It’s that time of the year again! Find myself and the rest of the MEGA team roaming around ad:tech in SF this year.  I will be in the bay area on April 9th-13th open for meetings any time.  We will have dinner tables and bar tables in the Clift Hotel during the entire stay so please feel free to reach out and join us there.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the adventure that is ad:tech SF, an excerpt from their site & schedule:

the largest gathering of digital marketers!

As THE event for digital marketers, ad:tech features the industry’s most entrepreneurial and innovative marketers. By attending, you’ll have the opportunity to network and learn from experts on what’s hot in social media, mobile, viral, cross-channel, application-based and geo-location marketing. You can also walk the ad:tech Expo hall floor to meet one-on-one with 300+ influential, leading-edge businesses and experts who specialize in everything from search and publishing to video, mobile and much more.

Conference: Mon, 04/11: 2pm – 6pm Tues, 04/12: 9am – 6:15pm Wed, 04/13: 9am – 4:45pm

Exhibit Hall: Tues, 04/12: 10am – 6pm Wed, 04/13: 10am – 4pm

Onsite Registration Hours:
Sunday, 04/10: 1pm – 6pm
Monday, 04/11: 8am – 6pm
Tuesday, 04/12: 7:30am – 6pm
Wednesday, 04/13: 8am – 4pm

So, you did it.  You set up tracking, got approved on some networks, picked offers, made landing pages, set up campaigns, and optimized until you started making some profit.  Good for you.  You might not be mentally challenged after all.  But now what?

Hiring

Chances are, if you’re making good money, you’re likely spending a good part of your day testing and optimizing, as well as coming up with new stuff to promote.  At some point, you won’t have much time left to do anything else, but may still have a desire to expand.  This is when you might consider hiring outside help.  You’ll probably need actual office space for this, which can be surprisingly cheap compared to what you’re likely making if you’re having any decent success to the point where you need to hire.  There are plenty of places to find employees but your best bet is going to probably be local universities, especially if they have any kind of work study type programs where they can’t afford to quit the job or screw you over because their credits rely on them staying at the job.  You may try craigslist too.  Be careful, though, because in this industry it’s easy for a newbie to learn enough information to make it on their own and then just jump ship to do just that.  Teach them exactly what you need them to do, and nothing more.  If you’re hiring them to manage your campaigns, don’t even tell them what an affiliate network is, etc.  Just show them exactly how to manage the campaigns, and how to create ads, etc.

Start a Network

What most people don’t know is that a good number of the bigger affiliate networks out there were actually started by affiliates who wanted to expand into other areas.  Honestly, it doesn’t take much more than a directtrack license and a list of affiliate friends to get off the ground.  It definitely requires hiring though, especially if you get big.  You will likely need a full staff after things get rolling.  Also, unless you want to give shitty payment terms to your affiliates, you better have a decent bankroll saved up.

A big misconception is that running a network runs almost no risk.  Totally untrue.  There is so much fraud going on right now it’s crazy, and the network is the one who ends up on the hook for that.  Add this to the fact that you’re floating a lot of money while waiting on getting paid by the merchants and things could be disastrous if you’re not extremely careful who you let on your network.  If you DO decide to go this route, please read this post if you want to stand out from the other thousands of identical networks out there.

Your Own Offers

You won’t find much info about this out there.  Why?  Because the barrier to entry is high and the people doing it already don’t want you to have a piece.  At Affiliate Summit West this year, there was a table at club XS that ordered 30some bottles of Crystal…acai merchants.  Setting up your own offers and doing it right, especially for a physical product rebill type offer can be HARD WORK and VERY RISKY.  If theres anything legally wrong with what you’re doing, you get sued.  If the customers aren’t staying on your rebill long enough for you to be profitable..you lose your ass.  A million things can go wrong, especially the credit card processing, which needs to be rock solid, and even then if you fuck up at all, they can hold your earnings for months and months forcing you to close up shop.  High risk for potentially very high reward.  If this is something you’re interested in, good luck to you.  You’ve got a long road ahead, but there may be lots of lambos and shiny stuff at the end.

