A while back I made a post about how great it is to have friends who are running the same offers as you. When they run the same offers, you can help push each other up to higher levels.

A lot of people messaged me asking how to make such friends and what methods they should use to start these type of relationships.

Recently I have been finding just how far you can "push" your affiliate manager for information. You really can get a ton of information if you build your relationships up. You don't need to be a super affiliate before they give you a ton of information so dont let that stop you.

The reason I bring these two subjects up is because a lot of times you can ask your affiliate manager what the top publishers are doing in terms of leads for a particular offer. They generally wont tell you any sort of exact numbers but even knowing a general figure is good enough to set a goal.

For example, recently I have been promoting this offer which I get anywhere from 35-40 leads per day. I don't have any friends running this offer so I didn't really know how well I was doing in terms of lead volume and lead potential except I knew I had not worked a TON on the offer.

Payout is around $18 bucks. After talking with my affiliate manager I found out that top publishers are pushing 400+ leads per day from this offer alone. CA-CHING. That's a great sign! Now you know that there is a possibility to hit that level. I've made it my goal to not stop working on this offer until I'm hitting at least 250+ leads per day now. At that sort of volume you should be getting roughly (this is a total estimation) $20 per lead. 250 leads * $20 = $5000 per day. Not too shabby.

Most people would be content with the $600-$700 per day I'm making with that campaign, but that is not the attitude we affiliates should ever get into. I've left this campaign generating the $200-300 profit it's been making me for a couple weeks but I needed that goal in my horizon to really make me want to ramp up my efforts.

I really think that this is one of the most important mindsets to have while working on campaigns. You cant ever be lazy, complacent, or "satisfied" with your current campaigns. I never stop tweaking my campaigns because you never know what small changes could bring in that extra money.

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It looks like Microsoft Adcenter coupons and affiliate program is going away as Feb 29th, 2008.

Therefore, if you have not yet signed up for Microsoft Adcenter, you have just a few more days before you can no longer get the $50 in free clicks.

You can get your free $50 in clicks by clicking this coupon link. They charge a small $5 activation fee but if you look at it in terms of investments, you're spending $5 to make $45 profit. Not bad at all.

After the 29th of February, you will no longer be allowed to use the link to get $50 in credits! Doh!

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I've been asked a few times what web host I use for my affiliate marketing projects. I've been working with web hosting companies since the year 2001. I started out with shared hosting with Web Quarry which was pretty good. Later in 2004, I moved to 2 dedicated servers which were hosted at EV1 Servers. They were ok for a time but eventually were over priced.

I then moved to FDC Servers, Softlayer, Layered Tech, Hivelocity, and a few other companies. I had been with Hivelocity the longest but then I lost a ton of money from server issues that I feel were their fault and I got compensated nothing, both times that it happened. I asked for a months compensation but they wouldn't even give a partial discount. It was hilarious.

I spend over 4k with them and then they were stupid about it so I moved to my current host, LiquidWeb.com. I joined liquidweb because of a recommendation a good friend of mine gave. This friend of mine used to manage a huge amount of Ebay servers and has since retired. When he thinks a place has great support and quality after working for a company like ebay in the position he had, I had no option but to trust him!

So far liquid web has been the best hosting company I have ever been with. I told them about my urgency when ordering my server and literally had it running and ready to go within 3 hours. I was very impressed.

Funny story about liquid web:
When I got back from India, I had a couple mail packages waiting for me. One was from Liquid web.

I opened it to find this (see picture).


They sent me two action figures of their mascot. "Cool," I thought.

My girlfriend was over visiting when I opened this package. She decided that she wanted one of the action figures and says, "I wonder if they stretch?!"

I began to read the letter inclosed and then hear, "RIP... Opps!"

I look over and she had ripped the arm off the guy by accident. Hahahaha. After that, she no longer wanted it.

I recommend them if you're searching for a great host: www.liquidweb.com

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This post is in response to Dezzy who posted on the Ask me a Question Part 2 post.

Content sites vs. Landing pages... that is the question! Which one should you use?

It seems like the answer to this question is a simple, "Yes!"

What you do NOT want to do is create a content site without FIRST knowing that the campaign is profitable. After you know this, all other factors can be tweaked. If you can find a campaign you're making a good amount of money on, why wouldn't you create a content site based on that niche?

So what I do is make a simple landing page to test my campaigns. If it turns out to be a highly profitable campaign or has a high traffic volume potential, I work on creating a site based on content.

