Recently, I sent out an email that had a subject, "$27,287.50 In 8 DAYS! (How To)".

This email was to notify people that the recording of the free CPV webinar with David and Corey was ready for free download (you get it for free on my affiliate marketing guide page). In this webinar, David explains how one of his campaigns made over $27k in just 8 days. They then go on to talk more about how they do CPV and give some great tips and tools. The download is well worth your time.

Anyways, BACK to the subject at hand... I totally ripped that email subject line from someone else.

I made obvious (truthful) modifications such as the dollar amount but the format is nearly identical. The results were amazing.

By FAR this email has had the best open rate of any email I have sent! I had a great open rate (people who read the email) and a great click through rate to the page.

See, after launching my affiliate marketing guide, I've been learning a lot about internet marketing. MOST of this learning has not come from an expensive course, training program, or even talking to an insider guru.

Instead it's been from signing up for every internet marketers email list and seeing how they do it. What headlines they are using, how they format their emails, how they...

Now, I know many of you will never market to the make money online niche and might be thinking that you won't learn anything. But the fact is, the methods and principals you learn from following these marketers is applicable to nearly every niche.

Just think how you could take high converting subject lines from marketers and turn them into ads for your affiliate marketing project.

Track Your Emails

Just a few days ago, Shoemoney shared a tip I have never heard of.

Say your email is chunkylover52@gmail.com. Now when you sign up for each email list you add a +whatever to the first part of your email.

Like:
chunkylover52+JohnChow@gmail.com (this is what you could do for John Chow's email list for example, which I highly recommend)

You don't need to make a new email for each one. Everything after the +sign is "ignored" I guess by the email providers so it still goes to chunkylover52@gmail.com.

Now it makes it extremely easy to track who send you what. You could even setup a special folder for each list and have them automatically sorted using outlook or gmail (and probably others).

Anyways, here are some internet marketers you should check out:

• Shoemoney System Email List - Shoemoney is a big player... You'll want to be on his email list to watch how he does it and learn from him.
• John Chow - John's emails people and people listen. He is Shoemoney's top affiliate for a reason.
• SpeedPPC - Jay Stockwell is an experienced marketer and consistently sends out amazing emails.
• PPC Bully - PPC Bully has sent out emails for nearly every large internet marketing product launch. Some would call it "spam", I call it free education.
• Magic Bullet - Amish just recently launched a multi-million dollar software offering and now is emailing people for these large product launches. He is where I stole... erm... "got the idea" for the headline I talked about above.
• Ian Fernando - Ian might not have the biggest internet marketing email list, but he knows his stuff. Although many of my affiliate marketing guide referrers have a list 20 to 40 TIMES his size, he was still in the top 10! That's impressive!
• DailyBlogTips - Daniel has impressed me with his ability to produce results and while he does not email a ton, his blog posts have some great ideas and content that get your mind thinking.
• Andre "Affiliate Bully" - Andre has been a top affiliate for multiple large launches and his idea of internet marketing REALLY impressed me. I signed up instantly to be on his "waiting list" so I could learn his style.
• All the bloggers at Affbuzz
• etc, etc, etc

The list could go on for so long but I'll stop there.

Now go get some free edu-ma-cation.

The other day my friend Dan showed me this awesome post on increasing form sign ups using a "mad lib" type style instead of a traditional form style.

The post is here.

In this post, the author shares how he saw this mad lib style sign up form and decided to test the form out on his own site.

Apparently doing this increased his form conversions by 25-40%!!! That is crazy awesome! I would MUCH rather fill out the form on the right than the form on the left.

This type of creative thinking is one of the things I LOVE seeing online.

This leads me to my point. It's really important to let your personality show through your website.

Google for example includes awesome easter eggs all over their website via searches like this.

Some other sites that come to mind when I think about this:

• Threadless
• Nickycakes
• Shoemoney.com
• Firefox
• Twitter

What are some others that you can think of?

When you think of these websites, you may love or hate them, but the fact is whatever you do, the company or individuals personality shows through the website.

Small things like showing your personality makes a huge difference in the way your site feels and as a result can lead to huge increases in conversions (and in my opinion trust).

Just like Shane Dollas says, "be willing to think out of the box."

I love all things involving making money online.

When I see websites that are clearly successful in making money it always makes me excited. That's why when I started to see those penny auction websites, I couldn't help but smile.

If you don't know what penny auction websites I am talking about, it's websites that offer a really high demand item (electronics, etc) for just pennies! The way that works is you go and buy "pennies" or bids. Each bid costs anywhere from a buck to ten bucks. Everytime you pay one extra penny, the auction is extended 3 minutes.

