Archive for the ‘General Affiliate Marketing’ Category

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?

Affiliate And Love Advice For Valentines Day

Valentines Day is on the horizon, as I’m sure those of you with girlfriends have been made painfully aware. And even for the singletons amongst us, it’s pretty hard to escape. I’ve always said that Valentines Day is “off season” for me in dating terms. For three years running now, I’ve found girlfriends in March and then broken up with them before the Christmas season. I’m beginning to wonder whether this is a coincidence or whether I’m subconsciously month-parting my affections for maximum ease of stress.

Either way, the dating CPA market holds obvious appeal as we charge towards the big day. You can guarantee that even the most hardened bachelors are going to be thinking twice about those “Want A Girlfriend?” ads. It’s all down to the social messages being put out there by commercials on television, banners in high street shops – and affiliates with dollars for eyeballs.

While the most obvious campaigns to be considering are dating offers, I’m going to suggest that they’re not actually the best example of opportunity in the current season. Take a look at the market. You have various ways of approaching the Valentines Day hoo har.

I’ll break out four stereotypes:

Person A – The die hard romanticist. He or she is deeply attached and wants to go that extra mile to make their partner feel special. Depending on the wealth demographic, you could be looking at targeting special Valentines weekend getaways. Round up a list of the hot spots. I can’t speak for America because I don’t know shit for what you guys do on Valentines Day. But over here, Paris and Venice are both popular getaways for the more affluent couples. Look in to flight and hotel packages with specific Valentines Day themes. Some couples are happy to go for a meal and then on to the theater. See what you can find.

PPC is going to be a hard nut to crack but PPV has HUGE potential and is relatively untapped (from what I’ve seen). PPV advertising has really taken off in the last year or so and with a one-off theme like Valentines Day, it’s a total wet dream for effective targeting.

Person B – The reluctant love atrocity. Think Martin Clunes from Men Behaving Badly. There are some guys who mean well but simply don’t have a scooby what to do for Valentines Day. These people are a stone wall match for the various gift dedicated stores that specialize in spelling out what your girlfriend – along with 4 million other girlfriends with the exact same taste – want to receive for Valentines Day.

Honestly guys, “My Last Rolo”? I think I might fucking blush.

Whatever though, these people are generally straight thinking types in an overpowering buying mindset. The Valentines Day pressure is so huge that if the gift looks even remotely like it might put a smile on her face, the purchase is already signed and sealed. Anything to put it to bed for another year.

Unfortunately when you’re working with the various gift stores, you aren’t going to be seeing a huge commission. It’ll be a small percentage. For that reason it’s important to build out gift specific keyword lists and find a store that allows direct linking through to the product pages. You don’t want to be wasting clicks on users who can’t locate the damn page they were interested in.

Person C – The dreamer. Have you seen the commissions on those “Name a Star”, “Give Your Sweetheart an Acre of the Moon” certification packs? If you’re Finch, you’re targeting these as a matter of routine – Valentines Day or no Valentines Day – because they’re such an untapped market (and probably won’t be for much longer after this post). Well, there are many guys and girls who absolutely love these dreamy smeghead tokens of love. Competition is low, targeting is extremely easy, and the commission is generally very good because the products are such an absolute waste of money in the first place.

“Here you go, darling. I bought you a portion of the moon from the International Space Acai Center. It’s just a piece of paper and a bunch of coordinates. But I’m such a dreamboat. Blowjob?”

I guarantee she’ll be impressed at your sheer bollocks for making such a lovesick puppy gesture.

Person D – The sympathizer. Oh come on, we’ve all felt the embarrassing attention of the Valentines Day Sympathizer. This is the eccentric motherfucker who doesn’t have a girlfriend, but still wants to celebrate the big day. Imagine your granny leaving a giant red envelope at your work station. Eager eyes watch as you tear in to the card only to see that – shit – it’s from your own kin. The entire office cackles at your sympathetic “It’s okay, really, somebody loves ya Jonny” card while you nonchalantly try to explain that you’ve had a new postbox fitted back home to deal with the excess mail.

The Valentines Day Sympathizer doesn’t necessarily want to spend money. But he or she WILL spend time browsing the eternally familiar Valentines Day e-cards and electronic gifts. It’s actually surprisingly lucrative to tap in to this “novelty” end of the market. You want to be targeting social media whores who already have a thousand applications added on Facebook. I’m pretty sure Farmville would do the trick.

Anyway, that’s a brief rundown of some different approaches you can take to milking the fat ass Valentines Day cow. I hope everybody gets what they wanted. If you’re a guy, that basically translates to have a good shag and don’t wind up in the spare bedroom.

Oh and I should also point out that if Valentines Day fails to tickle your interest, all is not lost. March 14th is International Steak & Blowjob Day. I’m pretty sure Tesco has an affiliate program. Sign up and get some links on the sirloins.

Affiliates Have No Ethics? PEOPLE Have No Ethics

As we exit 2009 and enter a new decade, I thought I’d get all deep and philosophical about the universe. Or at least, the part of it revolving around affiliate marketing.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of this year, it’s that people – consumers – have the tendency to be unspeakably stupid. There are no bounds or limits to the shit that people will buy if you put it in front of them.

And more importantly, I’ve learned that there’s no limit to the shit that we – as marketers – will try to sell.

If ever there was an offer that summed up the scandalous nature of this industry, it’s coming right at you.

