Whenever I start a new internet marketing campaign, I always research competition first, ALWAYS. There are many ways of doing this. Some methods can be done by hand, and some you absolutely need a tool for. In the past I've talked about some of these tools. iSpionage has just recently relaunched themselves with a new line of tools that are incredible!

What is iSpionage?

iSpionage allows you to easily find and keep track of keywords and competitors' ads across not only Google, but Yahoo and MSN/Bing as well. It is a comprehensive tool that includes so many features to sky rocket your marketing campaigns through competitive research that it is crazy.

Let's take a look...

iSpionage is constantly monitoring what your competition is doing in regards to what ads they're running and what keywords they're bidding on. You can find out at any given time what ads, what keywords, etc. Finding just one new adgroup idea can prove to skyrocket earnings.

What's cool is when you start a project, you can either aggregate related keywords by site or by keyword.

From there you will see what advertisers are using your selected keywords and how many they're using, as well as where they're putting their ads (Google, Yahoo, Bing), what their ads look like, and get links to their landing pages. (Win!!!)

Now, the really cool part.

Not only can you research your competition, you can actively build a new campaign ready for importing using their system, right there on the website.

You can literally have this website generate entire campaigns based on competitive research and be going in no time at all.

One of the other great features is to setup alerts on whenever a particular advertiser starts bidding on new keywords or when new ads are made. So when your competitors start a new adgroup, you'll know about it... You can always have the upper hand on what is profiting.

Special Offer For JonathanVolk.com Readers

In a special offer, I've teamed up with iSpionage to bring an exclusive deal in which you can sign up for the $129/month Professional version of the service at $40 off for $89/month. Check it out for yourself and you'll quickly see how much this will help you with your PPC campaigns.

What is Squeeze Theme?

Squeeze Theme is a wordpress plugin that can be used to generate some SERIOUS cash. This WordPress theme / plugin automates much of the process of making squeeze pages.

This squeeze page method can be used to generate some serious income... Let me explain below how.

What is a Squeeze Page?

A Squeeze page is page designed to have your visitors give you their email or similar in exchange to of viewing more content. This is a very common and highly successful marketing method used.

The idea behind this is that you offer valuable free content (usually in the form of an ebook or report) in exchange for the persons email. Then you use this email list to market / upsell your related product.

I personally have seen this method succeed. My dad has used this method to generate over $60,000 in a single month. Needless to say, it's highly effective.

How does Squeeze Theme Help me?

SqueezeTheme is designed to work well at gathering email addresses and that's exactly what it does. If you're not sure if this is something you could use or you're unfamiliar with building squeeze pages, you might as well check out their free 37-page Squeeze Pages 101 eBook. It's packed with REALLY helpful information on squeeze pages.

Check out this video about Squeeze Theme:

My next project includes Squeeze Theme

When I heard squeeze theme was coming out, I was really excited. I actually have a project coming out soon that will need a squeeze theme! This product is ideal for me because I can spend way less time coding and designing and more time focusing on the quality content. I am really excited to see how it all works out.

You can grab your copy of Squeeze theme here.

In the past I posted a HasOffers review that you can check out, but this post is about their new dedicated solutions.

I Love Has Offers

I am a huge Fan of Has Offers. I really love the design of the interface, the features, etc. I am surprised it has not been more widely accepted.

One of the main reasons that many people did not move over to Has Offers right away was due to the servers being hosted at their data center. Just like with Direct Track and LinkTrust, the servers stay at the tracking server company and you modify the software theme to match your website. The main concern I had heard from others is that Has Offers was run by Tatto Media, which also runs an affiliate network. Some people felt like they could use the data to their own advantage, etc.

Self Managed Solution! Awesome

With their new dedicated solutions, HasOffers is one of the first affiliate tracking software solutions that has the options to have self managed, self hosted servers. This is especially great due to the fact that you can keep the server in your own server colocation center vs. them having to manage the server.

A single HasOffers Dedicated Solutions’ server is capable of running over a billion impressions per month, which is quite impressive. More than enough for MOST businesses.

Price

I tried to get the price for the self managed hosting solution but because it varies due to certain factors, they would not tell me. They did say however that it is less than competitors.

What does this mean? I know the other guys run around $1000 bucks a month, so perhaps the price is under that? Either way, well worth it!

I'm really not a huge "book" type of guy. My wife is the reader of my family. She reads every single day, usually twice. I read usually just once a day, and it's usually the Bible. Hah!

When Twilight came out, she read through that series amazingly fast because she could not put the book down. Predictably Irrational has been like that for me.

From page one, there are nuggets of information that seriously have redefined a lot of the way I look at marketing promotion.

