While this seems like a fool-proof method for making money online, you’ll quickly find out that your campaigns aren’t profitable, and that you’re losing money on them. I would say the majority of the times it happens for one (or more) of the following reasons :

• The affiliate you chose to copy has been running the offer for a while and has a special payout that enables him/her to smoke the competition (this is what happened when at least 50 affiliates used to rip my dating pages).
• The affiliate is cloaking their landing page from you, so the page you’re taken to isn’t really the landing page they’re running.
• The affiliate isn’t even making money with their page/offer.
• The affiliate has optimized his ad targeting, something you wouldn’t be able to see.
• They were the first one to the party and the first one to think outside the box.

While there is money to be made simply copying other people, the most money is made from coming up with your own ideas. It’s just natural that a new style of page or way of selling something can convert better than the norm, simply because it’s something fresh that people aren’t used to seeing.

Instead of talking about concepts and theories, once again I’m going to construct this post with an example of thinking outside of the box that I used about 6 months ago. The point isn’t to teach you everything there is to know about thinking outside of the box, it’s to show you an example of it that will hopefully get your creative juices flowing, perhaps enabling you to think outside of the box a bit more with your campaigns.

Note: the example I’m going to use didn’t really work out for me, that’s why I’m sharing it. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but one thing to always remember is that most of your campaigns will fail…especially when you’re thinking outside of the box. For every 5 ideas that don’t work at all, there will be 1 that does work; making everything worth it.

Where the Idea Spawned

A while back, a lot of affiliate started using a new “outside of the box” method for selling grants. They would collect a persons Name and E-Mail on the first page, bomb them affiliate offers through Aweber, and then after they collected the data would take them to more landing pages pushing grant affiliate offers. I’m not about to out any pages right now, but you’ll be able to see what I mean anyway.

I thought it was an interesting way of marketing affiliate offers and also getting ads approved. Where any flog or farticle page would be rejected from most ad networks, this was something that looked new and different, and also more legit. Then I started thinking if the idea could be applied to something other than government grants…

Searching around, I realized that education offers were something along similar lines to grant stuff (since a lot of edu offers offer education grants), and then started thinking about how I could pitch it. I ended up with this page :

College students are for the most part cheap, so I set up a site that told them they could be saving thousands of dollars, and also access to free entertainment. As you can see I stressed the word Free a lot, and on the right they could enter some basic info to get the free guide. This page on it’s own converted decently, I think I got around 100 email submits before I called the campaign off. One they entered their name and e-mail, I took them to this page :

The page is simple enough and looks almost exactly like the grant second page did. If this campaign were successful, I probably would have redesigned the page and split tested a few different variations so it was more unique. This is something I designed and threw up in 2 days.

This page is extremely simple and leaves them with only 1 option…to download the free cash guide. Since that’s what they wanted anyway, shouldn’t really lose anybody on this page. When they click the button, a download link would pop up and then the page in the background would redirect to an edu offer.

So what did the PDF look like that was sent to them? It was a college cash e-book that was super basic, here are a couple screens:

It’s just a PDF loaded with affiliate offers. Surprised? It wasn’t 100% affiliate offers because I wanted to instill as much trust as possible and make the college student feel like they were reading good advice, so I threw in the tip about Grooveshark, Hulu, etc. While it may seem like a shiesty way of doing things, it’s all legit. None of the offers require a credit card (except for the tiny credit report link I threw in there), and they’re all things that students can use to help save some dough.

If the students had just picked 1 of the links to follow through with and convert, the campaign could have been very profitable. If they filled out multiple offers? Could have been very very profitable. I had their e-mail too and subscribed them to a list where I sent out mostly edu e-mails.

Why Didn’t This Work?

To be honest, it probably could still work. Sometimes I’m overly impatient with things and if they don’t work immediately, I don’t spend time optimizing (especially if I have another project going on). Like I said I ran about 100 email subs and only got a couple edu offer leads from it. Some questions I think about :

• Maybe the PDF seemed too phony?
• Maybe I should have just pushed all the offers on the next page, instead of e-mailing it to them in a PDF?
• Maybe I used too many offers and should have focused on 1 or 2?
• Maybe I wasn’t taking full advantage of the mailing list?
• Maybe I should have sent the PDF, but done something other than just redirect them to an edu offer after they downloaded?

