I’m getting a lot of people asking me what networks I am using. These are my networks and my referral links to them. If you have ever visited the site before, and want me to get credit for your referral, you need to clear your cookies before clicking through.
If you hate me and want my 4 children to starve, then don’t click my links at all. Note that I’m more likely to care about helping you one on one if you are one of my referrals.
Market Leverage Great network! If you haven’t signed on with them, you are missing something. If you hit $1K/week you can get weekly wire payments which will explode your cash flow if you’re a PPC’er. It’s like putting your cash flow on cocaine! If you know what you’re doing, you can reinvest all your money+profits 3-4 times per month.
Features of Market Leverage:
1. piles of offers I haven’t seen elsewhere
2. a beautiful website that’s intuitive and useful
3. a great 5% lifetime referral program
4. Will put you on weekly payments if you hit $1000/week and ask.
Revolution202 The guys from legendary Tracking202 and Prosper202 (both free), and Tracking 202 Pro (paid with added features) have what they call a partner network. It really is their mindset to provide you with whatever you need to succeed. Tracking202 users are a virtual who’s who of affiliate marketers. I use the free Prosper202 version of their tracking software and it has helped me increase sales. I know Wes and Roland personally and vouch for their integrity. Revolution202 is only a few days old at the time of this writing, but I plan to send about 50% of my traffic there. I trust them.
XY7.com If you are tired of working with affiliate managers that don’t know anything, give XY7 a try. Many of their AM’s run their own campaigns on the side. This gives them the knowledge to assist you in your campaigns. That being said, even though I like and trust my affiliate manager there, I cloak my traffic using Prosper202. You don’t want a smart affiliate manager having full access to your keyword and landing page information. Just a matter of principle to keep that stuff secret.
MarketHealth.com Most of their offers are in house and very stable. If you do article marketing or SEO and don’t want to promote something only to have it disappear. Then I would strongly suggest these guys. Also, most of their payouts also have a residual so you get paid again on re-orders. They tend not to have any ‘scammy’ offers, so some of their offers don’t convert as well as scammy ones found elsewhere, but you might be able to sleep better at night working with MarketHealth. I think these guys are ahead of the curve with FTC compliance so I feel more secure sometimes working with them.
XorClicks
A great network. Lots of the offers you want to be pushing. Also, I think they are easier to get approved to than a lot of other networks. That seems to be an issue for a lot of folks.
Clickbooth A pretty good, pretty large network. No reason I haven’t sent much traffic here. Just not enough hours in the day. They have lots of offers in just about every category.
Neverblue Network I’m running about 10% of my traffic here. I like their interface. Easily search their whole network for EPC (earning per click), network earnings and such. I always take a look here when researching new offers. Their interface is one of the best, and most intuitive. Very good for newbies. I also like being able to ad tracking pixels directly from my login.
MoreNiche These guys have an aggressive referral program which pays out $20/per signup +5% for life. Not a lot of offers though, but this network is pretty easy to get accepted to. If you have been denied anywhere, you should try applying to MoreNiche.
CX Digital Media A pretty good, pretty large network. No reason I haven’t sent much traffic here. Just not enough hours in the day. I haven’t even looked at everything they’ve got.
COPEAC These guys are on the ball. Call them and they pick up the phone. Today I called 20 minutes after my affiliate manager was supposed to go home. Did he let it go to voicemail? Nope, he walked me through something for 10 minutes and acted like there was nothing he’d rather do. Also, they have built landing pages for me. You can outsource landing page design to them for free which gives you more time to focus on building campaigns. Hey, anytime I can get a free and unique landing page I might as well at least split test it against my own layout.
CPALead These folks have a lot of surveys and such. Good for e-mail or Facebook apps or something like that. But not the kind of offers I’m into. If you have an e-mail list you’ve built, you should be looking at CPALead
Pepperjam Good network, great service, but they only pay a $.50/lead on referrals. I’d rather have the lifetime percentage. This is a big network, but I’ve had higher payouts on the same offers from Hydra. So far, I haven’t had a good enough reason to promote Pepperjam’s offers. But of course, they are a good, big network, and it’s always good to have as many options as possible.
Motive Interactive Nice smaller outfit. Getting accepted takes much longer if you don’t go through a referral link like mine. Mostly they take new affiliates by invite only. I met up with an AM (affiliate manager) on Twitter. They have been very pleasant.