So let's say you have a Wii that's going for 0.30 cents. You come in at the last minute of the auction and hopefully get the wii for $0.31 cents + the cost of the bid ($1 to $10 bucks depending on what site you're using).

For all intents and purposes getting a Wii for $10.31 is a huge steal... and that's the huge allure for these websites.

Now imagine doing something like that but with cold hard cash... up to $5,000. Imagine paying $100 to win $5,000! How crazy would that be?

Come to find out, there has been a site that just recently launched that does exactly that called BidOnCash.

What an epic idea.

So how do they make money if they give cash away for just pennies? Let's take a look @ previous auctions:

Looking at one of the best auctions, a $500 auction went for $26.99. A steal right? Considering each bid cost $1 (bid = $0.01) this made the website $2,699. Wait... is that right? 26.99 * 100 = 2699 bids. 2699 bids * $1 = $2699.

Unbelievable. Looks like a few of the bidders got caught up in a bidding war... Assuming they're not bots.

Granted not every auction ends up this way. You can see a few auctions that ended up going for $0.03 for $100. Clearly a loss for the website.

What a genius idea...

HasOffers has just recently released a couple particularly notable additions within their already impressive affiliate tracking system.

HasOffers Ad Manager

With the Ad Manager, they're providing the ability to handle ads throughout the entire creation and managing process.

The HasOffers Ad Manager enables you to create ads within the site and then optimizes the campaign based upon how the creatives perform. After the ads go live, their performance is tracked so that eventually the top performing ad is displayed, based on whatever factor you choose whether conversion rate, CTR, revenue per impression, revenue per click, or profit.

By testing a wide variety of ads that are then displayed based upon this data there is no guesswork about what combination of images and colors and other factors could make the best possible ad, but actual statistics.

The best creatives are then preferred by the system automatically. This system works not only with banners but with text ads as well. It also features advanced geo-targeting options so that the most effective creative overall isn't used in locations where other ads would have better performance.

The HasOffers Ad Manager comes with every paid edition of HasOffers and you only have to pay per use. It costs just $1-$2 per gigabyte transfer, which is about 100 thousand ads per month, and that's a great deal.

Check it out.

HasOffers Offer Exchange

The other awesome addition to the HasOffers platform is their new Offer Exchange.

With the HasOffers Offer Exchange system, any network utilizing the HasOffers platform can now set offers as available to other networks that also use the HasOffers system.

Whether or not they chose to do so for their own offers, any HasOffers powered network can also access the Offer Exchange offers of other networks powered by HasOffers as well.

The best part is that the only offers allowed on the Offer Exchange will be those that come directly from an advertiser or through an exclusive network relationship and as a result most of the offers are going to have way better than normal payouts. And advertisers can also directly enter unique offers into the Offer Exchange and in turn get connected to a ton of affiliate networks. Everyone wins.

As a HasOffers user, I am very much looking forward to the launch of this offer exchange! Should be great!

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!

So here is an idea that I don't have time to make but would be epic.

So often I have offers that I run with caps. Capping out on an offer is annoying. Usually, if you don't catch it in time means you're going to lose a chunk or all of your profits.

This can also happen when an offer is suddenly pulled or the host goes down.

So the solution to this would be to make a service where affiliates sign up with their cell number. Then you charge affiliate networks to be able to access this list / integrate it into their system. You ping the landing pages of the major offers to ensure it's up.

Whenever an offer caps out, gets redirected, etc, the affiliates on that offer are sent a text message right before letting them know to take action.

I'm not sure it would be possible, but if networks started integrating this for free into their system, it'd be huge. And then you could offer a unique benefit to affiliates that is not "highest payouts".

It's a really rough idea but a feature I have wanted for ages.

EDIT: Apparently this already exists... and I got them to give my readers a special deal!

Jaime Irvine runs Neptune Local, a local online advertising company based in Santa Monica. Recently, he and his team launched Chirofresh.com which specifically targets marketing for Chiropractors nationwide.

My partners and I have been in the local internet marketing space for the past 12 months or so. We initially jumped into it after reading a number of different blogs, and thought we could replicate a similar model in our area of Los Angeles.

There are a number of different ways to set up an agreement with a local business to handle their marketing and there are better people than myself in how to explain the different relationships that can be built. Here is a great article from Adhustler. Take a few minutes and read. I will wait. Twiddling my thumbs.
Ok, you are back.

