Today marks the third week that my free affiliate marketing guide has been available to the public. In that short period of time, it has been downloaded over 10,000 times!

I am extremely pleased with the launch of this free guide. I have received a ton of emails, PMs, IMs, etc of people who have learned a lot from the guide.

If you're new to making money online, I highly recommend you download it and check it out! I know you will be pleased with the free content (Money back guarantee for life.... haha).

On top of that, the PPV webinar that we held last Wednesday has been downloaded over 1000 times! (Now you can see why I hosted it on a free file host... ~100-150 gb of transfer). You can find this on the affiliate marketing guide page under Webinars.

If you have not yet downloaded my free guide, you're missing out.

A lot of people have been asking me about how I am doing the referral script for the free affiliate marketing guide that I launched just a few days ago.

First, if you have not heard about this referral contest, go sign up for the free affiliate marketing guide and then you'll see details there. Essentially the top two referrers get an Apple iPad as well as a randomized winner will receive an iPad.

Quick plug: There is going to be another contest that is related to this guide that has a prize worth THOUSANDS of dollars and is pretty crazy awesome. Sponsored by my favorite affiliate network... But that's all I can right now.

Anyways...

It's a custom script but really easy to setup so I decided to show you how you can do this type of thing as well.

Before I do, I want to be clear that the idea was not even mine. Jeremy "Shoemoney" called me the day before my affiliate marketing guide launched and walked me through different ideas on how to make the launch even better including the referral contest idea. Thanks a lot Jeremy!

The way that I am doing this referral script is using aweber. I use aweber to capture emails.

Aweber allows you to have custom variables, so I setup a custom variable called ref. You have to setup the variable in aweber's system before you do this or it wont work.

Then what I did is setup my email capture page to automatically get any variable from the url and put it into the awber form as the variable ref. Here is the code you put into your aweber form between the form tags.

Note: You need to use the raw html version instead of the Javascript version of the aweber form.

Get this code here.

After you have placed that, anyone who goes to Yoursignuppage.php?ref={putwhateverhere} will automatically have the {putwhateverhere} put into the custom variable area and sent to aweber.

Then to track, you can download your lead report via Aweber and instantly see who who has referred who in the ref column.

So there you have it. Simple enough right?

This is a guest post by Joe, the maker of WP Smart Tools, a great product used for converting WordPress into a powerful and impressive landing page toolkit.

But you knew all that.

Out of the box WordPress is missing many of the conversion-rate boosting tricks that successful affiliate marketers use to create highly converting landing pages. Simple things like exit popups, dynamic dates, etc. - WordPress wasn't designed for affiliate marketers.

WP Smart Tools adds the complete affiliate marketing toolkit to WordPress. With WP Smart Tools you can do things in WordPress like "fake dates," where a link or other block of text shows some sort of "relative" date. This is one of the best tricks used by affiliate marketers to increase their conversion rate on any type of landing page: telling users that a given offer expires in "+1 days" puts pressure on them to act now. You can add "geotargeted content", where content is only shown to people from a given area, or sentence says something like "Hi, I'm from [your city]." You can add exit popups to your site. You can mask your links. All of these things come together and create a simple, easy to use toolkit that streamlines your entire affiliate marketing business within the single platform: WordPress; and this is just a sampling of the features.

Artificial dates. This feature of WP Smart Tools allows you to use a shortcode like [smartdate pattern="+2 weeks"] anywhere within your content, and it will be replaced with the date of 2 weeks in the future. You can control the formatting of this date, the pattern (2 weeks in the future, the first Monday in September of this year, literally anything you want!). This is often used for keeping content looking fresh long in to the future, or for putting pressure on users to act quickly.

Geotargeted locations. Geotargeting has two primary uses within WP Smart Tools: you can enter something like "Hi, I'm Ashley and I'm from [smartlocation level='City']." and it will be replaced with the city the current user is from (or you could do country, province/state, whatever). The other use is to show offers only to certain people (if, for example, the affiliate offer you're looking at using is only available in certain regions). Using [ifsmartlocation country='Canada']This text only shows to people in Canada[/ifsmartlocation] you can easily create "intelligent" sections of your site.

Cloaked links. Professional looking links like www.yoursite.com/ResV are easy to make with WP Link Engine Basic, a part of WP Smart Tools. Link Engine lets you rotate links (so that /ResV link could try out 10 different offers), geotarget links (so that when a user from Canada clicks your ResV link they go to a Canadian offer, and when a user from the U.S. or somewhere else clicks it they go to a different offer), and much more. This is an essential part of your toolkit for sure.