EDIT: Luke from motive stopped by to say “Motive will do Paypal and wires – Motive will also do weekly payments as well and give higher than street payouts. You will have to talk with your AM at Motive Interactive CPA Network for approval on these.”
I do plan to do more business with them in the future. I’ve only heard good things about Motive from several sources.
Affiliate.com formerly CPAEmpire. They don’t have many of the sort of offers I promote. Also, their referral program is pretty terrible. It’s terms are designed to not pay you. I don’t expect to ever make any money from it. Today they have 282 campaigns, only 6 of them exclusive, and the ones I’m familiar with have higher payouts elsewhere. I know a lot of people do still use them. Maybe you’ll find something wonderful. Or maybe you have different strategies from me.
AzoogleAds.com These guys are real big. Lots of offers. I have gotten a higher payout with Hydra though so I haven’t run any of Azoogle’s offers, but it’s nice to have the option. Their referral program pays 2% only for 6 months after a signup, and only if you personally do over $1000/mo in conversions, so it’s basically worthless. I don’t expect to make anything off the referral program, but it is overall a pretty good CPA network and I would recommend signing up with them.
AVG – Affiliate Venture Group Good people with lots of offers. The network owners are solid. They are lenders and advertisers for lending offers. So they are not going anywhere. I had a blast hanging out with Ricky and Cathy from AVG out at Affiliate Convention Denver. I have some experience with lending traffic and will be running some payday loans business to these folks. I just need more hours in the day to get all my projects done.
LeadingEdgeCash They have the sort of offers that will always be making money. “male enlargement” type products. If you feel comfortable in this arena, the money can be huge too. (note the pun) Bad humor is free around here.
WorldNiche Worldniche is owned by the same folks as LeadingEdgeCash. If you are signing up to one, you should sign up to the other. It is similar products to leading edge cash. (male and female sexual enhancement) But they are branded with different names and so forth. If you want to do review type pages, you can find these types of offers at Moreniche and MarketHealth as well.
Monetizeit/Filinet/MediaWhiz: A good network with lots to offer.
TriFoxMedia These guys are a small outfit and want to grow. If you have been denied to other networks because you’re a newbie, apply to and call these guys on the phone. They’ll give you a chance because they are hungry for new affiliates. Don’t get the idea that their newbies. Todd the owner started out as an affiliate and knows what he’s doing. They are still small enough to really care about you and give you one on one help from someone who has walked in your shoes.
Hydra Network Hydra is OK. They are real big and have lots of offers, but I felt pretty let down when they cancelled the referral program. I felt like it was a breach of contract. I am not currently running any traffic to Hydra.
I’ve got 4 kids and my two in-laws living on my property. If you want to help a brother out and sign up through my links to any of these networks, I’ll be your best friend. Your mentor if you need one, and your collaborator. Contact me through @dangerbrown on Twitter. Most of these networks won’t pay me a dime unless you make money, so I will go out of my way to help you succeed. It’s a win, win for both of us. So get started applying to these guys now! Carpe diem!! (Seize the Day!!)
If you do want my insider secrets and want to sign up through one of these links, please clear your cookies first. I sure would appreciate it.
Have a nice day,
Danger
I signed up for Market Health because one of their affiliate managers spotted one of my campaigns and contacted me. Of course he wants me to sell their product. But yesterday, I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with him. It was very pleasant. I’m focusing on Health and Beauty, so it works for me.
One of the things that sets them apart is that about 90% of their offers are in house. They also have a legal department look over every offer so they won’t have to shut it down. If you have done any affiliate marketing, you know the feeling to have a profitable campaign pulled out from under you when the offer you are promoting disappears. This problem should be minimized with them.
Also, they have invisible link tracking. When people click your affiliate link it will look like this:
http://www.markethealth.com/
instead of this:
http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=314867
Which do you like better? Both of these links are my referral signups. (Which costs you nothing) View source if you are into that technical stuff. There is an extra script right after this paragraph. It’s easy, just like pasting adsense code.
Now, I do my due diligence and checked this company out. There are a few complaints out there suspecting tracking may be imperfect. The sad reality is that it is imperfect no matter what network you talk about. Also, lots of people have bad campaigns and want to blame someone else for their poor conversion rate. I was pleased to learn that the company has been around long enough to change their name. It used to be JoeBucks.com. I also think the advantage of invisible affiliate tracking would compensate (increase sales) for any imperfection in the system.