When I logged in to Copeac this morning and saw this page, I didn’t really know whether to laugh or cry. It sums up why we are the pimple on the arse of online marketing. Why no blushing or moral dignity will get in the way of a $32 conversion.

First of all, if you ARE a lonely cheating wife – why in God’s name would you be so resoundingly stupid to sign up on a dating website that markets you as a cheating hussy with a cock fetish?

Secondly, I wouldn’t want to be that smiling model on the homepage. I hope she got a big fee.

And thirdly, how many affiliates are actually that short on moral fiber that they’ll take an offer like this and promote it to married men?

I don’t feel particularly comfortable pushing a dating site that encourages guys to register on the off chance that they’ll get to skirmish with some poor fucker’s scheming missus. There are some lines drawn in the sand that you would truly have to be a money-driven soulless asshole to cross. And no, I’m not trying to sell the industry down the river (Dennis Yu already sold it), because we’re all as bad as each other.

I look at the page and think to myself…

This is simply matchmaking for like-minded individuals. You have guys who are so shallow that they’d make an effort to hunt down a taken woman for sex. And then you’ve got the wives who are clearly so dutty that they’ll become members on a niche dating site where they’re pursued like fetish ornaments with legs on.

So yes, if 2009 has taught me anything, it’s that you should leave your expectations of human nature at the door when dealing with online marketing. The world is full of retards, vanity and international retards.

Seeing how this will be the last post of the decade (I bet you were hoping I’d say that 9 years ago), I’d like to thank readers for actually taking the time out of their day to read my stuff. This blog has grown from non-existence at the start of 2009, to becoming, if I’m not mistaken, hot fucking shit.

In all seriousness, I’m pretty surprised at how things have gone.

Stick around for 2010. I would like to monetize you all eventually I’ve got some other stuff to say.

Happy New Year, stay safe, get trashed.

But obviously not so trashed that moving billboards make you sick.

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.

The Challenges Of Full Time Affiliate Marketing

Here comes another entry to my Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle series. Or as PPC.bz’s barman so elegantly put it:

“Dear Diary,

BAaaaaAAAaaaaaAaaaaahhhh!”

I would save myself from the reputation as the emo voice of affiliate marketing, but I think this is something that doesn’t really get spoken about enough. The number of part time affiliates far outweighs the number of us monkey riding this industry for a day job. I get the chance to speak to a lot of relatively new affiliates. Many have aspirations to jack in their 9-5’s and they want to know the best way to get there fast.

I find myself juggling between the advice of “fight for your dreams” and “you fucking retard, get back on the checkout desk, you’re gonna starve”.

I’ve said over and over again that a career in affiliate marketing is just that – a career. It’s not some casual job description you pin on your badge while sunbathing in the Caribbean. Your lifestyle will change completely in those first few months that you decide to go it alone.

Many affiliates forget that for whatever success they’ve been having with one hot shot campaign, it doesn’t come close to the guarantee of a monthly pay cheque. No matter how insignificant your work wages may seem in comparison, they are guaranteed.

When I first started making significant money with CPA marketing, you would find me sitting in coffee shops with a scrapbook. I’d sit there calculating how much cash I’d have earned by Month X and Month Y if I continued earning X ammount per day. This is the single most dangerous thing you can do as a part-time affiliate – especially if those numbers are pinned on a small handful of volatile campaigns.

You only have to look at the recent Google account bannings to see how a money spinning regime can collapse overnight. I’ve rattled on about diversifying for months now. If you’re serious about doing affiliate marketing full-time, you should be comfortable moving in to any niche and working with any traffic source.

People ask me how much money I think they should be making before they give up their day jobs. Firstly, how the fuck should I know? And secondly, basing your career decisions on current earnings is like deciding to climb K2 because you fancy a workout. You’re going to run in to the unexpected, you absolute psychopath.

I know this because I’ve made some pretty drastic decisons with my own career. I quit my day job having branched out in to only two traffic sources, and a handful of offers. By all accounts, I should be slapping myself with naive disgust right about now. I’m not because I had the initiative to learn quickly when I saw the danger signs.

If you’re going to move in to this industry full-time, here are the immediate challenges you face.

Managing your time – What is the point in going full-time if you’re simply going to wake up at 11am and watch your stats all day? You should have just stayed in the day job and enjoyed your temporary riches with the security of a guaranteed pay cheque to underline it. Hell, if you’re doing that, you CAN afford to splash out on the luxuries in life.

This is a challenge for affiliates both experienced and new. Assuming you saw your success as a part-time affiliate, you’ve probably become accustomed to the idea of seeing a return on a few hours of work. It’s not so easy to motivate yourself when you know that riches are such a beautiful sight to watch when they’re flowing like gold from a tap. Unfortunately, for all of the three hours it took you to setup that initial jackpot campaign – you could spend the rest of your lifetime trying to find the next one.

If you expect to be able to turn on profit like a tap, you’re digging your own grave.

Instead of being entranced by the money I saw beginning to flow when I first hit success, I chose to remember the many hours and desperate times where shit hadn’t gone to plan. As hard as it may be, you have to turn your back on the allure of whatever riches you’re earning and get back to work. Otherwise when the tap runs out, you’re back to square one.

Social sacrifice – Do you really understand the true involvement of running your own business? If you’re managing your time correctly, you are going to be busy. If you don’t feel that you’re busy, you’re probably not doing enough to stay ahead of the pack.

