Super Affiliate Marketing Blog

Alright kids.. so you’ve been waiting for the answer to the $1M over the weekend post I made a while back, well, I think it’s been enough of a wait, but I have to ask you to wait one more day, because instead of releasing the information here, I’m going to be a guest on WebmasterRadio.fm’s show Good Karma. Kinda ironic too eh? Someone like myself who doesn’t seem to give a shit about karma on a show labeled good karma? Ha!!

I’ll also be giving away FREE passes to Affiliate Summit East in Miami (July 8th-10th 2007). If you’re not a member of WickedFire, and just been a lurker, you best get your ass to the registration, because the VIP WickedFire party sponsored by Copeac is going to be fucking insane. It’s going to be in a mansion on a private island. The only way to get to it is via a yacht we are renting. Lots of free food, booze, music (private DJ), hot women, and networking. All the must-have ingredients for a great party!!

So tune in live tomorrow at 4pm EST at www.webmasterradio.fm for the Good Karma show with Greg Niland and me! We’ll be throwing it down and having a really fun time. Not sure if we are going to be giving out many tips, but if you can come up with some good ideas or questions for the show in their live IRC channel, you get a free pass to Affiliate Summit East 2007 courtesy of WickedFire.com. Not a bad deal!

This is going to be funnnnnn!!

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So word has it that I haven’t made many good posts lately that help people make cash. Well, I agree, so here’s how you can make some bank quickly and easily without breaking the bank too. Let’s take a quick look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing and see how underrated it is and how you can seriously make some cash without getting too wrapped up and hung up on the usual things that stop you from moving forward.

1- Create a site. If you don’t know how to, well, get someone to do it for you. It’s not that hard, hell, even I can do it and I am a retard when it comes to tech/design stuff. So buy a domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, toss up a WordPress blog and theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site), and you’re in business.

2- Depending on what your domain theme is, if it has one, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer. It can be a product, a service, doesn’t really matter which. Just pick something! There are no bad ideas or good ideas, everything can work in it’s own right if done correctly. If you are being a lazy bastard and need me to pick one for you, then choose a product that is cheap for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Ad networks have a billion offers, I’m sure you can find one. But try and keep out of finance/mortgage and ringtones for now, because those take lots of research, time and cash.

3- Great, you have your product picked out, now make a blog post about it. If you don’t know all that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or Google. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is about the product you are promoting. Maybe make the color scheme the same as the page where the user will buy something or fill out the lead.

4- So let’s assume you have your domain, host, blog with the offer all setup. Alright, so now comes traffic, the fun part! Let’s use Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter for it. Take $100 and deposit it into each of the accounts. You probably won’t use all of it, but it’s good to have it in there. With Adsense we can begin right away, but with MSN you may have to wait 24 hours or so until their slow asses get to approving the account. With both though, there are tons of free cash coupons and promo codes out there, and some on WickedFire.com that you can use and get some free cash to use.

5- Time for some keyword research. Before you start to use every keyword tool under the sun, let’s do a bit of manual work. First go and look at the advertiser’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. We want to focus on something called LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very general, expensive, and usually being looked at for research purposes and don’t have many “buy now” people using them. A long tail keyword are those 3, 4, 5+ word keywords that really target a product. So for example, a good longtail mortgage refinance keyword I would use is “refinance los angeles california” or “bad credit refinance new york” INSTEAD of “refinance new york” or “refinance la”. You can even compare the prices, and you’ll see the longer ones may not get much traffic on it, but they are so cheap compared to the other more general ones.

6- So you have some general and longtail keywords. Fantastic. Now some people use misspelling tools and whatnot, which is a good idea, so go over to SEOBook.com into the tools section and use Aaron Wall’s misspelling tool. But don’t do that just yet, because that’s the last step. What you should do first is get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of insole for a shoe, your keywords would be: buy shoe insole, cheap insole for shoes, doctor recommended shoe insole. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “shoe insole” or “shoe pad” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode. So your job, for the next 1-3 hours is to gather up as many of these keywords as possible. If you want to use keyword tools to do it for you, by all means, knock yourself out, but if this is your first time doing something like this, and you want to learn how to do it right, do it by hand, the old fashioned way, just until you get the swing of things. When you’re done collecting the keywords, run it through the misspelling tool, and save the end result. Make sure to also group the keywords into 5-15 keywords per group for Adwords and AdCenter. You’ll thank me later.