There are many reasons it could have failed, and many things that could possibly make it successful. If I see ads for similar sites up in a few days, I’ll know what I could have done differently ;). Feel free to manipulate the idea and test it out if you want, just be warned that it didn’t work out for me initially.

So there’s an example of a way to think outside the box a bit, and push affiliate offers in a different manner than most would. This particular attempt failed, but I’ve done very similar things and have been successful.

Are you thinking outside of the box? Or are you just spamming more of the norm? Both have their advantages, but if directly copying other people isn’t working out for you, you might want to start thinking outside of the box more.

…

It’s 2011 and maybe you decided that this is the year you try to learn how to make money online. Maybe it’s 2011 and you’ve been doing SEO for the past couple years and want to make the move to paid marketing this year. In any case, I’m going to approach this article from the standpoint of anybody just getting started this year.

As mentioned before, I’ve been working on a physical product for over a year now (it’s a slow process)…gotta make money somehow though. A couple months ago I got back into affiliate marketing a bit and am still testing new offers and working on optimization, so it’s almost like I’m starting new in 2011 as well. So hopefully I have a bit of a fresh perspective on things.

Completely New to Affiliate Marketing?

If you’re a brand spankin’ newbie, you’ll want to head over to the affiliate marketing guide I’ve put together. It could actually use an update (something I’ll do this week), but for the most part the articles are all still valuable information and good insight for someone just getting their foot in the door.

Affiliate Networks of 2011

The first thing that popped up in my mind when getting back into affiliate marketing was, “Ok, where should I get my offers from?” I’ll mention a few networks here, and why I’m looking at them :

Ads4Dough – Ads4Dough is a popular network among a lot of successful affiliates, a lot of it due to the relationship with the owner, Jason (smaxor), who I also happen to be good friends with. It’s not the prettiest interface of all time, but that really means nothing. They’ve got offers in every vertical, and are a good source for edu and dating.

Neverblue – Neverblue used to be one of my old favorites because back when everyone had DT, they had their own custom tracking software that worked great. I also became pretty good friends with a few of the people there and they’re all really cool. Solid interface, solid tracking, solid support, NB is definitely somewhere you want to sign up.

Epic Advertising – Formerly Azoogle, I used to have my first “big” days in affiliate marketing with Epic Ads. While I personally haven’t run much traffic to them lately, I’ve had a few people tell me of some high volume offers that affiliates are running through Epic. Don’t quote me on this, but I think they’re strong in rebill offers (last I heard). I think they also have some good insurance offers.

EWA Private Network – Ah, the Eagle boys. While not everybody is a personal fan of Ryan Eagle’s persona, nobody seems to have a problem with the way he does business. EWA gets tagged as a “broker network” by a lot of people, but the fact still remains that they have a lot of happy affiliates. They take small margins and pay out weekly, and really do want you making money. If you’re looking for a network run by younger guys with perhaps a more current insight into the industry (more like you), check out EWA.t

Firelead – I’m throwing this one in here out from left field. Firelead isn’t the biggest affiliate network out there, and I haven’t ever personally run offers with them. But I’m good friends with the owner Mike, and he’s a great guy. You’ll get more of a personal treatment (something very good for beginners), and these are guys you can trust. Maybe I’ll look into running some offers through them and report back on how it goes. I spoke with him earlier today and his network is private (referrals only), so if your app gets denied and you’re not a fraudster let me know.

There are a bunch more affiliate networks out there that I’m close with and would recommend, but the networks above are definitely enough to get you started with finding a few offers. Once you’ve got a couple offers that are running, shop around other networks to compare conversion rates and negotiate payouts.

Affiliate Offers of 2011

What offers are going to be the hot offers of 2011? I’ve talked with a bunch of affiliate managers and friends about what verticals are performing right now, and started to do some testing in these verticals myself. Here’s what’s going on…
 
Dating

Online dating is something that continues to grow more and more, and continues to become more of a “normal” thing for people to do. If you asked 100 people 5 years ago what the most consistent affiliate offer was going to be over the next 10-20 years, I’d bet that over 80% of them would say dating.

