Chris Barclay at Work

Recently there has been much buzz on the CPVDen forums about a big announcement. I’ll be honest, at first I just thought it was a guru hype technique to generate buzz. Man was I wrong! Just yesterday CPVDen announced they have acquired CPVCoach.

What does this mean? CPVDen will be adding content/posts from CPVCoach! So CPVDen members will benefit of the age of CPVCoach and also the brains of CPVDen, it’s a win/win situation for all members.

The BEST part! If you are already a member or join NOW you will not have to pay anything extra, your membership fee will remain the same. However it is guaranteed to go up in the near future so if you are thinking of joining, you should join now and get all the benefits!

Time and time again I often seem to get asked questions on what tools people can use and where to get these tools. Normally the answer seems to be you either need to program them yourself or pay for them.

CPV Den is changing this. They are now offering a FREE URL Scraper. You don’t need to be a CPV Den member to access this, it is listed under there “Free Tools” section.

This is a great tool for anyone to add to there arsenal, and even better – it’s FREE!

We as affiliate marketers are always judged on both quantity and quality even if we do not know it. Affiliate networks and merchants want quantity, they want our business, they want as much of it as possible. Why? The more traffic, leads, sales, etc we send them, the more money they make. Yes, we make money off of this as well, but let’s face it – the networks and merchants could care less if we’re profitable or how profitable we are as long as we keep sending them traffic and making them money. This is a fairly simple concept which most people are aware of.

Now on to the part which almost every new affiliate probably doesn’t know about, many intermediate affiliates don’t know about – Quality. Merchants want quality leads, they want leads to back out. What does this mean? First off, we need to understand the concept of a lead. Let’s look at a car dealership for an example. If they wanted to bring more people through their doors and thus increase the chance for sales, they might recruit a marketing company to find them ‘leads’. What a lead might be in this situation is someone looking to purchase a car, a full lead would probably constitute the persons name, phone number and address. The marketing company would sell these leads to the car dealership for a fixed rate, essentially the dealership is paying for the names, addresses and phone numbers of potential customers. So now what happens if the car dealership ends up buying so many leads and none of them buy a car? It’s not a good use of money and will probably stop buying them. However, if they find that buying these leads increase sales and profit, they will want more.

The affiliate marketing world isn’t much different, affiliates provide leads to merchants. Now the merchants will take these leads and often try to sell or get the ‘lead’ to sign up for there services. If the leads end up costing the merchant more money than they profit from, you will most likely be cut from the offer with the reason “the leads aren’t backing out”. In reality it may or may not be your fault, but the merchant needs to make money too. Like I stated above, we are judged for our quality if we know it or not.

Now what can we do about this? We can keep tabs on our offers and keep asking our managers at the networks if our leads are backing out for the merchant. Or we can take our destiny in our own hands. Continuity programs is where it is at. When working with continuity we get paid for our quality, the better quality we provide the more money we make. If you haven’t caught on yet – we are talking about programs which charge the customer a monthly (or weekly, bi-weekly, yearly, etc) fee. Each time the customer gets billed YOU get paid as well. Technically I guess this is more considered CPS (cost per sale) instead of CPL (cost per lead), but this is by far the best way to make money online in my opinion. The better we target our potential customers, most likely the longer they will remain a member of the program you are promoting and the more money you will make.

Another benefit of continuity is getting paid each month for 1 lead, it feels really really good, then the more leads you can generate the better it gets. The best part is you control your own quality. If you send a low quality lead, then chances are you will only get paid for that customer for 1 billing cycle because they left the program. However if you generate a high quality lead, you could be getting paid for that lead for months.

So where do you find programs like this? Private affiliate programs are great for this, programs like Affiliit you get 50% of the persons monthly membership. Other programs which deserve a mention are CPV Den and PPV Playbook.

So let’s sum this up – Join an affiliate program of a continuity product that pays reoccurring for as long as your lead stays a member, promote that product, profit for months to come.

…$1 Trials!

As of June 13, 2010 11:59pm Affiliit.com will no longer be offering a $1 trial. My recommendation is to get in while you can if you want to check it out for that amazing price.

