Useless Affiliate » Pay per click

Affiliate Campaign Failures

admin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:12:02 +0000

I hate to talk about affiliate campaign failures but we have to go over this since it happens to everyone. I’m not just talking about when traffic doesn’t give you leads I’m talking about problems on your side too.

#1 ) 404 pages aka paid search donations!

The biggest failure I have seen with affiliate marketing is when the affiliate gets too excited with ad copy and redirecting pages, that they neglect to do one thing. Check the link!!! There is nothing that you can do wrong that is worst then this. You are trying to make profit and you see that you just spent $100 worth of keywords and you wonder why didn’t I make a sale or lead. DUH!!.. So how do I prevent this? Take 5 seconds of your precious time and copy paste your URL.

#2) Offer Expired

This doesn’t usually happen but still good to be aware. You usually get a warning from the affiliate network that the offer is about to shut down. The worst you can do is check your landing page and you think its function properly. Then you find out that when the offer is clicked, it goes to a whole new redirected offer that has nothing to do with you keyword and landing page.

#3) Non Converting Keywords

In order to find this one out you would have to first test out the offer. It takes a while to figure it out if the keyword isn’t searched as much. This is why I always always always i mean always watch the campaign closely within the first 24 hours after the offer is submitted and approved. I usually watch it in the first 6 hours. If I see a keyword is repeatedly clicked and you get charged with no leads after 15clicks or over 150% of the total lead then I remove it ASAP. Hint : Try bidding on the term “free ringtones”. If your campaign isn’t being searched then I usually do a 3 day watch.

#4 Keyword Tracking

Please use tracking. I learned my lesson with this. When I first started I usually test a directlink first then I add tracking. Do not do this and it’s a bad habit. You are already losing ROI (return on investment ) when the offer runs. You might get lucky with the first few keywords and you don’t know which keyword made you the revenue. Keyword tracking can take a while to set up but its worth the extra few mins or even an hour.

#5 Competition, Saturation, & Marginal Revenue.

If you are just randomly reading different blogs and everyone seems to point to an offer such as “ringtones” most likely it is saturated with competition and you won’t earn much. Don’t get me wrong but if you are a newbie, then it is hard to jump in with all the big boys. My first offer to actually promote was ringtones. I learned a lot and I broke even all the time even though I had a good collection of keywords. However people were endlessly changing their bids to be #1. Ringtones was one of the most well watched campaigns in the affiliate marketing in the past. People were constantly changing their landing page and updating every little detail 24/7. It was a high maintenance campaign. However if you were the small percentage that knew how to be on top of the competition then you were making a profit.

#6 Demand Down the Drain

Yep.. virtual markets are the exact same thing as a real life physical item. There are supply and demand in affiliate marketing. You can run an offer and within a week your profits fall rock bottom. Some offers are seasonal which makes it hard to promote without knowning the time frame. You would not run an offer that gives out free Christmas cards in the middle of June. In contrast, you would also not run a free sandals and short offer in the winter. The only way to know which to run is by using your common sense.

#7 Keep your Mouth Shut

Don’t tell another affiliate an offer that you are running. Don’t blog about an offer you are currently running. Why? Check #5. Unless you are in close contact with that person like a business partner then it is ok. But don’t tell people even if they call you names! As you can see us affiliate blogs, are not blogging about the present. We are always blogging a few months if not a year ahead of the experience you learn. I would not post the campaigns I’m running. Simple because you can be an enemy.

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Hide Affiliate Links Redirect Method

admin — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:46:05 +0000

Hiding affiliate links is a great tool to use in most situations where affiliate links can be shown to the public. The point of hiding the affiliate links is for the user to go through your landing page without knowing they made you money. You want to prevent this because somebody can use their own affiliate link instead of yours and they get the sale and lead instead of the person that should get it. It is like hijacking your sale.

This method is pretty easy and used mostly if you want to promote an offer such as ringtones or car warranties. This is best for offers where a “fake search” would increase CTR (click through rate). For ringtones it would work well because you could say on that page that you are “searching for artist.. 5 seconds remaining” then they get redirected to the officially offer page. The good thing about using the redirect method is when you are using tracking, some of the tracking software needs a redirect page. In other words you will need a redirect page either way and you can just add the code for tracking and offer page in the same web page.

