Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

That’s right… Effective June 4th Google will no longer be protecting trademark terms. That means you can now bid on your favorite music artists, celebrities, and brands. This is HUGE if you run polls or even competing company offers. Here are my three favorite picks from the list of over 150 countries that Google will no longer investigate.

• United States (US)
• United Kingdom (UK)
• Canada

BAM That’s money right there. Unfortunately my #1 country isn’t on the list.

Click here to see Googles official list!

Click here for the article in Search Engine Journal!

Get those campaigns ready. It’s going to be a dirty fight to take over some of those trademarked terms!

You will need to remember to look at the original TOS for the offers that you are running.  Some offers make their own rules and you will still need to follow their rules on bidding on trademarked terms.

CashTactics is proud to hold a drawing on behalf of Direct Agents for not 1 but 2 FREE Affiliate Summit West Silver Passes to the conference event taking place on January 11-13, 2009. If I was to talk about one of the biggest turning points in my business, the first thing I would think of is the contacts I’ve made and the networking I’ve done. Making friends within the industry you are trying to build a business within is a very vital aspect in becoming successful and you should start immediately, it will put you way ahead of the learning curve! If you would like the exciting chance to win one of the FREE passes, please read ALL the details that are written below.

First, let me briefly talk about the company that is providing the 2 Free ASW passes. To be completely honest with you, I’ve never personally used them, at least yet. Their name is Direct Agents, they have been in operation for over 5 strong years and are continuing to grow rapidly. Just this year they doubled their office and client base, which says a lot! What I’ve noticed about Direct Agents, are the many exclusive offers they carry and each person I’ve talked to whether on the phone or through the internet has had an amazing attitude and focus heavily on one on one interaction with publishers, that’s a HUGE help especially for new affiliates. The biggest thing that has impressed me with them has been their selfless generosity, they didn’t ask me to write this, I actually offered because a company with characteristics like this is who you want to work with. Just an insider tip, some of their hottest offers right now is DirecTV, Fandango and USO. Each of these offers are goldmines!

1. Affiliate Networks:

Convert2Media

Market Leverage

Hydra

2 & 3. Competition Research and Offer Selection:

Google Trends

Google Keywords Tool

Associated Content

Ezinearticles

If you have more questions about this video and the topics covered, please sign up to the forum and post a question in the ‘Case Studies’ area in the appropriate section – Visit Forum Here

Our sole purpose is to help each of you understand how to build a profitable PPC or other method of an internet business. It takes alot of our time and efforts to publish any content on this blog. I read a comment in one of my earlier posts, where someone suggested that I start a blog of my own. To be honest, I’m not sure if I want to. It’s not an easy thing to keep up and there is very little monetary return. It is proven that my business will grow faster and better by not blogging at all. Then why am I blogging on CashTactics? Because, blogs where my main source of information at one point in time. So I want to give back and do what I can to help. If you plan to join any networks or products that we recommend, we would greatly appreciate it if you joined through us. It helps us cover the expenses of the blog and forum, which isn’t cheap.

We do plan to produce more case studies and perhaps on a regular basis. By the way, if you want to kick start your marketing budget, sign up for the CashTactics RSS feed, you’ll be in for a big suprise! Don’t wait too late.

The Motive Network is yet another affiliate network on the line.  Now I know you have all see a bunch of affiliate networks out there.  So what is so different about Motive? It’s the interface!

As I’ve mentioned before I have signed up with a lot of CPA networks.  They are like a drug to me.  But Motive has definitely stood out to me as a cut above.  The reason for this?  Their killer interface.  I must say, this is some serious interactive stuff.  I’m going to attach a YouTube vid at the end of this post of their new Advent 2.0 interface so you can see how nice the interaction is once inside.

Motive Interactive was started up in 2003 by Brendan Smith.  Currently they are located in San Diego, CA. Brendan started out working for NetCreations which is an opt-in email marketing company.  They work with large corporations such as MSNBC and CNET. Brendan is also a founding member of The Online Lead Generation Association (OLGA).

