A little under two weeks ago I launched my free affiliate marketing guide. In my eyes, it has been a huge hit and has helped thousands of people learn how affiliate marketing works.

When I launched the guide, I offered a referral competition where the top 2 referrals would get a free Apple iPad. In addition to that, one randomized winner would be picked where one referral is equal to one entry into the drawing.

Win a 27 Inch Apple iMac

Now before I go into listing the top 10, I want to say that John Chow is absolutely owning this referral competition. Like, over double the next guy... Shoemoney, you know, the famous internet marketer. Therefore, I wanted to see if anyone could take John off his throne...

In the next 7 days, if anyone can beat John Chow and become first place, I'll buy you a 27 inch Apple iMac and still give you the iPad at the end of the competition. In addition to that, I'll give you 2 months of advertising on my blog for free. (Over $2000 value)

If nobody ends up beating John Chow, I'll give the person who generated the most leads in the 7 days a $500 apple gift card as well as John Chow a $500 Apple gift card.

This is your time to shine since many of these big guys have already sent out the email / blog posts, you have a chance to at least take the top spot.

Here are the top 10 contenders for the top 2 (iPad) spots:

1. John Chow - John is absolutely owning everyone. He has over double Shoemoney's referrals (Sorry Jeremy) with almost 1900 referrals. That is epic.
2. Shoemoney - Although John has more than double Jeremy's referrals, Jeremy still is in second place. I never took him for one to settle for second place though. I gotta thank Jeremy for all the AWESOME information and ideas he has given me during this guide launch. In fact, this contest was his idea...
3. Jay Stockwell - Jay revolutionized the way I think about pay per click campaign so it's no surprise that he is in the top. With another email, he could probably catch up to Shoemoney and take him over.
4. Heri - Heri owns a clickbank product and just dropped a quick simple email and became the 4th place contender for the prize.
5. Daniel - Daniel is a friend of mine that runs the popular blog about blogging dailyblogtips. Just a few referrals away from being 4th place!
6. Ian Fernando - You know this guy is big time when he can contend with the big lists. Ian is 6th place and every person above him has a list of at least 40k. That shows some true conversions right there...
7. Zac Johnson - Zac made a great post about the guide and it resulted in some great numbers, just below Ian. You gonna let Ian push you around?
8. AffPortal - Corey redefined how PPV campaigns were made with his Epic toolset and partnership with PPV Playbook Coaching Forums. Great job! You are right on Zac Johnson's trail.
9. Shawn Collins - Shawn runs the best conference for affiliates, affiliate summit, so it's no surprise that he could make it into the top 10.
10. Gabriel - Gabriel runs a weekly web resource for programmers and designers at bitrepository. Nice job! Just goes to show that everyone is interested in learning affiliate marketing, not just those who have a make money online list...

Tools / Recommendations

To get your referral link, you need to access my free affiliate marketing guide. Once on the guide page, you can see your referral link.

Twitter:
I spent a ton of money on sponsoredtweets promoting this guide. Some of the best tweets were the following:

Check this out - Affiliate marketing guide for PPC, PPV, media-buying, & social media. (link)

If you haven't checked out Jonathan Volk's free affiliate newbie guide you are missing out! Good stuff! (link)

I recommend you try at least one of these tweets. They have some pretty good CTRs.

FREE PPV Q&A Webinar With Corey (afftools) and David (PPVPlaybook)
I will be hosting a Q&A webinar with Corey and David next week. It's 100% free and you can only access it if you have signed up for the free guide. Exact date will be announced today or tomorrow.

You can use this as another incentive to download the guide.

Thanks

To everyone who has promoted the guide, I would like to say a huge thank you! I cannot thank you all enough for the huge support you have given me.

Thanks again!

Yesterday I posted a huge (free) contest sponsored by AzoogleAds. If you have not heard of the contest, I recommend you subscribe to my RSS so you can be the first to hear about these contests!

A BIG HUGE CONGRATS to the winners:

• Michael Chiasson
• James Seligman

Many people continue to complain about the competitions and contests being geared towards those who have big email lists, etc.

This contest was completely fair - anyone could win it.

I have another contest coming up that is geared towards the "little" guy too so be sure to watch my blog or your email for that!

Thanks again AzoogleAds!

When I let AzoogleAds know about my affiliate marketing guide, being the epic affiliate network that they are, decided to hook up the readers of the guide and give two lucky winners a very special prize.

If you have not heard about the AzoogleAds LA weekend trip / Playboy mansion party, it is an amazing event. Azoogleads takes the top 40 (incremental) publishers to an all expenses paid weekend with the final day being a huge party at the playboy mansion.

I personally went last year to spend the weekend with Azoogleads (but didn't go to the mansion). It was amazing being able to spend time with some of the smartest minds in the industry. Besides just having fun, I really learned a ton and gained a bunch of great friendships.

Now, not everyone can be a top 40 publisher for a huge network like Azoogleads, but this is where this prize comes into play.

In order to win it, all you need to have done is read my entire affiliate marketing guide and be one of the first to get 100% right on the quiz.

So without further ado, take the quiz now.