7- We have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are. You don’t want to put too many keywords into one group because you want to keep your ads as relevant as possible for that group of keywords that it represents. So go ahead and make your ads. I typically write out 3-4 ads in the beggining, but sometimes as little as 2. It really depends on how confident you are of the keywords. Make sure to include the keyword, or the main idea of the base keywords (meaning, if the keywords all revolve around “back pain” make sure “back pain” is in the ads). Don’t be boring with the ad copy either, try and liven it up to get the attention of the searcher that will make them want to not only click on your ad, but also buy or fill out a lead for your product. Use your domain and page/site for this. Make sure all the traffic goes to your killler blog page.

8- Once you’re done with all of the above do something very important now.. Change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matches. You can even go as far as to create seperate ad groups if you really want to, but sometimes that’s just overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns for good keywords. The reason you don’t want to go with broad in the beginning is because you’re on a mission now. That mission is not to make money, but to get your CTR up to a nice level. You’re going to want to be doing this for a good day or so. Don’t worry, you won’t lose much money, and afterall, a lot of those clicks aren’t just going to go nowhere, they’ll be going to your blog/promo page. You still have a great chance that they will also result in a sale/lead. So no need to fret about it.

9- Wow step 9 already, look how quickly we flew through this tutorial. Granted there are a lot of details being left out, but you will learn them on your own and pick them up pretty quickly too. You have to admit, this is a hell of a lot easier than you thought it would be right? So the reason I want you to use a blog or something with content on it and not just a redirect or linking directly to the affiliate code is because Google and MSN have this algorithm called QS aka Quality Score. They say, that if a site looks like it’s not selling something exclusively, meaning, that the site’s sole purpose is to spread information rather than sales then it should not be paying as much as a commercial site that has a huge budget. Also these types of results (your site) are relevant for users and give them what they are looking for, instead of a sales page and a “buy this thing now or you will die!” approach. We want the users to buy or fill out leads, but we don’t want to give them the impression that it’s ALL we want, so maybe tack on a newsletter signup link. You can use Aweber, they are cheap and good. Also tack on a few information links on the blogroll or in the posts. To really beef up your QS, send some inbound links from other blogs, directories, sites, forums, wherever really. Just pretend you are SEO’ing it as well as using it for a PPC campaign. Within 2 weeks or less your QS should jump, your CTR should jump, and best of all, your PPC bid price will drop! In the wise words of Borat.. Wowaweewa!

10- This is not over. Just because your ROI is 2:1-3:1 or better doesn’t mean you are leaving this alone and moving onto the next thing. Your ass needs to go over everything, step by step. Keep a list. What went wrong and why? What changes did you make to it, and what type of effect did it have on the sale/lead/traffic? Ask yourselves as many questions as possible. If you can’t answer it yourself, go to the forums and ask someone there. There is an answers to almost any PPC and affiliate marketing related question on WickedFire.com somewhere, and if we don’t have it, another forum will, or ASK about it, because as great as we may seem to think we are, we can’t read your mind and see what’s going wrong. Be as detailed as possible too!

So there you have it. A blog post of value, quality and meaning. Will it make you millions? I doubt it. But be realistic, you need to try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, because this is not hard at all. This is easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a paycheck. So quit sitting on your ass and reading this, and go out and do something about it! The rest is up to you boys and girls, so go make me proud and try it!

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I rarely make posts not affiliated with affiliate marketing or the business of internet marketing, but I just had to express my love for JetBlue today because of how they took a serious and almost potentially reputation damaging issue and turned it into a positive change and experience. Whether something similar to this ordeal happens in our industry (happened to me over the last 2 weeks), damage control is something not many people ever address or pay much attention to, and it’s really something we can all learn a lot from.

Last week, NYC and the rest of the North East had one hell of an ice storm and snow storm. It was brutal. Of course delays were bound to happen at airports, but this one stuck out like a real sore thumb because of the way JetBlue handled it, or didn’t. The reason focus went towards JetBlue Airlines is because they’ve only been around for 7 years, but their track record is amazing. Their service, prices, flights, planes, staff, crew, safety and experience is top notch. There have been many times where I could have flown in business class on American Airlines or Delta, but chose coach on JetBlue, because their coach is just like first class, but without the shrimp cocktail and wine. The flights are always good, the staff always friendly and accomodating, and they are also witty and funny people, which I like a lot. So back onto topic, the reason people were making such a big deal out of JetBlue is because their delays carried over for not just a few hours, but 3 or 4 days! While over 30 million people fly with them a year, and this only effected 10,000 or so, it became a serious issue because they let a lot of the planes just sit on the runway for up to 6 hours! I know if I were forced to sit on a plane on the ground for 6 hours, regardless of how long or short my flight was, I’d be pissed to no end.