Exit popups. "How about adding a popup to people leaving my product page offering a 25% discount. I mean, if they're leaving my product page, they were at least interested enough to look: how about we sweeten the pot a little? Yeah, took all of 5 minutes to get it rigged, [and I got] 3 25% off sales in the next 36 hours. That's three sales that were leaving my site that this plugin saved in 36 hours." Money that would be lost, is no longer lost. Exit popups are that simple. Use them. Make money with them.

Protect yourself from landing page theft. Everyone is doing it. Stealing landing pages. Affiliate marketers are immoral people or something. I don't know why, but it is incredibly common for affiliate marketers to just save landing pages that appear to be successful, bid on the same keywords (increasing your cost) and eventually, make the market you've found unprofitable. WP Smart Tools protects your landing pages from theft - actually - it does better than that: it lets your landing pages be stolen. How could that be better? Stolen landing pages protected by WP Smart Tools will have the affiliate links point to whatever site you wish, even when the thief replaces them with his own. This is done with a little Javascript trick that foils the majority of thieves and gets you free traffic from the thief's efforts. Awesome.

"Funny too with the theft protection; someone ripped off a landing page on one of my sites [in the first week of using Smart Tools], but now I get a bunch of free traffic (at least until they figure out what's going on)."

WP Smart Tools has hundreds of other features that make it the single solution to affiliate marketing within WordPress.

Check out these testimonials:

"I want you to put this on your testimonials page. WP Smart Tools is so awesome I would nearly trade my wife to not have to give it up: every single lander I've made in the last 6 months has used it in some way. WP Smart Tools is perfectly designed, perfectly awesome, and I recommend it above everything ever. If you're going to do for your marketing, BUY THIS NOW."

"One last thing, if you are nooby noobistan, and you know how to install wordpress to your server (and if you don't either shoot yourself in the face or spend the hour googling it and testing it until you do) but don't really know much about affiliate marketing, well, buy this [sweet] suite of tools and go through the demo's, go put it up on a couple sites and test all the features, and you're going to know way more about affiliate marketing, in the trenches, than you did before." (note if you don't know how to install WordPress, WP Smart Tools includes free installation - I'll personally install WordPress and the plugin for you -Joe)

"WP Smart Tools is exactly the type of product that will make your life a lot easier, the type of product that's going to make you go 'how did I manage to survive without something like this?!?'"

I've known about the Shoemoney system for a little bit of time now and the more I hear about it, the more I get excited to see how it will turn out.

What is the Shoemoney System?

The Shoemoney system is a complete "how to" for making money online. Wait... before you think it's JUST another make money online system, let me explain.

Back in November I went to Pubcon in Vegas to meet up with Jeremy and to do a video interview for the Shoemoney system. While I was there, Jeremy began to tell me some of the really awesome things they were doing with the Shoemoney system.

What Did He Tell Me?

Jeremy talked to me about how they had taken numerous average (well some people would consider them "sub average") people when it came to technology and came up with ways to help them make money online. Things ranging from Ebay to Facebook to ... you name it.

While I can't say some of the stuff he told me, it's certainly not anything like the normal make money online systems out there today.

They did actual experiments with complete newbies. Legit.

What the Shoemoney System is NOT

Most make money online systems focus on outdated methods and things people simply cannot take full advantage of anymore. In fact... most of the time that there is a "system" it means someone used it, made their money, and are now selling the method because it doesn't work anymore.

This "system" is nothing like that. Instead they talk about ways average every day people can make money. Real techniques that might not make you millions, but can help you to replace your income and actually work from home.

This system certainly is not going to claim that you can become a bazillionaire from it, but if you apply yourself to this system, you WILL make money.

Live Call With Jeremy

On Thursday, January 14, 2pm CT, 3pm EST, Noon PST there will be a Live Chat with Jeremy Schoemaker about this system. Jeremy will be sharing more details about the system and answering many of the common questions people have been asking.

Click here to get on the live chat.

I am looking forward to seeing how all of this comes together!

Every year Tamar from Techipedia puts out an awesome list of the top internet marketing posts.

This years list is really awesome so I figured it was worth mentioning here.

