Things Friends Are Up To

by UberAffiliate on April 14, 2010 in Industry News with 24 Comments

Haven’t made a post in a while, I’d like to get back to posting more but I’ve said that before, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve had some industry friends come out with a few things though and figured they were worth sharing.
 

Local Lead Plan from Chad (CDF Networks)

I’ve known Chad for a while now, I’m sure many of you guys read his blog CDF Networks. If you know anything about him from his blog/tweets, it’s that he’s a good and honest guy. He doesn’t need to tear it up on rebills and acai because he knows what he’s doing outside of that realm (ie real marketing…acai is like taking candy from a baby).

Today is the official launch of his infoproduct Local Lead Plan. He gave me a free copy and it’s actually pretty awesome. The product is all about generating affiliate like commissions, only from local businesses, not affiliate networks/global offers. This is something he’s been doing for a while now and has gotten really good at it. It’s also something that’s very easy to share because for the most part, it’s local. He’s not too worried about you stealing his campaigns because they’re where he lives and already his clients.

If I were going to do this I’d join my local Chamber of Commerce that has business events for networking local businesses. That will give you a nice variety to pick from, and from there it’s about approaching them and letting them know that you can send them a bunch of new customers if they want to set something up. You’d then build an affiliate site for them and send them online traffic and get paid based on how many customers you send them.

I see this as being nice because it’s a little extra work (instead of just grabbing an affiliate link), but in the end you get more control. I have a feeling that most businesses won’t have much idea about what you’re talking about, which makes it easier for you to dictate the rates and commissions.

I believe there’s some nice eBook price slapped on of $79 or something…but honestly it’s worth it. If you’re struggling at all with online affiliate marketing, Local Lead Plan is definitely something you can profit from. Not get rich quick, but certainly can get rich.
 

Tatto Media Bi-Annual Affiliate Survey

Tatto Media just released a survey they took with over 2,500 affiliate marketers participating. They asked some general questions about the industry and got some cool figures/graphs. Shoemoney did a blog post about it a few days ago here.

Some of the more interesting points :

  • Nearly 68% of affiliates were promoting on 2-6 different networks, while approximately 22% were promoting on 7-15 different networks. Only 2% of respondents promoted on 36 or more. 50 affiliates out of every 2,500 are promoting offers on 36+ networks? Oh mama, for me it’s always been 2-6.
  • 60% of respondents believe that affiliate marketing-related tradeshows and conferences are valuable to their business, with the majority, 55%, stating that Affiliate Summit is the most valuable. Found this kind of interesting, I thought it’d be higher than 60%. Trade shows like Affiliate Summit are awesome for business, if you don’t get something out of it, it’s because you’re doing something wrong…not the conference not serving it’s purpose.
  • Many affiliates read various industry blogs for information, but nearly 42% said ShoeMoney was the blog they read most. NickyCakes was also popular at 35%. Not a surprise that Shoemoney came in at the #1 affiliate blog read. 35% from Cakes surprised me though, maybe it’s because he won affiliate of the year (for…what exactly? I didn’t know that referring a bunch of the original acai guys, traveling to Asia, and coming out with an overpriced product was what Shawn was looking for). Only kidding Cakes, I jus’ mad ;). My blog came in at 15% which surprised me…I haven’t been posting at all I figured it would be lower.

You can download the full report and check it out here.

On a side note, HasOffers a while ago opened up some different and paid options for their affiliate network software. If you have a product and you want affiliates on it, starting your own mini-network is a good place to begin.
 

Volk-nation Tearing It Up

When he’s not at a freakish family birthday party or hanging with his boo Mrs. Volk, JV has been taking the guru world by storm. He released his free affiliate marketing guide, and since then jumped from ~3,000 readers to almost 15,000. He posted some stats on his blogs 3 year anniversary :

# See about 1,003,980 affiliate blogs stop blogging.

…shit! That’s me.
 

Neverblue Escape

If you’re a Neverblue affiliate you may know about their Out of Bounds contest. You can win an all-expenses paid awesome trip to Vancouver Island and do a bunch of outdoor activities like jet-skiing. Neverblue is a solid network and I’ve always been a fan of networks that don’t use DT. One of the ways to win is by becoming 1 of the 7 affiliates with the highest incremental revenue gain. That means you don’t have to do ridiculous volume, you just have to show the best growth on your offer.
 

Twitter Ads

Twitter really isn’t my friend, but they are releasing an ad platform. I haven’t read too much into it, but TechCrunch reports they’re starting with a CPM model and I read on Wickedfire that these will show up in searches only. With the amount of bots performing searches this would really water down CTR and skyrocket CPC.

Maybe a blogger will find an exploit and become famous like meeeee (please understand my sarcasm in almost anything I ever say).

Popularity: 17% [?]

Rebills Are “Dead”…Now What?

by UberAffiliate on March 3, 2010 in Affiliate Tips with 53 Comments

Over the past few months the industry has seemed to gone through some slight changes. Rebill offers for the most part are not run like they were before. I know this because of what’s happened to my own traffic, getting approval on my own offer, and then friends that I’ve talked to who have had to go back to “legit” affiliate offers.

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.

Popularity: 12% [?]

AffChat at Uberaffiliate

by UberAffiliate on February 16, 2010 in Just Making Money with 16 Comments

Long story made short with no explanation : I’ve just created a chatroom here at Uberaffiliate, you can click here to connect to it.

