Happy New Years! I hope everyone is well rested, well fed and ready to take on all the positive changes that one starts pondering with the coming of a new year.  We have a new president in place… gas prices are lowering… and the real estate forecasts are telling us the market will begin to upturn, changes are in motion… optimism is at its peak and for internet marketers, this is prime time for marketing.  

Aside from the fresh scent of optimism, there is still the heavy stench of reality - our economy is at low.   So with taking all this in, in the usual responsive manner, affiliate marketers find offers to promote even when the bricks and mortars are having “going out of business” sales instead of end of year closeouts.   Hence: the new year trends: diet, debt consolidation, anti-aging products, biz ops and mid January Valentines.  

Besides the standard, new trends are always refreshing, especially to affiliates (the ones who are actually driving the traffic). The most recent to come to mind is in the lead gen vertical: Loan re-modification. As with any emerging trend, oh come all ye marketers [enter chorus]… and the competition begins.  ’Avoid Foreclosure’ leads turn into ‘In Bad Loan?’ (which increases conversions by speaking to a larger audience, yet sacrifices lead quality potentially).  In the end payout prevails and everyone is working on smaller margins. 

While some continue to ride the gravy train and compete within a competitive environment others are already thinking of the next. So if “Experts” say this year is the time to buy real estate, then maybe “Buy Foreclosures” should be in popular notion.  The ones to be the first to capitalize on this will immediately have the market share. 

So in conclusion, to round this rant off… lets all be thankful (in affiliate marketing) that we are in the position to help those in time of economic crisis, help them lose weight and basically stimulate the economy while making money ourselves   Happy New Year!   

 The year 2008 has been a great one for me, has it for you? At this time of the year I find myself flipping through pictures and reflecting on fond memories for this year. We will naturally think about the good times and the bad.  After we do that we all start thinking about the infamous New Year’s Resolutions! 

Marketers realize this, and are thinking of creative ways to capitalize on this mindset.  The general rule of thumb is that businesses who are one step ahead of upcoming trends, end up being the ones governing the market share in their niche. Even though it is not 2009 yet people are already thinking and SEARCHING for their New Year’s Resolutions (how to lose weight, how to make more money, how to save more money, how to stop smoking, etc etc etc)  The great thing about search and social marketing is you have an active engaged audience, so you already have their attention!  It now time for action.  If your landing pages, blogs, and campaigns are not set up yet for the New Years resolution push, you better start now! I have been discussing New Year’s Resolutions with a number of my affiliates for the past 3 weeks. 

I advise you to take advantage of your industry contacts, especially your account managers to get the insight on the top performing offers.  If you are not in our network you can sign up at this link and and reach out to me for personal attention to help make 2009 your most profitable year yet!

There is plenty of buzz in the air let’s seize the opportunity!

Talk to me,

Chris Mello

Today we experienced quite a sight! Check out AKMG and CKMG standing on the roof of our Santa Monica, CA offices on the 3rd Street Promenade enjoying the free show!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrYFnihnSe0

Chris Mello’s funny pics: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1279484191&ref=profile (make him your friend and view his gallery)

No matter how well a campaign converts it will not be a successful email campaign without the clicks. That is why I get frustrated when some publishers get caught up with epc’s. You can have a $2 epc but is the deal does not click then you have no revenue. In order to get the clicks the user must first open the email. This is why good subject lines are so important. I have personally seen a campaign go from so-so to wining by simply changing the subj lines.

I took some of my experiences and also began researching studies on subject lines with high open rates vs subject lines with low open rates. Here are some tips that I find helpful:

1) Avoid words that will get caught in SPAM filters. Some samples of words that flag are FREE, Sale, Prize, and symbols $, %.

2) Keep it short and sweet. All the studies I read agreed to keep the subject lines short and direct. Most successful subject lines are about 6 words or 40 spaces and less.

3) A typical misconception of subject lines are that you should “sell the user” in contrast it is proven that to simply “tell the user” is more effective in driving opens. More straight forward subject lines got more opens than pushy salesy ones.

