Now get your naughty affiliate minds out of the gutter! What I mean is that you need to learn how to communicate with your affiliate manager and not get screwed. See, contrary to popular belief, affiliate managers don’t always have your best interest at heart.

How many times has an affiliate manager told you affiliates were just killing it on an offer? How many times has an affiliate manager convinced you to run a campaign? Now, I’m not saying that affiliate managers never give good advice on campaigns to run…I’m just saying that sometimes an affiliate manager needs to get a lot of traffic/leads for a particular offer regardless of how well it is performing.

A lot of it has to do with the AM you get assigned. Like in any business there are competent and incompetent people working in the industry. A lot of it has to do with how well you get along with your AM. Some people click, and some don’t. If you don’t feel like you’re getting what you want from your AM, it’s reasonable to ask for another.

I want to compare what my best affiliate managers are like vs. the worst I have dealt with.

The best AM’s I have

• Stay in touch regularly without hounding me about offers/traffic, etc.
• Raise my payout on an offer before asking me to run it
• Get back to me promptly when I ask about something, even if its just to tell me they don’t have any news yet but they are looking into it.
• Share tips and strategies of what they have seen working (not giving away individual campaigns or anything like that)
• Fight to get leads credited for advertiser downtime, etc.

The worst AM’s I have dealt with;

• Call, email, or IM non stop about running offers or sending traffic.
• Don’t respond rapidly to issues. This is a huge deal if we are talking about getting a payment or something.
• Fight tooth and nail to not give me any kind of payout increase
• Send emails that look like they have hand picked an offer just for me when really, it’s just a blast to all their affiliates.
• Don’t tell me when an offer is going to be paused or taken down (I know sometimes they don’t always know)

Obviously, those are some of the best and worst examples, and many AM’s will fall somewhere in between. So the question is;  How do you get what you want from your affiliate manager without the BS?

Here are some tips for making the most of the relationship with your AM:

• Make friends with your AM. Don’t bug them all the time, but do try to make things a little more personal. Asking how their weekend was, something about their kids, etc. can go a long way to making it easier to share information in the relationship.
• Don’t be afraid to share your expectations with them. Say they didn’t let you know an offer was going down…a simple email saying ‘Hey, in the future I really need you to call me asap when that happens, because I am spending money sending traffic to this offer’. You might get a professional response that is acceptable or one that is defensive or antagonistic. In case of the latter, I would look for a new AM. There are some really good CPA networks and great affiliate managers out there. There isn’t much reason to do business with someone who doesn’t take your business as seriously as you do.

The relationship with your affiliate manager is very important. Try to keep a friendly, open line of communication, and you can build a relationship that will be very profitable for both of you!

Hope you enjoy these posts from some of the blogs I read

11 Lessons from Bruce Lee

Javascript & SEO = No?

Adwords Split Testing Tool

Newbie Entrepreneurs

Why self improvement courses suck

Money making myths

Bing vs. Google

Beginners guide to starting an online business

How to avoid becoming a workaholic

Free SEO tools

I am a big Chuck Palahniuk fan. Well, maybe not so much his last couple books but that’s a topic for another post on another blog. Many of you are familiar with the book or movie version of Fight Club. In the story, the narrator is basically working a dead end job, going through the motions of life until he meets Tyler Durden who is the exact opposite. Durden has no appreciation for ‘following the rules’ and basically does whatever he wants. I thought this was a good example of an alpha and beta male. But what is an alpha or beta affiliate?

An alpha affiliate has these characteristics:

• Develops their own unique strategies and techniques to build and test campaigns
• Asks for a pay increase on an offer and plays the networks against each other for highest payout
• Not afraid to go direct with advertisers
• Not afraid to test anything
• Uses their knowledge of real world testing when taking about affiliate marketing

A beta affiliate would look more like this:

• Uses strategies copied from a book or website to build campaigns
• Takes whatever payout the networks gives him
• Sticks with the CPA network
• Waits to hear what the latest hot trend is in all the forums and blogs before promoting it
• Uses their theoretical knowledge from something they have read when talking about affiliate marketing

The affiliates who are successful, or are going to be successful, are the ones who come up with their own system for doing things. They don’t blindly follow ‘the rules’, they make their own.