We as affiliate marketers love to use image buttons because it looks user-friendly and us humans by nature will click an image. In contrast if there was a “push button” ignition in a car and there was a normal turn the key ignition which would you pick? I’m sure more than half if not all would prefer the push button because it takes less work.

hahah that button is huge isnt it? Makes you want to click it right ? (CLICK IT FOR DEMO) Or would you rather have

www.uselessaffiliate.com/offerpage

Obviously the button would be easier to click on. So now comes the tutorial! The first step that you would want to do is go on and think about what kind of offer you want to promote. This will help you with the creation of the button. Lets say that we have an offer for a sale on ipods and the publisher tells us that we can promote the offer for 20% OFF Ipods and we get a certain amount of commission. So with our great minds we make a web 2.0 button with text that says 20% OFF ipod. Are you with me so far? Once you completed creating the button upload it to where the image location would be. Make sure the image is clickable and change it to the link where the redirect page would be

Second step will be making the redirect page. The redirect page will have the following structure. 1 ) Create a directory 2) make the code in Notepad 3) upload the code. A directory is just a folder in the domain root. So for this example I connected to my FTP using CUTEFTP and it allows me to make a directory. I called my directory offer-page. So the full link would be http://uselessaffiliate.com/OFFER-PAGE. Go into NotePad and enter this code

Redirecting in 8 seconds…
You can also make it 1 second so they don’t see this page redirect.

Change the values around. content=”INSERT TIME IN SECONDS”;url=INSERT AFFILIATE URL”

Once you have made that code save it in notepad and save as.. index.html and upload it to the directory. So once you are in the directory it should redirect you to the affiliate link web site. You guys might have a question on why do we need a redirect page when we can just add the url to the image and make it clickable. Well if you do a mouseover the image you don’t see ww.affiliatenetwork.com/affiliateID#12345. We want to be able to cloak that. We cloak it by having a generic offer page like ww.nichechoice.com/nichetraffic-signup. So we are tricking newbies by having them look at the link and trick them into thinking your web site is where it is redirecting. One last question would be.. but if they click on my link and it redirects then goes to the sign up page, won’t they see my affiliate link in the address bar? Yes they will but a lot of people don’t check. However there is another way around that called IFRAME!. Oh well that’s it for now this post. I will go over Iframe later. Basically an Iframe is redirecting the user under a new web site and using your web site as a window and they will see that the address bar is unchanged but in reality it is covered up.

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How to Make a Landing Page

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:28:21 +0000

As an affiliate marketer you need to learn this skill. There is no way you can go far without learning how to make a landing page. Sure people can buy landing pages and premade web sites. A nice way to cheat your way up to professional web design but after a while you start to get problems along the way. Maybe something happened and an image won’t load. Maybe the whole .index won’t load at all. Or maybe you want a new color or theme. You can either buy a landing page for another $20-$100. (jeez..) Seriously people do pay that much for a landing page and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone paid for $150+ for one. Show me the page you want and I can make it without breaking a sweat. I’m still noob at web design but I can probably get the same conversion rate with a $50+ landing page

So if you are not lazy unlike thousands of people out there, I can teach you a thing or two on how to create one.

A Landing page is basically the same set up on how you would show people what you are offering. For this post I won’t go over what the contents are but I will go over in detail how to at least set one up. There are so many ways and this is the way I have mastered.

Things You Need

1) Adobe Photoshop w/ image ready

2) Dreamweaver (doesn’t matter which version)

3) Ftp (I recommend Fireftp for ease of use)

4) Domain / Host

5) Your Brain

First of all you need a domain and a host. I can hook you up with a good deal. I’m suppose to make around $100 with every referral but since I help everyone a lot I’m going to use up the $100 on your guys. (Free domains + disk space with package). Domain is the name of your web site. So my domain name is obviously “uselessaffiliate.com”. Domains are important because if you are selling laptops you would NOT want “potato.com”. Maybe depending on your niche you can use “laptopsonline.com”. I just threw those examples so don’t worry about clicking or checking. Domains are cheap but make sure you don’t get all those extras. Unless you are running some major web site with tons of traffic, you don’t need most of the extras. So don’t spent more than $8 for a domain. Hosting is next. This is where the domain is going to be hosted. This is basically where all your files will be located. This will normally take a day or two for everything to be approved / hosted. But for me I can set this domain and hosting in under 24hours.

