This week I receive an email from some random guy asking me what made a super affiliate “super” or a guru a “guru”. And to be honest with you… I had no reply for the guy. Instead I have spent the last two days delving into the depths of the Internet to find out what made a guru a guru and a super affiliate super.

Unfortunately everone online has their own opinion on this subject. So I’m going to try my best to give my interpretation of these two terms we hear so often online.

First lets start off with a Guru. This one is easy. The definition of a “Guru” from dictionary.com is this:

1. A trusted counselor and adviser; a mentor.
2. A recognized leader in a field.
3. An acknowledged and influential advocate, as of a movement or idea.

Okay… I took out most of the definitions it gave. The term “guru”, when it was originally created, referred to an intellectual or spiritual guide/leader.

So when it comes to Internet Marketing who can we call a guru? ummm That’s a good question. These days there are so many “guru’s” that its hard to set apart those that are real leaders or guides against those that are looking to resell you information. Mike Filsaime… He isn’t a guru in my eyes. He’s a business man. An entrepreneur. But a guru… no… sorry. John Chow… He isn’t a guru either… He’s an entrepreneur. Shoemoney…entrepreneur. Will from PPC-Coach…Guru and entrepreneur. Ralph Ruckman over at Convert2Media… He’s a guru (although he’ll argue differently) and entrepreneur.

Yeah you heard that right. Coach has given me the opportunity to give away 1 lifetime membership to the webs best PPC program. That means you get unlimited access to the Tools, Vids, and Forum, for the next billion years (if you live that long).

PPC Coach is hands down a leader in PPC training. They aren’t specific to CPA offers which is nice. Not everyone makes money via CPA offers. There are several people in the site that are using PPC Coach to just better their own personal online store success.

In my opinion the point of PPC Coach is to become successful using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN  Adcenter. The tools inside include a poll generator, a tracking script, a campaign creator that will export to the three main PPC engines, daily budget calculator, max bid calucator, and more!  Thats a lot.  Now the one tool you don’t get is a keyword tool.  But if your inside PPC Coach already you will know that they stress a free method  (Google External Tool) for learning purposes.

So now you know a little bit of the benefits of PPC Coach.  Here is what you have to do for a chance to win.

Make sure you are signed up with Convert2Media.

For every $10 dollars you make from the time this post becomes live (6:50PM CST 12/15/08) to January 1st when I wake up (normally around 8-9AM CST), you will have one chance to win the lifetime membership.  That means that if you earn $100 you get ten chances to win.  Now… If you get $11 I will round up so you get 2 chances to win.  That means that even if you make $0.30 in the next 15 days you will get one chance to win. Just remember… Every $10 rounded up will get you a chance to win.

“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
-The Godfather

This is mainly for those of us that have our own products out there. If you don’t have your own product I suggest getting one. There isn’t anything better than making 100% profit on a product your selling AND having hundreds, even thousands of affiliates promoting a product for you!

So lets jump right in and begin talking about boosting up your response rate for email marketing or your own little lander.

The best thing that you can do is to offer free samples.  So what are some things that you can do? Giving a 3 day trial run or even a demo version of your product is the best way to accomplish this.  Now I know most of you probably don’t have your own product.  This demo version is often given on CPA offers as well.  Have you see the $2.95 sample pack of acai berry!? These guys know what they are doing.  They are getting people to buy into their product with a sample pack.

They can’t necessarily give away free samples of acai berry.  That would be suicide for them.  So what they do is they get a credit card number for a sample pack of acai berry and then in 7 days they hit them with the actual cost.  The sample pack is what drew them into the offer to begin with (that and Oprah).

Now, what are some other things that you can give away to help make your offer more irresistible?  A series of training videos, user manual, members forum or chat, unlimited support, unlimited updates for the life of the product.  There are all kinds of things you can add to make your product look outstanding to people.

One of the most frustrating thing in the world is working on a website (or LP for that matter) and not knowing enough CSS or HTML to make it work for IE, FF and all those other browsers out there.

One of my biggest mistakes is creating an LP, viewing it in FF, then showing my LP to family a few weeks later only to find out it looks like junk in their browser.  We all have IE coding issues.  It is the most retarded browser out there.  Why can’t microsoft conform to what we want their browser to do…

Anyways, there isn’t really a need anymore to ask you friends to check out your designs in their browser.  Instead you can jump over to Browsershots.org and cross check your work over 70 different browsers.