First, I want to talk about the term ‘free traffic’. No traffic is free, you are either going to pay for it with money, or time. For the purposes of this post, I am referring to ‘free’ traffic as traffic which you are not paying money for (PPV, PPC, etc). So what is free traffic anyway? You can get traffic without paying for it from a number of sources;

• SEO
• Twitter
• Facebook (not FB ads obviously)
• Youtube
• Article Marketing
• etc

Likewise you can get paid traffic from a  number of sources:

• PPC (Adwords, etc)
• PPV
• Facebook
• Plenty Of Fish
• Media Buys
• etc

What are the pros and cons of free traffic?

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a few ideas.

Pros

• It’s free. You don’t have to worry about ad spend, budget, etc.
• You feel better about leaving campaigns alone for a few days
• Traffic can continue to come for a long time after you stop working

Cons

• It can take a while to get a significant amount of traffic
• It’s often not as easy to scale
• If you are testing a new offer/niche you could spend a lot of time before discovering it was a dud

What are the pros and cons of paid traffic?

Pros

• You can get a lot of traffic very quickly
• You can test offers quickly to see if they will convert before spending too much time on them
• You can often be more targeted by bidding on terms/sites that you could not organically rank for

Cons

• You have to spend money to make money
• It’s easy to get limited by cash flow
• You often have to wait for payouts to run more traffic

Which is better?

Neither really. People have, and will continue to make a lot of money using both methods. There is really no good reason not to use both sources and get the best of both worlds though. I like testing offers with paid traffic because I can get data very quickly about the potential of an offer/niche. If a niche is converting well, then I will start doing some SEO, video marketing, etc to it. There really is no reason not to at that point. This way, I have traffic coming in whether I pay for it or not.

You also have to consider what your resources are. Paid traffic, in my opinion, is not the best for beginners to start with. It is also not a good idea if you have no extra cash to spend, are down to your last $100, or have a huge amount of debt you are trying to pay off. Some might not agree with that but I really think you need to have a solid foundation of marketing knowledge, and a decent amount of money for testing before you invest heavily in the paid traffic route.

I am still amazed at the number of people who are really struggling financially but won’t give free traffic a shot. With the right plan in place, you could fairly easily make $100k a year just through article marketing but most people just don’t want to sit and write articles all day. That’s fine, but sometimes you have to put in some grunt work so you can really succeed with paid traffic.

Networks are middlemen between the advertiser and affiliate. As a result, their goal is to get as much volume as possible. Often, this is at the expense of the advertiser, the affiliate, or both. I didn’t know a lot about this until I met people working on both sides and saw the big picture.  Now I see how they can afford the big parties.

CPA networks have ‘compliance’ departments. The stated goal of these departments is to keep affiliates in line with the networks rules, the FTC’s guidelines, and the advertisers rules or requests (no trademark bidding, etc). If you think about it, though, they really don’t have much incentive to monitor compliance all that closely.

Here’s an example:

An advertiser has a problem with the way an affiliate is promoting their offer.  They have bits and pieces to demonstrate that the affiliate wasn’t in full compliance, but the network claims it’s not enough to reverse the leads.  All the same, they remove the affiliate from the offer because they know the advertiser isn’t going to stand for it any longer.

Cut to a week or so later when the advertiser gets contacted directly by the very same affiliate. The affiliate is wondering why all his leads got charged back. The advertiser is confused and doesn’t remember this happening. It turns out the CPA network had charged back the leads but did not credit the advertiser back.  The network says it’s all BS, and that they had already paid the affiliate.  Who’s telling the truth here?

Now let’s talk about host and post. This cautionary tale is more for advertisers who put offers on CPA networks, but affiliates might be surprised to know how this works in some cases. A host and post offer means the affiliate or the network hosts the offer and collects the data that gets submitted (leads, etc.). The networks generally present this to advertisers as a way to do multi-variate split testing on the fly to maximize conversions.