Nothing prepared me for the personal burden of becoming entirely responsible for my own finances. I used to be socializing at every opportunity. Down the pub on Monday, drunk in a club on Tuesday and travelling out of town by Friday.

These days, a night out rarely passes me by where business is not somewhere close to the forefront of my thoughts. Some would see that as a prison. I’m passionate about what I do though and working has always been an enjoyable experience.

Whatever social gain you think you’re going to find by quitting your day job, rest assured that it will be neutralized by the sheer weight of responsibility that comes with slinging shit full-time.

Staying positive through hardships – I’ll be the first to admit that when I worked for other companies, I was never shy of a bitch or moan. If something went wrong that I was personally accountable for, I could play pin the blame and deflect attention from my own failures.

The biggest challenge for me over this last year has been embracing a new attitude. You simply have to be prepared to smile at the shit that gets thrown in your face. It happens every day. Every morning I open my email and instead of forwarding various tasks to my colleagues like I used to, I add them to my own to-do list. There are constant tests of your character. It may be an email that your Adwords account has been suspended, that an offer has been pulled, that your server was down for a few hours last night.

You can’t nonchallently forward these issues on to your boss. You ARE your boss. And your pay cheque will be the one taking the hit if you don’t stay on top of them.

There have been nights in recent memory where I’ve been sat at my desk, eyes aching, wondering just how I can turn a campaign around or get back on track. A part time affiliate would probably think “eh, was good while it lasted”, and that’s exactly where you have to stay strong. The industry is so volatile that if you stick to what you know you do well, it won’t be long before you see a return on it. Just be prepared to lose money and take a battering to your confidence in the process. It can be a lonely struggle.

I’ve already written several posts about how you should be investing for the future. It’s the single most important thing you can be doing to alleviate some of the stress. Short term fast burning affiliate campaigns are a recipe for long term unrest if you’re not moving methodically towards a more sustainable business.

Dating CPA vs. Dating CPS

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that dating offers are hot shit in affiliate marketing.

The dating niche is one of the few markets that we can all trust to still be here in a few years time. There will forever be a demand for matchmaking websites. Some dude will always be looking to improve his sorry excuse of a love life from the comfort of his stained bed sheets. And even if Facebook takes over the world, we’ll still have Zoosk. So you better get used to “Want A Girlfriend? It’s FREE!”.

Dating has become such an integral cornerstone of CPA marketing that we sometimes forget to test new business models. If you’re one of the guys who combs a network for the first $5 free profile submission going, you’re probably missing out on some ripe marketing opportunities.

Most affiliates assume that the CPA model will always pay better than a CPS offer. Is that the case? Well, have you tried it for yourself? Then you probably should. For all the expert advice of split testing ad copies, it seems pretty ridiculous that an affiliate could forget to split test lead/sale.

It was only recently that I took a few hours out of my day to do a little market research. I stumbled across a UK based dating network called EasyDate.

Two offers that I regularly see flouted on Facebook – Be Naughty and Date The UK – are both listed on EasyDate. The only difference is that the street payout for both is a whooping £4.50. For the trans-atlantic amongst us, that’s approximately $7.50/lead.

I’ve scoured most networks for these offers and the street payout is normally between $5-$5.50. Even with a bump you’re not going to get close to $7.50/lead. So what’s the catch?

The quality of your traffic, my friend. EasyDate is a performance based network, which is enough to send the alarm bells ringing for the majority of dating affiliates – myself included.

What the flashy screencap above demonstrates is the margin that the advertiser is looking to deal with in terms of leads to sales.

To receive the maximum lead payout of £4.50, you need to be averaging 15% for your lead-sale conversion rate. Even if you have no burning desire to test this, it makes for pretty interesting reading. On most CPA affiliate networks, we never get to see the invisible “quality score” that tells an advertiser whether our traffic is converting. But if you’ve ever had an email stating that you need to improve the quality of your traffic, this is why. Your leads aren’t backing out in the sales department.

Most affiliates will look at the chart above and think, “Damn, I’ll carry on sending my junk traffic ’til I’m kicked off the offer, cheers for coming”. That’s fair enough. It gets a bit more interesting when you look at the CPS program though.

£25 for a sale? That’s $45 for a dating subscription, no scratchy payout by anybody’s standards.

The downside to promoting a sale based offer is the lack of visible progress unless you start converting. There’s little way of knowing if your traffic is producing a lead or simply closing the window to head elsewhere. You could be making $40 for leads that never subscribed to the full program – instead of $0 for zero sales. But you’ll never know if you’re only being paid by the sale.

This got me thinking. Well, what if I could continue to send my traffic to a lead-based offer, and somehow seperate the premium converting traffic and funnel it through to the £25 payout instead?

If you could just know in advance which leads are most likely to become sales, you could filter them from the trail and send them to the CPS link. Besides collecting your usual payouts for the leads, you’d receive the occasional £25 sale. It has the potential to blast your ROI to much higher ground. We already know that the advertiser is happy to give you the maximum payout if you can hang on at a 15% lead-to-sale ratio. This tells us a little about the expected conversion rates – particularly when we look at the payouts a network will offer.

The problem is seperating that traffic and picking out the users who are obviously willing to spend for a shag. To do this, you need to understand the true essence of delivering quality leads. You need to understand which segment of the market are buyers, and which are merely tryers. In dating terms, you need to seperate the desperate from the really desperate.