The advantage here is that we know that with a landing page we can make money. If the content page does not allow for a profit, you can work on tweaking it to be more "click" driven.

A simple tip that *sometimes* works is putting your "content" below your standard "highly graphical" landing page. This only works if your landing page is a small, mostly graphic based page designed to get your visitor to the affiliate landing page as quick as possible.

For example, most people have seen a ringtone landing page. If you have not seen a highly graphical ringtone landing page, you can view one here.

(I've watermarked this image to prevent people from copying this dude's page. I grabbed a random one from a google search)

With something like this, you could simply add content below what is displayed in the image.

So in short: Test with a landing page, expand with a content site designed to convert!

If you're looking for offers to run, check out my recommended money makers on my about me page.
If you're looking to promote your offers, use pay per click using the following coupons.

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It seems that 10 days in affiliate marketing is quite a lot.

Here are some news highlights that I think are worth mentioning:

First off, I'm sure everybody knows Affiliate Summit West is going on right now. I really wish I could have been there but there is always another conference just right around the corner. You can read about ASW on most of the big blogs. I really have enjoyed reading Zac Johnson's blog with some updates on ASW.

Next, some pretty great news is that Yahoo Search Marketing is now allowing direct linking. Wahoo. That's pretty sweet! For campaigns that I direct link on, you can read my post on "the easiest $200 I ever made direct linking" and "affiliate landing pages."

Lastly, Microsoft is no longer doing an affiliate program for Microsoft Adcenter. What? How lame. This program was a pretty good one but it seems that they have decided to discontinue it for now. Bummer. I wonder why.

It's so good to be home.

I never want to eat chicken curry again! Haha. We had it 2 times a day, every day, while we were in India. I have steaks on the menu three times this week to make up for it. Hahahaha.

I'll upload some pictures of my trip in this post sometime later this week after I catch up with work (and emails).

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Well, I'm back from India! Wahoo!

India was amazing!

I do apologize about the lack of updates while I was gone. I had my posts post-dated but after looking through, it seems I must have forgot to upload all the posts I had done. Doh! Sorry about that. I guess preparing to leave for 12 days made me forget about quite a few things.

Anywho, I will be posting every day again.

To answer your questions about India:
1. It was AWESOME.
2. I only had about 30 minutes of internet time while there. It was insanely hard to do but it was a nice break.
3. We traveled from SFO to Frankfurt to Hyderabad. Total travel time: Aprox. 22 hours. Yea, that sucked.
4. Did I leave my campaigns running? Only some under the close watch of my girlfriend, Maria.

I'll be posting up some more of the answers to the "Ask me a question part 2" post tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.

Thanks again for your patience while I was gone.

For all of you at Affiliate Summit West, I cant wait to hear about how it went!

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Many of you asked in the Ask a Question post if I use a landing page for every campaign or if I use direct linking. AND if I use direct linking, when and where do I use it.

This is possibly the most asked question I get.

For those who do not know, Direct linking is when you advertise in a pay per click search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Adcenter and in the "destination url" you put an affiliate link.
For example: Say you're advertising Shoes.com. You make an ad on google for the keyword "buy shoes" and your display URL would be: shoes.com and your destination URL would be: shoes.com/?affiliate=jonathan.

Let me answer this flat out. Yes, I use landing pages. I direct link, at most, 1% of the time.

I actually wrote a post about this a while back which I think answers the question pretty well.

You can check it out: Easiest $200 bucks I've ever made Direct linking

I use landing pages for a couple reasons.

1. It converts way better MOST of the time.
2. While direct linking, if anyone else tries to direct link the campaign, you're screwed. Google Only allows 1 Ad to Display per domain. Now you're having to fight for your traffic.
3. It gives you more control over conversions and tracking.
4. Etc, etc.

The list goes on.

Eventually I'll post a bit more about affiliate landing pages and hope I can shed some light on that.

~Jonathan Volk

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Scott asked a great question:

Hello,

I saw some of your posts on Digitalforums and want to let you know how much I have appreciated your insights.

I have a critically important question and am hoping you can perhaps give some advice and share your thoughts.

The question is related to becoming an affiliate for someone else’s product(s.)