Good luck and I hope to see you there!

EDIT: No winner officially announced yet - remember you need 100% right to win so you might still have a chance! (I don't have access to see if there is a winner or not)

In my free affiliate marketing guide, I touch on knowing your demographics and the importance of it.

In pretty much every method (PPC, PPV, Media buying, and Social Media) that is taught in the guide, it's important for you to know your demographics.

The other day, I was reading through some posts and saw a really good post on Clickbooth's blog about women ages 35-55. This blog post is a good way to begin some research on knowing that particular demographic.

Check out the article. Good stuff.

Also, you should notice that my puppy Oliver, is the fan of the week. Clickbooth sent me a snuggie for Christmas (with their logo on it) and my dog took it over! He loves that blanket so I took a picture and tweeted it. Hehe. Pretty cute.

Ok, so the affiliate marketing guide is officially launched!!!

For those of you who have already signed up, you will be getting an email shortly with a link to the guide.

A couple things I didn't mention but add to the reasons why you will want to get the guide:

• Referral contest: I am running a referral contest. Anyone can participate. When you sign up for the guide, you will receive your own special referral link for the guide. The top 2 referrers will receive an Apple iPad (32gb WiFi and 16Gb WiFi respectively). I will also be doing a randomized drawing and each person you refer counts as one entry into the randomized drawing. The winner of the randomized drawing will also win an Apple iPad!
• Special Contest: While I can't say WHAT exactly yet. Trust me you'll want to know about this special contest. Let's just say it includes a prize sponsored by one of my personal favorite affiliate networks.
• Free Webinars: A couple of the amazing friends of mine who are experts in their field have graciously agreed to do Q&A Webinars on some of the marketing methods described in this guide. The first webinar scheduled is for a free PPV webinar. More details to come.

Let me know how you enjoy the guide!

Thanks!

Monday, February 22nd, I will be launching my FREE affiliate marketing guide!

In this guide, I go over the techniques that I have used to generate over $4 million dollars in affiliate marketing commissions including PPC, PPV, Media Buying and Social Media Affiliate marketing!

I have been working extremely hard on this guide and I believe that it will be of great benefit for both newbies and more experienced affiliate alike... I mean, even if you get just one good nugget, it was worth it right? Well, I plan on many of you getting more than one nugget.

So what are you waiting for? Go to my affiliate marketing guide page, enter your name and email and on the 22nd, you will be emailed the guide!

To your affiliate marketing success!

Ok, so it's officially tax season and... let's just say tax season is when certain affiliates make MAJOR bank in just a few weeks time. We're talking multi-million dollar type of sales numbers...

I got some info from some inside sources that THIS weekend is going to be one of the largest tax "waves" so to speak. All people looking to get their refund. After this weekend the traffic slowly goes down until the next wave.

So if it were me, I'd make time today to submit those ads and get ready for what could quite possibly be one of the largest days in your affiliate career.

That next wave is people who are usually business owners and put it off until the week or so before April 14th.

So there is some great information for you to use to target your Tax campaigns.

Demographics:
To start off, I'd probably target females. Looking at quantcast, there seems to be a slight favor towards females to the tune of about 58% of total site visitors.

I'd also recommend targeting ages 23+ and going from there. You want working professionals and that's probably the best age to start around. I'd go from there up to around age 35... and if you want to target even more up to age 50.

So, if you're looking for a tax campaign, DirectAgents is putting on an awesome contest for those who decide to participate in the tax season craze.

Enter the 24 Hour Tax and Direct Agents High Tech Takeover contest running now through April 15th! First prize winner wins an Apple iPad!

Here’s how it works:

• Sign up for a Direct Agent account if you don’t already have one
• Run the 24 Hour campaign on the Direct Agents Performance Network- Short Form Conversion!
• The affiliate who generates the most leads by April 15th wins!

Prizes:

• 1st Prize- Apple iPad, 64 GB/3G- The most anticipated tablet! Minimum of 750 leads
• 2nd Prize- Flip Mino HD, 120 minutes, 2nd generation- The power of HD video in your pocket! Minimum of 500 leads
• 3rd Prize- iPod Nano, 16GB, 5th generation- The newest model with built in video! Minimum of 350 leads

Now go make some cash!

Nickycakes (also known as affiliate of the year), just launched a service called LP Lockdown. This service is WAY overdue and needed for this industry.

In a nutshell, this service helps you: Cloak your page from other affiliate, cloak on facebook, cloak via geographical location, get SMS (or email) updates if your page / offer is down, and theft monitoring (and allows you to redirect their page back to yours).

Wow - That's a lot of stuff. Let me explain each one.

LP Lockdown Cloaking

Block Your Page from Being Seen by Other Affiliates
This is my favorite part of the service.

Ever had your landing page scouted out by other affiliates? I hate that and I'm sure you do too. This script uses a database of 150,000+ known affiliate IP addresses and redirects the person if they have that IP address. You can be really sneaky with this and redirect the affiliate directly to an offer, making them think you are direct linking. Or... if you want to be just plain mean, send them to... well you can get creative there. Thus, your landing page is SAFE for the most part.