I’d also like to point out that I’m not suggesting you hijack your own quality score by sending the best leads to Offer X and sabotaging Offer Y with junk traffic.

It simply makes sense that if you have somebody reaching your landing page by the search term “cheapest dating site”, you’re looking at a potential sale. Why send them through the lead offer when you could do a little PHP link switching and funnel them to the CPS offer instead? Sure, you will lose some leads. But it makes a lot more sense than setting up a CPS campaign and then sending a bunch of clicks from “free” infested search terms.

It’s much easier to implement this form of traffic control when you’re promoting via PPC. If you have access to the search term, you can make a sensible guess at whether the user is a buyer or a tryer. The presence of “free” in the search term should be an immediate trigger to send them to the CPA offer. In fact, you shouldn’t even be using “free” in your ad copies. That’s going to fuck up your quality score regardless of anything else.

Beyond simply analyzing the search terms, I can think of one or two methods of filtering potential buyers by simply getting cheeky with your landing page. You could even resort to having two links on the same page if you’re clever about it.

Whatever you choose to do, moving in to Dating CPS offers is always going to be a gamble. I’d recommend getting in touch with your affiliate manager. You know those emails you get sent every now and then about low quality traffic? It works in reverse. Get your AM to ask the advertiser how your traffic is performing. If they’re happy with the ratios, it’s a good sign that you could be lining your pockets with some extra money by opening the floodgates on a little CPS.

If you know that you have quality traffic, you’re selling yourself short on those $4.50 payouts.

I highly recommend you head on over to EasyDate if you’re working in the UK dating market. They have pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, and a hybrid model where you get paid for both. Maybe your best option is to stick with what’s already working. It doesn’t make sense to ignore what’s out there though. Go figure it out for yourself.

How Does An Affiliate Marketer Get Out Of Bed?

How many affiliate marketers hit the snooze button in the morning? It’s easy to go back to sleep when you’re not gonna have your balls ripped off for no-showing the 9am office start, right?

Motivation is a rare commodity that comes and goes. You can be rolling in money and still feel the need to work that extra campaign with just one more split test before you call it a night. Likewise, you can be struggling badly and for some reason still find it impossible to break the pattern of procrastination.

Finding the necessary motivation to keep pushing forward is something that can’t be taught, and yet needs to be found. One of my friends asked me the other day why I was so hesitant to give myself a night off, and to be fair, it was a pretty logical question. One night off isn’t going to break a business. Unfortunately I’ve trained myself in to such a hyperactive mindset that even a night off is riddled with subconscious brainstorming for tomorrow morning’s project. I instinctively check my phone for new emails even though I know I can’t reply to them (my phone is a piece of shit).

I recently tweeted that anybody who works as an affiliate marketer for more than 10 years is a wild savage beast who needs to be put down. Judging by the responses, I’m not the only one who’s felt that strain.

Since September, my mind has gone to another place. When I broke up with my ex-girlfriend, I lost a lot of the immediate strength that was holding me together through a difficult time. We’ve exchanged about two text messages in the time that we’ve been apart and there’s a gaping hole in my life where something so sure used to be. I’ve seen my attitude towards work take on a completely different life of its own.

Here’s a true story. I didn’t give up my day job because I was ready for the challenge. I gave it up because I was in a distance relationship and I felt that the best way to make it work was to give myself the freedom of self-employment. How naive does that sound? I pretty much took the plunge in to full time affiliate marketing for reasons totally unrelated to work. Money has never been, and will never be, my motivation.

When that relationship disintegrated – very suddenly – in the space of 24 hours, I found myself staring in to the abyss somewhat. Work had taken a stranglehold over my life, friends had become mere faces, and I felt as if I was drifting out to sea on a raft I couldn’t steer.

I’ve always been very honest about my aspirations. I don’t love affiliate marketing. I’m passionate about running my own business but you won’t see me on Twitter swooning over how many dollars I’ve stacked or how many zeros are on my next pay cheque. Towering riches mean very little to me.

So where does the motivation come from for affiliate marketing? We all have to feel a sense of achievement to be successful in this business without growing depressed. A musician enjoys the thrill of producing art, an actor has the pride of re-watching a movie he’s starred in, a fireman has the joy of saving a life. What the fuck does an affiliate marketer have to justify the love for his profession?

I enjoy what I do, but I don’t love it. If there’s anything I love about my job, it’s the lifestyle that it’s supposed to afford me. And even then, I work longer hours than every single one of my friends. So isn’t that just a fantasy? I could be earning less money and living in more comfort. A slave to the system, maybe, but sleeping at night.

I think the ultimate motivation is the final destination in your head.

When I get out of bed every morning, I look at my to-do list and it reads like a fist up the arse.

Every affiliate marketer has a unique image for what being successful entails. My motivation used to be to break free of a 9-5 job that dictated how I would live my life. I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend, having already promised her that I’d find a way to make an awkward relationship work. I’m not for divulging my private life any more than I already have, but needless to say, I failed.

It was quite surreal how it all happened. I posted this outburst, took a couple of days away, and then went back to work with a completely different mindset. I realized that I was being a weak little bitch and that the only way I could possibly move forward was to set a new goal.