In addition to dating being a growing trend across the world, winter time is the best time to run dating offers. Back when I used to run some volume in dating (~3k leads/day), my quality in March-September wasn’t good at all. I’d get cut from a bunch of offers and payouts dropped. But once fall/winter came, that same “bad” traffic was great quality for dating offers.

So as long as things are relatively consistent with how they were years ago in dating, we’re at the tail end of the good time of the year. Still plenty of time to get in there, competition is pretty fierce with it though. A couple months ago I ran a private label through Neverblue, so check them out if you’re interested in that.
 
Groupon Style Offers

If you’ve been on the internet the past year (…), you’ve seen a Groupon ad somewhere. Whether it be on a weather site, a porn site, or a how to give your dog a bath site…Groupon is dominating Planet Internet. If you’ve been keeping up with the times you’ll also note the $6 billion Google offer that Groupon respectfully turned down. Now personally…that’s a hell of a lot of money to turn down. But the company is HUGE, and only growing.

Everybody isn’t just sitting back and watching Groupon take over the coupon space though. There are basically Groupon clones out there with affiliate programs, and there are a lot of affiliates running them now.

It’s something to look into, a couple things I’d keep in mind :

-keep your CPC low, payouts generally aren’t that great on these offers (typically $3-5)
-experiment with direct linking and using a landing page, but if you’re using a landing page be prepared to be told that your quality isn’t good
-don’t forget to geotarget by city, these affiliate offers are all only for a select few cities
 
Education

Edu offers are something I mentioned a while back, and is another pretty consistent niche over the years. The offers have always been around in some way, shape, or form.

For me personally, edu offers have come in and out of phase. A few years back I ran the offers with a lot of success (I once got an unnamed network into a little legal fiasco because they just got this offer from a school and I sent like $30k worth of leads in 2 days with a few other affiliates that did the same…they did NOT want that much volume to start haha). I ran them a bit last year, and it was off and on. Started of doing well, had to pause, and when I turned back on it magically didn’t convert anymore.

Is this niche long-term? Some people think so, but I have some reasons to believe otherwise. The thing about these online schools is that they receive almost all of their revenue through government loans. And with Republicans taking Washington back, I’ve also heard speculation that one of the first government funding programs they want to cut are these online school programs. If schools lose their money, they’ll go out of business or in the very least not be able to afford to pay $25 for a form submit.
 
Rebills

I’m not going to talk much about rebills, because there’s not much to talk about. They’re not nearly as big as they were a year ago, but they still exist and I still see “Mom Teaches her 12 Month Old Baby to Make $2,443/day Online!” ads on weather.com.

My take on it? If you’ve got consistent sources of traffic that won’t slap or delete your Flog ads, go for it.
 
Penny Auctions

I remember like 3 years ago I stumbled upon a site called PennyCave.com. My friend had Facebooked me and said “You should check this site out, you can get TVs and stuff for a few bucks and it’s legit”. I visited the site and like a sucker, bought some bids to play around with. I got tired of having to constantly place bids with 1 second left and just left the site. A couple weeks later I was chattin with Volk-swagen and said to him “Check this site out, the idea is awesome. It’d probably be really profitable to make one and run traffic to it…”

Well, fast forward a few years and now there are 100+ penny auction sites out there. Some have shady rebilling set up, some have legit bid packages that are cost per sale, and I think all of them use bidding bots to jack up action.

You can find penny auction offers at most networks, with payouts varying. The more shady offers pay out $60-70+, while the legit offers like QuiBids and BidCactus pay out $30ish. I did a bit of testing myself with these offers and didn’t really have any success. It showed some potential (and there are affiliates running it successfully), but I’m not sure how long these offers will last and it just wasn’t really for me.
 
Tax Season

For whatever reason I never really ran seasonal offers, but I might give them a go with tax season coming up. People need their taxes done, and the traffic can get pretty high volume as the next few months progress. For the most part what I’ve seen in the past is people just making a simple landing page or direct linking.
 
