Confessions Of A Super Duper AffiliateAffiliate marketing information, help, reviews, and tips.

So being in the blogger industry, you can’t help but scope out other blogs in your niche and see what they’re all about. Well, most of them in the affiliate marketing area suck, and here’s why.

Shoemoney A.K.A. Baldmoney

Shoemoney is marveled as one of the greatest MMO dudes/bloggers out there, and his blog has over 20,000 subscribers. Go to Shoemoney if you want to learn absolutely nothing about affiliate marketing but learn all about Jeremy’s top picks for the next UFC site. It’s also cool if you want to waste 2 minutes every Retarded T-Shirt Friday to look at Shoemoney’s ugly self wearing a t-shirt. The ultimate clan leader for all noobs, all hail Shoemoney.
 
John Chow A.K.A. John Chicken Chow Mein

Chow is another massive blogger and proclaimed “super affiliate”, and is another real winner if you want affiliate marketing tips. About 90% of his posts are crappy product/service reviews that are pretty much useless, and then another 8% are posts with pictures off all the egg fu young he’s eaten this past week. The remaining 2% are posts that won’t help you, making Chow’s blog virtually useless.
 
SuperAffiliate Mindset A.K.A. SuperAffiliate Look At Me I’m Considered a Sultan In India!

Furreal bra, nobody cares that $500 can buy you the royal suite in India, and truly nobody cares that Google sent you a mini fridge for Christmas because you were a good boy and spent $10k with them.

Go to SuperAffiliate Mindset if you want the mindset to do nothing but brag about the money you make. Wahoo you’re an affiliate marketer that has a little money, so are a lot of us but we don’t make it a point to tell everybody EVERYTHING we have and EXACTLY how much it costs. I suggest reading Amit’s blog if you really feel like just having the urge to punch somebody who is overly pompous.
 
Zac Johnson A.K.A Little Johnson

ZJ is the perfect example of somebody who made a little money back in the day and uses that as his platform into making all of his income via a blog. His big post was how he was a genius for making $800k profit on Myspace with Yahoo Publisher Network 3 years ago. It makes no sense to me how that qualifies him to write a “Super Affiliates Guide to PPC” when he openly admitted at Affiliate Summit earlier in the year that he really doesn’t do PPC. So basically the big secret is making some money with YPN back in the day, starting a blog, and then doing nothing but promote affiliate network referral links and make $5k a month from your blog.
 
NickyCakes A.K.A. My Name Is Super Gay?

The e-rivalry between Nicky and Uber is so great that it is sometimes said that they’re actually really good friends outside of their blogs. Not. Nicky and Uber should definitely just fistfight but it’d probably be hard because all of the Wickedfire sheeple that worship Nicky would revolt and come at Uber with pitchforks. Uber thinks that’s really funny and he really likes affiliate marketing. Uber also likes long walks on the beach and promoting green tea.

Notice how gay talking in the third person is? Welcome to the blog of NickyCakes, talking in the third person, bashing people, promoting Advaliant for their green tea offers and playing CoD4 seems to be Nicky’s life. My guess is that he’s on high dosages of medication and when he forgets to take them, he blogs.
 
UberAffiliate A.K.A. GooberAffiliate

Uber is your textbook “hasbeen” in the realm of affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing blogs. He goes with the classic “fake it til you make it” method of posting some 300k screenshots of his Azoogle account to gain subscribers, make a few good blog posts to keep them there, and then try and make his living by pitching GooberCamp to newbies. He doesn’t post as much anymore and has basically ran out of tips to post because he’s extremely outdated. “I’m totally unsubscribing” is the most common comment.
 
Click Consultants A.K.A. Click to be Scammed!

Click Consultants has a blog like every other one out there trying to teach affiliate marketing to newbies. He even charges for private consulting and a paid forum! Well it’s a shame he made a post with his “earnings” that was legitly proven to be fake. He never made any post in his defense and has openly admitted to another person I know of faking it. If you go through the blog, you’ll notice that every single post is common sense stuff, rendering you confused as to if he really knows anything about affiliate marketing in the first place?
 
Jonathan Volk A.K.A. Jokeathan Volk

Wow, another affiliate marketing blog! By the time you get to Volk, you just get completely bored. It’s information every single one of us has seen probably five thousand times, making us learn absolutely nothing from visiting his blog. He had his little earnings graph up but it looks like he took it down, I guess he finally came to his moral self and got tired of lying to everybody. I have nothing to say about Volk except ZZzzZZzzzzzzz…
 
Tyler Cruz A.K.A. Tyler Cruz to the Top Blogging Instead of AM!

