re actively in the trenches hunting out these marketing opportunities, you’re gonna be better placed to make some money than the dude who sprays shit at the wall in Adwords hoping something will stick.

There’s too many arbitrage affiliates out there who refuse to get to grips with what marketing is all about. They become masters of traffic sources. They start turning over fortunes using just Facebook. Or just Adwords. One day their traffic source falls out from under their feet and what happens? They embark on this route of discovery to find the opportunities that they should have been getting out of bed to look for in the first place.

That’s the difference between the guy with the entrepreneurial spirit and the guy who knows how to use XXX to make money. One can live and learn from failure – the other will probably roll over and die if his one trick pony gets shot.

It’s not always about making more money. At least for me it isn’t. I take pride in wanting to be good at what I do. I might be harming my own profit margins by spending so much time exploring other avenues, but with knowledge comes experience. With experience comes the know-how to deal with failure. And you’re nearly always going to fail at some point in affiliate marketing.

Are you prepared for it? Or are you a headless fucking chicken who knows how to open Adwords and not much else?

Is The Warrior Forum A Pyramid Scheme?

I could be convinced.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve stumbled across this hell hole of an Internet Marketing forum and actually posted there. Not for long admittedly. As far as messageboards go, this is the shit that George Orwell pissed his bed sheets over as a small child.

Here is a board that thrives on the principle of getting nowhere in Internet Marketing. Let me correct myself. Nowhere beyond the actual confines of The Warrior Forum.

It amazes me that this place sustains a stuttering eco-system of guys and girls who make money on the SHEER PRINCIPLE of making money. I can’t imagine they make more than the odd ebook sale – but it’s still mind boggling to understand that this shit is happening. Real time. As we speak.

Every other member has a link slinging an ebook. You know the kind? Probably hand-picked from a collection of 72,000 in a Demonoid torrent. These people strike me as the sort of hob goblins that spend 6 months researching key terms for a soon-to-be-hot niche, only to roll out an acai berry blog in 2011.

It’s plain as day that the best performers in the Warrior Forum marketplace are making their money from selling crap to…fellow Warrior Forum members.

Okay, fair dos. You get the odd smattering of urchins from Bangkok looking to send 5000 visitors to your site in 24 hours – but as far as quality services go, I can only assume that these guys have accidentally homepaged the Wayback Machine and forgotten how to close the window. A brief glance over the latest threads and you’ll see questions like “Am i being geolocated?“, “How does this blog know where I am?” and my favourite of all time, “Does posting links on Google work?”

Now, I’m not trying to knock too heavily on the happy go lucky community of The Warrior Forum. I’m sure they’re all hard working mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. Christ, they better be hard working. But I’m writing this to anybody who’s new and getting started in the business. Anybody who reads some ridiculous sig link and is already on the phone to jack in his day job.

IF IT SMELLS LIKE BULLSHIT, IT PROBABLY TASTES LIKE BULLSHIT.

I spend day after day searching over new tools and systems that are allegedly going to make my life easier as an affiliate marketer. If I worked 365 days, I’d probably only stumble across something worth paying for on 5 of them.

When you get good at affiliate marketing, you become a good judge of the scam artists and the guys who are actually rolling out a quality service. I’m using the Warrior Forum as an example – I don’t hate the place – it’s just a terrible breeding ground for poor marketing. It’s like walking in to a fully immersive flog and personally, I come away from the place feeling just a little bit creeped out by the smiling avatars.

There is no magic recipe for success. And if there was one, it wouldn’t be sold on WF – or on any forum.

No successful affiliate hits the jackpot and then decides to sell it for $27.95 in an instant download. These guys seem to have established a mini circle jerk to pay the bills. I’ll buy your book, if you get three retards to buy mine. And so the madness spirals out of control.

I do a lot of work on traffic sourcing strategies that receive hardly any coverage across the many affiliate marketing blogs. Christ, most of my money is made from traffic sources that I haven’t even hinted at once during the lifetime of this blog. That’s just how it works.

You can go on Affbuzz and read to your heart’s content – you’ll get absolutely nowhere without action.

No secret worth knowing is handed to you on a plate.

Time and time again I’m getting contacted by guys who want a hint there, a nudge in the right direction here…but what can I say?