My goal was to work so hard that my original decision to quit my job wouldn’t have been in vain. I’ve said a number of times that affiliate marketing is an extremely lonely business when you’re doing it from home. I’m sure I have readers who open up their RSS at work and wish they could be sitting on the sofa with a laptop and a beer in one hand. But when that novelty wears off, reality sets in. The magnitude of responsibility weighs down and you realize that it’s time to sink or swim.

The shock of a broken down relationship was enough to get the sirens ringing in my head. I felt how vulnerable I’d allowed my life to become and I wanted to achieve something that was mine, and only mine. I’ve seen friends stumble out of university with less direction than they entered with. I’ve seen close family chained to the daily grinds of life in jobs they hate.

If ever I needed motivation for affiliate marketing, it’s that I can escape those realities. This is a unique industry where YOU are the master of your own destiny. Success is a question of how good at your job you’re determined to become. I’m not going to preach some guru bullshit that you can be earning $XX,XXX in 30 days. Hard work is the vital ingredient of every affiliate who’s ever made it and stayed made.

I’ve made up my mind recently that I want to move to America and face the challenge of setting up a business abroad. Coming from a sleepy town where nothing much happens, those are some tough targets to achieve. My motivation is that I want to break free of everything I’ve known so far. I don’t want to settle for the 14 hour working days or the very short sleepless nights.

One of those popular inspiration tips you hear mentioned is to surround yourself with visions of your future. Pin shit on the wall, change your desktop to a tropical island, remember to smile in the mirror four times a day. Whatever.

I work in the opposite way. On my wall, you’ll find pinned a collection of memories and photos that bring back pain and regret. I’m not a sadist, but for me personally, pain is a greater motivation than some nice sunset wallpaper which has an emotional attachment of precisely jackshit in my heart.

Having to stare at some of the biggest regrets of my life is the only way I know to move forward and work hard enough to slowly erase them from my mind. If I ever find my attention lapsing during the day, or my mind wandering, I focus hard on those memories and use them to kick on. It’s easy to find a reason to put in that extra hour if it takes you one step closer to escaping the skeletons in your own god damn closet.

Landing Pages And The Urgency Of Time

Landing Pages and The Urgency of Time?

This sounds like some kind of fucked up marketing ebook slash Harry Potter novel hybrid. But rest assured it’s not. It’s just the first title that came to my head. And seeing how I’ve been writing a “Beginners Guide” ebook for most of the weekend, I thought I’d go all J.K Rowling on the world.

If you’re new to CPA marketing:

1. Why are you reading this blog?
2. Will you buy my ebook?

It’ll be out in early December and it’ll teach you absolutely everything you need to know to start turning a profit in CPA marketing. Well actually, it won’t. But I’m not gonna tell you that when I’m actually selling it. Expect a Warrior Forum sized circle jerk of paid testimonials, artificial coupon price reductions and quite possibly Finch on his hands and knees. PLEASE YOU MOTHERFUCKING RETARD JUST BUY MY GOD DAMN BOOK THERE’S ONLY 47 RETARDS LEFT TO SELL IT TO.

Anyway, I got some positive feedback from the last post. Seems like there’s a demand for more landing page tips, so I’m going to address a technique that will nearly always increase your conversion rates.

It’s all about how to fuck a customer’s mind in to believing that there’s no better time than now for busting out the plastic and adding a swish $35 to your stats.

And I’ve pretty much just given the game away right there. It’s all about creating a sense of urgency in time.

Have you ever read a bunch of offer descriptions claiming that Product X has been “optimized, tried, tested, passed around, fobbed off and maximized” for the best conversion rates? What this basically means is that some dude took a look at their design and added a few calls-to-action that practically scream out to the user to order now or forever hold your peace. If you’ve engaged in some serious split testing in the past, you’ll be aware that one of the ultimate factors between success and failure is a sense of urgency in the consumer’s mind.

If you’ve got your eyes open, you should be seeing examples like this all the time:

How often do you see these rush-to-action techniques slapped on to merchant pages? It happens all the time with rebills. It works because the users are normally too dumb to think twice about challenging the deceitfulness of a JavaScript ticker. I’m not complaining, because that’s the way we like it.

So if we can accept that creating an urgency of time is key to increasing final conversion rates, why do so few marketers implement the same techniques to increase their clickthrough rates? This is a question that has always confused me.

Practically every variety of banner, text ad or Facebook flier I use is underlined by some kind of urgency to act now. Particularly when you step in to the realms of PPV and “interruption marketing”, it becomes even more important to stress the need to click and click now. Click now or you’ll miss out.

One of my favourite marketing techniques (but obviously not so precious to me that I’m going to keep it secret) is the 24 hour window sell. You might wonder what the hell that is, and rightly so, because I made the term up just then. But what I’m referring to is a landing page that was created “today” and will become redundant “tomorrow”.

Through the power of PHP, it’s really quite easy to add some dynamic controls to your page that edit the dates and create a realistic aura of “hot off the press”. I’m sure many affiliates are using this already to alter aspects of their landing pages. I’ve seen examples varying from the dates of comments, to the date of a post being published. But you’re really going to start to see the benefits if the date becomes an integral piece of your actual story.

I’m not going to out my own methods of doing that because it’s quite custom. But it’s all about creating relevance and urgency in one hit. If you can pair this up with a geographical scripting element, you should be golden for some mean looking conversion rates.

While basic PHP hacks are effective, you really need to be looking a little deeper in to your marketing efforts to see how time can be leveraged in other positive ways.

