Aminology

For those new to affiliate marketing, be sure to follow NickyCakes’ updated newbie guide. It’s not excessively detailed or in depth, which is good, because you can get started quicker. Link: Nickycakes newbie guide

Don’t waste time visiting and reading every single forum and blog - the real learning happens when you actually start trying out ideas.

It’s been a hell of a long time since I last posted here, so I’m suprised and honoured to see my feeds have grown despite the lack of attention I have given this blog. So what have I been up to? And why ‘losing focus’ as the title for this post? Well the answer is simple, ever since I started college I’ve lost focus on my business. Instead of constantly strategising, investing, expanding and trying out new ideas, I’ve taken a step back to merely managing what I already have. Instead of spending whole days and nights behind the computer working on projects like I usually do, I find myself with only a few hours a day at best to spend on my work.

While I definitely value the time I’ve spent here, it’s more than apparent that college isn’t for someone who already has entered an industry and field of work which relies on real world values of practice, experience and trial and error, rather than academics. What do you think?

If you advertise on Facebook and you want to save yourself a lot of time, be sure to install the Greasemonkey script for Facebook Ads written by ‘nstory’. With it, you’ll be able to mass delete, mass pause and mass change bids on your Facebook Ads. Gone will be the days where you had to make these changes manually to each individual ad in an ad group.

Click here to read more about the script and download it.

A big thanks to nstory for bringing this up on WickedFire.

My Facebook Ads account manager asked me today if I knew anyone that needed assistance with their ad accounts. An account manager is especially useful for getting a budget increase, and getting answers to your questions fast.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Facebook Ads newbie or veteran, if you feel like you need an account manager give me a shout and I’ll get back to you.

I recently came across a thought provoking section of a book (’The Living Company’ by ‘de Geus’) I’m currently reading as part of my studies, regarding the shared personality traits of extremely succesful and long lasting companies. As I was reading I couldn’t help but think about how we as entrepreneurs (or online marketers if you will) can excel ourselves at what we do by planning a long term strategy to help us make not just a lot of money, but a lot of money over a long period of time. Affiliate/Performance marketers in particular should really reflect over the excerpt below and think about how they intend to adapt over time in order to survive.

Here are the four key correlations found between the longest lasting companies, as stated in the book:

Conservatism in Financing. The companies did not risk their capital gratuitously. They understood the meaning of money in an old-fashioned way; they knew the usefulness of spare cash in the kitty. Money in hand allowed them to snap up options when their competitors could not. They did not have to convince third-party financiers of the attractiveness of opportunities they wanted to pursue. Money in the kitty allowed them to govern their growth and evolution.

Make a mental note: spend your money wisely . Here’s a quick scenario for the affiliate marketer. You just made a tidy profit of $60k from your last campaign. You can either a) buy yourself that super sweet sports car you’ve always wanted or b) leave it in the bank in order to fund the future growth of your company. If you want to be in the game for the long run, it’s pretty easy to see which option is truly the best to take for the future of you and your company.

Sensitivity to the World Around Them. Whether they had built their fortunes on knowledge (such as DuPont’s technological innovations) or on natural resources (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s access to the furs of Canadian forests), the living companies in our study were able to adapt themselves to changes in the world around them. As wars, depressions, technologies, and politics surged and ebbed, they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, staying attuned to whatever was going on. For information, they sometimes relied on packets carried over vast distances by portage and ship, yet they managed to react in a timely fashion to whatever news they received. They were good at learning and adapting.

Ok, this stuff goes far into history, but the point of this is clear: the companies which have lasted for a very long amount of time have all adapted to their surroundings. For the affiliate, the webmaster or the eBusiness owner, the ‘world’ changes at a faster rate - niches that are super hot can pretty much die in a matter of months. So if you want to stick around, you must look into building a strategy and investing some time and money into long term niches. If you’re a short term kind of affiliate (advertiser, or business owner), remember to keep your wits about you and have your eyes fixated on latest developments. As one affiliate who usually likes to speak in third person once said: ‘Adapt or get paved the fuck over’.

Awareness of Their Identity. No matter how broadly diversified the companies were, their employees all felt like parts of a whole. Lord Cole, chairman of Unilever in the 1960s, for example, saw the company as a fleet of ships. Each ship was independent, but the whole fleet was greater than the sum of its parts. The feeling of belonging to an organization and identifying with its achievements is often dismissed as soft. But case histories repeatedly show that a sense of community is essential for long-term survival. Managers in the living companies we studied were chosen mostly from within, and all considered themselves to be stewards of a long-standing enterprise. Their top priority was keeping the institution at least as healthy as it had been when they took over.

