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:

• You get to keep more of the revenue you generate.
• You’re more in control of the movement of cash into and out of your business. No networks and shady advertisers fucking you over. (Not saying that networks & advertisers are shady. 99% of the time, its the affiliate who’s wrong.)
• Others promote your product. So you can scale it up many more times than when you were an affiliate.
• Opens up other opportunities to monetize your traffic, like Co-reg for example.

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.

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.

SEO, link building and all that shit

I’m no SEO junkie, but I have lots of cool data from the campaigns I ran on search during the past 3-4 months. Yeah, I’ve been kicked out of Google. And YSM seems to hate my stuff more than anything else on the planet. So the smartest thing would be to SEO my landing pages for the top converting, long tail keywords. Low competition. Free traffic. I’d be a complete douche to miss out on this.

Social media = $$$

I got into Facebook just a little while ago (I don’t know what took me so long to give it a try. Fuuuuuuucck) and I broke even on my first week. Nothing too big..spent around 600 bucks and made $650. But what was evident was the VOLUME. There is so much volume out there in social media. And lots of monies to be made.

So the first quarter of 2010 is going to be all social media for me. Facebook, POF, etc.

List building, media buying, etc

As I get more comfortable with monetizing social media traffic, I’d love to expand into email marketing and media buying. If I can get there as soon as six months from now, I would be very glad.

EWA Network FTW

I love these guys. They treat me with respect. I got my first wire on just the 8th day of running with them. Hands down EWA is number 1 on my list. I’m so looking forward to growing with them. Great guys to do business with.

Number 2 would be Hydra…my AM there is good, and they’ve always paid me on time.

2010 is gonna be great

I had a really cool year in 2009. Learned so much and more importantly, took action. So I’m looking forward to take that momentum into 2010 and make more inroads. With so many projects at hand, I’d like to take one step at a time, & try and be less of the lazy ass marketer that I usually am. There are so many opportunities out there, overwhelming at times…I’m hoping to keep up with the changes in the industry and get some real work done. Comparing what I knew last year and know now, 2010 could well be the year for me.

This shit gets me excited all the time. I love this industry :)

I have a couple of suggestions to help improve the tool. As a Prosper lover, I would love to see these fixed in the next version:

• When you remove campaigns from Tracking202>Setup>Aff Campaigns, it doesn’t ask for confirmation…I once accidentally clicked ‘remove’ on one of my active campaigns, and whoosh, it was gone. I had to add the offer again, generate new links and update them in the PPC engines. Awww :/
• The log in screen doesn’t have a ‘Remember me’ or a ‘Keep me logged in’ option. Sure my browser can store my username and password, but I don’t want to hit log in everytime. I want it already logged in :|

Just my 2 cents.

And again, my sincere thanks to Wes and the team at Tracking202. We affiliates know the kind of work you put in to help us improve our businesses and we love ya :) I hope your latest ventures really take off and make you guys a lot of money. You deserve it.

EDIT: Nerdyaffiliate has a solution for the login. Cool guy.

It doesn’t take much to get to $50/day. Getting started and making $50 a day isn’t very hard. If you’re totally new to internet marketing, it might take a while to figure out and get used to the technical stuff like building a landing page, learning how to track, using the tools, etc. When you’re comfortable with all that, getting started is all about getting some actual work done. Jump in, get yourself dirty. Test some offers. Fail and keep going. That’s the only way you’ll start learning real affiliate marketing.

Make friends in the industry. Building relationships with the ballers in the industry should be on top of your priorities if you seriously want to make it big. Contrary to popular belief, most successful affiliates will actually take the time to tell you what to do and what not to do. This is gold. If you want to jump into a niche, just pick a guy who you know is doing well in that niche and ask him for some quick advice. Also, they will help you shape your mindset. We all know how important being in the right mindset is. So reach out and make some friends.

Help yourself. No one is going to spoon feed you. They will help, but you are the one who has to do the work. Develop a strong work ethic. Be disciplined. If you’re in for the long haul, you better develop habits that will help you go beyond the CPA industry.

Things don’t last forever. The traffic might dry up. The offer might go down. Its part of the industry and you have to adapt and keep going. Yes its frustrating when something you’ve worked so hard on is not profitable anymore. But move on and milk some other cow.

Help the advertiser and the network make money. If you really care about the advertiser and the network and help them make more money, you’re going to have very few problems. Make them happy and they’ll love you. Understand the whole process, not just your end of the deal. That’s what the top guys do. We want to build a long term business out of this, not just make some money here and there. No?

This post isn’t any different from the many others you’d find on IM forums and blogs. But if you’re just starting out like me, you might want to repeat these a hundred times in your head every day.

Thanks for reading.

Why would anyone be interested in buying a dictionary when they’re leaving a restaurant??! Selling a dictionary to people leaving a library, or to parents picking up their kids from school..makes some sense. A restaurant? NO!

The real problem is, none of these people know what they’re doing. They think they’re just doing their job and rejections are part of the daily routine. Yes there will be rejections when you’re trying to sell something, but you have to make an effort to atleast catch the right people in the right mindset.

This doesn’t stop with dictionaries. There’s a whole lot of people who have no idea what they’re doing, trying to sell stuff to people who are in no way interested in what they’re selling.

Whatever the product is, if you’re a marketer, target a tiny group of interested folks than going for the mass if you really want to lower your odds of failure.

Enough said.

I bumped into a few problems right at the start of October, thanks to YSM, but will sort them out soon. I can’t wait to blow things up. I guess I’ll move up slowly as cashflow is still one of my major problems.

So my next goal would be to hit $1k/week in revenue and get into weekly payouts as soon as possible. Two things: I can go try other traffic sources for the few email/zips that I’m running now, OR, I can try some higher payout offers with YSM and Adwords for now and think about other traffic sources later.

I feel one with the industry now :)

I’m currently doing $30-$50/day net with an offer on Hydra, direct linking on YSM. And I’m trying to hit $1000/week in revenue so I can get into weekly wires.

I’m experimenting with a lot of things, and I’ll try and drop a post every day :)

Profitable Days

The campaign that gave me my first profitable day didn’t last long, but I made another one that did. Rode that one for a while and had my first profitable month! lol, made some bucks at 400% ROI.

Cheques!

Got my first check on May 6th! And another one at the end of the month! Both from Neverblue. I was pretty upbeat until I heard that the cheques wouldn’t clear until 45 days. Also, the banks are going to charge me for processing foreign cheques. So no cheques from now on. Such a waste of time and money. I hope I get to those weekly wires soon.

Google woes

I pretty much hit a brick wall when my budgets dwindled. Coach suggested I should build my sites while I waited for the cheques to clear. Google tried to charge my card (with the credit limit already over) and the payment failed. So Google just suspended my ads. Have to get around this budget thingy pretty quickly.

Lessons

I haven’t launched much during the last 60 days largely due to non existent funds, but I have been learning quite a lot. Talked with a couple of successful guys on AIM and made a few decisions about how to structure my future campaigns. Very useful. Should continue networking with a lot of people in the industry.

Nothing interesting happened, but I guess I will have my good days soon :)

I was away from my computer most of the time yesterday but when I came back, I saw that I had spent $4.39 for clicks and I had made $6.90 in conversions. That’s a freaking $2.51 profit! :D Didn’t expect it this soon..but I guess me being away from my desk helped. Low numbers…but WTF, this is my first day of profit!