Dragos asks…

Do you know any self hosted analytics package that can track outgoing links and outgoing ppc links like adsense and other ?

Something that tracks Adsense too? Nope not really sure, sorry mate.

Vlad asks…

How much does your blog make you a month?

Personally I have no clue. All the ad sales just go automatically to my Paypal, and I haven’t logged in for a few months. I make $1-3k/month on average from my referrals, and then I’d say a few hundred a month from ad sales.

Phillip Andrews asks…

-Do you use fake blogs?

-When deciding how much to bid for keywords, do u use the formula of taking the offer’s payout multiplied by its expected conversion rate to determine the breakeven max CPC?

-How many campaigns have you failed at before you finally got your first successful campaign?

-Do you think PPC-CPA marketing is largely a numbers game? (Finding the needle in the haystack)

-I need to scale a keyword list from 1,000 to 100,000. What keyword tool would u recommend?

1) Yeah, I used to. I currently don’t have any running.

2) Nope, I just bid high and get some traffic to see if the niche has potential. Once I see conversion rate ad lose some money, I calculate my CPC based on the return I’m trying to get.

3) Zero. Started with ringtones and ran that successfully for about a year.

4) Well I guess. It’s all about numbers…CPC, EPC, ROI, CPA, etc.

5) Wordze was always pretty solid at generating massive keyword lists.

Al asks…

What type/category of landing page that is not a flog or fake review are you having good results with lately?

None. I’m not running anything at this precise moment.

joe asks…

You think 5k is enough to start out with in am for advertising costs as well as software? If not how much cash you think is needed to get started?

For sure. I started with around $3k and did fine, but this was 3 years ago. As long as you approach things properly and don’t blow too much money initially testing, you should be able to profit after spending a few thousand dollars.

Xohiab asks…

How do you think CPA offers go with viral marketing? Will it screw up the conversions?

I’m guessing conversions will be lower because it will most likely be free (and therefore unpredictable) traffic.

Joe asks…

What’s the best way to get credit to build your affiliate business? How did you build your credit card limits and/or get more credit for Google?

I am NOT the person to ask that question haha, my credit score is horrible. Don’t have too many open accounts, pay your bills on time, and make sure you don’t have any small accounts that you’ve owed a couple bucks on for a long time. My credit score crashed and I almost didn’t get approved for my Audi because I had a Chase CC that I opened a year ago that had like $1.12 due on it that I had no clue about. Killed my score.

Jon asks…

What advice would you give to someone who is new to CPA marketing? I have done some affiliate marketing with limited success. I know how to ftp, set up a web page and do basic keyword research. However, converting traffic has been my challenge.

With this background, how would you approach CPA marketing if you were in my shoes?

My advice would be to make as many friends as possible in this industry, and just talk to them. That means other affiliates via places like blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. As well as affiliate managers, they can be great friends and a great help/start to your business. Once you become good friends, you can start talking about what’s working in this industry. Even if you don’t know any specific examples, your friend can name a niche and you can chime in and say “Oh, have you ever thought about promoting it with this type of page…”

Make friends, ask your affiliate managers what to run and ask for example pages that they’ve seen.

NOTE : DON’T ASK QUESTIONS ON THIS POST, ASK THEM ON THE ORIGINAL. IF THEY’RE ASKED HERE THEY WON’T BE ANSWERED. I LINKED TO IT FOR A REASON.

Gary asks…

How much capital did you have to play with when launching your first ever campaign?

 
I had a general web directory I worked on for months and eventually sold that for $3,000, and that was my PPC starting cash.

Jonathan Volk asks…

How do you like your new car?

 
It’s great! There’s nothing like just unloading on the gas pedal, this thing was truly built to be driven hard. Looks awesome too, can’t go wrong with it.

Megan asks…

Hi, I had a question about building affiliate landing page. I have run over 20 PPC Campaigns with review style landing pages, but can never get a decent click through from my landing page to the merchant page…most people who visit it click out after a few seconds…

what can I do better? How do I get them to make the click….

 
Well first understand that review pages have a lower CTR (I’ll just give a general estimate of 50-60%), but they generally “sell” the product better and boost conversion rates.

You want your page to have a message at the top to let them know that they’re going to find exactly what they need here, and then you have to write convincing reviews. The page has to be attractive, easy to follow, and they for certain should know what button they need to click to visit the site they read a review about.

TipJar asks…

Hey Paul,

whole slew of questions I could ask, but just a few here:

1. What kind of skills do you need as an affiliate marketer? I really want to learn PHP, programming, web design/coding, or other skills. What would be worth my time?