When you uncover a marketing tactic that works – you’ll appreciate the value of shit not getting saturated. If you’re new and fresh to the affiliate marketing business, you need to grow some thick skin when it comes to sales talk. The reality is that the best tool you have for this industry is Notepad and your keyboard. Time to get skeptical about everything else.

Beating SEO Kids At Their Own Game

Most of us doing affiliate marketing have some kind of tear stained love-hate relationship with SEO. I got my first ever commission after ageing several years, wrinkling over slightly, and finally converting a long tail search term.

When I think of SEO, I think of ballbreaking keyword research and a drawn out link building program that could reduce a grown man to tears (or just a Black Hat manual). But the more money you spend on PPC, the more glaring it becomes that you’re paying to get your shit advertised alongside a bunch of free listings that are spitting out pure profit.

Now I know what everybody says. Link building? Writing articles? That, is the work of slavery, and damn near offensive to many.

Even beyond the attitude that it’s time consuming, boring work, and a waste of market knowledge – some affiliates seem to assume that it simply isn’t possible to catch up with the top rankers. Well, maybe you can’t work as hard as an army of Indian kids spinning out articles for $1 a pop. But you definitely can work smarter.

Through PPC, you can rapidly discover the keywords that produce regular sales. You do this by busting out your Adwords account, setting the crosshairs on a bunch of search terms, and then letting rip with your own money. Sure, you might lose money. But you can’t buy the knowledge that comes with knowing what sells.

Say you’re one of these organic search guys who lays down the foundations of an SEO campaign before a single sale has been banked. A good SEO campaign requires good targeting and good groundwork. You might spend 6 months optimizing a site of 300 pages to reach the top of Google for term “xxxxx”.

What if “xxxxx” doesn’t convert? Those 6 months would have been better spent on Redtube.

Coming from a PPC background, you can test the waters and find exactly which terms are converters. Get yourself 4 or 5 super targeted keywords, spin a domain out of them, and do your own SEO groundwork accordingly.

There’s no point wasting your own time on articles. But Christ, you wouldn’t believe how many affiliate marketers are so tight when it comes to paying a kid in Asia a small fee for getting some work done. If you’re truly enjoying the high life, employ a genuine professional and you’ve already got a competitive advantage over many of these top ranking sites.

Most affiliates build a successful campaign and ask themselves “how can I scale this bigger?”. Not many ask themselves “how can I reduce my costs?”

Reducing your costs will usually make a campaign more profitable than spreading your net and scaling upwards. I realized this after I noticed that I was making more money from a few organic sales than I was from 25 PPC sales in a day.

Fact is though, if you’re going to build long-term sites for your affiliate business – you’ve got one major problem.

How do you build a long term site for a short term product?

When I log in to Convert2Media, I see about 25 different Google offers. It looks a bit like this:

Google Profits
Make Money on Google
Google Money Profits
Profiting on Google
Google Income
Google Money Income

So how do you even think about building a site to rank naturally when the name of the shit you’re slinging is gonna change before you’ve opened the FTP to publish it?

I should say first of all that if you’re actually using the term “Google” when you push bizopp rebills, you’re walking in to a firestorm of legal problems. It’s blatant infringement on the Google brand. Even though the actual advertisers do it, why do you think we have so many Google bizopps in the first place? Rinse, say sorry, and repeat.

If you want to promote any kind of CPA rebill, you’re going to have to build your own brand and focus only on the terms that don’t change over time.

Sure, “acai burn” might be a popular search term today – but there’s no guarantee that it will be tomorrow. “Cure my fat ass” on the other hand, is always going to be a go’er, because let’s face it. America is fat.

For long term success, you need to be targeting the keywords that are here to stay. Ranking takes time and it isn’t really a good fit for the cut throat nature of the CPA industry.

The safest way to build a long term future in affiliate marketing is to target sales instead of leads. You can’t fuck with the quality of a sale. But that doesn’t mean we all have to bend over backwards and become bitches of Commission Junction. There’s still money to be made from long term sites pushing short term offers. That’s if you get it right from the beginning.