Next is the page itself. You can use adobe photoshop to make a page. Select the size you want. I normally use 800 x 600 as a landing page. Make your design and have your banners , header..etc. etc. Make CLICKABLE BUTTONS which is where people will click and see your offer page. Something like “click here” wouldn’t be a good idea. . We will take ringtones. Select Carrier : att , verizon. Make a button for att and verizon and people will click it since that is what they will be looking for.

This is a very basic landin page

BTW i got the image off my old blog

Following me so far? Now flatten image (don’t really have to) and move to image ready on photoshop. I wish I had the time to post pics but I’m short right now. Get your Slice Tool. Slice the area where people will be clicking. So slice around the att , verizon buttons you just made. Good ? Now “save optimized as..” html / images.

Good job you made it this far. Open up dreamweaver and open the saved file. It should be a .html file. In dreamweaver you can edit your web site title under the codes. I should go in deep details with this but you will end up getting bored and click the “x” on your browser. Dreamweaver is where you can add all the codes you want and text. All set? Now save in dreamweaver. Make sure the web page is index.html. When you do this, it will tell the browser to open up that file and load everything. There has been so many times where people don’t do it and get an error. Everything is up but the browser will search the directory and we like.. uh-oh no index.html and will error.

Open up firefox and go to fireftp. This is where logins sucks. You will get many values and you will be like WTF is ftp. Well for ftp just use ftp.yourwebsite.com. Username and password is the username you given access to the web site. This step is hard for most people but you just have to go back and remember what the ftp access account you set up was. Now you should had been able to connect. Under the web site folder which is “yourwebsite.com” open it. Now drag your index.html and images in that folder. MAKE SURE that you upload in public_html but if you don’t have it just upload it to the root or where the FTP takes you. This is just a common problem that messes everyone up because of different hosing.Open another window or tab in firefox and see if your web site loads. It should had loaded if not there is like 100s of things to check but usually its not a problem. As long as its index.html.

And there you VERY VERY basic FAQ on how to make a landing page..

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Affiliate Marketing Prerequisites

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:41:16 +0000

In the past month I have made a few hundred USD. I tell people everyone who I talk to, if they are interested. I filter out people who wants to do it and who doesn’t. Believe me , I can tell who wants to start and who just wants to do it. There are two different types of people. One person jumps on it and read everything I posted and wants to get started. I will be impressed if someone IMs asking me “how do I start PPC?”. If I have to push someone then its a burden on them to get started. Basically its two groups of people. One is someone who wants to start and another who wants to earn a few bucks and handle it like a job. Here we go again with Employer vs. Employee. I am an Employer while someone who isn’t as motivated is an employee waiting for me to give them a job. When my business flys (yes it will i believe in me) then I can give you a job to do while I spend my vacation in cancun. I just don’t want to waste my time on someone who is interested and who just wants to jump with me and other affiliates in deep cold water not knowning what happens when you surface.

I’m more than happy to help someone start, don’t get me wrong. But its hard to help someone who doesn’t want to start. Its the real world, no one tells you whats the best way to retire. Honestly I do plan my life but i have no idea WTF a 401k is or the # of work hours social security will pay you. But not to discourage anyone who wants to learn, I will help you. I don’t want to keep people from getting an education. Anyways the point of this post was to help anyone who wants to get started.

1) Please. Seriously, Read my blog. I know its not that much information but its gets you the mentality.

2) Before jumping in cold water PLEASE READ!. Seriously I can’t emphasize enough. I get people who’s trying to start ask me questions that are explained better in blogs than asking me. Just GOOGLE IT!!!

3) Know the following :

USE OF GOOGLE.COM OR YAHOO.COM !!! Html , Adobe Photoshop, dreamweaver, use of FTP,

Please search for the information you need. Thousands of bloggers like me have post this numerous times. I see people buying landing pages and they could had just spent about an hour or 2 making it themselves. Just know the VERY basic. I have not mastered any of the above and I don’t want to because knowning the basics will go a long way. 90% of you probably have a myspace and know what HTML is and some photoshop to crop your myspace pictures. Dreamweaver is a whole new ball park. It took me 2-3 hours to find out how to insert a picture on my first time. FTP is just moving files from your computer to the internet. Same thing as posting a picture on photobucket or myspace. They just make it easier for you so you don’t have to login and do all that easy stuff.