Old Trusties

There are a bunch of old/consistent/long-term niches that are still around. Things like mobile, credit reports, insurance, etc. If you asked any affiliate manager for a “Top 10″ report every month for a year, there’s a very good chance that one of these types of offers would be on the report.

For these types of offers it’s usually more of a slow build up. Typically search and content traffic which volume starts out pretty slow until you can optimize and scale. A lot of the other offers are offers you can blast traffic to from the start and see what happens. Which you can do with these offers too, they just typically require a bit more optimization than something like dating.
 
Talk to Your Affiliate Manager

The verticals I mentioned are just a few of many. All it takes it shooting an IM/email to your affiliate manager saying “Hey, what are some of the top offers affiliates are running with you now?” to get some more options.

Just beware that affiliate managers can sometimes inflate EPCs and make an offer seem like it’s a bit better than it really is. They want your traffic because that’s how they make money. That’s why it’s good to try to have a good relationship with as many networks as you can, you’ll get more honestly and transparency that way.
 
Offers: Where and How to Run

Now you’ve got a few offers in mind from a couple choice affiliate networks. Now you have to decide on traffic, and how you’re going to run the offer.
 
Search Engines

Google and Yahoo/Bing are still reliable sources to run traffic, both through search and content. In order to limit your spending in the beginning (as search traffic can be pricey), almost try to optimize your campaign before you get a general feel for the offer. Make sure your keywords are as related to your ads as possible, and that both of those are related to the landing page (same keywords, etc).

Google content network has always been a little “hidden gem” of mine for traffic. When a lot of people start off, they either just do search, or they mistakenly run both search and content on the same campaign and wonder why things are screwy with their CTR. If you know how to run G content properly, you can get a lot of traffic for 1/5 the cost of search clicks.

Word of warning: Google is extremely sensitive about going against their policies. One of my Google accounts was just perma banned a few weeks ago for cloaking. I made ads and sent them to QuiBids (legit with Google), and once they approved them I just redirected to another auction offer to test. I tested it for a day, paused it, never ran it again, and a week later I get the e-mail saying my account is terminated. Play nice children.
 
Social Networks

I kind of scaled back on my search traffic and upped my social traffic recently. If you’re good at it, clicks can come cheaper than search traffic. The offers run on social networks are obviously a bit different, and more catered to the younger crowd. Dating, app installs, edu, things like that. Mobile is big with the younger crowd but Facebook won’t approve those ads, go through Myspace for them.
 
Ad Networks

Most of the rebill stuff I see being run are run on ad networks like Pulse 360 and Adsonar. These ad networks have really high volume so if you can find something profitable to run, you can really ramp it up. The downside is that usually the traffic is pretty low quality, so don’t expect a real high conversion rate.

As with almost everything, it’s all about testing.
 
PPV

PPV is something I can’t talk much about, but is something affiliates have been using more and more to make money. There are a few articles in the affiliate marketing guide on PPV so I’d suggest to check those out.
 
How to Run

Any real major changes to landing pages in 2011? Nothing really from what I’ve noticed so far. First you should decide whether or not you’re going to direct link or use a landing page. I don’t know if I just suck at direct linking or what the deal is, but I’ve had better success using a landing page for 99% of the campaigns I’ve run.

As far as types of landing pages go, like I said haven’t noticed anything new and revolutionary like the Flog was. It’s hard to talk about what type of landing page to use without making an entire post about it. It’s pretty dependent on the offer you’re running and the type of traffic you’re running.
 
Anything I’ve Missed

I probably forgot to talk about something I wanted to talk about, but when it came time to get back into affiliate marketing again this year, these are the things I thought of.

One more old bit of advice that’s worth mentioning again: don’t take my word for it. Go out into the ad world yourself and see what people are running, that’s the best way to do research. You don’t need any special paid tools or programming skill, your competition posts their websites publicly for you to see.

Hopefully there’s some value in this post, more value than I’ve been providing lately at least. I’ll try to keep up with blogging more and also update you guys with how my campaigns are going. Let’s make some dough.