I highly suggest that you take a second to just read the free couple pages on amazon now. It's 4-5 pages that I bet will have you impressed.

In the first chapter of this book the author, Dan Ariely, talks about how we all make comparison to other products to come up with what is an acceptable price. For example, we don't know how much a 4 cylinder car is worth, but we know it should cost less than a 6 cylinder.

Dan talks about an experiment in which he demonstrates this and uses points of reference and comparison to get someone to pick a more expensive item more times than not.

The experiment given was using a newspaper subscription. You could join the newspaper subscription as follows:

• Internet only subscription - $59
• Print Only - $125
• Print and Internet - $125

What do you think most people went for? Over 80% went for the Print and Internet - $125. Why? Because the Print only was a price comparison point that made it easy for them to decide to get the print and internet.

Now compare this to when he just had the Internet only Subscription and Print and Internet as options. Now over 70% of people selected internet only. This was because they had no point of reference to make the print and internet deal seem worth it.

Crazy good right?

Read the first pages at least, well worth it for any internet marketer.

What Is WF Review?

WF Review is a SWEET plugin for wordpress that ADDS VALUE to your blog landing pages! The way it does this is by adding the following to your landing pages made out of wordpress:

• Gives you the ability to use Wordpress comments as Amazon.com style ratings! (This has shown to increase conversions an amazing 12% to 80% depending on niche.)
• Imports MASSIVE amounts of data, straight from CSV to wordpress, using easily modified templates that you control.

Essentially, you can get real life user feedback making it a community driven landing page. Google likes this, it's true. More importantly, (most importantly) it can really increase conversions!

Increased conversions = more money = you can increase ad spend = more volume = even more money. Like how that works? Then you should check out this cool little plugin.

It cost's a nice little chunk of change up front, $130ish but that includes unlimited landing pages, free upgrades for life, etc. At $130ish as a time fee, you'll be able to make that up in the increased commissions fairly easily if you're pushing some good volume.

While I was on my Honeymoon, Gary Simon, an amazing designer hooked it up and redesigned my logo for this site.

I really love the way it turned out and honestly, after looking at his work and price, wish I knew about him sooner!

Check out some of his other logos:

For $99 bucks you get a top tier logo designer.

He also does web design and other things.

If you'd prefer to do it yourself and learn to design, he also has a website for that called How To Design Your dot com!

Thanks Gary!

Revolution202

Just recently the Tracking202 team decided to launch yet another awesome arm of the 202 company, Revolution202. So now you can find new offers, track your campaigns automatically, get stats on your iPhone, and now, you can run your affiliate campaigns through revolution202, an affiliate network.

Another Affiliate Network?

It seems like every day more affiliate networks are popping up into the affiliate marketing scene. There are literally hundreds of places that you can run your affiliate marketing traffic through now, and your job as an affiliate is to find the best.

Every network out there can claim to give you the top payouts, the top this, the best that. The truth is, most networks out there are nearly identical, except for a few main things.

So What Makes Revolution202 Different?

The main difference that sets Revolution202 apart? It's really simply one huge thing. The staff.

The Revolution202 staff is filled with people who actually know something about the industry. First, you have the owner, Wes. Wes is one of the coolest guys I have met. Very personable, very professional, and genuinely loves all of this industry.

Next, the 202 staff. I got a chance to hang out with all the 202 staff during Adtech. Of all the teams of people I have met, this is honestly one of my favorites.

Lastly, the Revolution202 staff. Today I joined R202 and emailed Wes about it. He responded to me in 5 minutes (which I really appreciated) and my account was approved and my account manager was assigned. I looked and was pleasantly surprised that I knew my Account manager personally, Justin! Jacob and I had a good time just chilling with him during Adtech San Fran.

I really appreciate that R202 is filled with knowledgeable staff rather than some female who was hired only to get horny affiliates to run traffic with them.

On top of the quality staff, the R202 website actually has a really cool feature to reach the staff. On the side of R202 website, there is a chat window that allows you to chat with online affiliate managers at any time. Need a quick bump? Have a quick question? It makes it very easy to reach anyone, and I love it.

"Invest Into People"

I was reading a book the other day called, "Integrity" by Dr. Henry Cloud and the author was talking about his conversation with his multi-millionaire friend.

He asked his friend, "Now that you've made it, where and what do you plan to invest in?" His friend replied, "I only really know one area really well so I choose not to invest into anything except for that." Knowing that his friend had invested into a five or six companies, he asked him, "What about these companies? His friend replied, "I didn't invest into those businesses, I invested into those people. I know their work ethic, their drive, their etc, etc, etc."

