I haven’t really expanded campaigns, but have improved the ones I have.
June 2009
Money spent:
Adwords $4,947.28
Yahoo Search Marking $448.08
MSN Adcenter $84.74
Ad buy $320.00
Total money spent $5800.10
Money earned:
Hydra $8,196.00
MarketHealth $5.00 (second tier)
Adsense $360.60
Gross money earned $8561.60
Net money earned $2761.50
So, it’s OK, but I’m not satisfied with my efforts or my results. At least I won’t have to get a job.
After attending Affiliate Convention this month I’m pretty pumped up and want to take my wife to Affiliate Summit East in NYC in August 2009. It’s gonna take an earnings bump to justify the expense of a big trip like that but I don’t want to miss it. I figure if I can at least double this month’s net earnings I’ll go to New York.
And what’s the deal with people in forums posting gross earnings and talking about their best day ever. Gross means nothing. It’s a silly ego number. Net means everything.
This month (July 2009) I’ll be pushing into new areas and building out new campaigns. Things will certainly be interesting. I also am going to be coming more into compliance with my landing pages. So that might cost me some profit. I hope not.
Feel free to comment. I could use the encouragement.
Hey, my RSS feed is working! C’mon, join up. I made a road sign for you to find it. I’ll even attempt to make most of my posts more valuable than this one. Got an idea for something you’d like to see in the feed? Let me know in the comments. I browse through all of them.
Google sets is not too well known but can be a fast and easy way to come up with ideas.
Go try it now. For instance enter “diet, weight loss, lose weight” into 3 of the fields. Hit the “Large Set” button and check out the results. This can give you ideas for niches or adgroups that you might not otherwise have considered.
Have you ever used this tool before? What valuable uses can you think of for it? Your comments are welcome.
I sat in on a session at Affiliate Convention with Stephen Richter discussing new aspects of compliance we’re all going to have to think about.
You’ve probably heard some talk about the FTC cracking down on bloggers. Well it doesn’t stop there. They are getting all geared up to outline new regulations by the end of the summer.
Bloggers who have affiliate links or take any form of compensation as payment for a blog post including free samples to be reviewed.
Floggers (fake bloggers) are doomed.
Almost all affiliate marketers of any sort are going to be impacted.
You think you’re compliant but your not:
You’ve got some fine print tucked away somewhere in a privacy policy, or terms of service, or even a ‘disclosure’ page. Right?
Well that’s not gonna cut the mustard buddy. The FTC is looking at the ‘whole picture’ of a website including. Ads, landing pages, testimonials, etc. If one word on your website is a lie, you are not fully compliant with the intent of the law.
In addition to that, if you are reviewing or even (god forbid) giving a genuine and honest review of a product, you have to disclose the fact that you are being or will be compensated. We are talking about sweeping changes to the way online marketing is allowed to continue.
Disclaimer: I am hoping that you will read my article and then sign up through referral links to affiliate networks or hosting providers. All the ads you see and practically any link you see on this site is fully intended to make me rich. Maybe you should just give me half the money in your wallet right now and we’ll call it even.
On a final note, it’s a good idea to think about getting an LLC. And if you’re doing some serious business, or doing some seriously risky business, maybe you should be setting up offshore entities to make coming after you more difficult.
In addition, you might want to talk to a few lawyers about setting up your business structures in a way that will really protect your personal wealth.
Lastly, please note that I’m not an attorney and following any advice I give you may result in dire consequences up to and including loss of limb, life, money, property, or your freedom.
Want more? Read a Washington Post article about it here.
The parties at Affiliate Convention Denver 2009 were pretty outrageous.
The Parties:
Platinum 84; June 17, 9pm: I was about an hour late to the party. The location was inconvenient but there were free buses running a loop from the Hyatt convention hotel to Platinum 84. Being late already, I took a cab.
I heard several first hand accounts that Marcia Brazil the highly publicized celebrity hostess immediately got drunk, was on stage naked making out with 2 strippers(even though she wasn’t paid to strip). She according to one unconfirmed report did something with the beer pong balls that was more likely to be seen in Bangkok. She definitely dove across a beer pong table smashing full beer cups and making a huge mess. She was grabbing guys and kissing them full on the lips, poured beer over some guys head, and violated someone’s religion (don’t ask). In less than an hour, she got kicked out of her own party at a strip club. It had to be pretty bad.
