Aminology

Two weeks ago Nickycakes started a contest where anyone could win his Xbox 360 by being the first to make $1K with Advaliant after signing up to the network through his referal link. I thought I’d give it a shot, so I signed up and got approved the next day. I actually expected some big shot affiliate to hit the $1K mark pretty soon, but after the ‘cakes posted his update two days later, I knew I could do better than those already in the lead.

I was the first person in the contest to hit $1000 in earnings with Advaliant . You can read Nickycakes’ post here .

I made my $1K by running debt relief ads on Facebook. I made and tested dozens of ads. Here are two of the more interesting ones I posted which despite having poor CTRs, managed to get a good volume of traffic without getting slapped with $1 clicks.

This ad did best when targeted at 25-45 year olds in the United States. I had a 0.06% CTR on this ad, which was the best CTR I managed to get in this particular campaign.

This ad was targeted at all college kids in the United States. I had a weak 0.02% CTR on this ad, probably because of the mention of a zip submit, but it converted well.

I kept these going until I won the contest, upon which I killed them and scrapped the campaigns because the profits were eventually simply not worth the ad spend.

I will definitely be working with Advaliant in the future, my account manager Geoff Marcy is a top guy to work with too. In fact, Advaliant sent an Xbox 360 to Matt Marcin who came second in the contest. Matt definitely deserved it more than I did, because he made the $1K in less than 24 hours, while it took me 3 days to hit the $1K through Facebook. Having said that, Facebook did severely limit the amount of traffic I could have potentially done, for the simple reason that lunatics are running their social ad system.

A big thanks to Nickycakes and Advaliant for this contest and for each sending out an Xbox 360 to me and Matt!

Affiliate marketer ‘aim’ from the Wickedfire forum started a thread on “why affiliates are the bitch of the industry“. His post was targeted at affiliates who operate within the CPA area, and he was certainly on the ball with a lot of his points.

Posts like this are important because it gets affiliates thinking outside of the box. The more you promote as an affiliate, the more you experience, and the more you experience, the more you understand about how the whole system works.

I invest most of my time and money into creating and marketing my own informational products. My marketing campaigns in the CPA area are primarily for me to gain a greater understanding of affiliate marketing so I can in turn apply it to my own business, and gain inspiration for future projects.

There are certain types of offers which are prevalent in almost all the major CPA networks out there. Ringtones, cash loans and weight loss products would be a few good examples. While I personally don’t like to promote the more shady and ethically questionable offers, there is an abundance of good quality offers that can not only be promoted, but also replicated.

Let’s use a health product as an example.

Green Tea Extreme is an offer that you can find on the NeverBlueAds network. The payout for this product is $25/sale, so it’s pretty clear the advertiser is making much more than this with each sale.

After spending huge sums of money into marketing the product, an inquisitive affiliate marketer would start to think beyond the payout and reflect more on the actual business model itself:

“If I’m making so much money as a single affiliate, how much is the owner of the business making?”

That’s certainly the question I asked myself soon after I got into affiliate marketing, and it is the reason I prefer to have affiliates working on my affiliate program rather than be an affiliate and work on an advertisers program. You have got to remember that the advertiser has many affiliates promoting its product, so no matter how much you’re banking on that particular product, the advertiser is banking at least 10 times harder.

So how do we go about replicating this specific business model?

I’ve only just pulled this offer out of NeverBlueAds, and I’ve never promoted the product before, but I still have a basic idea of how I could go about doing this myself.

As we are not dealing with digital and informational products here, the product creation stage becomes much more complicated. Which is why we avoid it altogether.

I would go ahead and import the product instead. And the easiest and quickest way to do that would be through Alibaba.

So I go on Alibaba and search for ‘green tea pills‘. The search generates more than a dozen green tea pill products to choose from.

Here’s one item that looks interesting:

Green Tea Soft Capsules

Because I am using this is an example, and have no interest in promoting and selling green tea pills (at the moment anyway), I haven’t gone ahea and asked the supplier for a quote. But I know for a fact I can get the pills MUCH cheaper than the commercially available ‘Green Tea Extreme’ pills.

In fact, I did a similar search some time ago for weight loss pills, and discovered that weight loss pills can be imported very cheaply, no where near the prices they are being marketed and sold at right now.

What’s even more insane is that we can find many suppliers that offer ‘private labeling rights’. This means that the actual goods will be sent completely unbranded, with permission granted to you to label it under your own company brand.

‘Green Tea Extreme’ could just as easily be one of the cheap green tea capsules we found on Alibaba.

With the goods and branding completely sorted, we come to the real meat of the action. The marketing process. I need not go into this any further.

Why?

Because as an affiliate, that’s where your real skill lies. You’ve worked with the networks, you know how things roll, and you know how to market anything.

Seasoned affiliates can market practically anything on offer in the networks.

What most should realise is that they can use their affiliate marketing expertise to push their own product even better than the advertiser they are working for.