Four of my posts got featured (Thanks!) so I decided to list them below for you to check out:

• The Beginners Guide To Advertising On Facebook - Beginners guide to facebook ads.
• Cut the Fat: Some Quick Tips To Instantly Gain Profit - Tips on increasing the profits on your affiliate marketing campaigns.
• PPC Affiliate Marketing 101 - Great guide for starting PPC Affiliate Marketers
• The Art of the Pitch - Want to pitch an idea to me? Follow these steps.

You know... It's an interesting thing to think about.

What does little Grandma [insert Grandma's name here] do while she is online? What about Grandpa?

Seniors are one area in internet marketing that is smaller than most other areas but growing at a fast rate! And I know for a fact that they can be profitable for affiliate marketing campaigns.

That being said, check out this recent Mashable article called "What Do Seniors Do Online".

A majority of online seniors check their e-mail, print maps, play around with photos and check the weather.

This article includes amazing tips for you if you were to do some demographic targeting (such as media buys, etc). So Enjoy!

EDIT: Just saw another related article.

So every Friday, I will be doing interviews with different affiliates and business owners to be able to hear and get insight from a broad spectrum of affiliates and those in the internet marketing industry. If you would like to be interviewed for these posts, please contact me.

Today I interviewed Josh Todd of Inside Affiliate!

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?

I am 26 years old, was born and raised in Denver, CO, and I've officially been in the affiliate marketing industry for about 2 years. I've been involved with the internet, web design and general marketing since I was 16 years old.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?

So far I'm the most proud of starting my own affiliate network, TriFoxMedia. I've wanted to start a network for a while, since I had worked as an Affiliate Manager for a couple of different networks. When I quit my last AM job, I was planning on just doing my own affiliate campaigns for a while. However, friends that I had made in the industry, readers of my blog, and affiliates that I had worked with kept telling me they still wanted to work with me, so I ended up starting the network sooner rather than later. It has been a ton of work, but it's very rewarding to work with affiliates and help them grow their own businesses for a living. I dig it.

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?

It isn't really affiliate marketing related, but the toughest thing I've ever had to face was probably having brain surgery when I was 14. I seriously didn't know if I was going to survive the operation, or if I would be blind or have memory loss. The only way I got through it was because I have an awesome family that stood by me through the whole thing. Now I have a titanium plate in my head, but it doesn't set off any metal detectors or anything, which is a bummer. That would be fun.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?

I hate loading email creatives into our tracking system. It's just a super boring, monotonous task that puts me to sleep every time. I know I could hire somebody to do it, but I would rather keep things small and bootstrap it as much as possible. Besides, it keeps you humble.

What’s the best advice you could give to someone starting out in Internet marketing? Any pro tips you feel like disclosing?

The best advice I can give someone just starting out is not to spend too much time reading blogs (no offense) and forums, because you can easily overload yourself with information until you have no idea what to do next. The best possible thing you can do is open up an AdWords account or a Facebook Ads account and just spend some money, with the full expectation that you are going to be losing it and not making a penny. Don't think of it as losing money, think of it as buying education, the best possible kind you can get: first-hand experience. Once you have done that, then you can absorb and appreciate more of the information that is out there and ask more pointed questions to your peers and Affiliate Managers to help you grow your business.

What is the future of marketing?

I think that we have just begun to see the impact of the internet, and of performance marketing, on advertising as a whole. It's amazing that the industry has been around for about 15 years, and yet it is still in its infancy. In the future, I think we are going to see a lot of steps being taken to help legitimize Affiliate Marketing and take it more into the mainstream, with bigger brands getting involved. Also, there could be big changes in the different offer types that are out there. We will only be able to promote the same type of rebill and mobile offers for so long before they become too heavily regulated and something new will evolve out of that. Whatever happens, Affiliate Marketers will continue to be the innovators and be on the forefront of Marketing as a whole.

How has your education prepared you for your career?

I got all of the relevant education that I needed from experience. Some of the biggest skills that I learned were from running my dad's Landscape & Snow Removal business. That taught me how to operate a successful business, but I was never in love with the Service Industry. There are some definite parallels though, we used Sub-Contractors to perform the lawn & grounds services, just like I have Affiliates now that promote the offers in our network.

What are your greatest weaknesses?

I am terrible at programming languages. I am fine with HTML and CSS, but I am worthless with PHP, C++ or anything like that. It's something I would definitely like to expand my knowledge on someday when I have the time.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?