Due to the easy signup process, and my great experience interacting with them, I would recommend them especially for anyone who has been denied by another network. Keep in mind that if you break rules, they will drop you like a greased bowling ball.
I haven’t been blogging much lately, but have no fear. I have been working on new campaigns and twittering about it regularly.
My secret:
OK, here is my dark little secret. From August 2008 to March 2009 I have been making a living with Adsense arbitrage. I was driving traffic with adwords to loans and insurance related sites with adsense on them. I was able to double my money to the tune of about $1800/mo average.
It was doomed:
My sites were within terms of service, had original articles, privacy policy, contact us, terms of service, exit links, etc., but were doomed. What I was doing was legal, and the way I did it was within Google’s terms of service. Although Google can’t make it against TOS without shooting themselves in the foot, they don’t really want people doing straight Adsense arbitrage. In the forums, nowadays, you’ll read that most people think Google arbitrage is impossible. It used to be super-easy. Unfortunately I wasn’t around for that. I started after most people had been put out of business forever.For the last few years, they have been making it more and more difficult to pull off. I’m actually pretty proud to have made an arbitrage living for 8 months.
Google Slap:
I knew they would slap my domains. A “slap” is a penalty received on a domain (landing page) which causes all your adwords keywords to show up as ‘poor quality’ and your minimum bids to be $5 to $10. Google doesn’t notify you when this happens. More about slaps later. I hoped it would be months or years down the road. But about March 10th, they slapped my lesser quality domain. Two weeks later they slapped my domain with better targetted adgroups. I was left with zero income, but I had one more Adsense direct deposit ($4418.60) due on April 26 or so. Oddly, March was a good month with $2500 profit.
Terror:
So here I am, unemployed with no income. All I have is a very strong set of adwords skills. And a reserve of about $4000 before I’ll have to get a job. I came up with a plan. I’d held off on CPA marketing, because I didn’t want to change anything in my Adwords account for fear of upsetting my working system. Didn’t want to add conversion tracking, or analytics. Didn’t want to draw the attention of an account review. It was all fear based. But I have a wife and 4 kids to take care of. You heard me right. 4 KIDS!!!! I gotta pay the bills. Homelessness is not an option.
The plan:
I know that I could probably take my arbitrage to the next level. I have some good ideas about what kind of landing page would work today. But it would be temporary. Google will raise the bar again, and it will eventually be impossible. I need a longer term solution. So I decided to do what I could with Adwords driven PPC/CPA affiliate marketing. The plan is to try to achieve a living before I have to get a job. Plan B is that if I have to get a job for a while, it will only be a stop-gap measure until my affiliate efforts produce a living. I should mention that I haven’t had a job for 5 years. I used to be a 911 dispatcher.
The sub-plan:
If I have money in my budget to spend, I’ll be working on new campaigns. Which is why you haven’t seen much action here yet. But if my budget is maxed out, I’ll be working on promoting my blog with the ultimate plan of having many affiliates sign up through my referral links. The network (not you) pays me 2-5% of what you make. I only profit from your efforts if you succeed. This can build a lifetime residual income. I will be making a newsletter only sent to people signed up underneath me. In this newsletter, I’ll share information about my marketing techniques that I won’t share with anyone. For instance, I’ll share exactly what offers I”m promoting. I’ll also work one on one with you for free. I will tell you things that no affiliate marketer would share with his competition. I will teach you to fish.
The Good News:
Good news 1.
I made campaign 1 in the health and beauty category which is doing pretty well. It is only about 10 days old and I’ve spent $1488.83 and received $2246 in conversions through Hydra. So I’ve made $757.17 in profit on campaign 1. My ROI (return on investment) will improve over time as account history is built up which provides information that can be acted upon.
Good news 2.
Due to taxes we paid in the first quarter of 2008 and having 4 kids, we got a tax return of $4378. Much better than expected. I always wait until April 15 to file to reduce chances of an audit. (Even though I don’t cheat on my taxes, an audit would be a big hassle.) We got our refund deposit on April 24, and now I’m spending it on Adwords.
Good news 3.
I built another campaign in the health and beauty category yesterday. I worked 18 hours almost solid. Just ask my wife. I built a new website and Adwords campaign to promote it. Turned it on at 1:30am. As of this moment, when I’d be happy to break even, I’ve spent $25.56 and it has $108 in conversions.