To sum that up, he was saying that he did not invest into companies or ideas, but people. The same idea applies to who you decide to work with. That's why I highly recommend the Revolution202 affiliate network.

Sign Up For Revolution202

If you're looking for a top notch affiliate network, I suggest you sign up today.

Tatto Media (Pronounced Tat-Toe) is May's featured money maker!

What Is Tatto Media?
Tatto Media is an affiliate network run by some highly successful internet marketers. As well as an affiliate network Tatto is an advertising agency that serves tens of millions of unique impressions per month using a proprietary ad server system. For years Tatto has had an affiliate network but just recently launched the affiliate network publicly.

To get to their affiliate network, simply go to Tatto Media's website and then make sure to click the RED Affiliate tab (not the publisher tab like some other affiliate websites).

Why Is Tatto Media The Featured Money Maker?
Tatto Media just recently launched their new affiliate network platform to the public. Because Tatto Media is built from people who are highly successful marketers, they only have offers they for the most part have tried and tested themselves.

You don't have 1000 offers of which 950 are making $0 like most networks.

The other great thing about Tatto is that they are not your standard run of the mill direct track affiliate network. Many of the offers are their own exclusive offers that they have made and optimized themselves.

As well as having many exclusive in house offers, Tatto also has one of a kind tracking software that they built to ensure you get your affiliate commissions. If you know anything about tracking software, they use the best method, pixel tracking, which is one of the most accurate method.

Manage Your Own Pixels:
In years past, if you ever wanted to place a tracking pixel such as Google Adwords conversion pixel, you had to ask your affiliate manager to do it for you. Some networks back when I was first starting would not even allow this unless you had a certain income level.

With Tatto Media's new custom system, you can upload your own tracking pixels directly to the offers you want.

So now, if you want to see what keyword is converting for what offer directly in google adwords, you can do it and do it with ease.

Exclusive Offers:
Tatto has a nice long list of exclusive offers that you wont find in any other network. Many of these offers focus around the mobile space. The mobile cell phone offers are proven converters because there is no credit card needed. Instead users just get charged directly on their cell phone bill. When people don't have to enter billing information, it increases conversion rates significantly.

The other main verticals that Tatto Media has are:

• Dating Offers (Free Trials)
• Email Submits (Good For Facebook)
• Finance Offers (Credit report, biz op, debt consolidation, etc)
• Health Offers (Diet, Skin, and More)
• Insurance Offers
• And as mentioned, Mobile Offers.

You can check out a complete list of offers by joining the affiliate network.

Overall:
Overall Tatto Media is a great company that has been around for a while. Now that they are launching into the affiliate network side of things, I think they will be a strong player in the industry that you probably should be a part of.

Since they have a huge amount of experience themselves, I'm sure there is a lot one could learn just from being an affiliate at their network.

Check them out.

Ad:Tech San Francisco 09 was really awesome. Overall I made a good amount of contacts and more importantly had a great time hanging out with some of the coolest people in the industry.

Here is my recap of the events that went on.

Day 1: Tuesday
On Tuesday morning, Jacob (my marketing employee) and I drove in from the east bay to San Francisco. The drive took just about 30 minutes and we got in about 10:30 am.

When we got in, the first thing we did was meetup with Mr. Pauly Beats AKA uberaffiliate. We said our hellos, and then went to wait in the enormous line for badge holders.

After that we saw the guys from Tracking202 Pro and got to do a little meet and greet with them. It was great seeing / meeting all those guys again. Really a great group of guys.

Following that, Jacob and I proceeded to walk the floors until around noon. I met up with Justin from AffBuzz, a new site which syndicates all the popular affiliate marketers blogs.

Around noon, I had a interview with the tracking 202 guys. This interview went pretty well and should be posted online within a week or two. It's all about affiliate marketing, pay per click, etc.

After the interview, Jacob and I continued to walk the floor more.

While walking the floor, one thing really begun to bug me. It seems advertisers seemed to give us a little less attention than some of the older folks. I suppose that it was because they took us less seriously and thought that we would just take their time without producing any business.

There was one booth in particular that really surprised me. I was looking for traffic sources as always and began to ask the man behind this booth about the traffic that this guy's company was able to produce.

He then asked me what my budget was instead of answering my questions to which my annoyed self replied, "a lot." He then said, "a lot" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people in a condescending tone. After this, I explained a 6 figure a month budget. Unbelievably, he laughed and said, "2 guys from Pittsburg spending that kind of money... If you were spending that money, you would have heard about us already!"

After that, I just walked away. Who wants to do business with a guy like that?! Haha!