This can be great, but what is the downside? Essentially, when the CPA network gets this data they can do whatever they want with it (unless explicitly stated otherwise by the advertiser in their agreement). So what do networks do with this data? They use it to promote offers of course! Some CPA networks run huge internal operations using this data. If you own a car insurance offer and allow the CPA network you use to host and post it, they can even use that data to fill out your competitor’s offers. Yep…your competitors can be getting the exact same leads as you.  I’m sure you can guess what this does to the value of the leads the advertiser has just paid for…and the payouts they can afford to give affiliates…

And what about fraudulent affiliates?  I know it’s not cool for affiliates to “out” other affiliates, but have you ever stopped to think about what shady affiliates are doing to your payouts?  I don’t mean the weekend floggers or guys who fill out a test lead whenever they’re at a free wifi hotspot – I’m talking about the massive 3rd-world networks that make purchases with stolen credit cards or auto-generate thousands of leads with fake data.  These guys are a major thorn in the side of advertisers, and the networks aren’t always doing everything in their power to stop it.

Take, for example, a case I recently heard about.  An offer was getting slammed with phony leads and they had documented evidence.  They passed it on to one network, and the network kicked the affiliate off the offer.  Sounds good, right?  On the contrary – an ethical network would have banned the affiliate and made the information available to the networks that run their offers under affiliate accounts there…this particular network did no such thing.  The affiliate was still totally free to run offers on the network – even the very same offer, once they found another network’s affiliate ID to run it through.  Nice to know the networks are doing their part to preserve value to the advertisers and keep the payouts high…

Keep in mind – these are limited cases.  Not every network is guilty of these sins, but they definitely do happen.

So who is really cashing in? Affiliates or guru’s?

Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of each.

Guru’s have the advantage of:

• Not babysitting campaigns all day long

Yep, when you have your own product there is less worrying about when a campaign or traffic source will dry up.

• Having a large pool of people who want to learn

There is and will always be a large number of people wanting to learn how to make money online.

• Not having to deal with annoying affiliate managers, networks that don’t pay, cash flow, offers getting pulled, campaign slaps, etc, etc.

Basically, a lot of the stuff CPA affiliates deal with all the time.

Sounds great right?

Here are some disadvantages:

• Getting bombarded with people who have a very unrealistic expectation

Ironically, this situation is actually in large part created by the guru’s who promote how ‘easy’ it is to make money through affiliate marketing. Now, a lot of guru’s do not answer personal email (which I think is a big mistake) but the ones that do, have to deal with a lot of people who really don’t have realistic expectations. Often it is much harder to get students to change their views on making money online than it is to actually teach them marketing.

• Having to hear about some unfortunate circumstances

Getting lot’s of email about children who are sick, relatives who are homeless, jobs that have been lost, savings that is down to their last $200 and wanting to know if you can help them make a small profit. Often these aren’t dumb people by any means, nor are they trying to get a free handout. They really want to work, they just aren’t in a good situation to do so. If you are down to your last $200, paid traffic is NOT something you should be looking into IMHO. If your kids are sick, you need to get the first paying job you can find and work on affiliate marketing when you have money coming in. Now as I said, most of these emails are ignored by guru’s but I try to answer every one I get (usually my response is steering them away from internet marketing).

• Dealing with refunds

IM products have a pretty large refund %. There is not much you can do about it, it’s just the nature of the business.

• Having products that flop

A lot of guru’s are not as successful as they portray. I know, shocking right? Most of us know that but there are actually several well known people who you would be surprised to hear don’t make all that much money. You can fail just as easy, if not easier as a guru than an affiliate.

So what are some advantage of being an affiliate?

• Getting to interact as little as you want

As an affiliate, you can keep to yourself quite easily which is great for some people.

• Having a variety of ways to make money

As an affiliate you can do SO many things…PPC, PPV, SEO, offline, blogs, etc, etc, etc. The smart affiliates diversify their income between traffic sources.