I thought it’d be no big deal to be a fashionable 1 hour late to this thing, but regret that I missed out on the opportunity to get some pics of this craziness for you guys.
After I got to the party, it was packed full of mostly professionally behaved people with an open bar and full buffet of food and booze that never ran out. There were incredible looking topless women everywhere. They called it a strip club, but they just stayed topless. None of them ever ‘stripped’. Although I was much too interested in networking and meeting people in the industry to leer at the girls.
The Platinum 84 party was about as wonderfully tacky and sexist as you can imagine. If you like that sort of thing, then you certainly missed out on something.
The Alto; June 18 5:30pm: Heather Paulson of the Paulson Group threw a classy little gathering here where it was pretty upscale. It was early so everyone was sober and well behaved. I made a few connections and then received an invitation to dinner so ducked out at about 7pm or so. I don’t know how late this gathering lasted.
The Lure Lounge; June 18 9:30pm: Not a strip club right? Well, maybe you should decide. I was late due to my dinner with 3 network owners and the 202 guys.
I assured my wife this one was networking only. No naked girls. But to my surprise they had about 6-8 painted ladies running around with trays of shot glasses. Drinks were free for a short while, then you had to buy your drinks unless you knew someone who gave you a vip bracelet. I was up there pouring vodka straight into people’s mouths. I took a video of some local rapping duo that performed for about 30 minutes up there. This party was packed full and pretty fun I have to admit. For you pervs there are a few more pics of the painted ladies in my photo gallery.
Unknown location: about midnight June 18
I was hanging out with some pretty awesome people. But in their interest I won’t name them here. We headed from the Lure Lounge on foot to some other club and one network owner smooth talked us all into the vip upstairs area with free redbull, drinks, and girls dancing on a platform. That place about finished me off and I stumbled into a cab about 1:30. I’m sorry, but for some reason I don’t remember the name of the place. There were maybe 10-20 conventioners that made their way over here. Bonus points in the comment section if you can name the place.
June 19, 5:30 pm, I can’t remember the name of this place either even though I didn’t drink anything on Friday. Really…. I gave my drink tickets away.
We went straight from the convention hall to this place. It had a large bar area upstairs and a couple tickets for free drinks. Some wings were laid out. A decent sized crowd showed up here. I stepped downstairs with a couple affiliates to have dinner. People were still their socializing until 11:30 when I left. I was homesick for my wife and kids. I’m sure I could have partied until 2 in the morning again. I drove home that night (about 220 miles) and got home at about 3am.
Parties I missed:
There were parties in hotel rooms every night until very unreasonable hours.
I know some folks went to the Diamond Cabaret strip club on both the 18th and 19th
On the 19th, there were people gathered at the top of the Hyatt having drinks.
Probably a lot more I don’t know about. I imagine there were several simultaneous gatherings at diverse locations every night.
Here’s a quick video walkthrough of the party at kind of a quiet moment:
Affiliate Convention was certainly an experience. First I’m going to post about the daytime convention activities. Then I’m going to tell you about the parties. I have a series of pictures covering both. Warning that some are not safe for work. Take a look at the photos page at top right if you’re interested.
You’ll certainly have heard people complaining that it was small, but I feel it made networking a more intimate experience. I made some wonderful new friends and really loved the whole thing. I’m certainly glad I went.
The talks I attended were useful but available on Webmaster Radio. So I tended to not worry about attending them and focus more on networking. I was too hung over to make it to any of the early talks although they were probably the best ones.
I sat in for: Super Affiliate Marketing Techniques: with Heather (awesome) Paulson, Steve Schaffer, Hamlet (supercool) Batista, and Jessie Jones
All intelligent speakers giving out good advice but just like any 1 hour talk they didn’t have enough time to go into enough detail to really change things for me. It served well as an introduction to a few concepts. A person would need to get some one-on-one time with these geniuses to really benefit from their experience.
Managing Search Campaigns that Scale: with Dan Boberg, Marc Barach, Mark Ziler, and Brian Lewis
All nice guys with good services to sell, but these things are geared towards large companies. After sitting through a long talk discussing strategies for using up to millions of keywords and how it can make you super rich, I asked a question of the panel. “How much do your services cost and how are the fees calculated?” The answer was about 5% with a $5,000.00 per month minimum. These services are not really intended for small time affiliates. But it might be worth considering for very large affiliates. Had I known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have been in the room.