Give Back

Don’t be a dick.  You know you’re promoting shady diet rebill offers.  Please give some money to a worthy cause.  Yes, it’s a tax writeoff.  No, you shouldn’t be doing it just because it’s a tax writeoff.  Cakes has a soft spot in his heart for drug and alcohol treatment centers, and likes to contribute to those, but just pick something that you feel is a worthy cause and contribute some money every year.  That is the sign of a true balla in cakes’ opinion.  Honestly, which one of these statements sounds like you’re rolling in dough: “Yo I just dropped $100k on a watch.”  or “Yo, I just fed thanksgiving and christmas dinner to every poor person in the city.”  You got it way better than most people, so don’t forget where you came from.

What NOT to do

Don’t start a blog.  Unless you love writing and are doing it because you love helping people and making friends, then just don’t.  It’s rarely profitable for anyone.

Don’t share your secrets with anyone.  Yeah, you’re excited that you have your first $1k a day campaign, now shut the fuck up about it for as long as possible.  Someone will eventually see your ads everywhere and catch on and copy you but you can make plenty of money before that happens if you keep quiet.

Don’t be an asshole to other affiliates.  There have been plenty of reports lately of affiliates reporting other peoples ads, or merchants calling the FTC about other merchants offers.  If you do this kinda stuff, you’re a total douche who can’t make money in an industry where money pretty much grows on trees.  Congrats on that.  Be respectful of others or you will get shunned in this industry really damn quick.  News travels very fast.

Once you have some successful, or close to successful ad campaigns running, you will likely want to start refining those campaigns to maximize your profits.  Since, as mentioned earlier in this guide, you know jack shit about marketing, your only real option for doing this is by testing.  Split testing is simply the process of making two variations of part of your campaign, be it your ad, landing page, affiliate offer, whatever, and splitting your traffic between the two to find which works better.

Split Testing Ads

Split testing ads is easy with most of the popular PPC platforms such as Adwords, MSN Adcenter, Yahoo, etc.  The basic idea is, have 2 separate sets of ad copy running at all times, and periodically get rid of the one that does worse, and make a new one.  Some people (like nickycakes) do this as often as once a day, and some much less frequently, or not at all.

When starting out, it may be good to make several different ad copies, maybe like 5 or so, but make sure they are all very different.  After running the ad for a while, you can pick out the winner, and start split testing that ad by making very small variations.  Seriously, like only change ONE thing about the ad.  There are so many things to choose from, sentence structure, caps, no caps, display url, etc.  Just change one thing each time you’re split testing ads.

How do you know when the number of impressions the ads have gotten is enough to be statistically significant so you can make a proper decision?  Easy, just use this split testing calculator (thanks dr ngo): here.

Split Testing Landing Pages

This is a little more involved than ad copy split testing, but it’s the same idea.  Split traffic between two different landing pages to see which one converts better.  Your goals will probably be something like reducing bounce rate, increasing clickthrough rate to the offer, and increasing overall conversion rate on the offer.  To do this you will likely need a decent analytics package.  Here are some you may want to check out:

ClickTale (clicktale.com) – This one is a little pricy, but if you have the cash, it’s apparently well worth it.  It tracks literally everything you could want to track on a page.  Where people are clicking, how long they’re taking to enter information in a form field, whatever.

-CrazyEgg (crazyegg.com) – Much less expensive, but doesn’t quite track as much.  You probably want to look into this one if you don’t feel like shelling out a lot of money but want some solid analytics.

-ClickHeat - A free heatmap package.  Not too comprehensive.

-Google Analytics – Decent features and free, but not realtime.  If you’re cool with only being able to see your stats once a day, and not having that many useful stats to look at, its better than nothing.

-Google Website Optimizer – Ok, Nickycakes has never seen this one in action, but apparently it’s pretty good for doing split/multivariate testing on landing pages.  If anyone has some experience to share, please leave it in the comments.