Block Your Page from Being Seen by Facebook
Beyond just cloaking other affiliates, you have the the option to cloak known facebook IP addresses.

The way this is most commonly used is to get landing pages that normally would not be approved by facebook, into the system by cloaking them to a page that would be allowed.

I don't cloak my facebook accounts because I don't want to risk getting banned, but some people do it and make a ton of money doing it. This script makes it even easier.

Block Your Page by GEO Location
This is another really great part of the LP Lockdown service. You can block entire states or countries based upon IP address!

This is where you can get pretty creative in how you use the script.

Uptime Monitoring LP Lockdown

Uptime monitoring is a much needed service in the affiliate marketing world. LP Lockdown makes it simple enough to get SMS updates as soon as your page goes down. Nothing new here, but a nice feature to have integrated in for sure.

Theft Monitoring / Protection LP Lockdown

Has your landing page ever been ripped off? It sucks. It's happened to me a few times and I know it does not feel good.

This script allows you to monitor if someone has ripped your site and uploaded to their server instantly via SMS Message.

After you get the SMS message, you can actually REDIRECT people back from the stolen page to your landing page effectively taking back the traffic. That is... until the person realizes that all their traffic is being stolen back.

Cost

LP Lockdown costs around $49 bucks per month... and for everything it does, it's well worth the money.

Sign up For LP Lockdown

I've had the privilege of being allowed into LP Lockdown, but unfortunately not everyone will be allowed in. It's an invite only system.

Now, if you're wanting to buy LP Lockdown, contact me, and I will send you an invite. If you don't buy within 24 hours after getting the invite, you've lost your chance forever.

I ONLY have 10 invites, so the first come, first serve...

If you're unsure if you want to buy or not, click here, to be added to the waiting list.

It was about a month or two ago I was watching an episode of Million Dollar Listing. If you have not seen the show, it's about three young real estate agents / brokers that sell multi million dollar homes in and around LA, California.

Anyways, while watching one episode, one of the wealthy guys looking to purchase a few homes said something that is true. "Buy when people fear, sell when people are greedy."

Now, I am not sure but I think he was actually quoting Warren Buffet on this. It makes sense... in the housing markets especially.

This principal I think can also be applied to affiliate marketing. There are certain traffic sources that affiliates are leaving in masses (Google for example) primarily due to fear of banning, learning curves, etc.

At the same time there are certain areas that affiliates are getting greedy (Shady rebills for example). Recently a bunch of these offers went down and rebill offers are getting increasingly harder to make work. Certain affiliate who knew nothing but how to promote a rebill soon had nothing left but to try and figure something else out.

It's in times like this that I like to look at those "feared" places and figure out how to make them work. Right now while people focus on PPV, media buying, and social traffic, I plan to look further into the area that people seem to be leaving.

Anyways... just a thought.

Yesterday I wrote about this idea where a service would text you if your Affiliate Marketing offer got redirected, capped, pulled, etc.

The response I got was pretty impressive. In fact, I was pretty excited to hear that this service indeed does exist already!!! Whoop whoop! (Sorry if you started making this type of service - hey there is always room for improvement).

Today I was contacted by Matthew from Observe Point and told me about their service. Better yet, he offered me and all of my readers a special deal! But before I get into that... check out this email he sent me.

We’ve worked in the affiliate industry for many years and are all too familiar with the problems affiliates face every day. Driving traffic to down pages, broken redirects, disappearing tracking pixels. And now traffic caps. They’re not just annoying problems, they are a source of lost income. With no good solutions for the affiliate, we started ObservePoint.

We offer two types of monitoring: standard one-page monitoring and transaction monitoring. One-page monitoring can monitor any aspect of a page: server response, header load, page load, and pixels; tracks the load times for each item and trends them over time. We’ve helped lots of networks get money back in downtime situations because we were able to show the duration of the downtime.

Transaction Monitoring is a beta product that can meet the more advanced needs of affiliates, like cap monitoring. Using our Firefox plugin, you would “record” a two-step process where the first step starts at the landing page, and then continues to the advertiser’s page (the page that has a cap.) On that page, we choose to monitor a few unique objects to “mark” the page. Our back-end servers would then simulate the processes on a continual basis 24x7. When the page changes, an alert would be triggered and sent out via text, sms, or email.

Setting it up sounds simple because it really is – literally start firefox, open the sidebar and click through the process like a normal user. Click save, and ObservePoint does the rest.

We are currently in the process of making some major improvements to our website, plugin and product, and pricing structure, and even then we already have several large clients in the affiliate space using our monitoring to keep track of their offers.

We offer a free 7-day trial, and our pricing model is super-affordable — especially when you consider the potential loss. I’ve included a screen shot that shows a high-level view of the status of offers in a client’s account. This chart would be the main go-to place to find out which offers are operating and which aren’t, for whatever reason according to the offer.

Special Offer

So... They have a 7 day free trial offer but, he said that anyone who enters "VOLK" in the "How You Hear About Us" field get's an extended free trial (14 days). [Thanks Matt!]

So go here and check it out.

It's totally worth having in your affiliate business!