Black Hat vs. White Hat: with Scott Polk, David Snyder, Frank Watson, and Marc Lesnick
Fun to attend. Fun to listen to. Mostly it was entertaining. Should make for a fun listen over at Webmaster Radio. There were lots of clever ideas being thrown out there. Go check it out.
Legal Matters and Affiliate Marketing: with Steven Richter and Amanda Berry
Definitely worth attending. The short of it is that if you are an affiliate marketer, you probably aren’t compliant even if you think you are. Your TOS won’t protect you if the rest of the site is a huge scam. It is critical that you actually treat your visitors in the way your privacy policy claims you do. I asked him about LLC’s and offshore companies as defensive strategies and Mr. Richter emphatically recommended having a good lawyer set things like this up for you. He added a small disclaimer that setting up offshore entities can work against you by raising suspicions of the IRS and other investigative agencies. In other words incorporating goes without saying, but going offshore may make you look guilty. But it makes it much more expensive for people to come after you.
Final Panel Debate: with Heather Paulson, Beto Paredes, Phil Maher, Charles Mui, and Hamlet Batista
Free beer and potato chips with no limit on the beer. Everyone attended this one. Just a big, fun wrapup to the convention. Prizes were given out, people were thanked and the general feeling was pretty warm and fuzzy.
Meals: I had the opportunity to meet and socialize with some wonderful people. On day one I grabbed lunch with some serious SEO types, Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media among them.
For dinner on day 1 I was honored to share the table at Maggiano’s with Ricky Ahuja, and Cathie Terry of Affiliate Venture Group, Wes Mahler and Roland Navarro of Tracking202 fame, Mario Girard and Julia Smart of CPA Underground and Rishab Verma and Richie Gill of Elite Commision. I wish I had a recording of the conversation.
On day 2 I skipped lunch and wound up having dinner during the evening party at the Lure Lounge with Augusto Ellacuriaga of SpanishSEO and Jim Kreinbrink of Hyper Dog Media. Both of these gentlemen are multi-faceted in their diverse knowledge of internet marketing techniques.
The parties were legendary and impossible to forget but hard to remember for some reason. I think they deserve their own post. I’ll try to get to it soon.
I came home with some great pictures but sadly there are several awesome people I met and somehow failed to get a picture of. I’ll have to do better next time.
I just got my first little ad buy running. Bought some space on a targeted site for $640/month. I had been trying to placement target the site with adwords but couldn’t seem to get the Google love I wanted. I wanted 100% impressions so I contacted the webmaster and bought some space.
Only catch is this. I made the mistake of letting the owner know I was ‘Danger Brown’ and he saw my blog. So if I make $20,000.00/month off it he’ll know and then price gouge me for the advertising. So that’s a lesson learned. In the future I’ll use a differnent e-mail address to contact people for media buys. (Nothing against this webmaster. He seems like a really nice guy. I just realize this will be something to consider in the future.)
One thing I didn’t fix yet is geo-targeting my visitors which is lame. I figure if I get 1-2 conversions from USA/Canada I’ll go to the trouble. If this ad won’t make money from USA/Canada, it’ll be a loser and not worth taking the trouble to maximize the return….. In other words, my CPA offer isn’t available for worldwide promotion. I need to either geo-redirect people to an alternative offer after they leave my landing page, or geotarget to multiple landing pages from the ad)
I was also lazy about only having one ad made for the spot. I wanted to get it running though and was impatient. The ad I have is really good I think. But if it gets some conversions, I’ll probably do some ad rotation testing. That’s another pain in the neck. I’m used to letting Google take care of this stuff.
I’m trying to put together a few other small buys. Put a few hooks in the water. So cross your fingers for me.
Tomorrow I’m heading out to Affiliate Convention so I’m getting my bags packed and trying to think ‘What might I be forgetting’. My campaigns are pretty much on auto pilot.
That being said, my new ad has had 2 clicks now. I’m watching things in Prosper202. I’m waiting for that first conversion!!!
This script really is pretty crappy. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t real nice. People hit cancel instead of reading it and when they do, it sends them to your offer. For the crappy little cherry on top, I put my own affiliate link in there. If you don’t change it, I’ll be making the money instead of you.