The best advice I've ever been given is that if everything were to fall apart and you lost it all, the only thing you can do is start over. It doesn't do any good to sit around and whine about what might have been, just pick up the pieces and the experience that you gained and do it better the next time.

Do you try to keep current with the latest Internet marketing news at all? What or who are your main sources?

Absolutely. I think AffBuzz is a great site, and it aggregates everything together nicely so you just go to one page. I still do have my favorite blogs that I subscribe to with RSS, but I use Google Reader a lot less since AffBuzz came around. Another source that I really like and read on a daily basis is Mashable. It's technically not an internet marketing site, it is focused on Social Media, but it often has really great insights into the internet community as a whole and how that can affect the campaigns that you are running. As far as blogs, I'm a fan of Graywolf, CDF Networks, and of course a shout out to Barman and PPC.bz.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?

My long term goals are to make enough money so that I can just invest it and spend less time working for it. I love almost all forms of entertainment, whether it be music (which is my offline passion), movies, video games, sports, etc. I have been in bands in the past, and I am in the process of getting a new one off the ground now (check out Locus), and I would love to be able to do a tour of Europe just playing music with the band. Also, I would love to be involved in some type of media creation and production, like developing iPhone Apps, Video Games, or some new form of entertainment that hasn't been dreamed up yet. I'm not much of a programmer, but it would be awesome to be a part of it on an Executive level, overseeing the big picture.

What are your typical hours like? When do you just chill back? Do you have a usual day off?

I usually come in to the office between 9 and 10 in the morning and go home between 5 and 7 at night. Of course, when I go home, usually I just get back on the computer there or get on the laptop while I watch TV with my wife. Monday through Friday I would say I'm connected to the internet in some form for at least 12 hours a day, sometimes more. I normally try to take Saturday and Sunday off to spend with my wife, and we are expecting our first son in January (he's due right in the middle of Affiliate Summit).

How do you like to spend your free time? What does work-life balance mean to you?

To me, work-life balance means that I get enough time in working to achieve my goals in a timely fashion, but still having enough free time to enjoy the fact that I set my own schedule. For example, I usually take Saturday and Sunday off. I know that if I worked seven days a week that I could achieve my goals faster, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my social life and family time to do that. There's a balance between how much money you can have and how much you can enjoy it. If you are a guy that makes $100 million a year but never has time to relax and enjoy it, then that's a fail. I heard once that there is a certain point where increasing your income stops increasing your quality of life and actually starts decreasing it. I can't remember what the dollar amount was, but I definitely believe that is true.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?

I would have gotten into Affiliate Marketing sooner! I constantly think about how much money I've missed out on simply by being late to the party on things like the Ringtones gold rush. But that's the best thing about this industry, you never know when the next gold rush is around the corner!

I wanted to take every Friday for the next couple months or more and interview an affiliate, network owner, manager, etc. Just someone involved in the internet marketing industry.

I think that this will be a great way to learn and hear multiple points of view about the internet marketing industry as a whole.

I'm really excited to get this going and have an interviewed lined up already which I will be posting tomorrow.

If you are an affiliate, network owner, or have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for some time, please feel free to contact me so I can interview you.

Thanks!

I was recently given the opportunity to have an interview with Ryan Eagle of EWA Private Network. Ryan is a great guy and a super hard worker. For this interview I kept things short and sweet and I hope you'll enjoy it.

One thing to note about Ryan is that he has a hard, "gangster" front but actually is a great guy.

Who are your favorite rappers? What are you listening to most these days?
Man o' man - the list goes on and on. Birdman, Do or Die, Max B, Dr. Dre, The Game, Gorilla Zoe, Gucci Mane, Jay-Z, Lil Keke, Lil Wayne, Mobb Deep, Outkast, Rick Ross, Shawty Lo, Snoop Dogg, UGK, Young Jeezy, and Z-Ro.

Jokes aside, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm the man, and I know that. Love me or hate me - I'm out here to make you more money as an affiliate. I'm 22 years old, a cocky asshole (that still pops his collar), loves blackjack, and will always keep to my roots: money, hoes, cars and clothes. I've been working full time online since 2004, and I'm the owner of EWA Private Network, the network that takes low margins like Wal-Mart. Bigshotism aside, I'm grateful for everything that I've achieved and I never take it for granted. I have a loving family, beautiful girlfriend, and I attribute my success to my sobriety and God.