It amazing me how many people subscribe, comment, and waste their time with blogs like these. At least the guy is honest with the fact that he doesn’t make squat with affiliate marketing, but it seems like the flood of newbies doesn’t really understand that. Cruz is one of the blogs that I never ever really have looked at, but looking over it for 5 minutes you can tell that he’s very similar to Zac Johnson, and will continue to make a few pennies repping MarketLeverage and blogging about crap that won’t make any of us any more money.

If you weren’t on here, congrats! Your blog is either so awful I’ve never even seen it, it wasn’t worth bashing, or I got too lazy and tired of writing to continue. Moral of the story, don’t waste your time with blogs people, just get out there and do it. Three cheers for linkbait!

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Just a couple random things I’ve learned through testing and experience, maybe they’ll help you.

• There’s nothing wrong with using dashed domains like This-Affiliate-Site.com. Everybody seems to like to tell people to stay away from them, but I’m using them now and it’s been perfectly fine for me.
• A cool domain “trick” when registering stuff. Register www-yourdomain.com. Note the dash after www, users can just overlook it and think it means yourdomain.com. You can snag some really good looking keywords that way and just redirect the www traffic to straight http://, so you can have things like http://www-dentalinsurance.com.
• I continue to make landing pages with little to no content on them and Google seems to not care. I haven’t been slapped at all lately knock on wood, so just letting you know it’s still possible to do well with thin pages.
• The whole “bid high and your bid prices drop naturally and position remains the same” isn’t always true I’ve learned. I’m some heavily oversaturated niches, you’re not going to see that much of a drop in CPC no matter how long you tough it out up there. At that point you just have to man up and accept the lower position and less clicks, unless you can do something to you page to get that EPC way up.
• I can’t stress enough how testing all different types of landing pages is so important. Test single pages, review pages, blog-style pages, news article pages, and test out all different setups. Landing pages can totally make a seeming bust campaign start rocking.
• Track the clicks you get to an offer. If you find a difference in the clicks you have vs. the clicks networks show, complain to the network and demand you be compensated. Sometimes the click differences can be huge and it’s money you’re missing out on that can ultimately destroy the campaign.
• I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again; keep your mouth SHUT when it comes to affiliate managers. AMs between networks are friends a lot more than you know, and they blab to eachother and disclose information that they are certainly NOT allowed to disclose. I know because it’s happened to me more than once. Cloak everything, and be as discreet and resistant to tell your affiliate manager anything. I don’t care if they want to help you, chances are you’re better at affiliate marketing than them anyways. You never know who they could tell. They can directly tell their affiliates to run this offer like that, or tell other affiliate managers who tell their affiliates, or tell AMs on other networks that then go and tell their affiliates. An affiliate manager of mine a couple weeks ago asked to see what my ad copy looked like and I just said “No”, and he was like “…uh what? I don’t get it”. They don’t have to get it, just zip the lip.

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So last night I was up all night with my allergies, didn’t get to sleep until 7:30am. In that time period I got up and took a shower, and started to really think about my life, and affiliate marketing. I started thinking about something I had completely avoided thinking about, because I knew it would change my perspective on the industry, and knew it would also severely negatively affect my income.

Whether we like to admit the fact or not, A LOT of business in affiliate marketing completely scams and screws people over; and we’re the guys in the background making a profit from it. I started thinking about the most popular niches out there and the effect it had on the hundreds of thousands of people signing up for these offers. I myself have promoted these offers, and even was currently promoting them, until now. We completely take for granted all the money we make online, and the lengths we’ll go to to make that money sometimes. Let’s just look at a few of the popular niches out there today…

Payday Loans

Payday loans are one of the biggest verticals in the financial sector. I personally know affiliates making over $30k/day on payday loans, and I myself have gotten into them quite a bit. What is a payday loan? Simply put, a person in desperate need (here comes the first moral issue, targeting people who are desperate for money) signs up for a loan. When he doesn’t pay the loan back, he’s charged 400% in interest and ends up being in debt for years. Rather then rambling on about it, I’ll just quote some real testimonials I searched and found last night.

Small Loans, a predatory lender owned by Money Tree, Inc, gave a $200 “payday loan” to a disabled, elderly, illiterate man and thereafter took in his benefits check for him and paid him a small “allowance” out of it, less the money they deducted as “repayment” on the loan. All told, they took thousands from the man over a period of years, bleeding him so badly that he ended up homeless, begging for power to run the machine that treated his chronic lung infection.