Advent 2.0 is pretty advanced for an affiliate platform.  My favorite feature would have to be the simple fact that I can log in and look at a huge graph right in my face that tells me how well I am doing.  The graph they got is from Maani, but it definitely integrates well with the site. Also, once inside you have the option of adding several offers to a quick view.  That means that once your in right under the graph is a list of offers that you are currently promoting and their live stats.  If all affiliate networks integrated this quick view I would be much happier.

There has already been a post in regards to choosing your CPA offers. However, I have had several requests to start from the beginning and break everything down a little further.

The most common types off offers you will see are as follows:

• Zip/email submits (One field)
• Short forms (3-4 fields)
• Long forms (More than 4 fields)
• 2 page (2 pages of fields)
• Sales based (Surf the site, make a purchase)
• etc, etc

If you’re starting out and your trying to run a sales based offer, I promise you will be discouraged with PPC-CPA. We often hear about Polls and creating polls for CPA offers. Great! Do it! But don’t run a sales based offer on your backend. A beginner’s key to converting an offer is to allow for the least amount of clicks possible. That means we want to start with zip submits or email submits.

Method 1

Well great… Out of the hundreds of possible offers which should I choose? That depends on you. When your starting out pick an offer that appeals to you. Don’t try and pick an offer that would appeal to a crowd that you don’t know and understand yet.

If you pick something that you know and understand then you have knocked your research down quite a bit. If you’re a fan of fishing choose a fishing offer. If you like video games choose a gaming offer. I promise you, if you start with something you are familiar with you’re way ahead of the game.

Method 2

A word first to readers, forum members and future publishers that Convert2Media CPA Network has officially launched. The Press Release is soon to come where you will be able to read the entire Official Release Package. For now, the network is live and the C2M team is thrilled. It has been quite a trip for us over the last couple of months. The thing about Convert2Media is that it’s ran by a succesful group of like-minded marketers who are experienced in Retail Affiliate Marketing, Lead Generation, Email And Pay Per Click. On top of that we bring a team of dedicated Managers who’s main focus is to build long-term, prosperous relationships between advertisers and affiliates.

A few things that Convert2Media is striving for is Advertiser and Affiliate transparency as well as dedicated managers devoted to tracking and payouts. As marketers we realize one of the most common problems is the lack of communication and straight answers coming from Affiliate Managers about offers, terms and payouts. With our dedicated team, we hope to set a new standard on advertising transparency on both sides of the “fence”.

There will be more to come in the following days, but if you are interested in becoming a publisher for Convert2Media you may feel free to signup and a manager will be in contact with you.

This is important. This is vital. Not taking this seriously is the exact same reason why people may gripe about the time it takes getting accepted to programs or not getting accepted at all. Time is money in this business. Treat network applications as if you were applying for another job. Does half-assing your resume increase your chances of banging out that new office with a view? No it dont. The same applies online. Take your business seriously so others will as well.

Personally being a Co-Network owner and not even launching live to public publishers I have deleted over 400 fraudulent applications in the last 24 hours. That’s just one day on a network that is nothing yet. I wonder how people like Market Leverage and Hydra feel? I can only imagine.

The theory that networks only glance at your applications is partly correct. How would you feel looking over 410 applications only to find out that 400 of them were not legitimate? That cuts your production time down and does not allow you to focus more time, energy and dedication to the people who are legitimate.

Here are some tips on getting accepted to Affiliate Networks:

1. Dont have a website, build one. It’s an instant red flag. Another red flag is if you dont have a website then using something like Google or Yahoo will get you denied pretty quick. Fact of the matter is that silly things like that are seen hundreds of times daily. Your best bet is to ALWAYS utilize the comment box located in applications. You better be telling why you dont have a site and what your intentions are.