Split Testing Offers

This one is extremely important.  There are so many similar offers out there that it’s impossible to tell which one is going to convert best with your landing page.  IGNORE the EPC data that the networks give you for the offers.  They are often meaningless bullshit, and will have no bearing on how well it will convert for you.  They could have had some idiot direct linking ppv traffic to the best offer on the network driving the EPC down to like 1/10th of what it will perform for you.  So, as usual, test for yourself.  Just like with ad copy split testing, assuming there are several choices for similar products, split test 2 of them, wait till you have enough data to determine which is the better offer, drop the underperformer, and split test the winner with a new offer.  Pretty simple.  If you have enough traffic you could, of course, just split it between all of them at once and find out the winner in a day.

Split Testing Call of Duty 4 Guns

So, which SMG is better? The P90 or the MP5?  Try 5 rounds with the P90 and then 5 rounds with the MP5 and see which one gets you more kills and headshots.  Obviously the mp5 is going to win hands down unless you’re spray-and-pray newbslice, but again, it’s good to test for yourself.

Ok, so you have your tracking set up, you are approved at some affiliate networks, what do you do next?  Well, now you have to pick what you want to advertise.  Since, like Nickycakes, you probably have about 0 real world marketing experience, you probably have no idea what to do.   And even if you DID have an idea what to promote, it would be wrong.  That is why you really have only 2 options: asking someone, and trial and error.  You will be using a combination of both.

When Nicky got started, he tried to promote a bunch of stuff that he thought would do well, and it all failed.  Then he started randomly picking stuff that he never thought would ever do well in a million years, and guess what happened…he found some profitable campaigns.

Ask Someone

Go to your affiliate managers at all the networks you are signed up with and ask them to pick 1 offer for you that they think you could have the most succeses with.  If they recommend one that has already been recommended to you by another AM, ask for another.  Get a list of 3-5 and write them down.  Affiliate managers are a great resource for this because they know exactly what is doing well for other people.  They know what a lazy newbie like you can do well with, so just ask.

Pick a Few at Random

Pretty simple…go through the list of offers and literally pick a couple random ass ones.  As mentioned earlier, you suck at marketing, so throwing a dart at a dartboard or banging your face forecefully against the keyboard will certainly provide better results than your best instincts.

Combining the two should give you like 5-7 offers to get started with.  Make sure you write them down, along with the network that they’re on and what the payouts are, because that stuff is easy to lose track of.

This post is rather short, but it will probably take you a while to get done, so get started.

It’s worth starting off by saying that I am much more of a product peddling affiliate than one who promotes the kind of offers found on CPA networks. I make most of my money through Clickbank, which offers a HUGE number of products across various different niches you can promote. If you thought the only way to make money through Clickbank was by promoting crappy ‘get rich quick’ eBooks, the kind of stuff that Nickycakes vomits over, then your dead wrong. When it comes to Clickbank, you’ve got to be creative and not just look at the top performing ‘high gravity’ products.

Now the idea here is to produce a number of different content based ‘review’ sites promoting the same products in a small niche of your choice. You would then advertise each review website on Google through a separate Adwords account via the Adwords MCC (My Client Centre), allowing you to have all your review sites displayed for the exact same identical keyword search terms you are targeting in your campaigns.

If you target the same keywords in multiple campaigns within a single Adwords account, only the ads from one of your campaigns will be displayed at any one time to a user searching for one of your keywords. However, by creating new accounts through the Adwords’ MCC, you will be able to create a new campaign in each account and have all your ads in all your campaigns displayed for the same keyword search terms.

While I have personally not had any problems with Adwords for doing this, I’m assuming this really depends on how you go about implementing this method. If for example, your review sites all use the same content, are all under one domain through sub domains, and are blatantly there to promote one product, then don’t be surprised if Adwords comes down on you with a ban hammer.