Taking a dieting product as an example, how could we build an urgency of time? How can we make Product X scream in the consumer’s face that it needs to be snapped up now? For dieting, it depends on the season.

Given how it’s nearly fucking Christmas already, you could try something like this:

“The acai berry is the world’s most in-demand superfood. But as we approach the new year, thousands of Americans will be looking to lose weight as part of their new years resolutions. Unfortunately we have to raise our prices during the peak season time. That means, you only have until [PHP SCRIPT INSERT] to start our revolutionary diet for a bargain $X.XX”

“You’ll still be able to buy Product X after that time. But unfortunately we can only sell it at the peak season price of [How cruel are you?]. This is still a fantastic deal for the body you’ve always dreamed of having, right? If you want to take advantage of our limited free supply, you must act now.”

“Save $XX.XX By Ordering Today! ACT NOW”

This is just another example, following on from the last post, of how you can turn a negative (the cost) in to a positive (what the customer is saving).

It’s also completely unverified considering 1) I don’t promote acai, and 2) I write this shit in about 20 minutes. But what I do know for sure is that time has, and continues to be, one of the biggest defining factors in whether I make a sale or not.

It’s worth taking a look at how your pages could be given the dynamic spark that brings them to life. Get creative in how you build an urgency to the consumer. There are so many innovative ways of doing so, and they don’t only have to be restricted to a landing page. Your banners, Facebook ads, sponsored search listings…they’re all fair game for a little mindfuck time-to-act-now makeover.

PS. If you’re new and don’t understand what just happened, buy my ebook in December. It’ll stimulate your mind AND offend you in one cool hit. A bit like a donkey punch, but with marketing attached.

Does Your Landing Page Need A Language Makeover?

This is a break away from the techniques that I normally write about. But in my mind, it’s probably one of the most important skills you can master in affiliate marketing. For all of the praise that top marketers get for their understanding of various demographics, not much attention is paid to the language that’s used to communicate with those demographics.

Every other day I get guys hitting me up with examples of landing pages they’ve put together. They normally ask me “do you think it will convert?”, “do you think I’m promoting to the right audience?”. More often than not the answer is a resounding and unfortunate no. It seems that a lot of affiliates – talented or otherwise – have trouble relaying to the user exactly why they should be persuaded to part with their credit cards.

You’ll find that the best converting landing pages generally excel when it comes to communicating on the correct level with their targeted demographics. And much of that communication boils down to good old fashioned persuasive writing. Writing with your market in mind.

Too many affiliates sell the features of a product instead of the benefits. It’s a classic mistake. I guarantee if you go back now and look at every landing page you’ve ever published, you’ll see glaring examples of the feature-sell that you missed at the time. We all fall victim to this, particularly those who churn out an obscene number of campaigns in the hope that something will stick. Understanding your market is key. You have to get aggressive and really attack the reader’s channel of thought.

As an example, here’s a snippet from an Acai flog I stumbled across the other day. This was supposed to be the “hard sell”. The slap in the face that gets Average Joe American to whip out his credit card in the hope of a looser waistband.

- No other fruit packs as many healthy vitamins, nutrients and antioxidants!
- The Acai Berry is only grown in the Amazons, which means our supplies are limited
- 1500mg per serving of 100% pure Acai Berry (it’s not filled with other useless chemicals)
- Eliminates harmful toxins in days!
- Free trial, only pay $2.95 for shipping

My problem with copy like this is simple. Why should I give a shit? Here is what your target market is thinking as he/she reads the key points.

- No other fruit packs as many healthy vitamins, nutrients and antioxidants!
Really? What’s an antioxidant? I don’t want a science lesson.

- The Acai Berry is only grown in the Amazons, which means our supplies are limited
I don’t give a shit about your supplies and I don’t give a shit about the Amazon rainforest. I care about my stretch marks.

- 1500mg per serving of 100% pure Acai Berry (it’s not filled with other useless chemicals)
What will 1500mg per serving do for me? Will it get me high? Will it clean my balls? Will it give me cancer?

- Eliminates harmful toxins in days!
Okay, cool I guess. I’ll remember not to take the damn thing in a gas chamber.

- Free trial, only pay $2.95 for shipping
Great. Sounds good value. Shame I won’t be buying it because I want something simple that miraculously cures my fat ass.

I’m not suggesting you start fabricating product benefits. But if you write your landing pages without the specific benefits of the product highlighted, you’re going to lose interest. It’s a classic case of an affiliate letting the product sell itself. You can get away with that for super high demand offers – but with a credit card submit on a skeptical consumer, you need to seal the deal. Here’s a simple modification to the copy above that makes it relevant.

- Full of healthy vitamins and nutrients that spur on healthy weight loss. Live a healthier life.
- Only in the Amazon. The Acai Berry is in extreme demand as the world’s number one weight loss superfood. Get it before it’s gone.
- 100% pure Acai. Don’t buy a weaker blend. Achieve maximum weight loss and boost your energy levels with the real deal.
- Start feeling the effects of a healthier body as our supplement flushes harmful toxins in DAYS.
- Want to feel better about yourself? Start shedding pounds today with the Acai Berry Diet for just $2.95 shipping

Each feature of the product is used to promote a benefit for the consumer. Now I’ve literally just translated this on the fly so don’t go jacking it in to your landing pages and then come running to me if it doesn’t convert. It’s the principle that you should be remembering. A good landing page will resonate a solution to a problem that the user has. If they don’t feel the explicit need to go out and purchase, they won’t. It’s up to you to sell that need.