Source and read more

Mr. Milford is chronically broke because each month, in what he calls “my ritual,” he travels 30 miles to Gallup [New Mexico] and visits 16 storefront money-lending shops. Mr. Milford, who is 59 and receives a civil service pension and veteran’s disability benefits, doles out some $1,500 monthly to the lenders just to cover the interest on what he had intended several years ago to be short-term “payday loans.”

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Sure most of these people are stupid, but can we use that as a legitimate excuse to ruin their lives? Hell no. Payday loans completely screw people over, and for this argument’s sake we’re going to disregard idiots using it for gambling debt or something like that, because either way we’re still harming thousands of good people.

Green Tea/Acai Berry Diet Pills

The green tea/acai phenomenon is huge right now in affiliate marketing. There’s ads all over Facebook urging overweight people that they can really lose weight for free with the help of green tea. The fact alone that we’re leading these people to believe that drinking green tea is going to make them lose fat is bullshit. The sites are filled with fake testimonials and people even pose as fat chicks to get conversions. It gets worse though, they think they’re paying $3.95 to get a free trial bottle, but in the fine print they opt-in to be sent a bottle a month if they don’t cancel within 7 days. These assholes charge $90 for a 1 month supply bottle and just rebill the persons credit card every month. Most people don’t realize it until they’ve been hit a couple times and paid $200 bucks and gotten crappy pills that didn’t help anyways. What makes it worse is that these places don’t pick up their customer support number, don’t respond to emails, and don’t try to every provide ANY help to the poor suckers that were charged. I’ve bought this stuff to examine it myself, and it’s a crappy little bottle in a small plastic wrap that gets mailed to you. Do you know how much it costs the advertiser to produce a bottle of this shit? UNDER $1.00. Trust me, in the past I looked into doing it myself. They charge people $90 for something that cost them a buck, and then upsell them on 10 other crappy products that don’t work.

I took the week’s supply…felt no different…and said “oh well…I’ve done worse things with $3.99.”

I know you’re waiting for the other show to hit the ground and duck…here it comes!

I get a package in the mail with a bottle of 60 pills. I go on line and look at my credit card and they have charged my card an additional $74.99!!!!!!

First I called the c/c company and am disputing the charge but I know I will lose. I contacted Performance Products USA at acai.performanceproductsusa.com and was refered to their webpage buried among millions with a click on accept terms which has a negative marketing plan and they will continue to hit my card for $74.99 until I opt out of the program.

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I used the sample GreenTeaLLC sent for 4.99 they claim I signed a contract to take 84.90 a month for their Product I did not! It does not work it is a scam.

I called the told them to cancel any further orders.

They have charged me for three orders 2 i didnot

receive.I was told they will only refund 60 dollars.

THey were supposed to stop taking the money from

my Acct. But Haven’t. I received my bank statement

and they taken another 84.90 out I am very angry

what can I Do ?

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Ringtones/Crush/Mobile

I don’t even really have to go into ringtones and mobile stuff because everybody knows they’re deceptive. Again these people are idiots for reading the text that says $9.99/month or $2.99/day, but either way we’re taking advantage of them because they just read the PIN and confirm it. I did ringtones for a long time, who hasn’t tried them? Sure they’re the least harmful of any of the other offers I’ve mentioned, but it’s still the principle of ripping people off. Crush offers advertise “You have (2) new crushes!”, so you sign up to find out and just get a retarded horoscope subscription service.

Flycell, a NY company, billed me $20 a month on my cell phone bill for four months (total $80). By the time I tracked down who was billing me, I contacted them and told them I never asked for or received any service from them (I don’t even know what they do) and asked for a refund. They refused.

Source and read more

The sources above took me literally 10 minutes to find, and there’s hundreds of other stories out there. Now sure you’re going to have pissed off people in any niche or any place; there’s always people who aren’t satisfied with what they bought into. But the point is at least they knew they were buying into it. People taking out payday loans are unaware to the fact that if they don’t pay the loan back, they’re going to end up in debt for years. There’s a reason payday loans are completely BANNED in several states. Fat people signing up for the next hot thing in acai don’t realize they’re going to be billed $90 for a horrible product; they just want to try it for a week and see that it does nothing and only a healthy diet and exercise will help them achieve what they want. Teenagers with cellphones don’t really care what’s on the bill, most of the time their parents are paying it so the parents end up being the ones screwed and pissed off.