I think this point is far more important to huge companies than it is to the kind of business we do in the ‘internet world’. Affiliate in particular usually work completely alone, and outsource their needs as required. Nonetheless, if you’ve got a business or an established website and you have people working for you then I won’t dispute that the above is pretty important for your success. Infer what you will from the above passage.

Tolerance of New Ideas. The long-lived companies in our study tolerated activities in the margin: experiments and eccentricities that stretched their understanding. They recognized that new businesses may be entirely unrelated to existing businesses and that the act of starting a business need not be centrally controlled. W.R. Grace, from its very beginning, encouraged autonomous experimentation. The company was founded in 1854 by an Irish immigrant in Peru and traded in guano, a natural fertilizer, before it moved into sugar and tin. Eventually, the company established Pan American Airways. Today it is primarily a chemical company, although it is also the leading provider of kidney dialysis services in the United States.

Our business rapidly changes, new ideas come and go all the time, and there’s really no chance of success unless you try out new things all the time in this business. So realistically speaking the above point should already be pretty obvious to you.

I also came across this awesome statement in the text:

Stora was in copper in order to exist; it did not exist to be in copper.

Replace ‘copper’ with your industry and you’ve got yourself a brilliant quote. Try out new things and don’t just stick to one type of business/industry. If you want to last you’ll need to adapt and change over the years, so you might as well get ready now.

Ever since I dropped out of my last course at university I’ve been living like a hermit and marketing and growing my web empire pretty much non-stop. I now find myself days away from starting my new course, so I thought I’d share some some important things I’ve come to realise from the year or so I’ve spent specifically doing CPA marketing.

First and foremost, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve heard it before, but it’s true. This applies to the ad networks and affiliate networks you use to run your campaigns. For example, if you’re making good cash through Facebook advertising, make sure you at least attempt to launch another campaign promoting the same offer on Google Adwords. There are two good reasons for this: 1) You should always actively be scaling the hell out of any campaign which is turning in profit. 2) If you’ve got traffic coming in from multiple sources, it will be A LOT more bearable to see one traffic source (even if it is the most precious) go down. I’d take it even further and do some SEO work as well if you’re promoting your own site. It’s also a good idea to diversify the networks you deal with - don’t let all your money rest in the hands of just one company.

Secondly, I really believe it’s worth having at least one or two long term sites which have your long term investment and commitment. This could be a GOOD content site (I’m talking good quality content with style), monetised however way you see fit, OR a product site (physical or virtual) with an affiliate program. Again, there are very good reasons for this: affiliate marketing is unstable and affiliates are always vulnerable from ad networks, affiliate networks, and other external legal and political forces that like to meddle with our ways. Things can turn either good or bad incredibly fast, and even if you’re confident you are the shit when it comes to affiliate marketing, having the mere knowledge that you have something stable to fall back on during those turbulent times will do a lot to help with the stress. The stronger your long-term ‘backup’ site is, the less important your failed affiliate campaigns will be.

Thirdly, if you’re anything like me, you need to chill out more. Take more breaks from your computer, join the gym or buy a set for your home. I recently finished reading ‘How To Get Rich’ by Felix Dennis, one of Britains wealthiest men, and he mentioned one of his mistakes was not pursuing his passion (writing poetry) earlier. I’ve recently started playing guitar and it’s been a pretty good way of completely taking my mind off work. Put more time into whatever passion/hobby you have and take it more seriously, it will do you good.

And by the way, PUT. THAT COFEE. DOWN. I’m not quoting Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross character just because he’s awesome, I really mean it. If you need more energy, exercise more, it will give you the necessary boost. Go easy on the caffeine ladies.

Amin out.

It’s been almost a month since I last posted, so I thought I would keep the small readership that I already have updated with what I’ve been up to since:

1) My last profitable campaign got killed by the Facebook mods after they decided (after two weeks) that it did not meet their ‘advertising guidelines’. As a result, a daily $600-$1000 stream of income disappeared overnight. I haven’t had much success getting another profitable campaign up and running, and after the amounts of ads I’ve had rejected, I don’t think I will be making any further attempts any time soon. Lesson learned: Screw Facebook (for now).