I write my own content for most landing pages that I publish. I know a lot of guys choose to outsource – which I’ve done before – but I like to keep a close hold over the style of writing. Persuasive writing is something that I’ve always been strong at, even if I spent most of my English lessons through school sleeping or reading the paper. It’s a skill in itself. I don’t honestly expect all affiliate marketers to be good enough to handle the writing aspect of a good landing page. But what you definitely can do is narrow down the features and benefits of a given product. And you should be doing this before you even hit the Go button on your Wordpress auto-install.

Draw up a checklist of the key product features. You should be able to jack the key points straight of the merchant page. Write them down and start brainstorming what sort of benefits each feature is going to provide. I like to do this before I choose my demographics to target. Primarily because it’s so easy to be ruled by the tide. Remember when 95% of Acai offers were targeted to females? Yeah, I wonder which bright spark decided that the key features of the acai offer could be just as easily translated to benefits for the male demographic…

Once I have my list of benefits, I like to turn in to a cynical piece of shit (some would say that’s what I always am), and begin to question them with possible consumer doubts.

The best landing pages don’t settle for simply describing the benefits of a product. They mercilessly stamp out the doubts and stumbling blocks that would prevent you from signing up.

My favourite way to do this in language form is to ask questions, and lots of them.

I can’t remember who said it, but it’s definitely true. The more times you can get a user to answer “YES!” to a question, the more likely it is that they’re going to say yes when it really matters.

Price is a regular doubt in the consumer’s mind. So I like to combat their doubts with questions that they can only really answer yes to.

For example:

“Wouldn’t you love to lose XXX pounds if you only had to pay $2.95 shipping? And with the option to cancel your free trial at any time?”

“Are you willing to pay just $2.95 shipping to try the weight loss superfood that could change your body and your life for the better? Can you afford $2.95 for the body you’ve always dreamed of having?”

It works because you’re tactically dealing with the consumer’s subconscious negative desire to shoot holes in your product, and forcing them to answer with a positive response. You can use positive language and positive questioning to very quickly break down the barriers that would have your target otherwise finding a reason not to buy. Price is very easy to address in the CPA world. Other issues are more challenging.

Writing to persuade is one of the great and rarely mentioned talents of top CPA marketers. If you’ve got it, you can sell in any environment. If you don’t have it, you should be looking to outsource to somebody who does.

Qualifying Your Traffic Will Save You Money, Fool

One of the biggest mistakes I see from newbie affiliates is the desire to run before they can walk. The difference between success and failure is rarely a stroke of luck. It normally has much more to do with understanding your market and reaching it effectively. So today I was hoping to chat some shit about qualifying traffic for the offers you’re promoting. It’s rarely as simple as it sounds.

By qualifying traffic, I’m talking about getting the most out of your paid advertisements. In your head you know the type of people who you want to direct to your page, right? But are you getting your message to them without massively overspending?

The difference between breaking even and 100% ROI can often be as simple as cutting out the crap. Just like the difference between slim and fat can often be cutting down on the calories you shovel down your cakehole every evening. And instead of going out to buy some berries, you should probably first look in the mirror and ask what you could be doing more effectively. Same concept for scaling a PPC campaign (err…I think…somewhere in there). If you want to increase your profit margins, you should weed out the bad traffic before you go hunting for more.

If you don’t qualify your traffic, you are quite literally engaging in the very unsophisticated art of throwing shit at a wall and hoping something – anything – sticks.

Too many affiliates think of sailing the ocean before they’ve explored the depths of their own ponds. They cast the net wide and try to capture every last stream of traffic. Presumably because this is what the “super affiliates” are doing to harness big volume and big earnings. Well fuck what the super affiliates are doing. You should start worrying about your profitability before you start dreaming of your palaces.

Right from the very first planning stages of any affiliate marketing campaign, you should be considering these key points:

1. How can I drive targeted, relevant and interested traffic to this offer?

2. How can I make sure that I’m not paying for clicks, page views and impressions that are never going to convert?

3. How can I ensure that the CTR from advertisement-to-LP is just as healthy as the CTR from LP-to-offer?

You wouldn’t believe how many campaigns I’ve created that have failed under the scrutiny of that third point. It’s very easy to get a strong CTR to a landing page. You can make up any old bullshit if you know the demographics that you’re targeting. But if your creative is mustering a stench of false promise, you’re going to see a huge drop-off in clicks through to the offer.

Successful affiliates know how to create a sales funnel. They know how to grab an innocent Googler by the wrist, drag him kicking and screaming through a text ad, appeal to his needs with a relevant LP, and then finally seal the deal by convincing him that he genuinely needs Product X.

The art of this process is understanding your traffic. You need to understand where those clicks are coming from, why the user has decided to click your ad, and what you can do to stop them from nailing the Back button.

If you are one of the many newbie idiots who moves in to a new niche, downloads a 15mb database of keywords, imports to Adwords and sets a default bid to $0.50 across the board – you are walking in to a complete unknown. You don’t truly know why your users are clicking your ads. How could you?