4). Buy Domain and Hosting ( Total Estimated Cost : $80 / year.)

Domains is your name. I bought www.uselessaffiliate.com for like $6. Hosting, I got mine for one year prepaid. If you need any of it, just let me know. I can probably hook it up with 2-3 free domains + 20-30% more disk / bandwidth space. I’m suppose to earn around $100 a referral but I’m just going to give it back to you guys so I don’t earn anything but able to get you guys started.

5) Sign up for affiliate Links. If you look in the right side I have links with my referral. I earn a very small amount for each referral. If you find this informative you guys can sign up and I can thank you. If you just hate me then just go to the web site itself. ( Sign up with me and I’ll help you more ). My income is not through referrals so I can careless of referring people.

6) Sign up for paid traffic. As of right now, just “google” free credits for adwords, msn, yahoo paid traffic. I have a link on my blog and you can sign up through me.

7) All set? Check if you have everything from steps 1-6.

Make a Landing Page ( will post in detail later on). The landing page is just links to your offers. You are the salesman, saleswomen of your company. Make it look NICE!

9) Get some tracking on the landing page. There are a bunch out there. Google it and find out which suits you well. I would recommen Tracking202

10) Add keywords. Keywords are gold coins and the source of your income. It is also the ugly duckling when it comes to getting the wrong ones. Just TEST TEST TEST.

Alright I think I covered it very briefly. There are more to it but this is the structure on how everything works. If you have any questions just IM me.

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Keyword Tips

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:52:42 +0000

Wow its like 7am right now and I’m hard at work already. I feel that in the morning my productivity rate is at its peak performance. No one is awake and everyone is still sleepy and no one to talk to. The best time of day to manage everything. The hardest part of finding the right keyword is well. . finding the right keyword. If I knew all the answers right now, I would be a super affiliate. But for now I’m not. There are so many keyword tools out there and I have not tried them yet. So far for my niche I am focusing on the long tail keyword.

A long tailed keyword is a chain of keywords that has about 3-5 keywords. For example, if you were promoting acne, you would use :

How to treat acne
Best acne medicine for teenagers
remove blackheads with best medication
Best medicine to treat blackhead
free proactive trial

Those are just a few examples. So why wouldn’t you just use “treat acne”, or “acne medicine”. This has to do with the type of customers you are looking for. In PPC you don’t want to waste your money on people who are just researching acne. The customer has to be someone who has a potential of buying the product.

In reallife situations, lets say we go into a car dealership. So I walk in and you walk in with me. I talk to the sales rep and ask him I want that White BMW Z4 in the corner. So simple enough because I know what I want and he has a high potential to make a sale. After I buy my car you talk to the sales rep and ask him “I need a car”. In order for him to help you as much as possible hes going to ask, what kind of car? what color? you want a sports car? do you want 4 doors?. ETC. So now hes refining your search and you have a small potential of giving him a sale because you are not targeting what you want. Maybe you just came there to test drive every single car but don’t buy anything.

I hope the gives a bigger picture on the types of keywords you might need. Don’t get me wrong the short term keywords are good too if you have some money to burn.

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Make Money Overnight Experience

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:49:16 +0000

Lets see too bad I didn’t have this blog up since I was too busy getting up my campaign and niches. I was told by a friend to start it on ASAP so I had some sparetime and why the hell not right? So I done it. First of all, I got some accounts from affiliate programs. I got approved in a few days. I already had a web site up and I had a host. I had money to burn on this campaign. Now I needed a domain for my niche. I got everything all set up. First I created a landing page. I will NOT lie. It took me about 5-6 hours to make one. I did not have sufficient knowledge to make a landing page. I researched how to do it and by the end of the day I had made my first landing page. Now I linked everything with my affiliate links and i did NOT use tracking. But wait.. shouldn’t I use tracking first?

The answer is YES and NO. The reason why I didn’t get tracking was 1) I did not know how to get tracking and 2) That was not my goal. I had a goal of “making my first few sales”. So it doesn’t matter and I just threw my eggs in the basket with no names or color. So if the eggs fell I made some $ but I didn’t know which fell. I was being skeptic and didn’t think you were able to make money in this certain amount of time. For me the goal was 1 week = 1-3 Leads. It was a small goal / step but my return would be huge. The return was not the money but the inspiration. My first Night this is what happened.

