I love a little competition. This is going to be a two part contest. The first part of the contest will help you get to know your affiliate manager and Market Leverage a little better. The second part will involve some 1-on-1 time with your Market Leverage affiliate manager and some offers that they have available. This contest is to help you break the ice and get involved with an affiliate network.

One of my favorite networks is Market Leverage. I don’t just like them for the offers they run, but for my affiliate manager Kyle.

Kyle is dedicated to my success. He wants me to succeed in this business. He is always telling me about hot offers available. To top it all off he also likes to hold little competitions with the affiliates that he manages.

PART 1a So, in honor of those Market Leverage affiliate managers that want to help you… The first part of this contest is call up your AM and introduce yourself. Reply to this post and let us know who takes care of you over there. I will be calling to make sure you did this, so please be honest. If you are already on speaking terms with your affiliate manager, give them a call just to see how they are doing… Then reply to this post with their name

Part 1b Market Leverage has their own series of videos that give you CPA offer updates, and industry news. The site to visit for this is MarketLeverageTV.com.  Watch the video under the “Market Leverage TV 06/09/08 Your Source For Affiliate News“. That video will flash the Cash Tactics logo several times. How many times does it appear? Don’t post the answer here. Instead email me at kris@cashtactics.net or use the contact forum. In the email include the name that you use to post here, the email that you use to post here, and your answer.
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Okay sorry about the delay. I’ve been a little busy on the home front. Also, jump back into the free ruck reports as there is a new cleaned up version of the CashTactics URL rotator <—- Or just click that. We will be using and talking about that version from here on out. Thank you Yebot from Yebot.com for getting us a better rotator and iframer.

Before we start using this URL rotator let me explain some things. It is important to test multiple offers. Split testing is VERY important in this business. One bad CPA offer can kill your budget. At the same time one good CPA offer can buy you a car! When I use the iframer I like to test out 3 offers at a time.

The offers are place in the $offerstr. Remember to separate your affiliate urls with a comma ( , ). Also, in order to activate that function you will need to delete the backslashes ( // ). You should find two of them there so make sure you delete both of them next to the $offerstr function. If you have a line counter on your html editor it’s on line 31. Or you can do it the old fashion way and just count down 31 lines.

Make sure that the offers you’re rotating are in the same niche. Don’t run a dating offer with an insurance offer through the rotator. Also, I like to rotate an email/zip submit, and two short forms to begin. This is just for testing purposes.

Okay enough about setting the URLs to rotate. If you have questions post in the members forum.

Now, what I like to do is purchase a domain for the specific niche. For example, if I want to run these bingo offers from Conver2Media I’ll go purchase a domain name like “PlayBingo.com” or “BingoTonight.net”, something bingo related.

Okay, so this CPA Poll monster is pretty much beat to pieces. I have one last thing I want to share with all of you before I move onto other subjects.

Framing an offer is more powerful than giving them a poll. However, there are certain items that work better with a poll than they do with a frame. Zip and Email submits that are “chances to win” something should be kept on a poll. What about those other offers that the CPA companies have that are about insurance, or dating? You can’t really run them off of a poll. They just wont convert that well. But you can drive traffic to them directly. In an indirect way. Let me explain that better…

Now Googles actual policy states this:

“…we monitor and don’t allow the following:

• Redirect URLs: Ads that contain URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
• Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
• Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site.”

You can read Googles full Affiliate URL policy by going into Adwords help and performing a search.

Okay now. I know what Googles policy is. However, by building a Poll we are already violating it. A Poll is a “bridge page. It’s a intermediary page whose sole purpose is to link and redirect traffic to the “parent company”.

All righty… Contest time is upon us. CashTactics will be hosting 2 contests very shortly. The first one will begin June 11 and end June 18th. Winners will be announced June 19th. If you aren’t currently a member of Market Leverage please join them by clicking on the banner, as being a member of ML is required for participation in this contest.

My good friend Debbie with ML has informed me that the gifts to be given away will include:

• Flip video camera
• $200 ML Amex Rewards card
• USB Pen
• iPod Nano

The iPod Nano will also be engraved with Market Leverage and Cashtactics.net

Coverage for this contest will not only be on this site but will also be covered on MarketLeverageTV.com

Check out the contest page often for more updates as the big day approaches!

ALSO, If you would like to be entered in please include a comment to this post.

Ad-Tech Miami kicks off June 3rd and 4th. Our favorite blogger Ruck will be there with the Convert2Media team. If you’re going to be there make sure you find the guys with the C2M shirts on. They will be giving some away to a lucky few, so make sure if you’re going, that you FIND THEM!

So why goto a convention? Because that is where you will find out the latest in industry news, hear about techniques you have never heard of before, and network with some of the best!