2. As you progressed, how were you able to get high-limit credit cards?

3. For affiliate marketing on a (low) budget, would you recommend I create SEO-based sites or start off with PPC sites?

4. How’s the car treatin’ ya?

 
1. Web design doesn’t hurt, I definitely use those skills all the time. PHP and programming will take you a good amount of time, I’ve always tried to start learning PHP but never really had the time to get far. I just outsource my coding and it works out fine.

2. Most of the time you’ll get a high limit credit card with a lower limit. Just keep paying your bill early and the limit will go up and up.

3. You can start with whatever you think you’ll have success with. Maybe research a campaign and throw some money at PPC and if it doesn’t work out try and make the money back by doing some SEO. I’ve never done SEO so I don’t know anything about it.

4. Great :).

maVin asks…

What do you think about using offline methods to drive traffic?

 
I think there’s definitely potential in things like setting up local dating ads all around big cities, I mean why not. Drop some local dating business cards in bathrooms at bars/clubs or something. There’s plenty of ways to get traffic and offline methods do work, it’s just up to if you want to do all that work or not. Personally I just like getting all my traffic by laying here in bed on my laptop :p.

Neil Newmann asks…

Why is affiliate marketing better than marketing your own products?

What would you recommend to non-americans interested in getting accepted by affiliate networks?

What are the information products that have helped you/other affiliate marketers the most?

What are your favourite books?

Thanks!

 
1) It’s not. There’s pros and cons to both, potentially there’s more money in owning your product, but it’s a lot of work (trust me).

2) Just communicate that you’re a legitimate affiliate that wants to promote their offers, and CALL THEM ON THE PHONE. It’s worth it, if you can get an affiliate manager that will have a conversation with you and you can explain your business, there should be no problem in them approving you. But you have to take the steps necessary, you can’t just submit an app and hope for the best.

3) I didn’t use any infoproducts.

4) I don’t read any business books. My favorite book is Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. I enjoy reading anything Clancy writes, The Bible, a couple graphic novels, and I’m currently reading a Jimi Hendrix biography.

Rix Robinsen asks…

How do u efficently find successfull campaigns. I know about tracking but like how to do u just churn out successful campaigns. How many keywords, how much do u initially invest before u decide to continue or dump. How u decide on choosing a profitable campaign. How good is good enough?

 
Lately I’ve just been picking offers that I know are saturated, but I also know have big profits in them for those who work at it. So my success/fail ratio has been pretty favorable to me as of late. I’ve only really tried running 3 offers this past year, and I had really good success with 2 of them.

Xohaib asks…

How would CPA offers go with viral marketing? Will the conversions look funny?

 
It all really depends on the traffic going to it! A viral marketing effort coming from TeleTubbies.com probably won’t convert on a dating offer, but something viral from a place like Facebook may. If you’re asking “can viral marketing lead to cost-free CPA sales?”, then my answer would be yes.

Jona Raves asks…

How much can you earn only from zip/email submits a day, if you do it the right way?

 
I’ve never ever done zip submits. I guess I would say I’ve known people personally who have done a few thousand dollars a day from zip submits (profit), but I’m sure there’s bigger dogs out there.

Alright keep asking, more will come soon.

Just post a comment on this with the question you have. Let’s do it up.

yeikow asks…

1 How do structure your testing landing pages? Do you just name them index1.htm index2.htm etc? Same for internal non-index pages? Seems clumsy but it’s how I do it…

2 Do you use drupal or other CMS for most of your sites? If not, what do you usually use?

3 Do you still design many of your sites? (ie. is it a key skill to learn and apply)

4 Do you pay to have your content written, and then just add all the articles to the site?

1) I usually just put them in different folders…similar to what you’re doing.

2) I usually use WordPress to host all of the content.

3) Yup it’s maybe 75/25, I design a lot of my landing pages but if there’s something I can’t handle, I’ll use one of my designers.

4) Yup I go to DP and outsource 100 articles or so.

papaman asks…

I wonder were you get traffic from except from PPC. Do you use any traffic from Image hosting sites or Web proxies? Do you think traffic from those sources might be useful and “monetizable” and if yes what would you try to market on sites like that?

thanks in advance.

There’s definitely other sources of traffic to monetize, but everything I do is PPC. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Facebook pretty much.

Frank asks…

How much text is on your Landing Pages? Tons of bla bla or just a few word like “Buy this crap now!”

Depends on if it’s a regular page or a review-style. Review pages have more text on them because you want people to review the products. General pages are more the hit them with bullet points and make a nice call to action button.

Maximum Rare

How do you prevent your landing pages from getting slapped in Google? Do you just do landing pages, or do you do full content sites that you have to update regularly?

