Initially I was going to write about how to *retain* our traffic and get every bit of juice from it with our landing pages but from the emails I received yesterday I though we would go a little bit more in depth on what NOT to choose as an offer when your first starting out. Even though I take a shotgun approaching offers (meaning I’ll try anything to see how it works), I dont suspect your the type of person that wants to lose money off the bat. This unfortunately IS GOING TO HAPPEN. The difference between not wanting to lose money and going in full force knowing you will probably lose money at the beginning is the separation between us. If you want to make serious money, you have to spend serious money. That is of course unless your a *crawler* in which case it may take you longer to accomplish this than most.

Here’s a few ideas on what not to choose as an offer if your new to the game.

#1 - Ringtones or SMS Message offers. The industry is by far from over however over the last year it has got increasingly competitive. Not only are there thousands of marketers in ALL the search engines fighting over the same keywords but a lot of ringtone merchants have now changed up their terms of service which points out the fact that users will pay somewhere around $9.99 a month for the service. In the good ole days people would join up and not find out about the offers details until you had already generated a commission. Deceptive marketing at its best.

One of the biggest factors in succeeding or failing in affiliate marketing comes from the offers you choose to promote. Now your probably asking yourself "how do I know a successful offer when I see one". Well, I wont lie to you. After you have been doing it for a few years you sort of develop a sense for it. With that said their are still all kinds of little hiccups along the way that we could face such as:

• A poor converting landing page
• Merchant just sucks
• The market is just not profitable

As you fail and succeed in promotions you will start to develop almost a 6th sense for good ideas of what is *likely* to be a better offer. Even then this can fail you but hey, "it’s not all peaches and cream". I test at least 25 offers a week and usually come away with 1 that’s good and maybe 2-4 offers that I can *work on*. So there’s work involved but it’s so rewarding when you get one on autopilot.

Your probably asking yourself "can you show me an example"? So for this post let’s do an exercise together and do a walk thru on how we choose an offer and start promoting it.

Warning: The following material I am about to share with you is in a brutally competitive market and the payouts for the offers are quite low. I have gone another route of promotion for this landing page but I can tell you that if you copy this and go to Adwords with it, just be careful. It’s not going to take very long for you to lose money. Within hours I would say. You’ve been warned. Dont come crying to me.

One of the biggest keys to making a huge payday (or month) is gearing up for the holidays. November was actually better for me (PPC wise) than December. I got hammered with other projects in December and paused a lot of campaigns that were running just so I didn’t have to monitor them. As far as gearing up for the holidays, I ran only 1 offer.

Valentine’s day is coming up in a little over a month. That is about when I start gearing up for these paydays. If you want a great example of what can happen when you research, plan and execute properly then I would suggest taking a look at CDF Networks post Breaking The $1,000 Per Hour Barrier. This is a prime example of major preparation before the holidays.

So here’s some tips on how to prepare yourself:

1. Start utilizing Google Hot Trends and Yahoo Buzz and start looking for keywords that will start to climb. Of course right now you may be watching for yet another couple of weeks before you start seeing consistent keywords popping up but this will be a good exercise for you to start monitoring markets and keywords. If you don’t know how to do it properly then starting here is a great way for you to get this method down now so that you can apply it later on to Easter, Mother’s Day, Independence Day and etc.

2. Grab yourself a complimentary copy of Benjamin Maker’s GTrends Made Easy. This is a completely free tool provided by Benjamin (who reads this blog and is a member of my Discussion Forum). The tool is super easy to use and will be a great asset for both search campaigns and optimizing blogs. Yes, this tool will retrieve the pages in Google for every keyword. You could start in just a few minutes gearing up a Valentine’s blog with a ton of keywords that have hardly any competition in the SERP’s.

This is pretty basic and is used often by many spammers bulk emailers. It was actually a godsend back in my heavy Myspace spamming commenting days. The whole idea to most people is simply to redirect their traffic thru their own domains and servers. Most CPA networks actually encourage this. Do you know why? Yea, you guessed…spammola. Now I won’t say that CPA networks DONT want to know where your traffic is coming from because most of the time this is untrue. However, sometimes YOU may not want certain people knowing where your traffic is coming from.

Case in point…

Have you ever seen a CPA Network that has some kind of bullshit sentence like "Affiliates caught promoting on Myspace or Facebook will be banned"? Your probably thinking to yourself that the network just told you NOT to promote on these sites. This in most cases and with a lot of networks is actually FAR from the truth. They are in it to make money people and behind the scenes I can tell you personally that it is sometimes a VERY fugly business. It actually says "if your caught", it does not say to NOT promote there.

So I won’t get into specifics here, nor will I name any specific networks (hell, that may incriminate me), but reading between the lines and knowing how and what to do can actually keep you making money somewhere where you thought your glory days had ended.

Another case in point is with Yahoo Answers. Have you posted a link from a CPA Network and been banned? I know of affiliates that got the hammer from Maxbounty for posting links on Yahoo Answers. Answers explicitly prohibits any commercial traffic in their terms of service and Maxbounty will have none of it. Keep what I am about to tell you in mind, it will save your tail in the long run (or at least allow you to concoct some bullshit to tell your AM).