There are many speakers at conventions. You’ll learn all sorts of good stuff. Ad-Tech Miami has around 100 different speakers from different niches within the internet marketing world. Some of the more well known companies include “Fox Interactive Media”, “Yahoo”, “MSN”, “Terra”, and more!

Now Ad-Tech Miami is a conference that is more focused on the Hispanic end of marketing. Many of the speakers are from the Hispanic or Spanish division of the companies they represent. Miami was definitely a good choice for a location as Miami is definitely a hub for South America transport.

Take a look at their sponsors for an idea on how “spanish” influenced this conference will be.

Also, don’t forget to jump into your CPA networks and look for offers to run in Spanish speaking countries. Knowing that this conference is “Spanish” oriented definitely lets me know that there is something good to be had from marketing in Central and South America… Oh and don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of North Americans that speak Spanish.

By now, we should all know how to run a poll based on recent news. These polls can be profitable. However, they are unfortunately short lived due to new news popping up everyday. I had someone ask me last night on messenger “Why won’t my poll get any hits?” So I jumped in, looked at the guys landing page, and saw that it was about a news event that happened 8 months ago.

Now, setting up a news poll before the topic becomes main stream, and while the topic is main stream is great! However, once the news item goes to the back shelf you’re out of luck. Clicks will die down, and eventually impressions. You’re more than welcome to keep these polls running… However, I promise you conversions will go down as well. It’s just the nature of the beast.

The best way to set up a poll is to… are you ready… this next bit of info is top notch… COMPARE TWO ITEMS… There are 100s of CPA offers for different items. You can compare brands of shoes, brands of lip gloss, types of candies. You can even compare stores. I know for a fact there is a Target gift card and a Wal-Mart gift card floating around there. Compare Wal-Mart vs. Target. When they vote for their specific brand send them to that offer! Your conversion rate will sky rocket.

“Where would you rather shop?”
“What kind of lip gloss do you like”
“Which Candy is Sweeter?”

When people are taken to the “item” that they vote for then they are naturally going to be inclined to opt-in. How cool would it be to get a chance for some Nike shoes after you just said that they were better than Adidas. Or vice versa…

Often times we talk about creating our own online store. I’ll be honest. I have two drop shipping stores. Now we all know what BANS is I hope. If not, thats okay. BANS stands for Build A Niche Store. The basic concept behind BANS is that you get a full “online store” that pulls its product from eBay.

Now, what if I told you there’s a product out there that allows you to build an online store while pulling product from Commission Junction (cj.com)… The Affiliate Mashup Store does just that. Its a full online store that allows you to have virtually any product from Commission Junction.

Paul Hedger is the UK based programmer that came up with this script. It’s a full on mashup pulling not only from CJ, but you get a feed of eBay products and a page for YouTube videos, all dynamically generated from your keywords or user-submitted search terms.

My favorite part of this script is the “automatic” specials listing. Basically when a Commission Junction vendor has a special running your product will show that there is a special as well. In other words, this really looks like your very own online store.

Check out the FAQ page before you decide to buy Paul’s product. Don’t forget to sign up with his newsletter. He’ll send you a “baby” version of the script that you can install on your server to make sure that everything will work for you.

Now you may be wondering why I’m mentioning a Mashup Script in the middle of all this CPA stuff. Not only am I giving you Mashup people a heads up on a great product that co-insides with Ruck’s Free Affiliate Mashup report, but I’m also giving you a great way to put your new found PPC skills to the test. Build a Mashup store and DRIVE TRAFFIC TO IT WITH PPC.

Now this can be a hard thing to judge. In fact, I don’t really measure my clicks vs conversions as a standard. Instead, I measure my cost spent vs. my cost earned. The key is to set a goal and to stick to it.

When I test a campaign I try and set my goal to 100 clicks. If, in 100 clicks I get no conversions I will try switching out the offer. (Ideally the offer would be rotating from the beginning). Sometimes polls will run that are complete duds from the beginning, and sometimes a poll will struggle to get 100 clicks let alone 100 impressions!

If you’re having a hard time getting impressions, check out your ad-groups. Are they tightly grouped? What about the keywords your using… Are they outdated? Many times when we run those popular “recent news” polls the topic gets blown through really fast, therefore, yesterday we might have had great keywords and today… yeah they can suck. There is always new “hot” news everyday.

Now, if you’re getting the getting the impressions but not the clicks… yeah that’s an ad copy problem. We’ll go over ad copy later.

Okay back to the topic at hand.

If I’m getting clicks and one or two conversions then things are still going good for us. We may meet our goal of 100 clicks, spend around $15, and make about $4, then that is okay. This is something that we can work with.

We need to make sure we are getting people from our page to our offer. The first thing you want to do to check this out is to load the report from your CPA network and see if they show any clicks to the offer. Remember… Not all networks have real time tracking. AND some offers have to be uploaded by the advertiser.