For the first few campaigns that we ran for local businesses, we went with the pure performance or affiliate based marketing. We charged to build a website upfront. Then we covered the upfront costs of the marketing and advertising, and our clients paid us a commission on what leads they converted as customers. In our heads, and in my theories on business in general, this was a win-win. The more customers we drive to the business, the more money we make and they make. In addition, as there is little to no risk on the part of the business, the upfront sale was much easier and made getting clients pretty simple and straightforward. Sounds gravy, right?

From our experiences, the downside of this model in the local space is three-fold:

1. There is plenty of trust that you must have in the business, as you can’t track every conversion 100% of the time. You need to be able to rely on the business to make sure they are counting every conversion. I don’t believe we had a problem with this, but do want to make people aware.
2. If you are covering the marketing costs, the business has no pure downside to not converting the lead. If they do not call back the lead or convert it, no “skin off their bones” as they are back at square 1. They haven’t taken the “hit” on the marketing and seen the money leave their pocket. Very key with some local businesses.
3. This is the most important thing I can tell you, “local businesses suck at sales.” Let me say that again “local businesses suck at sales.” If you are reading this post or others on this topic in the blogosphere, you will see that line over and over and over.

These businesses maybe great at being a chiropractor, a dentist or a landscaper, but they do not structure sales correctly in their office. Now, not all 100% of these local businesses are that bad at sales and there are the exceptions. If you want to go with an affiliate based model, make sure the business is one of these exceptions. Go to their office, meet their sales team, get a run-through of their sales process, show them graphs, data or whatever that emphasizes the importance of answering the phone right away and/or contacting customers back quickly and efficiently. If you have a bad feeling about the sales of the office or their integrity (remember it can be difficult to track conversions), walk away. Scratch that, run away.

Here is a snapshot of one campaign that was about average for our clients. Unfortunately, I can’t give you exact specifics, but here you go for the first two months of the campaign. This was a chiropractor in and we primarily focused our marketing on Google and Facebook:

Ad Spend: $2435
Leads (Phone and Email): 36 email and 15 phone
Revenue for the Chiropractor: $10,300+

From our experiences, the affiliate based model didn’t work for us. We were wasting money and spinning our wheels, although we felt we were delivering enough leads to them. I still do believe it can work with the right group, and there is still tremendous upside with going this route. That being said, we have changed our model (for the most part) to a management fee structure and/or per lead structure. If the right group came to us, we would consider structuring it differently, but for majority of our new clients we have gone this route.

With this current setup, it is less risky, but there is not as big of upside. In order to be the “big baller” with this type of model, it needs to be scalable. Our thoughts are to do just that by specializing in one specific niche and expanding that throughout the country. We have had success with chiropractors, and if it works in Pasadena with a local chiropractor, then it works in Des Moines, Little Rock, Minneapolis, etc. We have launched a company called ChiroFresh where we are doing just that.

The bottom line, local internet marketing is a ton of work. In any marketing and advertising, the data is the key to the puzzle and gathering enough data is tough with local clients—there just isn’t enough or it takes awhile to gather enough. With a national affiliate campaign, you can gather enough data to make changes in a couple of days, but that isn’t the case on the local level. If you are lazy, don’t jump into it. That being said, if you are lazy you probably shouldn’t jump into any affiliate style marketing either.

If you do want to jump in, you should concentrate in verticals that are high paying industries and products, along with good promotional offers that you can market well. I would recommend not building websites for local companies as you will want to bash your head in. They will want to make a 1000 different changes, all of which will not help your marketing campaigns for them. There is money to be made in local internet marketing, but it is not clearly defined. Be prepared for plenty of trial and error and prepare to lose some capital upfront, but I do think this is a good place to be in the long-run, and mobile advertising will be bigger than ever here.

Hopefully you have find this helpful and good luck!

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.

The year 2009 has proven to be my best year as an internet marketer so far. In fact, I've broken more goals than I even thought I would have (although not the $20 million / year goal... next year maybe?).

Some of these goals are good. Revenue was up, profit was up, I purchased a home, got married, life is good.

Some of these "records" so to speak... not so good. In looking through finances this year I've realized this year I've lost more money to bad businesses than ever before. Over $22,000 in unpaid commissions. Ouch.

These are (mostly) from two companies which will remain nameless for the sake of not starting a riot. One company is now bankrupt and the other is still alive, and we've since worked it out.

In this business, not getting paid is part of the game. Sadly it happens at times because there are shady people working in this business. If you're legit, stay with the more legit networks - the established companies.

Don't go off and join any ol' network because the chances of you not getting paid are exponentially higher.

So here is my list of networks to join that have always paid me on time and can be trusted. Don't get scammed out of money like I did. Use the networks I recommend.

Thanks to those companies who have helped to make this year great!

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.