4) Exclamation marks!, % Off, more savings! seem creative and catchy but had a poor open rate. While subject lines that offered a direct message leaving a little curiosity had a high open rate; which makes sense because people have so much “junk” mail these days it looks like an advertisement or spam they will automatically delete or flag as spam.

5) Branding Branding Branding. If your offer has a household brand name use it in the subject line.

6) Testing is important. It is important to test different variances before blasting away.

7) Change up your subj line, a subject line that is over used will not open as well.

The search affiliate marketing industry can be very complex. Especially if you are new to the industry. There are so many factors: keywords, ad copy, ad placement, verticals, reading data. It can be overwhelming! Relax….the best way to fix the feeling of being overwhelmed and having it effect your business is to live by these simple characteristics and repeat them daily to turn them into habits. 

Self Control when optimizing the right campaign: Far too many times we have seen a search affiliate get pumped up about making the BIG almighty dollar. They set up the offer and within the first 5 minutes they are changing keywords and bid prices. They see one conversion and think it is going to lead them to the treasure pot of gold. If you are going to do this business the successful way and build a strong solid foundation. You need to expect to test a lot and lose some money. The idea is gathering actionable data. It will let you know what works and what doesn’t. It will tell you when and how to move forward. Having 30 clicks and 1 conversion is not even close to knowing what will work. You need hundreds if not thousands of clicks to gather (depending on the offer of course). Having the right actionable data can be the difference between a profitable campaign and a losing one. 

Put into Practice: Continue to test. Don’t touch the offer until you have actionable data. 

If the offer is too good to be true…it probably is: I think you all know the offer that I am talking about. But just in case….can you say acai berry. I am not saying don’t advantage of a killer offer like that. I am just saying don’t get greedy. Never put all your eggs in one basket. Have a menu of great offers that you can have rocking and rolling so when one goes down you wont feel the big hit. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.  

Put into Practice: Run at least 5 AKMG offers daily and constantly be testing new offers, even if you are already killing it on your favorite offer:-)

A-B-L: Always be Learning. There are more and more successful affiliate marketers than ever these days. The industry is moving at an all time high pace. The best way to increase your revenue and profits is A-B-L. Know that you will never know it all and commit yourself to constantly learning and growing your knowledge base. 

Put into Practice: Read at least one hour a day of something related towards your business. 

These are a few golden pearls of wisdom that we have noted from the habits of a strong vs. weak search publisher. There will be more to come make sure you keep coming back and checking in.

Happy Holidays!

Chris Mello 

To strike a tasty balance (and a profitable one), it is extremely important to compliment your PPC endeavors with good SEO practices.

Aside from varying pay-per-click expenses, PPC landing pages and portals cost money to maintain. In any standard PPC campaign, your return-on-investment (ROI) will rely exclusively on your campaigns’ respective performance.

There’s a way to have your PPC costs reduced greatly or even disappear. How much will your organic volume cost you? Absolutely nothing. That means that any conversions you receive via organic origin is going to always be 100% profit.

Take this 100% organically harvested converting volume and throw it right at your PPC costs! Although learning and implementing of good SEO practices are not for the weary, this approach is extremely straightforward and will prove (with the proper TLC) to increase your net profit!

For more information on good SEO practices, check out this great reference guide from Google ( I assume they know what they’re doing ): http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

If you’d like to leave SEO to the pros - check out our sister company, Content Kings Media Group.

Happy Holidays,
Josh

Last week I discussed how to find your ideal CPA network. In that blog a big part of finding your ideal network is a good affiliate manager. This week we will look into finding your ideal affiliate manager. Take notice of these characteristics with your affiliate manager to find out if your relationship will be successful or not.

They should know their publishers

Give your AM an opportunity to know as much about you and your business as possible. If you don’t trust your AM then one way or another the relationship will never reach it’s full potential. When doing business with anyone in any industry trust is key. Trust takes time and experience to develop. You will be more interested to take their recommendation when the next offer is presented to you. 