< / end rant>

After that annoying bit, we had lunch at buckhorn grill. It was fairly good.

Following lunch, we went to the second floor exhibit which I enjoyed much more. Much less traffic and much more professional people, with the exception of "SEO Inc." which over all treated me like a child and way over quoted me on prices. $15,000 for a small local website project that is already ranking... I don't know what they're trying to pull. I could hire a digitalpoint seo for $500 and probably get significant results.

Beyond the bad experience with SEO Inc's booth, there was a ton of great booths.

I got to meetup with the people that I am using for my credit card transactions and also the people who I am using for outsourced billing support. Both really great companies and people. I won't post that information on here, but if you're in need of either, feel free to contact me.

After all the walking, I was worn out and we drove back home around 4 PM. It took us a bit longer to get home due to good ol' traffic.

Here is a video I tried to make... Excuse the "Ok Guys" that I constantly say... Not quite sure why I kept saying that... probably due to being distracted by all the stuff.

Day 2: Wednesday
Wednesday was a great day for me.

I had my morning work out and then a meeting locally.

After this meeting I drove in around 4 PM. I got to catch up with Jason from Direct Agents. He is my AM and has been really great in working with me!

After this, I went out to the Lobby and caught up with a couple guys including Larby, Rob (Partner with Larby), Nickycakes, Paul (Uber), Blake from Meritcard, Harrison, and a few others!

It was nice to just talk in the lobby for a while with no sales pitches, etc. Just good times.

I drove over to San Francisco and offered to drive Larby, Paul, and Rob over to the meetup202. I was scheduled to speak and was unsure about what I was going to say really... Doh! Here I have a car full of people who make a lot more than I do, and I am going to be speaking in front of them! Hahaha... They made sure to tease me a bit about that. It was funny... But not as funny as getting lost on the way to this place!

My GPS decided to take us on a while goose chase... and we circled the block about 3 times before finding where this place was. Rob called Wes and we got a bunch of people to come wait for us out on the street to help us find the place! Haha.

The meetup started out a bit slow but turned into this super awesome event, the highlight of the Ad:tech week, in fact! Not only did I get to hang out with incredibly smart people, I got to meet and greet with everyone and got free pizza. Woo!

I got to meet a lot of the people from Jar-Media which is a great affiliate network in San Francisco. That was great!

After hanging out with friends for about an hour and a half, it was time to "present." Gulp... I was the first to go because I saw that Dennis Yu (who is probably the most crazy smart PPC Marketer I have met) had Power point! You can never beat powerpoint!!!

So that being said, I spoke very briefly about expanding your PPC Campaigns. It was brief because I was nervous. I could have expanded a lot more on what I was going to say but I was nervous and usually cut things short when I am nervous.

After I spoke, Ruck, Paul Bourque and Larby spoke to the crowd as Dennis Yu prepared his presentation.

All the presentations given were really good. I learned something from each one and I hope you guys did as well.

I enjoyed hanging out with the guys and we decided to have lunch on Friday.

We all went to the Cheesecake Factory. It was pretty good food but really great times. I learned a ton of information!

(from left to right)
Dennis Yu, Pauly Beats, Nick Chedda, Me, and Larby.

It was a great time for sure!

And that ends a great Ad:Tech!

If you're just hearing about what a Flog is, chances are, you've just got onto the internet or have adblocker plus on.

A flog is the coined term used to represent a "fake blog" - Flog. These flogs were all the rampage during the height of Acai and made many people millions of dollars. Basically you say you're a woman and give a long story of how you lost weight using acai or . For a while, you couldn't turn left or right without seeing these acai blogs advertised on a website!

The reason that these flogs become popular (literally over night) is because they converted and converted well. This goes to show that real life success stories sell.

Over at the blog, 5 Star Affiliate Programs, Linda posted about an upcoming smackdown with these Acai flogs and the industry as a whole.

This smack down includes the Center for Science in the Public Interest, along with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. They blasted Acai websites in general and Acai flogs in particular saying they’ll likely sue the people behind them for consumer fraud and try to recover damages and restitution for those who felt misled. Wow!

While this may suck for certain affiliates, there is always something that can be learned and taken from these Flog systems. See, while these flogs are virtually unaccepted is most major pay per click networks now (Google, yahoo, Msn), you can at least learn that testimonials truly sell and sell well. So integrating that into your marketing campaigns really should have an impact on your sales.

I guess it goes to show why all those infomercials have person after person saying, "You're going to be saying sham- WOW!" and "I never need to buy paper towels again!!" etc.

So while this may be the demise of one method of marketing, your job as an affiliate is to learn the ups and down of those styles and adapt the good for your use...