I’m just making this post to say: I still have plans on blogging more in the future. I’ve learned A LOT of information that I can definitely share. Right now I’m just too busy to really think about anything else but my main projects. A project 5 months into the making is going to launch in the near future (for real this time) so it’s like cramming for finals week in my head right now.

Once things cool down I’ll be able to relax and get to blogging more. Priorities folks…gotta win the bread.

This post will be totally useless without some usable piece of affiliate marketing information so here it goes: something I’ve been experimenting with in a few small affiliate side projects is collecting email address information and THEN shooting them to the affiliate offer (“You’re getting a free [blah blah], just enter your name and e-mail address to continue!”). It seems there are quite a few people out there doing this. E-mail them with some “Welcome” packet of affiliate offers, sub them to your list and just mail out more affiliate offers. Plus make commissions off whatever offer you send them to after you capture the name/email. There’s almost always higher payouts for email only offers too. Something to think about and test.

Sorry for being lame.

So now what? Some food for thought…

Oldies but Goodies

Offers like credit reports, auto insurance, dating, etc. These are the classics but they’re offers that have been running strong this entire time for a reason…they convert. Some of the very first offers I ran back in the day were all 3 of those I listed above, and all 3 were profitable. I also see Google ads as well as Facebook ads for all 3 of those, which tells me that it looks like they’re converting just like the old days.

Mobile/IQ

Mobile used to be the hot “shady” thing to do, when rebilling people for $9.99 was unethical. My oh my if we only knew we would rebill for 10x that amount and go to bed with a smile on our faces (‘our’ just referring to the entire industry). Mobile offers are doing well from what I hear. I see some ads on Myspace and other teenage oriented sites, and I also hear incenting these offers on app traffic is working nicely.

Edu

If you take a closer peek at Facebook and a few other places, you’ll see a few people running education offers. These have been kind of a “sleeper” for a while now, I ran them a while ago with some success. The only thing you have to watch out for is quality, they can end up nailing you on it. But other than that it’s a nice leadgen with a good payout for just completing a form with no credit card.

Good Ole Fashioned Business

Maybe it’s time for you to take some of those rebill profits and pour them into a business idea you’ve had in your mind for the past year. Don’t forget that affiliate marketing is just one of the ways to make money online. Build a site that people want to visit every day or a service that they don’t mind paying to use. In the age of Facebook/Digg/Reddit/etc, sharing has never been easier. This makes viral sites all the more easier to go viral.

Just some things to think about in case you’re a deer in headlights now that the FTC truck is speeding at you.

How My Operation Started

I started ~3 years ago on my own, just a solo affiliate trying to learn the business. I had my own campaigns that did well, but after going to some events and talking with industry friends I realized I was small potatoes. Most of my affiliate friends were solo as well, so I pretty much stuck with that route for a while. I had a few partnerships along the way, but that’s an entire post on it’s own (hmm perhaps the next post then?).

After a while of working on my own and building out my skills, I took a step back and looked at what was happening. I was making pretty good money but I was doing everything myself. That’s when I went golfing with Matt and he jokingly suggested that I hire him. That day I thought about it a lot and it actually seemed to make sense. I’d pay him hourly (more than he was making at his current job) to work on things for me. The more work I gave him, the more free time I had to work on things myself, start new ideas, and network a lot more. And play Call of Duty here and there ;).

So I went through with that idea and it proved to be beneficial. Now a few months later I see that my plan was still very flawed. I thought about things and what I was good at, and what I was training Matt for. I was good at coming up with ideas, setting up a decent landing page, and driving traffic to it. I pretty much spent months teaching Matt the same thing. WRONGGGGGGGGG.

Instead of initially looking for someone to compliment my skills, I should have been looking for someone to supplement them. Meaning instead of training someone to do what I’m already good at, I should have been looking for someone to work in the areas that I’m weaker in; primarily programming and design. Now that I realized that small roadblock I made for myself, how could I take it to the next level? By…

Building a Team

If I could break it down into a step-by-step process, I’d go something like this.

Step 1 : Making sure you’re in the proper mindset.

