Category : Musings
I don’t think it’s a secret that many people really killing it on CPA offers are up to ‘no good’. See, when I first started out I was doing everything ‘by the book’ and while I was doing ok… I couldn’t figure out how these other affiliates were driving so much volume. I was grouping my adgroups right, making sure my keywords were relevant, and making the best landing pages I could yet other affiliates were SO far ahead of me.
What I of course learned is that most of the people driving tons of volume/sales on CPA offers are at least a little shady. This can be anything from a little misleading to outright fraud. I have the opportunity to look at the back end of a very large offer on a lot of CPA networks and I can’t believe the crap these high volume affiliates are doing.
We as affiliates are NOT expert marketers. I know most would like to think they are but most of the big names out there hit on a niche or two and banked on that as long as they could. I’m not taking anything away from that, it’s certainly an accomplishment, but often when someones traffic source/offer, etc dies they never make anything else work.
Let’s look at some real life examples:
A while back affiliates were killing it bidding on ‘chat’ related keywords for their dating campaigns and doing a lot of volume. Now this was only a little shady because you can’t really ‘chat’ on most of these sites. Nowadays people are using porn sites & hiding their traffic for as long as they can until they eventually get kicked off the offer.
Some affiliates will put an offers lead form in a page about something totally unrelated (hiding all content from the offer page except the form). I saw one where a customer would think they were filling out an offer to help Haiti but in reality they were just filling out a CPA lead form.
People made a LOT of money off of flogs/farticles. I shouldn’t have to explain how shady this is. I’m not judging, I’m just saying fake testimonials are not exactly on the up and up.
So can you make money being a nice, well behaved affiliate? Sure! But next time you see a huge affiliate doing numbers that make your head spin you can almost be sure that something anywhere from 1-10 on the shady scale is going on.
I wanted to do a Q&A here so post any questions you have in the comments section or through my contact form and I will post the Q&A here for everyone to read.
…It can be hard to get to any mar-ke-ting but I somehow, some way keep avoiding time wasting crap like every single day.
Ok, so my rendition might not make it on a Snoop tribute album but..
Why do people love drama so much? I admit I get suckered into reading a thread or blog post every once in a while but some of this crap is getting a little ridiculous. I think a little affiliate news is important to keep up with, who is doing what, etc. but just get a sense of it and move on. Do you really need to spend an hour reading pages and pages of drama on internet marketing forums to help you make more money? If you like that sort of thing fine but I would rather spend that hour setting up new campaigns, or working then spend my goof off time AWAY from the computer.
I know a LOT of affiliates who spend hours reading forums & blogs. There is some great info out there but do you really care who in the affiliate world is mad at who, thee secret dirt behind somebody, or whatever?
If you can’t resist reading that stuff fine…just use Egg Timer and keep it to a minimum.
We know Zynga took a hit when they had to take off all their incentivized offers. Now, it looks like Zynga might be trying to do something with PPV traffic:
http://toolbar.zynga.com/
So what is Zynga going to do with this? Well if you hurry and download the toolbar today – “you’ll be the first to know about new features for your favorite games. Best of all, we’ll also give you a free item!”. Now what they don’t tell you (but I suspect) is that you will also start seeing ads very soon. My guess is they will just keep this to themselves to generate traffic to offers.
So start targeting http://toolbar.zynga.com/ with your PPV campaigns and siphon off some traffic. What you could do is build your own toolbar and convince people to download that rather than Zynga’s. Just a thought 
Affiliate Summit is over and I am tired! We had a great time but it feels good to get home and back to work.
Affiliate Summit
This was our suite at The Palms Place:
The view at night was great but the pics were a little blurry (time to upgrade the camera!)
I didn’t have too much time at the meet market because I had to leave to meet Justin Dupre and get ready for the PPV Mastermind session. We met everyone down at the Rojo Bar in the lobby and then went upstairs to the suite to start the session. We had a bigger group than originally planned but it was great because there were a number of experienced marketers there which lead to a good discussion. We talked a lot about targeting PPV traffic, landing pages, and Justin gave some great advice on cloaking. We also talked in depth about the best ways to monetize PPV traffic which were not just driving traffic to CPA offers.