Yeah it’s pretty kool how the tool works.  Basically somewhere a virtual machine boots up the browser and loads your webpage. Then screen shots are taken in three segments, put together, and presented to you like a little prize or something.  If your site is really long (like a blog) then it won’t fit the whole thing in.  But you will get a good look at your header… And you will see… that IE8 sucks.

Since you all will be wearing the t-shirt, I would like to know which designs you all liked the best.  The contest is being held at 99designs. Here are the two main designs that I am deliberating against right now.

If you can please jump over to the contest and then return back here and voice your opinions that would be much appreciated.  I’m really tied right now and don’t know what to do.  The contest is over in about 9 hours.

Here is the direct link:

http://99designs.com/contests/14743

Thanks guys and gals!

Before I blog about this please remember that not all backlinks are created equally. Not all backlinks are good.  Not all backlinks are worth your time…ok… Remember that with proper SEO you can out do a site with 10,000 backlinks with a site that has 200 backlinks…

We all love backlinks.  No really we do.  I know I just got done telling you some stuff about backlinks up there in bold lettering… But still.  This is a great technique that you can use.  And I’m sure all of you can think of other uses for some of these tools I’m going to share with you.

This technique that I am going to show you will help you get some link juice from RSS feeds.  It is basically a technique where you take an RSS feed and send it out to several different RSS Aggregators.

_____________________________________

1. Jump over to RSS Mix <–click that….
2. Add Several different RSS feeds to the list.
3. • Your Blog RSS Feed
   • Your ezine article feed
   • Your Social Bookmark site feeds

   You can literally add anything to the RSS feed.  Videos, podcasts, articles, whatever you want!
   If you don’t have an RSS feed for your website then you need to head over to Dapper.net to create one from your existing content.These feeds should be in your niche and to YOUR sites.  Don’t gather feeds from someone elses content. That would defeat the purpose of getting YOURSELF backlinks.

4. Click create.  This will generate a new RSS feed.  The new RSS feed is filled with the RSS feeds that you inserted.  It basically combined everything for you and put it into one easy to use feed :)
5. Jump over to RSS Aggregators and submit your new pumped up RSS feed!
   Here is a list of sites you can use!
   

Hey everyone! Thanks for participating in the contest.  I have the final winners listed below.  Thank you everyone for participating.  I hope you all enjoyed this!

1. Top Referal to the CT blog. - xyberthebizbum & sillybilly

Xyberthebizbum & SillyBilly – Please send me an email with your paypal account information!

2. Top Quality Commentor – Andrew Wee, Themelib & Skywatcher

This was a complete spam war.  For the last 2 hours of the contest I was hitting the refresh button in the admin panel and having to delete several turd comments like “great post!”.  In the end the server said it was 12am when it was really 11pm for me.  So I went in and fixed the server time.  Andrew was about 20 behind but when the server hit 12 ThemeLib and Skywatcher stopped commenting but Andrew kept trucking along.  SO in order to compensate the other two guys for the error on the part of the server I am going to be shooting them over $50 a piece as well.  So if the three of you guys can send me over your paypal information that will be great.  :) Thanks for your comments LOL

3. Top Forum Participator - jeremy217

This was hard.  There really wasn’t any forum participation.  However, for just a couple of days Jeremy217 went in and posted about 21 answers to peoples questions.  Not just bogus answers but real answers from real experiences. That was a one man competition :D

Send me your paypal information Jeremy

4. Best Blog Post – Keep reading below :P

This was a hard one to decide.  Here where the entries

1. xyberthebizbum – http://www.oolahmoolah.com/2008/11/how-cashtacticsnet-can-make-you-filthy.html
2. SkyWatcher – http://dewdrop-sem.blogspot.com/2008/11/one-affiliate-marketing-blog-to-be-on.html
3. ThemeLib – http://themelib.com/contests/2008/11/30/cashtactics-review/

Thanks for playing guys!  All screen shots were made and I’ll post tomorrow with the official winners.  Right now I’m off to bed.  I have to get up early and drive to San Antonio.  So keep an eye out tomorrow night.

Great job guys!