Why work 18 hours in one day?:
I pushed so hard yesterday because I knew if I got this running that any income made the last 3 days of this month would come back to me on about the 20th of May. So I can reinvest it again. If I spend money today, I get to spend it again in 3 weeks.
I’m not getting a job:
With my tax return I have about $5K to invest. I have two promising campaigns. Hydra owes me $2482 due in 3 weeks. It looks like I’m going to make it. I haven’t had a job for 5 years. Swore I wouldn’t get one again. And I think I’m going to be able to keep that promise to myself and my wife. She likes having me home. We are very much in love and nearly inseperable.
With a new campaign, everything should be highly targeted. Small, tight keyword groups are the way to go. Your keyword should be found in your ad text, url, and webpage. Google has quality scores for keywords and relevency is important.
Writing ads:
If you don’t know what to write for an ad, do a Google search for your keyword. Look at the ads that come up. These are the ads which most likely have the highest CTR (click through rate) which is critical for adwords success. It may be frowned upon by some, but you can usually “borrow” the ad text from some of these successful ads. If there are trademarks you may have to avoid them. Use combinations and variations of the ideas you see on these top results. Make multiple ads for every ad group and make sure you have selected “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” for ad serving under “campaign settings”.
Bidding:
Now is the tough part. If you are in a competitive niche, and want your adgroup to be successful, you will probably have to run it at a loss for a little while. A time-honored strategy is to overpay for a little while and get your ads running in a good position, then to slowly lower your bid. Often your ad will be able to maintain it’s postition at the lower price.
Split testing:
During this process, your multiple ads should be selectively served by Google automatically. They will start serving your best ad more than all the rest. Once your best ad(s) have risen to the top, you may opt to pause most of the under-performing ads. (We’re looking at CTR here) Take your best ad and make some small change to it. For instance change your url from word caps to lowercase like this www.DangerBrown.com www.dangerbrown.com or the other way around. If you have narrowed it down to one ad, and want to speed up your split testing, you may choose to change “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” for ad serving under “campaign settings” to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”. This will display your split tested ads 50/50. When it has become obvious which is the better performing ad, pause the weaker one, and make another small change to the best ad. It is adviseable to always be split testing your ad. Always be improving it.
Keywords:
Especially in a new adgroup, watch your keyword quality. Google rates keywords on a scale of 1 to 10 for quality. Your keywords quality scores and CTRs are averaged into your adgroup, campaign, and account quality scores. If you have any poor quality keywords they should be paused or deleted. Keyword CTR should be 1% or greater or it may start to count against you. Sort by impressions and if you have a keyword getting 1000′s of impressions with a CTR that is really low (below .5%) pause or delete it. Usually, these are poorly targetted words less likely to convert into sales anyway. If you have a great quality keyword with a high CTR or conversion rate, plug that keyword into the keyword tool to find more similar keywords to expand on that success.
Conversion tracking:
Utilize conversion tracking if appropriate to your marketing purpose. It may be possible that your best CTR keywords and ads are not the best converting. Use the same methods above to optimize for conversions instead of CTR. Usually a balance between the two is wise as lower CTR results in a lower price paid per click and hence a higher profitablity.
I’m here to help you make money with internet marketing. What’s the catch? There’s got to be a catch right? Yes there is, but it won’t cost you anything. The catch is that I’m going to encourage you to sign up for some of the major affiliate networks through my link to their website. If I get you to sign up, I can receive 2% to 5% of the money you make with affiliate marketing. It doesn’t come out of your pocket. It is an incentive many networks offer to get new affiliates (people like you) on their network.
I can’t make money from this plan unless you are successful. So I really am here to help you succeed. I want you to make lots of money. I’ll be exploring various techniques, sharing my own strategies and am happy to answer questions you may have.
If you become my sub-affiliate with any network, I’ll share really specific info I wouldn’t share with my mother. Things like exactly what offers I’m promoting, keywords and negative keywords, ad scheduling, and more. If you are wanting to sign up to any network not listed here, but still want a mentor, let me know. I am probably a member and can send you a sign up link. If you e-mail me. danger@dangerbrown.com
I’m a member of several networks, but these are my three favorites:
Join Hydra Network, The Leading Performance-Based Advertising Network, Today!
Sign up for Neverblue, a great company with high standards.
Sign up for MarketHealth, they own about 90% of their campaigns. Their campaigns are not fly-by-night. Good if you want long term profitablility in a PPC campaign.