The below script will send people wherever you want if they hit cancel. It will let them close the window or navigate away if they hit OK. It should be placed right before the </head> tag. This is really for langing pages only. You should use ‘open in new window’ on your links on this page, because otherwise this script will fire no matter what they click.
If you have a better one, feel free to post it in the comments or e-mail it to me and I’ll include it here.
<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”>
var areYouReallySure = false;
var internalLink = false;
function areYouSure() {
if (!areYouReallySure && !internalLink) {
areYouReallySure = true;
location.href=”http://www.healthbuy.com/?aid=314867”
return “*****************************************************\n\nWait! \n\nPut your own sales text here, I’m not doing everything for you.\n\nThis product outperformed all other products.\n\nIf you want to have it all, this product can make that happen.\n\nClick cancel to visit our top recommended product’s site\n\n*****************************************************”;
}
}
window.onbeforeunload = areYouSure;
</script>
Just a quick interesting tale here of how I went in the eyes of a large affiliate network from being unworthy to highly desirable. One of the larger networks (you’ve heard of them) initially denied me. I had been planning on moving into affiliate marketing, but hadn’t done anything yet. Hey, you have to have something to promote before you can make money right?
I applied to several networks and most approved me, but 2 didn’t approve me. Whatever….I moved forward and started promoting Hydra offers and making some money. Less than 4 weeks after starting my rise to affiliate affluence, I got a phone call from an account executive at a big network. It went something like this.
Danger: “hello?”
AM: “Hi, I just saw your landing page xxxx.com and noticed you’re running some xxxxxxx offers. I looked in our system and saw that you had applied to our network already. I’d like to offer you a higher payout on some exclusive offers we have in your niche and I can approve your account while we’re on the phone so you can log in right now if you want.
What is significant about this conversation is that they had denied me already. I had a denial e-mail from them. Further, they were looking at the same landing page I had submitted as one of my websites. The only thing that had changed is that they noticed my ad came up for a keyword on one of their higher performing niches.
To be very clear, what happened is the AM did a search for some keyword in my niche on Google and one of my ads came up on the first page of search results. I was automatically in even after having been denied by them. The people they want in their network are those who are already experienced affiliate marketers.
I of course do not recommend this as a specific strategy to get accepted to a network. I do think that this real-life example is very revealing as to how affiliate networks really think and what they really want to see in those applying to their network.
What we’ve learned:
1. Tell them that you are going to do something, and maybe they’ll approve you.
2. Tell them(honestly and believably) that you are already doing something, and they’ll approve you for sure.
Note that this is not the only call I’ve received like this. This scenario has started to repeat itself. Once you are a successful affiliate the roles become reversed. You no longer need them, they are the ones who need you.
I’m soon going to be doing a more in depth post about how to get accepted to a network. You don’t have to wait for that though. Check out these affiliate network signup links.
I heard several first hand accounts that Marcia Brazil the highly publicized celebrity hostess immediately got drunk, was on stage naked making out with 2 strippers(even though she wasn’t paid to strip). She according to one unconfirmed report did something with the beer pong balls that was more likely to be seen in Bangkok. She definitely dove across a beer pong table smashing full beer cups and making a huge mess. She was grabbing guys and kissing them full on the lips, poured beer over some guys head, and violated someone’s religion (don’t ask). In less than an hour, she got kicked out of her own party at a strip club. It had to be pretty bad.
I assured my wife this one was networking only. No naked girls. But to my surprise they had about 6-8 painted ladies running around with trays of shot glasses. Drinks were free for a short while, then you had to buy your drinks unless you knew someone who gave you a vip bracelet. I was up there pouring vodka straight into people’s mouths. I took a video of some local rapping duo that performed for about 30 minutes up there. This party was packed full and pretty fun I have to admit. 
For you pervs there are a few more pics of the painted ladies in my photo gallery.
finished me off and I stumbled into a cab about 1:30. I’m sorry, but for some reason I don’t remember the name of the place. There were maybe 10-20 conventioners that made their way over here. Bonus points in the comment section if you can name the place.
place. It had a large bar area upstairs and a couple tickets for free drinks. Some wings were laid out. A decent sized crowd showed up here. I stepped downstairs with a couple affiliates to have dinner. People were still their socializing until 11:30 when I left. I was homesick for my wife and kids. I’m sure I could have partied until 2 in the morning again. I drove home that night (about 220 miles) and got home at about 3am.