I went thru my archives and hand picked some posts I thought were pretty good before we head into the New Year. Enjoy!

Back In August I gave some general tips over making money with P2P Networks and Torrents. Torrents are still alive and kicking and I have not really spoken of them since this last post. I really should but the fact of the matter is that this method is very petty and so very easy to do. However, I bet 99% of the people who read this post probably didn’t even try it or quickly gave up on it. Let’s take a look at just one program I promoted with these petty torrent methods.

Here are payments for the last 6 months. For a method so easy I sure seen a lot of bitching from people who said “it’s too much work”.  Here’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to a project for a couple of hours a week no matter how petty, simple and boring it is.

Also in August, I wrote a free report detailing how I go about getting high rankings for articles. I normally do not write my own articles but I do however use the methods described because it seems nobody can get it right even with a guide. I guess that just goes to show that what works for someone, may not necessarily work for another. However, the guide is free and it’s a great read….(IMO). :)

In September I also introduced a way to advertise your blog cheaply utilizing Stumbleupon. I have tested this out a few times and it seems to work well. When I say that, what I really mean is that as cheap as it is, you get back about the same return. However, it’s a great traffic building method and I am sure the right type of blog will make the difference.

Everyone wants on the PPC to CPA train. There is no doubt that driving thousands of people to CPA offers CHEAPLY is a great way to make a TON of money online. However, it’s not as easy as it seems. Trust me on this one, I have experienced nearly every failure a man (women too!) can experience using PPC to drive traffic to CPA offers. However, when I quit screwing around and started putting some actual thought of identifying where my hungry markets were, I started experiencing some success. More importantly, I quit spending my built up bankroll and started experiencing profits. A little profit came in and it was a rollercoaster to where I am at now to get to some serious money. It can be a rough trip but let me throw a few examples of how I have overcome high bid prices and not fighting so much competition.

Last night I was having a conversation with a web designer over IM. However he is not just a web designer. We have been talking a few a nights now and I have come to find out that he’s just a little bit older than me and into almost everything from movies, music and ideas as myself. This was kind of like a blessing as he stayed up till the wee hours each morning with me doing some design when my traffic hours would be at their lowest. I was able to discover that he has experienced some success with the Google Adwords content network. Grinning from ear to ear behind my PC, I decided we would take a break and talk a little in-depth about some of the things I have accomplished on the Content Network. Oh before I forget, you should probably listen to all them dipshits out there that tell you the content network is worthless. :)

Traffic Brokering is a blast. If you have the capital to jump in balls first to test offer after offer it is one of the best feelings when you find a profitable one. As you can see from my last post about making money with ClickRiver, being different and having the will and ability to test new platforms with no regard as to what can happen, I can almost guarantee that you will find gems from time to time. When you do, it’s like getting the best (safe) high that you can get. Knowing that you just tacked on some passive income (at least for awhile) is a great thing :)

However…

Is it just me, or do a lot of people freak out knowing that they have to test Adwords? I get so fidgety and even agitated knowing that I have to test an offer in the shark waters of Adwords. I have ZERO problems taking my offers to Yahoo, MSN, Goclick, ABC Search or other smaller engines, but we all know the meat of traffic is at Adwords therefore it commands our attention to test the offer there. The moment I find an offer in one of my CPA Accounts I immediately begin asking myself

Can this Be Successful?

Will it convert?

Will Google bitch slap my landing page or even worse, my site?

Have I done enough research on this market to determine it WILL be profitable?

It’s just little things like that, that immediately start flowing thru my head. You have to realize when your traffic brokering, the bulk of your offers are most likely to have anywhere from $0.80-$2.00 payouts. I cannot tell you how critical your market research, demand, landing page AND site optimization are to help determine your cost in Adwords. Obviously the idea is to get the LARGEST gap between Cost Per Click and Earnings Per Click. The larger the gap, the better Return on Investment.

ClickRiveris a new PPC service I have been testing out this past week. I haven’t got to test a lot of it, but the very odd thing about ClickRiver is I half-assed a quickly put together campaign and the son of a gun is making money. I kid you not, I literally put this campaign together in less than 10 minutes. From finding an offer, grabbing my affiliate link, coming up with 22 keywords I thought would go with this offer, writing my ad and submitting. Normally if I were on Adwords, Yahoo, or MSN I am very selective with what offers I will try. The wife is yelling at me for the last two days to get off the computer (holidays), so I had to put the hustle on it.

First if your not familiar with Clickriver it is basically a Pay Per Click service (much like Adwords) but the ads are shown on Amazon. Unfortunately for a lot of people they won’t be able to use this service. It only accepts US right now. The service sort of intrigued me as I read about it. I mean seriously, your going to be showing ads on a shopping site? People have cash in hand and are in the buying mood already, so I said let’s do it.

The bad part…Take a look at where the ClickRiver ads are shown:

This really sucks obviously. They are shown at the bottom of the Amazon pages. Of course, Amazon doesn’t want anyone to take their cheese so it’s only logical to do this but we still get ads on there and that was enough for this money shark to jump in balls first.