• Having a large pool of traffic

You have a lot of way’s to reach your audience as an affiliate. As a guru, you have those traffic sources available but more often than not, they are unsuitable for your product. Remember the IM niche is pretty small in comparison to what we can market as an affiliate.

Ok so who really banks harder? To be honest, based on what I have seen the advantage goes to the affiliate marketer. In both circles, there is a small number of people who are really ‘at the top’. The reason that affiliates win, is because of how they can diversify. Guru’s (for our discussion purposes) promote one thing – making money online. When I say affiliates most people think of people promoting CPA offers, but there is so much more being an affiliate can mean.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the subject.

Ad Tech is over and I am exhausted! I live pretty close to San Francisco so it was a short drive down. The exhibit hall was a lot bigger than Affiliate Summit and there were some pretty interesting companies to talk to. One thing that really stood out is how many booth’s gave no clear indication of what they actually did. Some I even stopped to read about and still wasn’t clear. These were more companies looking to help people with branding, etc but their marketing was pretty bad. If I had a booth (wasn’t that a Dr Seuss Book?) I would make it VERY clear what I did, and how it could benefit you in a way that people could understand in about 5 seconds.I did run into Matthew Lesko on the floor and got a cool pic.

I met with a couple newer CPV type traffic sources that I am curious to check out and test. I also got some great ideas for new niches/verticals to run offers in.

The Affbuzz lunch meetup was great! There was a huge turnout and everyone had fun eating cake. I got to meet the elusive Mr Green finally! I also got to meet some people I talk to online all the time but had never met in person. I saw a number of people there I wanted to say hi to but had to leave for a meeting so I apologize if I missed anyone!

Later that day was the Facebook/PPV session I did with Jonathan Volk. We had a great turnout and some well known affiliates came. I thought the session went really well and I picked up some great tips myself. Jonathan brought his wife Maria who seemed to really enjoy the session. Jonathan and Maria are two of the nicest people you could meet in the industry and we had a really great time hanging out with him. Jonathan also brought Jacob who works for his company and knows a lot about Facebook marketing.

Wes Mahler also came to the mastermind and it was great to finally meet him!

It was a great show but I am glad it’s over and I can get back to work now!

Come say hi!

I just wanted to do a kind of random post on things I have been thinking about & working on.

Stuff Worth Mentioning

Even though I have never met or exchanged so much as an email with him, I have been a reader of Chad from CDF network’s since his blog started. He recently released a local lead generation guide which has a lot of people talking. Check it out here local lead plan

I have dabbled in local lead gen a bit and I do think there is some good opportunity there if you have the personality for it. The part I hated about it was actually dealing with the clients. I am going to pick up a copy of Chad’s guide though because I’m sure I could improve on that.

My friend Mr. Green runs the best affiliate marketing blog (In New Zeland anyway) and is always full of useful posts. Check out his posts for some great insight.

Corey and I get questions about tracking when doing pre-pop submits. Corey wrote a great post about it here Simple subID tracking for PrePop email submits

Corey and I also just finished our 8 week webinar series PPV 123. It went really well and we had a lot of happy students. We have another course coming out soon that is something all internet marketers can relate to so stay tuned!

Jonathan Volk & I will be doing a Facebook & PPV Mastermind session at ad:tech Tue April 20th. I’m really excited about that and for hearing Jonathan’s insights into Facebook.

Really Random

In an effort to break out of the work from home rut where you stay in all day I have been trying to get a little more adventerous.Recently my adventures have got me into:

• My first hangliding lesson (awesome!)
• A Trapeze lesson (terrifying!)
• Indoor Skydiving (fun!)
• and a contortion class at the San Francisco Circus school (painful!)

What I am finding is the busier I make myself the more productive I am. The days where I have all day free to work are usually when I get the least done. The days where I am really busy and have to sit down and focus to get things done I end up getting a lot more accomplished.

Ok, back to work on my presentation for ad:tech!