I just remembered that I have to get this blog going..and when I took a look at all the older posts that I wrote, I feel real stupid. A few months is a lot of time in this industry and I evolve a lot when I come across new ideas and people. The point is this – the posts that I’ve been occasionally dropping here are so fucking lame and so naive that they serve no real purpose or use to anybody. And I don’t want it to be that way.
Now I’ve got two options. 1) Take the blog offline. Seriously, with all the ‘my-affiliate-journey’ blogs out there, the world would be better with one lame blog less. 2) Post some internet tips every other day..and try to help people make money or love life or get high..something that will fetch me a gazallion rss readers.
I think I’ll go for option 2. It should kinda give me the ‘internet guy’ persona where i get to shove unsolicited information on my readers’ faces and walk away with a multitude of noob fans stalking my every step for magic tactics(!) to make moar interweb moniez. I might even get to meet the president.
Sounds pretty good. But still lame. So after some deep contemplation (while staring at Katie Holmes on my desktop), I have decided to take option 3!
Manu, I see 2 options above. What the fuck is option 3?
Help and network with real affiliates like myself!
So here’s what I think I’ll do to ensure the quality of my reader base and keep the blog cool:
- Post shit that makes sense and helps the mid-level marketer do things better.
- Piss off the noob crowd back to digital point.
- Act decent and keep the site ad free. Only put up banners for things that are truly awesome.
- [reserved for more amazing ideas that I'd think up in the future]
Wow pretty long ass post. I can’t believe I actually wrote 300 words trying to explain that I was naive before I took a 4-month hiatus and now I’m all intelligent and evolved.
Anyway, peace.
Think Long Term Suckerz
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a tad more than a year, and while I had some really good campaigns making me money, I’ve had many MANY that sucked donkey balls. I’m a firm believer that affiliate marketing can be big if done right. But in an industry as volatile as this, you could be up one day and hit rock bottom the next. Volatility is the number 1 problem we face (It can be good thing as only the most creative ones could adapt best to changes…and oh the ones with deep pockets…okay I’ll save that argument for another post). When the money is rolling in its all cool, but what if your most profitable campaign stops working for you?
I’m not trying to be all negative here. Good campaigns do make up for the bad ones we had, and they do make a lot of money. But someday your little cash machine is gonna run its course, and if we aren’t prepared we’re fucked.
But Manu, that’s why we diversify.
Good point. When we look at all the really successful ones in the industry, we notice that they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. They run in multiple niches with multiple traffic sources, so even if some go down they’re pretty balanced.
That brings us to problem number 2 of this business model – Scaling. How far can you take it? A few million dollars a year? That’s not bad, but what if you want to get better than that? What would you be doing in 5, 10, 20 years?
So in this post I am going to touchdown on why you should look outside the AM business, not just multiple offers and multiple traffic sources. I’m not gonna get into the topic of offline businesses (which I totally recommend you invest some of your money and energies in). We’re internet marketers, so lets look into how far we can go online.
TA-DA!
Think Long Term Suckerz – The Meat
Content Gateways: If you’re new to content gateways, I’d love to give you some tips. But I’m new too, so fuck you. Okay here’s what I know:
If you have premium content (text, video, flash game, membership, etc), you can block access to them and ask users to fill out a free survey before they get to the content, and you get paid for every person who fills it out.
You can sign up for a publisher account at CPAlead, Pinball, Adscend Media, Blam Ads, etc and go to work on creating exclusive content that your site visitors would fill out a survey for.
As a publisher, other than creating irresistible website content, you could create viral apps and ask users to fill out surveys for virtual money and goods. Many Facebook apps already do this and its responsible for a big chunk of their revenues. (Psst..wanna see an example? Try Zoosk on Facebook)
This is a branch of the CPA industry otherwise called incentive based marketing and some big businesses are totally built on this model. TrialPay does it really really well. And you know what, this model is so cool that you can build a PPV network with it! (example: Direct PPV sells traffic from Loudmo installs)
Like in everything else, you’ll get ahead if you understand the whole picture. The publisher, the advertiser, and the middleman. You can’t be the middleman forever if you want to scale unless you’re as big as Mafia Wars, so show your fears the sacred finger and come up with something like TrialPay. You can bring so much value to the marketplace.
Talking about understanding the whole picture, the point above goes for affiliate marketing as well…which leads to our second kick ass internet business idea:
Your Own Product: This one is awesome if you’re doing great as an affiliate. You know the ins and outs of landing page optimization, unique ad copy and split testing. Why not build a good product yourself and promote it? Lets look at what’s great about it:
A few things to note:
Now noobs start thinking ‘Whoa everybody else is gonna promote my product! Let me just make one and get listed in the top networks’. Noob FAIL.
You gotta test your product, landing pages, checkout pages, traffic channels, etc. Nobody is gonna do the testing for you. Why would others spend their hard earned money to see if your product is good enough? Networks need data, statistically significant data, lots of it. So you go out and do a lot of buys in display, search, email, ppv spheres, and let them know where your product performs best for everybody – you, the network and the affiliate.
Networks also ask for a deposit, to make sure you don’t run away to wherever the fuck you go with all their money.
Don’t be shady. Product owners getting greedy and beating the negative option billing a.k.a continuity model to a pulp has been the greatest fuck up of the century. Make a good product. We’ve had enough of your berries and google monies, thank you.
Traffic Source: This is one of my favorites. Why not build your own ad network? Why not convince a few big websites and a few big fat ass board room dwelling brand advertisers to come use your service? This one is pretty hard, but not as hard as you think. You could come up with a really cool idea like promoting brands with CAPTCHA or you could be just another text/display/rich media ad network that sells better and takes care of clients better and still win.
The problem with launching an ad network is, you need to get both the publishers and the advertisers going at the same time. So what do you do?
You can start off with Right Media and ADSDAQ’s shiny APIs and sell inventory for a better price than what you buy them for.
The beauty of this whole thing is you can get a self serve ad platform made for you and access inventory from the ad exchanges directly via their API. And you pay only for the impressions your advertiser clients buy.
A lot of ad networks broker impressions from multiple ad exchanges to meet the demand when their inventory runs out.
After you get a few advertisers, you can start calling up high profile websites and offer them premium CPMs. Don’t be a jackass, do your research first and figure out a way to give them a better deal than what they’re getting from others already. Many many brands are getting into online advertising and more will flock this space in the next many years ready to spend a fortune for inventory. Ride the wave fellas.
Okay I wanna go to bed. I’ll be back with Part 2 of this post, with some other options to diversify (from AM) – ideas with scalability. So keep an eye. Here’s a couple of things I’m gonna talk about:
Building massive web properties
Web applications (SAAS)
Peace.