I’m certainly not saying that now we should just all stay away from every niche out there, because there are consumers out there who do want to buy products. Even if the product doesn’t work out for them how they wanted it to, they still were aware of the fact that they had to pay for it. I believe in karma and that’s what got me thinking on the subject, and I’m done promoting these things that either completely ruin peoples lives, or scam them for a quick buck. Is it worth making a lot of money for yourself when you know that you had to screw literally thousands of people to do it? Just think about the kind of negative effect you’re having on all these peoples lives.

I’m going to lose A LOT of profit but I’ve already paused my campaigns and sent emails out to the networks/direct advertisers that I was working with giving them my reasons for cutting the campaigns. There’s plenty of legitimate money to be made online and I do have a few of them running so I’ll be fine. I already have enough money and doing these things to thousands of people just isn’t worth it and I feel better already now that I’ve stopped. Sure just because my ad drops off means someone elses ad will take it’s place, and this stuff will always be promoted, but that’s not the point.

If you do want to promote in these shady/deceptive niches, head over to my page for shady affiliates who want to do shady things and let me know what you’re interested in and I’ll see what I can do.

Bring it.

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This is a guest post by my good friend CPA Share. I just saw that he’s recently cranked it up with his blog and been posting a lot, so definitely check it out. Most of you probably know that Harrison is 16 years old and making a lot more money than most of you probably are. Every time I talk to him he’s at some different spot around the world. Anyways, here’s his post…

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I asked Paul to write a guest post– and given that I’m in the writing mood on topics such as affiliate marketing networks and local online advertising, I thought we could talk about SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management). This is just a fancy way of ranking for your own name (or that of others) by buying that domain name. And if you don’t own your own name, you should snap up at least the dot com version, whether or not you plan to develop it, since it’s a pre-emptive measure for folks who might do it later. For example, you might be:

• a rep at United Airlines Mileage Plus who accidentally marked a customer as fraud, but then tried to bamboozle your way out, digging yourself deeper. Don’t allow an unhappy customer to buy your name. You might even buy your name just because there are so many others with your same name.
• a boulder massage therapist who happens to give me free massages in exchange for some promotion of her massage therapy business.
• someone convicted on a major crime: not going to tell you who, but we’ll just say this guy had some pretty bad pages dominating all of the first 30 listings– with cnn.com talking about the biggest bust ever done by the Feds, and his name all over it.

If your name is not common, then ranking first for your name is a piece of cake. Just do a canned WordPress install. But if you’re “John Smith”, then you have a bit of work to do. Maybe someone has your name bought and won’t sell it for a reasonable price. They buy a name like first-last.com or FirstLastBlog.com. Then create a bunch of profiles at places like LinkedIn, Facebook, and various online directories to get it to reinforce. And for good measure, put up a small PPC campaign on Google and Yahoo– bidding on your name with exact match on the search network only with perhaps a 20 cent max CPC and a $1 daily limit.

If there are bad things about you in the press and you want to push those results down, you may have to create a few sites. One neat trick I’ve used is to post video snippets at places like youtube and propeller with that person’s name in the title and tags. In once instance, I grabbed 4 of the top 10 search results within 24 hours through video alone, for a client who had some pretty bad stuff on Google’s first page. Then by posting on free press release, plus some more blog content, cleared the remaining results– so that we owned all 10 first page rankings. One other affiliate colleague had some business partners who got drunk at a party, got banned, and that behavior was posted on a major forum. We used the video tricks here and got it cleaned out in a few weeks– which is longer than you’d normally expect. Like I was saying before, sometimes it takes only 24 hours or just a few minutes, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this tidbit. There are folks out there who are real pro’s at this– I’m merely sharing my own experience and what’s worked for me. If you have questions you’d like to ask me or want to read more of my articles, just drop me a line at my blog.

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So CX Digital bought banners all over my blog and Ubercamp this past week for their “Roll Like A Billionaire” contest. All it had was a countdown and signup link, not even they would tell me what it was. Well today they launched the contest, posting the video and prizes, you can watch and read about it here.

Basically every dollar you earn from September 15th to December 31st counts as a point. The person with the most points (aka dollars generated) wins. The grand prize is said to be valued over $100,000 and includes a private jet flight for you and your friends to a private villa on an island. There are 50 prizes that include a bunch of other vacations, ATVs, iPods, Blackberries, TVs, Playstaions, and more.

Pretty sick contest if you’re not signed up with them I recommend you sign up now and see if you can find an offer to tear it up on.

They’re investing a crazy amount of money in this so hopefully it pays out a crazy amount more back to them. Hopefully I’ll be able to post this winter on some big prizes I won ;) ;).

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