If you don’t know what your users are searching for, you can’t possibly design a landing page that slaps them in the face and says “it’s your lucky day, bitch, come on in”. No, you’re an Eric Generic affiliate – and considering most ordinary affiliates despise the sheer thought of losing money, this is a great way to create 1000 campaigns, lose money on all of them, and etch yourself the certainty that affiliate marketing doesn’t work.

I know there are many affiliates out there who can afford to unleash a new campaign, lose a thousand dollars, optimize and eventually see a profit. But most new affiliates are too piss poor from their day jobs to afford such luxuries. That’s why you’re following the dream, right?

So start small.

Let’s take colon cleansing as an example, if only because I’ve got it on my mind after the chilli I had for dinner.

So you’ve designed your beautiful flog to scam the living christ out of every last poor American with a weight problem. You sit there staring at your masterpiece and thinking “Damn, how could anybody NOT want their colon cleansed?” I mean, just look at the before and after pics, right?

The newbie affiliate will then assume that his hard work is done. The hard sell is there. He just needs to get people on the page, right?

So he’ll load up Adwords, create maybe 4 ad groups, empty entire categories of suggested keywords in to each and hit the Activate button. At this point he probably minimizes his window, posts some advice on the Warrior Forum, and waits for the clicks to roll in. Which they do.

He checks his stats (probably every 7 minutes), and notices – firstly – that not many of those visitors are clicking through to his Pure Cleanse Kit V909.

Secondly he notices that those who are clicking through to the offer…aren’t actually signing up their free trial. How inconsiderate of them, I know.

A few hours pass and Google Adwords swallows the equivalent of this poor mope’s subscription to PPC Coach. He pauses the campaign and moves on to the next niche.

Of course, if you were to look through his stats, you’d probably find active keywords like this:

“cleanse my colon”
“clean my car”
“free colon kit none of that rebill shit”
“professional colon treatment in texas”
“lose weight with colon”
“put on weight with colon”

I’m exaggerating, but the point I’m trying to make is that each of those keywords expresses a different need. A different want. A different desire.

It doesn’t matter how well suited your landing page is to your target market…if you’re not finding that target market. What is actually a very easy problem to correct for the experienced affiliate becomes a campaign breaker for Average Joe. He assumes that because he’s tried every last keyword in the colon niche, there can’t possibly be any profit there for him.

If you’re new and inexperienced, I can’t even begin to stress the importance of testing with the lowest number of factors to consider. Troubleshooting is a lot easier when you have less data to work with.

Start with small ad groups that are direct matches for the content of your landing page. Worry about scaling in to general and broad terms when you’re making profit. I know a lot of guys will say that their best success has come when they tested a few thousand keywords and filtered out the crap. Well…nice. But I’m speaking to the affiliate mindset that’s still paralyzed with fear over the idea of losing money. And it’s all a learning process. If you scale upwards slowly, research your niche well, and target separate content to separate audiences, you’ll find that you lose a lot less money on clicks that were never going to convert in a million years.

Another classic example of qualifying your traffic comes from working with CPS offers. If you’re promoting something that requires the target to part with his credit card and pay a hefty sum – you damn sure better mention it in your ad text.

Your CTR will naturally take a nosedive if you start mentioning that Product X costs $74.95 plus shipping. That’s because most people surfing the Internet are not in a buying mindset. You can decide not to mention the price, have them click your ad, and smile at your lack of conversions. But that’s pretty stupid, don’t you think?

The CTR from LP-to-offer is just as important. There is absolutely no gain in having somebody click your ad on Google if they never even had $75 in their bank account to begin with. Bust out your most appealing ad text but do yourself a favour and mention the catch. If you’re paying by the click, you don’t want to waste a windfall on unqualified traffic.

To advertise something like dating with PPC, particularly if you’ve chosen an offer where your payout is only confirmed for a specific market (say 30-40 males) – it goes without saying that you should be dressing your ad text with incentives for that audience.

“Aged 30-40? Want A Girlfriend?”
“We’re Offering A Free Pass This Weekend”
“Chat To A Girl Near You Tonight…”
“DatingSite.com/30sTo40s-Only”

You’ve qualified your traffic in several ways. You’ve narrowed down the field to only 30 to 40 year olds. And you’ve mentioned the search for a girlfriend. In theory you should be attracting males in the right age plan. You shouldn’t be wasting too much money on clicks that can’t bring you conversions. Either that or you’ll attract a bunch of keen bean lesbians. And if that’s the case, opt them in to an email list and forward that shit to me.

At the same time, it’s very easy to play some neat mindfuck tricks on your target audience to get them to click ad texts that they otherwise would have ignored. I’m a believer that if you can get the user to say “yes” to several questions, they’re more likely to say yes when it matters.

There are many other examples. You really should be making use of negative targeting to filter out the crap traffic that isn’t suitable for your offer. I normally make sure that any search query with “free” doesn’t get the slightest sniff of my sponsored ads. The same could be said for “torrent”, “download” and a few others. Your negative terms will vary according to the offer.

I’ve been talking a lot about PPC here. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what form of advertising you’re currently using. There are many ways to qualify traffic and avoid wasting money. The super affiliates might be happy to burn through their wallets for quick success. But you have to earn the right to enjoy that freedom. So you better start from the ground up and get to know your target markets.

If you’re wondering why you always fail, it’s probably because your sales funnel is trying to please too many people. Make everybody who visits your landing page feel as if it’s been designed just for them and you will start to see a lot more success.