Take note of the following if you are particularly worried about having your Adwords account banned:

• Make your content high quality – the higher the quality, the stronger the pre-sell
• Use separate domains – a no brainer, you MUST have a separate domain for each site
• Have new content written for each site – that means new reviews for the same products
• Use a new Clickbank account for each site – so you aren’t caught out by savvy competitors
• Cloak all your affiliate links – you should always do this anyway for obvious reasons

I normally outsource all of my reviews to inexpensive ghost writers. I then check over all the content written for me by my writers and I always end up making changes to the content so it actually functions like a good sales copy. For the actual sites, I use Wordpress with a free theme slapped on. There are tons of themes to choose from, and you can easily have it modified into a review style site. If you can’t modify themes on your own or don’t want to hire someone to do it for you, there are a few review style themes you can choose from as well. Google it.

Three final points worth considering:

1. I use this particular strategy to promote paid products as an affiliate. I’ve always been more comfortable investing my time and money into developing content rich review sites for products which don’t have an expiry date. This allows me to optimise my sites for the search engines without worrying about the offer expiring, in addition to gaining a large share of PPC traffic which would otherwise have gone to my competitors. Having said that, there is no reason you can’t use this method to promote CPA offers via the PPC > landing page > offer approach.
2. This strategy works best for smaller niches which aren’t madly saturated with competition. Dominating small niches in the sponsored links section of the Google SERPs through multiple placements is far easier and more effective than to attempt to do the same for a much larger and more competitive niche.
3. Don’t start all your campaigns at once. I had one campaign running for months before I started a new campaign advertising a new site on a new Adwords account. That put aside, you want to know your first campaign is generating a solid profit before you go onto expanding, otherwise you will feel like an idiot if your three new campaigns on your three different accounts fail en masse.

The main point of this post was to make you aware of how you can put your Adwords MCC to good use. I also spend as much time and money on PPC as I do on building links to my site and developing site content for SEO purposes. There is nothing better than having your websites listed at the top of Google’s organic AND paid listings, no matter how small the niche is. In fact, the smaller the niche, the easier it is for you to dominate it.

I didn’t really get into any real depth here, mostly because I’m lazy, but hopefully you should have gained several ideas from this post.

Cheers,

Amin

Often times you will be asked, as Nickycakes is often asked, “What do you do?”  When you start making money online, people are generally curious as to exactly how you are doing it.  The first time you are asked this, it’s hard to come up with a short answer.  Nickycakes generally says something like, “I run an internet marketing company.”  If they pry further and ask specificially what that entails, it’s usually, “Companies pay me to run ad campaigns for their products.”  (No, Nicky doesn’t refer to himself in the 3rd person when talking to people irl)  While Affiliate Marketing is a little more complicated than that, and a lot less glamorous than “running an internet marketing company” implies, that’s pretty much the reality of what you’re doing.  Companies pay you a commission to advertise their products.

Of course, when you are asked by a family member to explain what you’re doing, you may have to give them a little more detail.  The analogy Nickycakes uses is one that was given to him a while ago by one of his affiliate managers:  Let’s say that Coca-Cola wants to sell more Coke.  They already have their own ad campaigns running on TV, and possibly the internet.   But, they want to sell more.  So Coca-Cola sets up a program where anyone who so desires can make their own advertisements for coke products which link to the coke website.  For every case of coke sold through one of these links, Coke agrees to pay the “affiliate” $1 commission.  Pretty simple.

There are affiliate programs for thousands and thousands of different websites, companies, and products.  Amazon.com has an affiliate program where you can link to any product on their website and make a few % commission on anything sold.  Ebay the same deal.  Lawyers sometimes pay very well for leads forwarded to them since they make so much money per case that they win.  Most dating sites will pay for every person who signs up for a free account on their site.  With the extremely low risk on the part of the company offering the affiliate program, it’s almost stupid NOT to have one.

So how does Coca-Cola know that the sales are coming from you and not from another guy?  Well, they have tracking software set up, and they give you your own link to advertise, like… coke.com/affiliate/12342345 or something, and anyone using that link is kept track if, usually via browser cookies, so that the resulting sales are credited to the proper affiliate.