Naturally, the media had a field day with this, but after everything went back to normal, JetBlue did something no one saw coming. Instead of just issuing a press release or press conference saying how sorry they were and blah blah, they decided to make a change. Not just any change, a serious one so that it would never happen again, and if by some chance it would, the customer would be overly compensated. No airline, ever, has done this or gone to this extent as quickly as JetBlue did to make a change. This is why I will continue to fly only with JetBlue as often as I can.

So what did they do that was so spectacular? Well, first off, they issued the normal statement saying they were sorry. Normally a company does something like that, the media eats it up, pokes fingers for a week, and then the story is dead and entered into the large history books of errors and screw ups made by that airline. Instead, JetBlue’s CEO and Founder David Neeleman did an interview with The New York Times, and expressed his feelings, almost un-censored about what happened. Yeah that’s impressive, I know, but it doesn’t stop there. They have also decided to change the way they do things and restructure their HQ staff AND their airport staff, as well as add new training programs so to address the issues at hand and any future ones.

But wait, there’s more!

JetBlue has gone even further and made something they call “JetBlue Airways - Customer Bill of Rights”. What the?! Are you serious?! Yes, they are quite serious. So what is this bill of rights to the customer? It’s pretty much their way of saying: if we screw up in any way, shape or form again, and you are not satisfied, you’re going to get comped immediately, either through  free flights and vouchers, or get an actual check from them for up to $1,000.

What other airline has ever done something like this. Even the ones who crash more often than a drunk driver in a parking lot. All they ever do is settle it quickly, issue a statement and press release, and move on. This is why I love JetBlue, and you should too. Here is an airline that really wants to change the way business is done. Not to mention they are the only airline that buys brand new planes, flies them for 2-3 years at most, and then sells them to the major carriers only to buy new ones all over again. For me, flying brand new planes vs old ones is a serious safety precaution that they are willing to invest heavily on.

The moral of the story here is that JetBlue could have taken the usual wussy route. Admitted they screwed up, done the press releases and interviews, and then said “better luck next time”, but instead they accepted full responsibility, and made serious changes, quite publicly too, to address the matter and make damn well sure it never happens again.

Here’s the link to the official page for JetBlue. A video from their founder/CEO, and an outline of the new customer bill of rights program. Kudos to you JetBlue, you’ve done good here, better than any other airline carrier ever has, and you will be remembered and trusted for it. Not to mention your competitors will be even more jealous of you guys now than ever before, but screw it, you guys deserve it and they don’t. Hey American Airlines, take note of these guys, they rock.
I compare this story to something that happened to me and WickedFire over the last two weeks. We had made some serious mistakes over the last few months, and let people do what they wanted. After cracking down a bit, we quickly realized where we were at fault and made the necessary changes and as the owner, I publicly admitted and apologized for what had happened, to all parties, both at fault and not at fault. I also did something I haven’t done in a long time. Ask for advice from everyone and anyone. The results were amazing. At first the experience had got me down, low enough to the point where I was considering selling off WickedFire and walking away from the whole project. But my drive and passion for it and for a changing industry kept me afloat. Not to mention the overwhelming amount of support and advice from members and non-members of the forum.

Instead of just making some blog or thread posts about being sorry, it sparked a serious change in the entire base of WickedFire. From changing jobs and staff positions, to adding a completely new team that we had never considered doing before. We’ve made serious changes, all in hopes that it was the right decision and goal to meet for the future of both WickedFire - as the community, and for the industry.

We’ve started to take a very serious and aggressive approach to changing how things were done before into how they should have been done before things started to head downhill. Like any musician, I never wanted WickedFire to become some one hit wonder and then die out in a year or two. I’m here for the long run, and now I’m glad to say we are finally acting like it too.

Thanks to everyone for your advice, comments, feedback, and support. I definitely could not have done it without any of you. Keep the comments, feedback and ideas coming, I’m reading everything and exploring lots of new areas and ideas we never considered before.

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This is quite possibly one of the only times I will ever show a deep down sensitive side of myself on a blog post ever. So read it and take it to heart, and maybe you’ll understand what I am feeling about it. I would also really appreciate any advice anyone can give on the matter. I’ve been reaching out to friends in the industry and peers alike. This isn’t a cry for help or a pity post, this is more like a “what the hell is going on and what should I do about it?!” thing.

Over this last week or so, some shit has hit the fan on WickedFire. Without getting into all of the drama and details, the gist of it is that I banned a few key people who were doing nothing but harassing the shit out of me and other members, and just overall bitching about everything. Apparently their friends didn’t take it too well, and a sort of online lynch mob was started. Trying to neutralize the situation, I complied with many of their requests to answer a list of questions. Some of them were just plain stupid, like asking my height. This is the list of “serious questions” I requested from them. At first I wasn’t going to answer any of them, but after some deliberating and asking the advice of some friends, I decided to go ahead and try to do anything within my power to defuse the situation and come to an agreement.