2) Finally launched my latest product, which should have been released earlier this year. It took me MONTHS to finally get my designer to deliver me the final goods, when it should have quite literally taken less than a week to do. Their incompetence made me complacent, as a result the project was delayed by months, which equates to months of LOST REVENUE. Lesson learned: Keep to deadlines and don’t delay an entire project because of incompetent freelancers.

3) Contacted by an established company within one of my niches, requesting regional selling rights to one of my products. Downside: The deal would mean I wouldn’t be allowed to sell my own product in the country they would like to have complete selling rights in. Upside: The sales I already make in that country are negligable. In addition, they are extremely well placed in the market, and would potentially generate me an extra $80k profit in sales this year alone. Lesson learned: Hurry up and secure the deal.

4) Ah yes, I almost forgot. I got my hands on a copy of Xrumer , a software application that automatically posts your messages to forums, guestbooks and bulletin boards (yeah, it’s a link spammer). The purpose of this tool is to increase your position in the SERPs, and while I haven’t experienced any significant changes in my rankings, it has boosted the positions of the few sites I have been experimenting it with. At $450 it’s not exactly cheap, but it does its job suprisingly well, and is quite easy to use. Definitely something to look into (unless of course you shy away from Black Hat tactics).

Any serious mailer will tell you that the high volume mailing business isn’t something you can just jump into - you need real technical know-how, a decent amount of start up capital, and a good amount of experience to make it worthwhile.

However, you can easily send several thousand emails a day without having to invest in a hefty setup.

Here’s a quick step by step method I’ve been using to send up to 500 emails an hour:

1) Buy Atomic Mail Sender . It costs £55 (around $100) and it’s a nifty little software which allows you to mass mail by connecting to an external smtp server. I personally use this software, and it gets the job done. Any other reputable mass mail software should also be fine.

2) Get a Hostgator hosting account. The hosting account type you need to purchase depends on your mailing needs. Anything up to 500 emails an hour will work fine on a $5 a month shared hosting account. Even if you have a list that runs into the thousands, you can easily just schedule the software to mail a maximum of 500 emails an hour - that way you could effectively send over 10,000 emails a day. If you need to send a signifantly more amount every day, then just opt for a dedicated hosting package, which allows unlimited emails.

3) Set up your mail sender app with your hostgator smtp mail server settings. Hit ‘test’ - if successful, you’re ready to go.

4) Import your mailing list. Hit send. Make cash.

I won’t go into CAN-SPAM laws here, so just remember, keep it legit. Not that a few hundred/thousand emails would get you into trouble anyway ;]

So it looks like Viacom’s $1bn case against Google over Youtube is going to work against not only Google, but over Youtube users too, as Viacom will now be able to gain access to the names and IP addresses associated with Youtube viewers and uploaders that have ‘infringed’ upon their copyright.

While I strongly doubt Viacom is going to sue anyone over watching clips of the Daily Show on the site, I do think it’s a possibility that Viacom will go after Youtube account holders who have uploaded large amounts of video footage of programs owned by Viacom.

Even more worrying, is the problem this would cause video marketers, who employ tactics of mass downloading videos from the popular video sites, mass watermarking them with their own websites’ URLs, before mass uploading them to video sites again, including Youtube. And because of the scalability and automation involved in such an operation, the damage against individual video marketers could be severe, should Viacom choose to take action.

Let’s just hope they’ve been using proxies…

I started using Prosper202 a few days ago, and I’m glad I made the effort to download it and get it set up on my server to test it out.

Prosper202 is a 100% free self hosted tracking tool, designed to be used to track your affiliate marketing campaigns. It takes no more than 5 minutes to install, and once done setting up campaigns becomes a breeze.

Prosper202 allows you to track and identify the top converting keywords and ads, as well as see a live auto-updating view of visitors interacting with your affiliate campaigns. The interface is extremely user friendly, with instructions provided in each step explaining the various actions required from you.

Perhaps the only real downside of the tool is its inability to record your real CPC costs - you have to enter an estimate CPC bid which is hardly accurate considering how click costs always fluctuate. As a result, the ROI generated in the stats also becomes inaccurate and completely useless.

However, this is hardly an issue, as your ROI can (and should) be calculated based on the stats generated in the actual affiliate network and your PPC account. Prosper202 does the job by telling you exactly which campaigns, which keywords and which ads are converting in a very manageable and friendly interface, and for a free tool that is one hell of a good deal.