Went to sleep at 3am (12/6/2008). Landing page was up, Traffic was high bid, I added about 100-120keywords. The keywords were just random but I handpicked it and made sure I was on top of everyone. My alarm goes off around 9am. Well there goes about 5 hours of sleep. I was going to go back to sleep but instead I checked my earnings. DING DING DING. One lead. I broke even though but no profit. WHO CARES! CONGRATZ ,You proved to yourself you are able to make money by sleeping. I was wide awake and I was about to jump around like a maniac. The logic behind this was, if you are able to make a lead you can multiply it after and tweak things to make even more money. 1*1 = 1 , 1*2 = 2. Multiplication does not LIE. So fast forward to the next few days.

Amazing isn’t it ? Basically I was broke on Dec 5th, 2008. Then I made profit on Dec 07th, 2008. WOW thats really fast. If you guys only knew how i felt it was crazy. So now I am busy tweaking all my campaigns and getting better landing pages and CTRs. I have a small amount of profit but when I know how to do it, it should not stop me from becoming my dreams. I have been so into my little online business that I added a goal, calendar, quotes, timesheet on my wall. Whatever it takes to focus just do it. In order to succeed you need to have short / long term goals. Some can be nearly impossible to reach but make sure you attempt to reach it..

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Introduction to PPC Marketing 101

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:23:17 +0000

Hello fellow affiliate marketers, I bet after all the research of PPC you guys are wondering where to start. Pay Per Click is one way to start. I myself, started to use pay per click method to make that extra money. I wouldn’t say its a good way for beginners but PPC makes you learn everything you need to branch off to make other offers work. SEO is also a good way but takes lot of time and experience. I’m not saying Search Engine Optimization is really difficult but if you are trying to rank with other people that is where it does get tough.

Well you can start by signing up to any of the affiliate networks. There are some on my page you can sign up for. If you find this information valuable please sign up through me , but if you don’t find it necessary to go under me then that is fine. I have used affiliate.com (cpaempire formally), neverblue ads, and copeac. There are many out there but this is what I have chosen and have seen among other affiliate marketers.If you are not able to get approved with the 3 I just listed, contact me and I’ll hook you up.

Usually you have a better chance if you have a blog or a web site already made. Regardless, I can hook it up for ya. Once you get approved by these affiliate networks, you will have access to more affiliate offers.

The pay per lead is a great way to start promoting. It pays really well and the customer or the traffic, doesn’t have to pay for anything. What they do is make an action like inquire for a loan, buy a ringtone , or try a free trial. Most leads require the customer to put on their personal information. Some go as far as a Credit card and some only get a phone number.

The Pay Per Click is what we are all about here in the internet business. A great example of this would be an advertiser for adsense. I really don’t like adsense anymore since the rules are too strict and getting old. Some history of adsense was around the early 2000 era when lots of people were using adsense and making huge bucks. Now adsense is still great but not like what it used to be. Basically all you do is get an adsense account, promote it on a landing page or a seo’d web site and bam! money. I won’t go much about adsense because my blog is all about affiliate marketing. But who knows maybe I’ll show my experience later on.

The Pay Per Sale works well with an unsaturated market if you are going to use paid traffic, or in a nice seo web site. I say unsaturated market because if the market was too saturated making a sale, would be very difficult since this isn’t a pay per lead. The way this works, is a customer has to buy something physically (packaged sent to house) and you get a certain % of commission. A good affiliate network like Commission Junction ( C.J) as a ton of these offers.

The Pay per Action is the last one I’m going to talk about in this post. This one is a sure fire way to earn money if you have lots of traffic. The conversion rate is not as high as the other ones I mentioned but this one has no strings attached. All the user has to do is download like a toolbar or a program and you get paid! These offers don’t pay a lot but if you get lots of traffic this is the way to go. You just have to hope the targeted traffic is someone who is most likely to be illiterate when surfing the web!

Well I hope that explains some terms that you will come across when starting to make some easy money on the internet. Well this concludes today’s blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR AND MAY THE YEAR 2009 BECOME A SUCCESSFUL YEAR FOR US ALL!

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