Well, needless to say, even after answering their questions, and drafting up some big changes with the staff of WickedFire to increase the quality of the posts and threads, these “friends” of mine decided to go off and start their own forum. Which I’m not against one bit, but the betrayal started when I came to learn that they were deleting their posts on WF that were of quality from months ago, and used WickedFire to contact other members to get them over to their new forum. This is where I draw the line of diplomacy. I called one of them, and his childish response to it was “I was bored, and you deserve it”, then hung up on me.

I now hear that they are also stealing a lot of the original WF ideas I had, and confided in some of them with, for their new forum. I still don’t know WHY they are doing this, aside for the excuse that they are saying “WF sucks” and “you suck”.

So what should I do about this? When someone wants to go visit other blogs or forums, and start their own thing, I have no issues with it. But when you start to fuck with my business, and all of the time, and money I’ve spent building my forum, only to undermine everything with no real reason, except that maybe he is jealous or seeking the spotlight too by doing a lot of this screwed up stuff to generate that lynch mob effect again, what am I supposed to do? Sit by and watch? Or get up and do something about it?

So I call on everyone who reads this blog and is a fan of WickedFire to give me advice. Either by posting here, or IM’ing or emailing me, and tell me what you think should be the next course of action. Because right now I feel as if a friend of mine has deliberately backstabbed me for his own gain/benefit for reasons he won’t even tell me, or doesn’t even have! I should probably also stop listening to Metallica - Seek & Destroy and Master of Puppets too, as they make me want to do some very not nice things in retailiation. But at this point, I really don’t know how to handle this correctly, and I definitely do not want to make any longterm mistakes that would ultimately effect any potential peace talks with them.

Here’s your chance to be heard and to give me expert advice or just regular advice on what you think I should do. I appreicate all advice too, even if it’s constructive criticism.

PS - I’ve been in bed with the flu for the last few days, and although I’m feeling much better, I may not be on for a long period of time, so be patient if you’re expecting a quick answer back from me. Thanks in advance to everyone!

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I really don’t like updating my blog all that much because it takes away from my daily activities and work schedule. But I will attempt the impossible and try to update it at least 15 times this month. I know some of you are waiting for a few of those make $1M in a weekend posts, but, you’ll just have to wait it out the hard way for now.

Nothing but the stats eh? Well, the reason I dubbed my blog topic as this is because I am working on, well I should say almost finished with the next section of the WickedFire resource area. It’s the Statistics part on the far right on that lovely flash nav bar at the top of the page.

Let’s face it. As an affiliate, or even from the advertiser’s end, we all live and die by our stats. You know what I’m talking about too, so don’t even pretend to deny it. When your stats go up, you have a better day than if the stats are creeping at some low numbers. It’s all about stats it seems. Even for SEO’s and SEM’s, we want nothing but stats. So how can I make your day a bit better other than confusing you with this post? Well, I probably can’t make you earn lots of cash this way, but I can certainly help your floundering ass!

I’ve been compiling, no joke, an absolute shitload of data from a number of very helpful affiliates both big and small, that were kind enough to send me their affiliate stat averages based on campaigns and across a large network of different ad networks. At first, poring over it wasn’t too bad, but being surrounded by numbers for so many hours at one shot can make anyone want to open up notepad and write “all work and no play makes Jon a dull boy” 5 billion times.

Wait, where was I going with this.. Ah yes, blame the Adderall for that last bit, but really, I’m going to be releasing weekly or bi-monthly (that’s every 2 weeks for you retards) documenting the averages, stats wise for the top converting offers, on their respective types of traffic being used. Following me still? I hope so, because I’m not going to explain it much more than that. You’ll basically be getting access to a list of data that none of the networks would ever share with you. This is coming straight in from more than 20 different affiliates of all types of calibers so that you, as an affiliate marketer, can make a wiser decision on which campaigns to run, and which not to run, and for which type of traffic too and from which network to use! Ahhhh so much data!! Take it from me, please!

So yeah, you get all of this for free too, so don’t offer me cash, unless you really want to. Everything like this is always free for everyone to use on WickedFire.com (see, I linkbait plug on my own blog too!).

I’ll have the final data up and running as soon as my programming team gets the section up and running. For now, all of the data is ready to go, and as trigger happy as I am to release it right now, that wouldn’t be very fair, because then I’d have to do it all over again for the boys and girls at WickedFire.

Fine then, you got your damn blog update with useful, or somewhat useful news and information. Now get back to work and stop hanging out on mybloglogs, youtube and the useless forums out there.

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