Well I have returned from my vacation in Panama City Beach with the friends (pics to be posted) and this blog is in dire need of an update.

Over the past two weeks I have drifting away from the traditional SEM (find an offer, get some keywords, and push it in the PPCs) and moving more towards offering custom solutions to a variety of businesses. Recently in my post, The Exclusive Affiliate, I spoke about about becoming the sole affiliate and SEO for a motorcycle parts site, well some were asking how that was going and I’m happy to say that we are ranking top 5 for some of the target keywords where we formally didn’t rank at all. I accomplished this by the good ‘ole method of link building (and a couple neat tricks!).

The Facebook Marketing Experiment turned out not so good.  The Flyers were pretty much a bust, although cheap, they just failed to attract the CTR I was looking for. Also conversions were pretty lousy on a variety of offers (ringtones, ipod, weightloss, etc.). As for emailing high member group admins…. well almost no response. So my advice, for now, would be just advertise your party across from campus, not affiliate products. I still testing with this so when I get some solid good advice, that converts!, I will share.

If anyone has any topic they would like discussed, please send me an email!

Time to give back some link love…

Internet Marketer Fail when they get Lazy …“Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”

How to Make $5,000,000 … “Many people that succeed or make it big many times fail at first, but the important thing is they got up and kept trying.”

5 Reasons Blogs don’t Last … “Just like going to the gym, blogging takes months of hard work to see any noticeable benefits.”

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Yes, their is a common theme here… DON’T GIVE UP! The biggest reason most people fail is because they’re stupid or lazy… and since you’re reading this blog I know you’re not stupid! But honestly, if you expect to have $ and success handed to you, then you will fail, because there are many other people who are willing to get off their ass and win.”Make success, don’t take success.” -me

June 1st. That is the date Google Adsense will be deleting arbitrage publisher accounts. For some it was a sweet run, the literally tens of thousands made from MFA sites… and for others it was even sweeter. Supposedly the email says the accounts are related to an “Unsuitable Business Model” and they have two weeks till their accounts are disabled. Thankfully, all amounts due will be paid to the publishers.

This is a big kick in the teeth to a TON of publishers, both on the white and black hat side of the realm… but my opinion is that the MFA guys aren’t really the only ones doing arbi. In a sense both comparison shopping and affiliate marketing (ppc) are doing arbitrage. Arbitrage is simply the practice of taking advantage of a market imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market price, so driving PPC to a landing page full of affiliate redirects is essentially the same thing. The big reason Google is targeting MFA though is to protect it’s Content Network. One of the first things I do on an adWords campaign is disable the Content Network, and I know I’m not the only one who does this! But I suppose Google killing off MFA will eventually boost the payouts of other “more legitimate” publishers and reinstate faith for smaller advertisers in the Content Network.

To all the arbitrageurs, I bid you adieu. I know I will see more of you with me on YPN (when it’s out of beta) and possibly on Microsoft’s new contextual service… Oh and I don’t do MFA.

Thanks to Jensense for the break!

I was reading Neil’s excellent post about censorship at digg and it made me wonder about a problem I had with digg.

About a month or two ago I submitted a story concerning the “church” of scifientology and their continued effort towards censorship of an unreleased film. The story received 2000 diggs very quickly and became the number 1 story on digg.com and remained there for quite a while. After about an hour I hit refresh on my browser and the story had completely vanished from the front page! I did a quick search and found that it didn’t appear in the search results either, I thought that it was buried but confused why it didn’t even show in the searches. I light heartedly guess that they censored it on the request of the scifientologists, but now I am thinking this may be true…

Let’s look at some recent buries… Go Here and press “Control + F” then type “scientolo”.  Keep clicking next to see all the buries revolving around scientology (which is a LARGE amount)… all are identified as inaccurate or spam. hmmm.

Anyway, I just thought I would share my thoughts… oh and if you want to see a bit of reporting on the bullshit of scifientology visit xenu.net.

The word super affiliate can best be described as an one capable of generating a significant percentage of an affiliate program’s activity, some even describe it as…

• Part of the 1% of all legitimate affiliate marketers (ebooks don’t count!)
• Monthly affiliate marketing revenues should be no less than $250k a month (revenue, not profit)
• Annual profits should be no less than $1 million based on your total affiliate marketing revenues
• You must be hitting the minimums for at least 1.5 years consecutively (to make sure it isn’t a fluke)

Now I’m not about to say that I qualify for that realm but I would like to talk about becoming a different type of affiliate (one that could possibly lead to becoming a Super Affiliate), the Exclusive Affiliate. Being an exclusive affiliate means to either be a businesses only affiliate or to capture a percentage of every sale, of course the latter is the greater.

Recently (as in yesterday), I finished a deal to become the exclusive affiliate for a motorcycle parts sales site. I personally know the gentleman who operates this site and we worked out a deal to where I would receive a percentage of Every sale. I obtained this position by first figuring out his needs without talking to him, when doing business it is vital to be able to anticipate needs. I reviewed his site and came up with a one page detailed analysis of his standings, including SEO factors, a marketing plan, target keywords, needed site changes, and customer acquisition strategies.

When I finally approached him about the site we started to discuss what he wanted and the possible direction he wanted to take the site. He was very impressed with my presentation and told me that he didn’t want to market through PPC and only wanted to grow through organic, he also explained to me that others have approached him with their “SEO Services” often with price tags over $10,000. We finished our first meeting with handshake and planned our second meeting for the next day (which was yesterday).

The next day our meeting went as planned with about an hour discussion into marketing then compensation. We discussed his margins and markup on the products he offered, and eventually we came out with a compensation rate of 5% on all products sold, indefinitely.

Now to some 5% may not sound like a large amount of $ because most are dealing with limited relationships. You only get paid on the sales you bring in. But as an Exclusive Affiliate, compensated on all sales, the totals add up quickly. For example ranking #1-5 for popular term can mean a residual, passive income even after position in the SERPs has been obtained. Yes this will be ALOT of work up front, but after top placement has been achieved it is relatively easy to maintain a top result by killing the ranking in comparison to others for the same keywords. Overall becoming an exclusive affiliate for several business can help you wallet become fat quickly. My advice would be to try and strike some deals with local companies… it can be very rewarding!

New Job Title: Exclusive Affiliate.

Job Description: SEO, SEM, Marketing Director.

Sorry for another post that qualifies for the Rant category, but I saw this today in the ‘Google Adwords Editorial Guidelines’ page and it just bothered me…

Affiliate Policy

• We allow affiliates to use AdWords advertising. Please note that we’ll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same Display URL per search query. We also monitor and don’t allow the following:
  • Redirect URLs: Ads that contain Display URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
  • Bridge Pages: Ads for webpages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
  • Framing: Ads for webpages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site.

  https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html

Why does Google try so hard to kill off affiliates? Honestly 95% of the ringtone affiliate landing pages out there are in violation of this policy, and it’s not just ringtones! Insurance, Dating, Heath, and just about any other affiliate program has affiliates sole purpose is to drive traffic to the their affiliate link. Quality score is another issue where they were after MFA (made for ads) sites but ended up hurting affiliate marketers in the process as well. Google says they are always trying to provide a positive user experience, so why do they target aff’s when our entire business model revolves around driving extremely targeted traffic and providing a very positive user experience? More so why are other type of sites like shopping.com not getting stung by Adwords so much? Shopping comparison is essentially the same thing.

I guess I’m just tired of Google walking on affiliates…