Building a team is serious stuff, and for it you have to be serious. That means not only will you have to take a risk in paying all these employees that may not make you anything more than you are now, but you also risk them being counterproductive to what you’re already doing. These risks can be minimized by simply hiring the right people. You have to be prepared and ready to accept a potential loss, it’s all a part of the game.

Step 2 : Asses the strengths/weaknesses in your company/yourself.

In my own case, I mentioned that the strengths in my company from myself were traffic generation and ideas. My ideas come to life, but not at their greatest potential. If I were to take things seriously, I would want employees that would specialize in :

• design
• content creation
• programming
• accounting/legal/bookkeeping

Now that you know what you have and what you don’t have, it’s time to actually make it happen.

Step 3 : Set up your game plan.

There’s actually a few ways you can hire and manage the team you’re going to build. I’ll list a couple of them:

1. Hiring an outsourced team. I’d suggest hitting up a place like Odesk.com or even a design/writing forum or some sort of internet forum. Post up a job and take resumes and portfolios. Take all the info, look it over, and then choose your team to hire over the internet. Communicate via email, phone, and IM.

Pros : Can find much cheaper work, it’s faster, you can communicate anywhere, cutting someone is no hassle, you have the opportunity to just hire on a per project basis and not hourly/salary.

Cons : Everything that comes with hiring a remote staff. They may not pick up your calls or take a while to respond, time zone differences, quality of work may be lower because you’re not there, and things are generally easier to explain in person.

2. Hiring an in-house team from scratch. I’d say the younger the better, so if you were to build a team from scratch I’d try and find some students fresh out of college. Post listings at local colleges and design schools, in English buildings and computer buildings.

Pros : We just made the change to in-house, meaning you have a constant watch over everybody, communication is easier, and teamwork is a lot better. Simply put in-house is just much more effective. They’re fresh out of college and are ready to learn and work. They know nothing about the industry and with your proper guidance will never know enough to quit the company and go off on their own. Just make sure that you really specialize what they’re doing and not tell them anymore (i.e. don’t show a designer affiliate network stats, traffic stats, revenue, or anything).

Cons : Training. Depending on your current skills, this can take either a long time or a really really long time. Matt still has a ton to learn and he’s been with me approaching a year now learning everything that I know. Also you run the risk of them just not working out and not learning well. If you’re going this route make sure you have an extensive interview process. Also costs. You’re going to want to get some office space, equipment, and then the employees will most likely be more expensive.

3. Collaborating with and poaching existing industry folk. Say you have a really good friend and he’s bomb at programming or something. You two decide to team up and hire a team. Someone will have to move, but you both get together and build the company together. You can either hire fresh students, or you can hire existing industry affiliates and affiliate managers. I’ve known more than one instance where I’ve seen an affiliate manager be poached by a private affiliate.

Pros : Most members already know the industry. Training is kept to a minimum, ideas flow much better, you have everybody’s connections combined, and it’s all just much faster.

Cons : Already being in this industry, employees like affiliate managers will want a decent salary or some sort of revshare. You’ll already be splitting the company with a partner (if you choose), so that means you get even less of a cut.

Step 4 : Take the plan to action.

Now it’s time to put the game plan into action. Go out and find your employees whichever way you choose. Hit up colleges with flyers, talk to professors, talk to your industry friends, etc. This is where 95% of you reading this will just stop. You’ll get psyched about the money you could make with a full team, plan on actually doing it, and then never following through. Maybe the campaign your working on now takes up too much of you’re time, or maybe you’re just a baby and don’t want to take a risk. There’s nothing I can say that will change your mind or reveal anything to you, so I guess that where it’ll end. Either do it or not.

I’m probably going to cut the article off here for now, because that’s pretty much what I can report on. I have multiple friends that employ teams EXACTLY the way I just described to you, and they’re raping it. Right now I’ve started taking some steps to outsource a little work, and partner up with some industry friends for single project revshare deals. Next year I plan on getting out of Buffalo and moving somewhere nicer. Once I do that I’d like to get an office and just start hiring in-house.

So while I can’t give many tips on managing a full team yet, hopefully it’ll make for a decent post next month.

See ya’ll in NYC in a couple days.

EDIT: I think comments are back and working.