One of the main problems I see with becoming an affiliate is this: you can build a list and learn valuable skills while making a small amount of money selling someone else’s product / service. However, they make all of the money on the backend after you drive a customer into their marketing funnel. In most cases, the backend is where 99% of the profit is. I saw one study where the marketer made approx. $1k on the front-end info product and approx. 200K dripping on his customer list using offline methods (all of which were brought into his marketing funnel through the front-end product which was sold exclusively through affiliates.)

So my question is this: how can one be an affiliate for someone else and still get a percentage of the backend? Or is that lost forever? I realize that you can build a list and perhaps even offer some “exclusive” bonus to them related to the high-end products…

That said, is there a way (outside of emailing your own list directly with the higher ticket offer) to become an affiliate and make a percentage on future backend products sold directly by the company you initially referred the customer to?

I do realize that another alternative would be to only sell higher priced products and forget about the smaller front-end product.. but it seems that this strategy may prove difficult as it appears as if it would be difficult to sell a higher end product without building a long term relationship (via a list or otherwise) first. Also, if they are marketing the bigger products offline I cannot figure out how to make sure I am getting paid as there are no controls in place? Is this accurate?

Anyway, I realize that this is a bit long winded but any thoughts appreciated. My goal is 10K Net per month so I feel that I will need to earn a nice percentage on relatively high ticket items to reach this level.

Thanks in advance for your time. It is sincerely appreciated.

Scott

Scott, you have some great points! As affiliates, 99% of the time, we don't make back end sales! Let's take a look at some of our options which I have used.

The most obvious and commonly used option would be to use an email capture system like Aweber. Personally I have used this to capture thousands of emails on my landing pages.

This way, you can build up a huge list of what would have been 1 time sales into a stream of reoccurring income. But I'll be honest with you on this one. I'm not the best at this method just yet. It takes a lot of skill and effort to make this method work.

Another way for you to capture backend sales is by setting up a special deal with the advertiser. Some affiliates (some hosting companies for example) will give you a nice slice of whatever business comes from that affiliate. Sweet!

The benefits of affiliate marketing

Not being able to have backend sales does seem like a pretty big problem but let's think about this.

As an affiliate, I am able to send thousands of dollars worth of customers each day. Do I ever get calls from them complaining about customer service? Do I ever get a support email (besides from this blog lol)? Nope.

The benefit to me is that I never have to deal with the customer. I stick to what I am good at, getting sales and eventually am branching out to service industries.

I do realize that another alternative would be to only sell higher priced products and forget about the smaller front-end product.. but it seems that this strategy may prove difficult as it appears as if it would be difficult to sell a higher end product without building a long term relationship (via a list or otherwise) first. Also, if they are marketing the bigger products offline I cannot figure out how to make sure I am getting paid as there are no controls in place? Is this accurate?

You'd be surprised how easy it can be to sell a high priced item to the right audience.

If someone searches "buy Kenmore refrigerator," chances are, they're ready and willing customers. The same goes with other products. If you find the right audience, you can sell anything.

Hope that helps!

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Patrick asked a great question:

How do you scale a campaign? If you are spending $.30 per click on Google and you get 20 clicks per day, how do you get 100 clicks for $0.30? Do you have to pay more per click to get the 100 clicks? If you have to pay more, doesn’t that eat into your profits.

There are many factors but I personally find that the main factor is going to be your Click through rate of the ad.

Your CTR plays a HUGE role in deciding where to put your Ad. Having a huge CTR can be achieved by 1 thing. Testing, testing, testing.

I change ads EVERY DAY. 7 days a week. It takes no more than 20 minutes to simply delete lower converting ads and remake one based on the higher performing ad. Doing so can take a losing campaign and make it a winner.

Hope that helps!

~Jonathan Volk

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A lot of people asked me about my profit margins. More specifically what my profit was when I hit my $3,000 day.

Generally my profit margins run slightly under 50%.

I'm very aggressive with how I bid. I like to push the limits to see what my traffic volumes can get. If I can take a lesser profit margin but in the end make more money due to volume, I'll do it. (Duh)

Again, affiliate marketing is all about testing. Find what is best. Sure I can make 1000% returns (And I have) but my sales were around $102 for spending $10. That's no way to make money. Fast forward to now, I spent maybe $200 to make $400+ with that campaign. So, yea I made less profit margin, but I'd much rather have $200 bucks than $92 bucks.

A lot of my money campaigns run at about 33-50% profit. I find this number to be pretty consistent with most high hitting campaigns unless you've found a really hot converter.

Hope that helps!

~Jonathan Volk

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