The monthly price will (for now) remain at $47, if you or know anyone that is on the edge about joining, now is the time to get in and take advantage!

Clint and I have been doing lots of work to improve the site, some of which is visible now, some will be visible shortly and some in the future.

Thanks for the support!

Chris

So I went against my better judgment and decided to open a DirectCPV account a while back. Despite the several bad reviews and negative experiences. Boy was I stupid. So most traffic sources, you will either pre-pay or post-pay for your traffic. DirectCPV has decided they are going to do both. So just to give an idea for those who currently do not run with them, they will not send you any traffic until you pre-pay, I think the minimum account top-up is $100.

Recently I decided it was time to let my funds run out as the conversions from them compared to other networks were horrible. So my balance run out and we’re all done right? No, we certainly are not. The day after my balance run out I noticed I was still getting clicks from them, I thought it was odd but maybe a glitch somewhere so whatever. A few days later I noticed traffic was still coming in. I decided to login to my account and it looks like my “balance” was accumulating, I thought whatever and paused the campaigns thinking that they have some serious glitch in there software. I mean what reputable company would let traffic run after a pre-paid accounts balance is exhausted? I guess the answer is no reputable company would allow that.

So I find out that DirectCPV has been billing me for the traffic I received after this. I contacted there support and was told that they will continue to bill you until you pause your campaigns. It doesn’t matter if your balance is depleted or not, they will continue to bill you. I found this a shock, like I said earlier, any reputable company – once your balance has been depleted your views are stopped. Obviously with post-pay it’s a bit different.

So to me, this is DirectCPV’s loss more than anything, I will certainly not use them again and will pass my negative experience on to others. You would think a newer company like this would be a little smarter, there are horrible reviews and bad experiences already posted everywhere.

Am I whining? No, just venting. One of my biggest pet peeves is poorly run companies. DirectCPV seems like a perfect fit in this category now.

Just a warning to everyone, even after your PRE-PAID balance has run out, pause your campaigns or you will get billed. (Seriously, what company does pre-pay and post-pay at the same time?)

Almost every year we see people around us set new years resolutions – a set of goals for themselves. It seems as the year goes on they get abandoned and forgotten about except for the small percentage that actually work hard for the full year and fulfill those goals.

So, why do we set goals and then give up on them? I guess it can be a number of things, but it comes down to – how bad do we want it? When we want something bad we’ll do everything we can to make sure we get it.

So what we can do to ensure we hit our goal?

Set mini realistic goals goals is a good start. Map our your main goal, then break it up by month, by week and even by day depending on what it is. Map out what you need to do and what target you need to achieve in that time period to hit your main goal. Make sure you stick with the mini-goals, if you don’t hit one of them, make sure you adjust the rest to compensate.

Write your goals down in a place you can see it every day. I use a whiteboard on my wall to keep track of all important information, my goals are on there, along with lots of other good stuff.

Give yourself rewards. Set rewards for each mini-goal you set and even one for your master goal. Often that slight motivation of something immediate will help with the master plan.

Publicly announce your goals. It’s no surprise that not many of us want to put ourselves out there for the world to see, now with announcing your goals to the world, you’re not only being held accountable to yourself but to everyone who has read them. Now long with your own self satisfaction for hitting your goals you will have the constant encouragement and push from others to help keep you motivated.

Hold yourself accountable. If you massively miss your goals, make sure there is some repercussion, make sure you work that much harder to hit the next one.

Best of luck for a prosperous 2010.

With being the co-owner of an affiliate training site, I get to see and work with several individuals – all with different backgrounds, experiences, training and knowledge. It’s no surprise that not everyone will become successful at Affiliate Marketing. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s like any business – it takes a certain mindset and dedication. I have noticed a trend of successful marketers that have not only come through our program but in general, they all share very similar attributes. I highly recommend anyone new to affiliate marketing or trying to break out in it to study these and try to adapt to them as much as possible.