Eh it’s pretty easy to get around slaps, just make a new site, new domain, new account and start all over. You’ll have a little ground to make up but it’s not too bad. I haven’t been slapped in a while actually knock on wood.

Billy asks…

Do horses wear socks?

No, but sometimes they wear shoes.

nick asks…

What ever happened to you teaching your Dad affiliate marketing? Did that ever happen and if it did how did it go?

Meh that kind of fizzled out like I had expected. He came to accept the fact that he’s not part of the computer generation, he knows how to check his mail and play Euchre on Pogo, but for cryin out loud he still uses AOL.

Brandon K asks…

Do you tend to build micro-sites or just landing pages for your campaigns?

I have shifted towards mirco-sites, in an attempt to incorporate SEO into my site design. I am not sure if it’s worth the extra effort.

I’m just sticking with landing pages for now with the extra content via a blog.

Kevin asks…

Is it important to cloak our referrers so the networks don’t see our landing pages or is just cloaking our keywords good enough. I’ve heard of people’s conversions going up after they allowed networks to see their landing pages. But I also heard networks will give out your LP to other affiliates if they see it is working and they also might use it for their own in house PPC team.

Also with the current state of our financial system with some banks failing. Do you need to open up multiple business bank accounts and just put $100K in each? FDIC only insures up to $100K per bank…or is there something else you can do since you are running a business?

1) It depends on if you want the networks to know what you’re doing :). I usually cloak everything but if I have to be ultra-transparent with them in exchange for them being just as transparent with me, I’ll refrain from cloaking.

2) Yeah I have my money in a few different bank accounts.

Urban Wear Lookout asks…

What’s with these wierd small posts?

Life dude. I’m trying to blog as much as I can and work on UberCamp as much as I can, but I have a baziliion projects going on, a house, and now a puppy. It’s not like I work on my campaigns for an hour and then go watch movies all day :). Boy I wish…

tim asks…

How many split-tests do you conduct to get your campaign’s ads CTR up to a decent level?

I probably split test for around 2 weeks to a month, testing 2-3 ads at a time.

Johnson asks…

Could you email me your instant messaging contact?

I promise not to bug you with questions every single hour… =)

It’s already on my about page.

ben asks…

From what I understand, the huge leap in your income was the result of meeting the right people. Obviously, the guys you met wouldn’t guide you in the right direction if they didn’t expect something from you in return. So what kind of approach did you use to get what you wanted out of them? What did they expect from you?

I set up a partnership…we both do the work together and split the cash. Then once you start making good money, things become a lot easier. Then the connections came to me, as affiliate networks and other guys knew I made money.

dominic asks…

Do you think you’d do as well if you promoted pay-per-sale affiliate programs like those found in Clickbank and Commission Junction?

No idea, to be honest I’ve never really messed with anything like that. I tend to stay mostly in saturated CPA offers/niches.

Curiosity asks…

What was the ONE action you took that blasted you from barely-making-it to several millions dollars in affiliate marketing income?

There wasn’t really ONE action…a question like that is way too broad and simply can’t be summed up with 1 thing. I guess it was just taking the plunge and risking the loss of a few thousand dollars to make much more.

Amir Meta asks…

Do you think PPC Affiliate Marketing is *largely* a “find a needle in a haystack” kind of game? Meaning you’ve to throw up 50 campaigns to find 1 profitable one.

Through experience, certainly not. Ringtones are profitable. Dating is profitable. Credit reports are profitable. Diet products are profitable. I know because I’ve made a profit on each one, and they’re the most saturated ones out there. They’re the boulder in the haystack that everybody sees but many people are too afraid to go try and pick up.

nate asks…

What tools do you use to build your keyword lists?

Google suggest, SEO book, and my brain. Sometimes Wordze if I want to compile a huge list.

Sandro asks…

Is there a way to do direct linking? Do you still do it?

Yeah there’s a way, you make an ad and directly link to the offer. If you get slapped for it or w/e, just set up a domain and redirect or set up an iFrame of the offer on it.

magnesium asks…

Hi, what niche do you target?

Saturated ones.

lolwtfd asks…

Who the fuck are you that you are the go to guy for questions about ANYTHING?

I made a thread asking for questions…if you want to ask something I’ll answer it. I’m not saying I’m right about anything, but I’ll answer from my knowledge and/or experience.

Get a life.

Frank Abagnale asks…

Can you describe how you start an affiliate offer in 10 steps or less?

Like:
1. Choosing niche
2. Building/buying landing page
3. Research on ppc
4 etc etc

w00t.