Since being in the industry my business has adapted and changed several times. I started off doing full time SEO, diversified into CPA advertising in 2005 then switched completely to full time affiliate marketing in early 2007. Nowadays, most of my revenue still comes from our internal affiliate marketing option focusing on media buying, social traffic and contextual popups. In early 2009 we launched EWA Network to provide a network based on 4 simple things: EWA will pay more, EWA will get more, EWA will pay quicker and most of all - EWA will help more. All our staff are active affiliates that will help you build, scale and optimize campaigns.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
My sobriety - it's the most important thing in my life now and because of it I've gotten where I'm at now.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
Well, I started a web design company awhile back and it was an epic failure. I was able to get clients pretty easily, but I found out quick that dealing with small business owners that barely turn on computers isn't the easiest task. I was revising and revising websites to suite their needs for little money - not worth my time whatsoever. One night I got sick of it all and simply refunded the last clients I had, shut the site down and started forwarding all the deals to a friend of mine. Horrible business. I hate clients. I hate deadlines.

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
Being young and having too much damn money was almost the death of me. Earlier in my career, I attributed my creativity to my drug use and got deeper and deeper into drugs. I thought that I was invincible and money could solve every problem. This hedonistic and twisted mindset turned me into a bitter person and I eventually got consumed with the fast life and even put money as a second priority to drug use. I spiraled downward and eventually reached a bottom and decided to get help - the best decision in my life. I'm a recovering addict and I can truly say that I wake up everyday happier than I ever was before. I can now have healthy relationships with family and friends.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I hate voicemails. My cell phone is both my business line and personal line, so it's gotten to a point where I can barely answer it anymore. I wake up every morning and the calls periodically come streaming in every 15-20 minutes. Every night I use my voicemail to sort through the important ones then return the calls. I know emails are impersonal, but for someone like me it's the most efficient way of handling business.

What’s the best advice you could give to someone starting out in Internet marketing?
Get off the forums. Close your eBooks. Stop reading the blogs. The best teacher is experience - get your credit card out and get in the trenches. You will learn more from losing money than you will from anything else, I've never read a single guide on anything. I learned it all by myself, and now I'm sharing it with EWA affiliates.

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when you were starting out?
Listen to the D.A.R.E. teacher.

If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
I don't recommend niches that I do not currently run, because I'd be talking out of my ass. I prefer to be upfront with my affiliates about what I know and don't know. I've been running dating since 2005 and I still love it - there is a never ending supply of single guys. Lately, I've been running more and more game offers both domestically and internationally. These short little CPL's really convert with the right demographic targeting. If your ballin' outta control with one it's only healthy to grow it - but spend time to try other niches. A super affiliate in my books can run everything from rebills to dating to mobile offers - they're not restrained to one niche.

Do you try to keep current with the latest internet marketing news at all? What or who are your main sources?
JonathanVolk.com, of course =D. I gotta' give props out to PPC.BZ too - affiliate drama is just so much fun to partake in.

What are your typical hours like? When do you just chill back? Do you have a usual day off?
I've been working insane hours ever since I can remember. Back when I was 16 years old I was working at Walgreens corporate office full time over the summer, and then putting in another 6-8 hours every night after work to build up my own business. When I started making that nice paper I continued working the crazy hours because I knew the potential out there. Nowadays, I work on expanding the Birdman empire about 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. I'm constantly trying to expand my
team to distribute work but it just keeps piling up and I'm a control freak. Sundays are usually the day that I take partially off - to spend time with the girlfriend or family.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
Advertisers that don't pay. Owning a network isn't all glitz and glamor - we run on super-slim margins relaying on paying advertisers. When they don't pay, it hurts the business and this in-turn affects affiliates. I ask myself sometimes, was it really worth it? When it does happen - nothing makes my day more than harassing them on the phone, threatening their business or leveraging my connections to ruin any future businesses they have. I do take it personally, every time. I still have the SEO touch and I'm not shy to use it to ruin their name. Call it cut throat - but I'm out for blood when I don't get paid.

When you're going to do some marketing / advertising on a site, it's important to know who your demographics are.

If your offer is to females, then you should be targeting sites and places where females generally "hang out". If you're targeting males, do the same. If you're targeting retired people, then make sure you know where they go.

This morning I came across a chart that lists the % of male to female on all the major social media sites. It can prove pretty helpful for sure when deciding which site to target.

(click to make it bigger)

Enjoy.