I see quite a few guys trying to build review sites for dieting, cleansing and whatever else is pulling a $37 commission. I can only imagine that they’re PPC burners, because it doesn’t make sense as a long term goal otherwise. These CPA offers are getting rebranded practically every day. You need to target the needs of the market, not the product on the shelf.

Anti-Aging For Pets: It’s On Like Donkey Kong

Okay, what the fuck is this?

I decided to check in to Advaliant after a couple of months of not running any of their offers. I managed to stumble across this absolute gem of an offer. I can only assume that it’s geo-targeted to America.

The niche? Anti-aging…for pets.

I shit you not. Check the link.

Petipaaws: Your Pet’s Gonna Live 30% Longer, Or Ya Money Back

Click here if you ain’t American.

I’m sorry but this takes the rebill business model to new lows. I can half understand the principle behind an anti-aging product for, you know, humans. Because Average Joe might just notice that he feels ten years lighter after popping a few pills. But your pet dog? How’s woof woof for a testimonial?

My favourite part of the landing page is this:

Try it risk free? YOU MEAN IF I POP THEM MYSELF MY PUPPY WILL LIVE FOREVER?

The thing that really boggles my mind is the idea that this product is actually being packaged in to a monthly rebill. I’m guessing the customer simply pays until his pet cops it, then cancels his credit card to get out of the monthly charges.

Please, somebody.

Define the criteria of a successful 30 day free trial when it comes to pets and anti-aging. Do I assume that if Rocky is still wagging his tail after four weeks, and still eating as per the norm, it’s been a raging success and he’s going to live forever?

I don’t know.

I do know that I’m going to promote it.

Sign up to Advaliant here and push your own anti-pet-death Resveratrol today.

It’s shit hot. 35 bucks per victim guaranteed.

How To Lose $250 Digital Point Style

Digital Point Forums isn’t exactly known for it’s useful information. But every now and then, a numb nut comes along and proves to the world exactly why there will always be a demand for the supermarket cleaner vacancy. Here’s how to waste your money quickly and effectively.

So I was gazing over the usual threads of “how do i get my site 2 rank”, “help me get pr2 guys” and “hi, cpa networks don’t accept me i think im from somalia”. You might criticize me for even wasting my time on DP in the first place. The only reason I browse the forum is on the off-chance that I’ll see a good idea being executed poorly.

Unfortunately, the majority of users are so far buried up their Clickbank asses that it’s a needle in a haystack chore.

Anyway, I was reading over a thread from one particular guy who was looking to promote his colon cleansing offer on a popular health related forum. He’d checked with the forum admins and agreed on a media buy.

48 hours of 468 x 60 banner advertising on the top of EVERY page. He agreed to pay $250 for this exposure.

Bare in mind that $250 to the average Digital Point user is probably a bank loan and stealing from Grandma Jean.

So the forum admins wired him up and he sat back waiting for the targeted traffic to lap up the offer. Who wouldn’t pay $1.95 for a colon cleansing kit on a leukemia related forum, right?

In a tragic and somewhat amusing twist of fate, the affiliate network pulled the offer just HOURS in to his advertising stint. Obviously the retard was sitting there clicking through his stats like some kind of nympho in a porn chain. So it must’ve taken him – oh I don’t know – all of about 15 minutes to realize that his banner traffic was arriving at a dead link.

Yep, he’d direct linked to the offer without sending traffic through his own redirect page.

DIRECT LINKING OFFERS W/O REDIRECT + MEDIA BUYS = HI, YOU’RE STUPID

So while the forum admin cashed the $250 all the way to the bank, Idiot X found himself sat in a bedroom in his underpants (probably) sending desperate private messages asking for his destination link to be changed. Oh, and pleading for advice on Digital Point for how he could redirect a network link to a different offer. Brilliant.

Guys, it’s not difficult to setup a basic PHP redirect.

If you don’t redirect your traffic, you’re adding needless hours of edits on to every landing page or website you ever build. Not to mention the fact that it looks sloppy and unprofessional.

Here, I’ll even supply the PHP code. Place it inside your standard PHP tags.


header('Location: http://www.link-to-the-offer-goes-here.com');


Save the file as an index.php, place it in a folder, link to the folder. Pretty basic stuff – but pretty fundamental to not being a complete affiliate marketing failure.