What’s an Affiliate Network?

Ok, so since affiliate programs have gotten so ridiculously popular, it is easy for companies with such programs to get lost in the crowd.  There are hundreds of webhosting providers that offer generous affiliate programs, for example, so going to each one individually to see which one is the best to promote becomes tedious.  That’s where Affiliate Networks come in.

An Affilaite Network is just a company that handles the relationship between the company with an affiliate program, and the affiliates.  An affiliate can sign up to an Affiliate Network and then select from thousands of different products and services to promote, and can easily see exactly how much they will get paid per sale/lead/signup/whatever.  The Affiliate Network handles recruiting and paying the individual affiliates, so they never have to have a direct relationship with the Merchant/Advertiser.  In return, the Affiliate Network takes a small(well not always small) cut of the commissions.  With enough affiliates sending enough sales, Affiliate Networks get rich just for being a middleman.

So why would you work with an Affiliate Network instead of with the Advertiser directly, knowing that they take a cut of the money you are making?  Well, there are a few reasons.  First, and most important, is payment terms.  A lot of merchants will only agree to pay you Net 30, or worse.  This means that after the month is over you need to wait 30 days to be paid for that month’s commissions.  This can suck if you’re spending a lot of money on advertising their products and can’t afford to continue for 60 days without being paid.  Affiliate Networks generally have much better payment terms, often giving affiliates weekly wire transfer payments if they are generating a decent amount per week (usually around $1000 is the standard threshhold).  Also, many Merchants don’t want to deal with a bunch of affiliates, they just want an Affiliate Network to just handle it all for them, so even if you wanted to you couldn’t work with them directly.

Methods of Promotion

Here’s the work part.  It is completely up to the affiliate to generate customers to buy these products if they expect to earn some commissions.  There are way too many individual methods of promoting websites to even begin listing, but they generally fall into two categories: paid and unpaid promotion.

Unpaid promotion is stuff like SEO, email spam, social network spam, “social media”, “viral marketing”, etc.  These unpaid methods of promotion, while basically free (money wise), generally require much more work than their paid counterparts.  They also (generally) do not provide nearly as much volume as their paid counterparts.  But, they are a good resource for newbies to get started with if they’re broke.

Paid methods of promotion are things like PPC (pay per click), media buys, legit email spam…err…deployment, paying bums to hold up signs at busy intersections, etc.  These types of promotion can generally, but not always, generate a ton of traffic if you have the money.  They are, however much more risky, since you’re obviously investing your own money with no real guarantee that you’ll see any return on that investment.

PPC and media buying are what Nickycakes does the most of these days, so that is the focus of the majority of the info on this site.  He has done his fair share of SEO but it’s rather boring, doesn’t generate enough traffic to be worth the time, and it’s so brainless and monotonous that you could train a monkey to do it.  Even blackhat SEO is only fun for a few days after you figure out what you’re doing before the novelty of pushing a button and seeing 10 thousand backlinks showing up completely wears off.  Also, Nickycakes has never ever met ANYONE that has gotten rich from SEO.  Find someone making 5 figures a day with SEO.  Seriously, good luck.

Warning Before Doing Anything

Most people fail.  Seriously, don’t quit your dayjob.  Don’t drop out of college.  Don’t invest any money you aren’t comfortable losing in PPC.  If you want to learn how to do online marketing as a fulltime job that supports you financially, please do not make any serious life changes until you’re already making at least twice what you need to live comfortably.  Nickycakes spent the first several profitable months as an affiliate working retail and going to class full time.

Seriously, expect to fail, because chances are you’re too stupid or lazy to succeed, which is why the rest of us make so much money.

Why Nickycakes Loves Affiliate Marketing

Nickycakes loves affiliate marketing because it’s not boring, he’s good at it, the rewards are directly related to how much effort is put in, and it provides amazing freedom because there is no boss and there are no employees.  Also, the people in the industry are great.  When you go to an industry conference for the first time, you really expect a bunch of obvious computer nerds who live in their parents basements, and there are some of those for sure, but mostly everyones pretty cool.