They better know their stuff

It should go without saying that you have to know what you are talking about. When that next offer is presented to you, ask questions. Your AM needs to know and communicate to you why this is the next best offer. If he/she can’t sell you to run how is your audience going to buy it. Don’t be afraid to call their BS.

They better treat you like their best friend

The cardinal rule for every good AM is the more money their affiliate makes the more money they will make. It is not the other way around. The focus of your AM should be to make you the most amount of money you can make. If you want/need something from them ask it. If they don’t respond to your emails, aim’s, or voicemail. You are not that important to them.

Bottom line if your AM can abide by these three traits you are on the right track. It may seem like simple stuff to follow but in reality it does not always happen. Every month analyze your business and one thing to take notice is your relationships with your AM’s. Are they helping your grow your business or slowing you down? 

Any thoughts?

Talk to me,

Chris Mello 

You spend hours and hours perfecting you PPC game. It’s hard enough finding a pocket a hitting it big when you have tons of competition.

What do you do when your competition is unethical and shady, producing more than non-negligable amounts of fraudulent clicks that you pay pay for?

The first thing to really get a grasp of before you can fight back against these dregs of PPC society is to understand just why they want to produce clicks into your accounts. First, they want to help burn through your investment capital. The more you spend on untargeted clicks, the better for the fraudsters for a few reasons:
- So your quality score goes down dramatically (especially if you have provider-based analytics enabled)
- So your CPC can tentatively become more expensive (the more clicks you get doesn’t necessarily mean a lower CPC)
- So they can taint your conversion rates and overall analytic integrity - provider-based or not.
- If all of the above happen for you, the fraud-loving hoodlums can possibly see a higher quality score, lower cpc, and general punk satisfaction.

Here’s what you can do to fight back and control / prevent click fraud:

- Ensure that your PPC provider, whomever it may be, has good policies and systems in place to battle click fraud. This is always the most important.

- Limit your campaign-targeting and geo-targeting to specific countries only. Some countries have a much higher concentration of click fraud than others. They will literally pay people to click on your ads all day long while rotating IPs on proxies.

- Be careful with content matching. These ads usually appear in ‘AdSense’-esque displays, which means the displayer get cash every time a click is made - you can see why fraud is lucrative for them and bad for you. Lower your bid for content placements always. Alternatively, if your provider allows you to target only high-value / high-quality sites, exclusively get display there.

- Use a central analytics tool. I recommend Prosper202/Tracking202. You can see combined analytics from all providers.

- If you have a real problem on your hands, consider a utility like ClickTracks. Although it’s pretty expensive, it could be an asset to the superaffiliate that is experience analytic data integrity / click fraud issues.

- Monitor your campaigns. It sounds simple, but click fraud algorithms and trends are specifically oriented to the publisher that just ‘lets the offers run’ with no monitoring. They go quite unseen in these cases - be careful - a hand could be in your pocket without your knowledge.

That’s it for now - hit me up with any questions!

Josh

With social media traffic on the rise, online marketers are scrambling to find the best way to monetize it.  Not only is there banner space on the social networks but there are also applications and widgets that not only generate traffic but also require a high level of user interaction. Working on the affiliate side, I can tell you I have personally seen an increase in affiliates marketing ads on social media, Facebook predominately.  

I can see why in the CPA world buying is successful on Facebook, as their user base is slightly older than most social networks, college graduates with spending money.  They also have an easy self serve interface to load up campaigns.  For a newbie this has to be one of the easiest ways to jump into internet marketing with little to no overhead.  This is also where seasoned online marketers can easily make additional revenue as they will have a leg up being familiar with epcs and what cpc bid points they should start at.   

If you are an affiliate interested in trying out social media buys, Facebook is a great place to start.  Please feel free to reach out to myself or Chris Mello to get insight as to what is working and can even put you in contact with an actual Facebook rep who can give you valuable insider info and guide you through the process.