The next day I walked around the floor talking to networks and other affiliates. I was so busy I forgot to pull out my camera!
A lot of people recognized me from ‘PPVPlaybook.com’ written on my badge so it was cool to talk to some readers of my blog and forum. I also got a lot of questions from networks with affiliates are looking for traffic sources outside of Google and media buys.
Affiliate Marketing in 2010
I kept hearing the same things from virtually every network I talked to; most networks are going to be moving away or trying to distance themselves from rebills and focus more on lead generation offers. This is fine with me because I run lead offers almost exclusively. It will be nice to have more offers to choose from but we are going to see a lot more competition in that sector this year.
Most networks I spoke to also expressed the desire to work with a smaller numbers of affiliates who can actually drive leads and traffic as opposed to a larger number of new publishers. I think this year networks are going to get even stricter with letting new affiliates in their network. I was able to make some deals with a couple networks so that the affiliates I coach can get into their network. Mostly the networks just want to focus on experienced affiliates because they usually take the least amount of time as far as support goes.
The best part of ASW was getting to meet people in person who you usually only speak to over the computer/phone. It’s amazing how much information people are willing to share. It seemed like everyone was more than eager to ‘dish the dirt’ so I picked up some great tips.
Anyway, it was great meeting everyone!
I think one of the reasons I’ve done so well with online marketing is because I’ve failed more than most people I’ve talked to. Sounds pretty glamorous right? Most of the time we see people posting campaign studies or talking about their winning campaigns where they seem to be effortlessly raking in the money. What you usually don’t hear is how long they spent optimizing their campaign to get it profitable, how many failed campaigns they have gone through to find that one, or how short lived that successful campaign might have been.
I wanted to share some failures I’ve had and hopefully show people that to really be successful you have to fail.
1. In the entire time I have done affiliate marketing I have only started a handful of campaigns that have been successful right off the bat. I could show you some really successful campaigns I have now and you would think “wow that’s great!” but they would seem far less impressive once I showed you the months of grunt work and money I had to put into them.
2. A few years back I tried to do email marketing on a large scale. I spent about $10k getting everything set up and I could never get it to be profitable enough to continue with.
3. I’ve lost more money than I would care to admit testing different traffic sources & advertising methods.
4. I’ve spent months trying to copy what others were doing with the latest hot niches, trends, etc. and failed most of the time.
When I look back on some of this stuff, it’s pretty obvious to me that most of my failures came from trying to copy what other people were doing.
When I think about the success I’ve had, it’s been mostly coming up with my own way to do things.
1. Back when I did ringtones, I came up with a unique way to scrape artist names and bid on those (not a totally unique idea but it was one nobody shared with me). I made a lot of money doing that.
2. When everyone was focusing on Adwords, I was killing it on Yahoo and MSN (I still do).
3. Instead of chasing the latest hot offers, I decided to focus on pretty boring offers that most people were overlooking. While I was slowly scaling those campaigns, more and more of my competitors were dropping off to chase the offers everyone was talking about. As a result, my campaigns continued to do better and better.
4. When I first started with PPV/CPV, everyone was telling me to direct link email/zip submits using a big list of scraped URL’s. I could never get that to work so I came up with my own method for using landing pages and targets that worked for me.
A lot of people are afraid to admit their failures or if they do it’s something like “I failed so much at first but now I am a huge success!”. Any affiliate marketer who is currently successful continues to fail whether they admit it or not. You don’t reach a point where you are suddenly ‘successful’ and every campaign you put together, or project you start is a winner. Even the latest campaign study I posted in my forum is currently losing money!
You will learn more by understanding why things don’t work than by getting temporarily inspired by seeing someone’s successful campaign, then wondering why it’s not profitable when you try to copy it.