Most of the larger affiliates have run into this problem.  Since your ads are so incredibly visible to everyone on the internet, it is very easy for other affiliates to simply copy/paste your landing page onto their own domain and run traffic to it from your traffic sources.  Doing this can take as little as 15 minutes and can bring in quite a bit of money.  This is, of course, unfortunate for the people who spend hours making/paying for landing pages just to have them jacked, but is it something they should get upset about, and should they take action, or should they just chalk it up as an inevitable loss?

Nickycakes doesn’t want to get into a discussion of the legal side of this issue, mostly because that takes way too long to research, but there are a few points worth mentioning:

First, NEVER trust legal information that you get from a source like…this blog…marketing forums (wickedfire), IRC, etc.

Second, apparently, exact wording is protected by copyright, but “styles” are not.  For example, you can’t legally jack the exact text of someones landing page, but nobody can copyright the “blog style” landing page.

Ok, so legal stuff aside, is it morally wrong to take other peoples landing pages and use them as your own?  Nicky estimates that most people would say that to a degree, yes, of course it is wrong to steal the work of others.  That’s fairly obvious.  But it is, on the other hand, easy to see someone in this industry justify it, especially when they are promoting products such as payday loans, weight loss products that don’t work, etc.  If misleading kids about ringtones charges is morally WORSE than stealing someones fake testimonial landing page, is it really THAT bad??

And that brings up another point.  A lot of the landing page theft is happening to these “flog” (fake blog) landing pages.  The testimonials on these pages are rarely real.  The Cakes isn’t exactly a legal expert, but something in the back of his mind tells him that there is some department in some government agency somewhere that is tasked with finding and persuing such acts.  So is it wrong to steal from someone who’s breaking the law to begin with?

What about the networks?  Should they get involved in disputes involving copied landing pages?  Often if an affiliate feels someone has stolen his landing page, and the person who stole it is using an offer from the same network, they will contact the network and try to use their traffic as leverage to convince them to drop the affiliate who stole their page.  Should the networks take action in these cases, or is this blackmail?

Nicky, has his own opinions, of course.

Stealing is always wrong, but this is an industry that tends to have very flexible morals.  Should you steal peoples work?  No.  Not only because it’s wrong to steal, but because being innovative and making your own stuff will many times produce a much better result than taking someone’s work.  Remember that you may be stealing from the biggest idiot in the world, and anything you create on your own could preform 10x better.

But should you get upset when other people take your stuff?  No, but you will anyway.  It stings less after the first few times it happens, but it will happen inevitably.  If people see your campaign popping up day after day, they will assume it works well and copy it.  It means you’re doing something right.  If you come up with a whole new way of promoting something, such as when people first started using blog landers, you should definitely not get mad when people copy your style.  Immitation is the best form of flattery, or something like that.  If you feel really butthurt about someone taking a direct copy of your work, hire a lawyer.  There are probably millions to be made by lawyers helping affiliates sue other affiliates who copy their pages as it is a clear copyright violation and there is a large quantifiable monetary gain as a direct result of the theft.  Basically, either sue them or quit crying about it.

Should people try to blackmail their affiliate network into kicking other affiliates off offers if they steal their pages? No.  This is not the networks responsibility, and this puts them in a very uncomfortable position.  Not only are you hurting your relationship with the network when you do this, but you will likely be branded as a snitch to everyone in the industry.  Your reputation in the industry may seem inconsequential when you consider that you run your own company and you don’t really need to be looked on favorably by other affiliates, but this is a very shortsighted position.  Consider how many networks and advertisers are run by former affiliates.  How many of these were affiliates just a year ago?  Lots.

Basically, even if stealing weren’t morally wrong, it is usually much more profitable to innovate.  And, snitches get stitches.

Nickycakes would love to know, what is your opinion on landing page theft?  He would especially love to hear from known landing page thieves like Zac Johnson