Hard Working
I think this almost goes without saying, all the successful affiliates I have seen have a tremendous work ethic, they work hard and work often. The fatal mistake I see many people make is they treat this as a hobby and you just can’t do that. This is a business, you need to treat it like a business. It’s understandable that if you have a full time job that the time you have to dedicate to affiliate marketing might not be as much as you’d like, it’s very important for you to make the best of the time you spend, limit distractions and get down to business. Most of the time you don’t see these people talking on AIM, they are too busy working.

Clear Vision / Goals
Most people that excel at affiliate marketing have clear goals on what they have to achieve, they know where they want to be in a week, in a month, in a year, etc. They lay out what they want and then figure out how to get there, they don’t just fly blind in the dark, they make sure they have a clear path.

No Fear
They aren’t scared to try something out and not afraid to fail. Let’s face it, in this industry there is no guaranteed success. Everything needs to be tested and what works for me, might not work for you. Fear of failure can hinder even the most bright people. Even if you do fail on a campaign, take it as a learning experience, learn what you did right and what you did wrong.

They Listen
There is lots of advice out there on free and paid sites. Some of that advice is good, some of it isn’t. Either way it’s good to take it in and let it digest, even if it’s not good advice it might give you other ideas.

Obviously this list isn’t an end all be all, it’s just some of the attributes I’ve seen. Now get to work!

Just wanted to throw out a friendly reminder that we are still doing a webinar tonight with Ian Fernando and Clint Lenard about Affiliit. It’s not too late to join. If you haven’t signed up yet, here is the signup link.

It starts at 7:00pm EST.

http://ianternetmedia.com/webinars/affiliit

We hope to see you there!

Ian Fernando has been nice enough to invite Clint Lenard and Myself to speak about Affiliit and various other affiliate marketing topics at a live webinar next Wednesday (December 9, 2009) from 7:00pm to 8:00pm EST. Ian is well known in the affiliate marketing industry, we are very happy to have this opportunity to be part of this organized event and hope this may lead to future endeavors.

I really hope you can make it to the webinar!

To sign up for this FREE webinar just follow the link below.

http://www.ianternetmedia.com/webinars/affiliit/

So far today I have made a whopping $4.88 through Adsense. While some people may say wow that’s amazing and others will just make fun of me. Either way, it doesn’t matter! Do I use adsense as a source of income? Of coarse not. I think like everyone else when I first started designing websites I threw Adsense on them for the sake of it, this was before I knew anything about affiliate marketing and thought – hey I might be able to make some money from this! So years later (this year) I finally received my first Adsense check. You can imagine my joy – out of nowhere I get a random check from Google for years of advertising! Now that’s a business model!

But back to seriousness. I’m sure many people will find Adsense as a means of income. In my personal opinion, if you are making a reasonable amount with Adsense (not what I’m making off it! lol). I think there are better ways you could monetize your sites. CPA offers, even Yahoo advertising. I have personally talked to many people who were running strictly Adsense and after some experimenting we were able to find some CPA offers which matched the website content and demographics and there income went up substantially. Now will this work for everyone? Probably not. It can take lots of testing and experimenting to find winning combinations, however if your willing to put the time in it is very likely you will find a winner.

Now back to Adsense. Now that you’re making fun of me wondering why I am even talking about it. I had a nice friend at PPCMom who started to joke around what she was making on it, so I just had to jump in on it too. Most of us Affiliate Marketers do not rely on Adsense to make money. It seems to be more of a webmasters thing. I do not mean that condescending or anything. Affiliate Marketers have one main goal in mind – to make money. Webmasters on the other hand want to design a site, get constant visitors, it’s what they live for. It’s 2 different types of people and 2 different types of businesses and business models. However in the end there is much we can learn from each other!

So ironically I had to actually look up which domains/sites I had Adsense on as I had no idea as it’s been so long. Man those are hurting sites, they just were setup a long time ago, not much optimization, or even real design. They are like old war veterans on auto-pilot. Who knows what there next mission will be!

So by now, you probably realize this post makes no sense. As many of my friends say, after 6 I start to make no sense and its 12:30 now! Have a good night everyone!