Now for the explanation. If you’re anything like me, some days you’re at your house chugging away at campaigns and you just get bored. Maybe most of your friends on IM are working and can’t talk, you don’t want to wait for people to reply to your forum posts, and you just want to take a break. That’s why I set up a small chat room attached to UberAffiliate. I plan on just popping it up in a new window and letting it chill in the corner of one of my monitors. I used to hang around the Cakes chat room, but the past few times I’ve gone in there hasn’t really been anybody on.

This is also a way I think I’ll be able to connect with you guys (the readers) better. A lot of you send me IMs during the day and I’m either not paying attention to Adium, or by the time I get back to the computer to respond you’re already gone.

So if you just want a place to hang out and chat/shoot the breeze with other marketers, just head to the chat room.

Nothing big, maybe I’ll see you there maybe not! Oh if you have your own IRC program that you’re more used to, the channel is #affchat.

Popularity: 9% [?]

A Note to Affiliate Networks…

by UberAffiliate on February 9, 2010 in Affiliate Networks with 24 Comments

Hey guys and girls. I just want to write a little message, and I want other affiliates to comment on this issue as well. This is kind of aimed towards affiliate networks.

This post is coming because of something that has happened to me many times. If it’s once or twice at one or two networks, okay maybe those are legit. But when it’s happened at almost every network I’ve been at, some have to be true. This actual post is because I’m planning on running smorgasbord of offers with 1 network. They gave me the heads up that 1 of the offers I requested was no good to run. So my response was basically what the rest of this post says, and a ‘thank you’ to that network.

How many times have you asked “So what are your top converting offers to run for Vertical X?” and got a list back, ran those offers, only to find out that it’s converting worse than what you’re running now?

This has happened to me quite a few times. I’ll get a list of the top offers, and then I’ll ask my AM what the offer is converting at for most affiliates. They usually say very nice things, like “It’s converting at 13% for affiliates with a $5-6 EPC”. Now I’ll be getting like a $3.50-4 EPC now so this sounds amazing, almost double my revenue. So I run the offer and guess what, it’s a $2 EPC and I’m now almost losing money. It’s just happened too many times for them all to be my fault (I know my traffic is good because I’ve run it fine on other offers that look exactly the same).

For an affiliate like me, who doesn’t even want to talk to networks anymore unless they’re going to be honest, I propose this :

Instead of telling me what offers “your affiliates are running great right now”, give me some REAL numbers I can look at. If you have 1 affiliate running at a $6 EPC and 10 affiliates running it at a $2 EPC…tell me the offer has a $2.50 EPC. If that doesn’t beat what I’m running now, that’s just the way it works and I won’t run the offer. But if you’re honest about it and you get an offer in a month that has a $3.50 EPC overall, when you come to me I’ll actually run the offer. It’s annoying to run the offer, not see the $6 EPC, and lose money half the time just to find out that it’s a bad offer.

There was 1 vertical where I literally ran at least 20 different offers where every time I was told were the best offers at the time with great EPCs, only to find out that they all sucked. Lost at least $10,000 just to learn that anything an AM tells me about this offer is going to be a lie, and I should just call it quits.

Anyone with me?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Nickycakes Gains GURU Status w/ LPLockdown (/sarcasm)

by UberAffiliate on February 4, 2010 in Tools with 67 Comments

So Nickycakes has come out with his first affiliate industry product he calls LPLockdown. It’s a service that provides cloaking for your landing pages so other affiliates can’t see or steal them.

LPLockdown : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good

We’ll start off with the good here. The things it does for your pages are nice, if you’re not currently doing something like this with your pages, you should look into it. LPLockdown will :

1) Cloak your pages from other affiliates. Cakes has a database of affiliate IPs he’s collected, so when they hit your landing page they’re redirected somewhere else.

2) Steal their traffic if they steal yours. if someone rips your page 100% and leaves your javascript, you can redirect traffic from their page to your page/offer.

3) Uptime/downtime monitor so if your landing page goes down you get a notification.

The Bad

While there are positives to using this service to protect your page, there are cons to this.

1) It’s not self-hosted. And seeing as Nickycakes himself said it’s “by affiliates for affiliates”, do you want to give Nicky (an affiliate) potential access to all of your landing pages?

2) I have a friend who programs and said he programmed the exact same thing for himself in 2 days. Do you want to pay $50/month for something you can pay a programmer a few hundred bucks and have forever?

3) This is interesting…reverse IP lplockdown.com. You’ll find the site 11i.us. Check the WHOIS on that info. It’s Nicky’s actual info. Do you trust a product who was created by someone that can’t privacy protect their own self?

4) It looks like I designed that site the first week I learned Photoshop. The WordArt in the video gives it a nice ’95 touch.

The Ugly

Everyone is pretty aware that this is NickyCakes’ product. I’ve gotten the chance to meet him and chat at events and he’s a nice guy. Like with all arguing on the internet I think once everyone comes together we realize how lucky we are and the pansy e-fighting that happens doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Be that as it may, Nicky’s online persona has always been ripping others in the industry to shreds. He rips on the big Gurus like Shoemoney and Chow, and also has torn apart myself (the Goober) and Ubercamp.

So the question is : if he really made this product to “contribute” to the industry, why does he have to charge for it (more so $50/month…maybe $5-10/month would be more legit)? Especially when it’s not anything advanced, it’s like making a blog post about how to track keywords with PHP. Again I’m not a programmer and haven’t seen the backend of LPLockdown, but after talking to friends it doesn’t seem all that hard to just do this on your own (or pay someone to program it for you). I’d use LPLockdown as a fresh reminder that you should be doing your best to hide and protect your pages.

Nickycakes having financial trouble perhaps? Gotta pay those taxes.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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