How many of you know what your affiliate manager likes to do in his/her spare time? It might seem like an overkill but this is exactly the kind of friendly relationship you should be aiming for. Your affiliate manager is there to help you so use their expertise and inside knowledge. I find that too many people simply don’t realize the potential in such a relationship.
First of all you as an affiliate is one of the most valuable assets and affiliate company has. You make them money. Once your leads have checked out you can start thinking about getting a better rate. Affiliate companies need you, so negotiate the price. How do you do that? Via your affiliate manager. Contact him/her and ask for $1.60/lead rather than $1.50. If your lead quality checks out an AM would usually be more than happy to negotiate the prices with you. This is where your relationship plays a crucial part. You are much more likely to succeed with the person who know you and trusts you.
Secondly, most affiliate companies would often have private offers only available to chosen people. How are you suppose to be picked when nobody even knows you? Make yourself know, speak to your AM about your methods of promotion and you may well be invited to participate in the next private offer. Besides, the more the know about your methods, the more they will be able to help you maximise your revenue. Remember, these guys know what converts and how more than anyone.
Finally if you have doubts about your campaign don’t hesitate to speak to your AM first. Keep your emails and conversation history. If something goes wrong you will always be able to refer back to your previous conversation and say:”Look, I spoke to -name- and he/she advised me to do this”. At one point I had a grey hat idea that required some incentive offers even though my affiliate company did not have any suitable campaigns. I actually decided to run my idea past my AM and tell him exactly what I was going to do. A few hours later I was surprised to see him get back to me with a list of offers I could try. Those were none incentive offers that I was allowed to promote in my specific way on one off basis. One of these offers did not convert as well and I was politely asked to stop promoting it. Besides from that minor quirk, a month later I was walking to the bank with a completely legal yet grey hat cheque from my affiliate.
So what I want you to do is next time you log into your affiliate control panel grab your AM’s instant messenger contact details, ad him/her to your contacts and have a friendly conversation about the offers, marketing ideas and life in general. Turn this into a habit and you will thank me one day 
PS: That picture at the top represents you contacting your AM on Skype I know… I know…
First of all I would like to say sorry for the lack of updates. I have had to make a few really important decisions and with increasing amount of work, blogging was not on my priorities list.
I’ve decided that I will not be continuing with my university degree. Instead I will concentrate on my online ventures and continue doing what I was doing full time. There were a number of things that influenced my decision. First of all I did not feel like I was learning anything, in fact, most of the time I was the one sharing most up to date information. Secondly, I just could not see myself doing anything with my degree. Especially when you are expected to fork out all these money in order to get there. (If you don’t remember I was doing Internet Management and Web Design)
In general things have been good. The minute I set my mind to work and my decision was out of the day I started breaking daily revenue records one after another. I am currently concentrating on CPA and ClickBank marketing although after meeting some very talented people we have been playing with an idea of launching a startup. I will keep you updated on that if we do go ahead with it.
I went ahead and removed some of my previous blog posts. The post about Linkbucks was way too cheap. I don’t know what I was thinking. Nobody should lower themselves to the level of earning pennies for spamming links. I would rather teach you some real marketing. Secondly there was a post about Revtwt. Now it looks like these guys are going downhill so don’t bother with them either.
There have been some interesting developments with nofollow links. As you remember I always said that nofollow links still helped you rank better for your keywords. Even though I had some proof, most people remained sceptical. Maybe I will blog about that next and tell you some interesting things Google has been recently saying about nofollow linkage.
Meanwhile, I hope I still have some readers left and I’ll be bloging for you guys soon
Let me teach you a straight forward way to make some cash with Twitter and ClickBank. This method is a perfect side project because it is pretty automated. You probably won’t make millions but $60/day is very doable and requires little effort.
Step 1.
Go to Twitter and sign up. Think of a theme for your account. Lets say that you are going to be a female tennis player. The reason why I went for a female is because sex sells and a much higher % of people are going to follow you. Customize your profile and create a unique template using prettytweet.com
Step 2.
Make a few Tweets about the most random stuff. For example: “Just going out to play some tennis” and “Feeling tired and hungry” etc.
Step 3.
Grab yourself a Twitter friend adder. I personally use the one from livelybrowser.com because I’m sooo awesome I hang around with other marketeers, people give me their products either for free or with a discount. If you don’t feel like spending money I’ve seen tons of different friend adders out there.
Step 4.
Add around 400 friends interested in tennis, wait for a day and add another 400. Continue adding friends every day until you reach 2000 (maximum). Then delete the ones that don’t follow you and repeat the process. Once you reach 2000 followers you will be able to add as many as you like. I suggest you take it easy because you might get banned for aggressive following. The twitter adder I use does everything automatically so all I need to do is click and let it do the work over night. (Don’t forget to carry on posting random updates and responses)
Step 5.
Now when you have a bunch of followers you can go to ClickBank and search the marketplace for a product you can flog to your “friends”. But how do you know which products they might be interested in? Twitter products! There are over 60 various Twitter traffic systems and money making techniques being sold. Some will pay you over $40/sale. If you have 4000 followers on Twitter, making 3 or 4 sales should be straight forward.
Step 5.
Now remember your tennis theme? Well, some of your followers (Those that did not add you purely because you appeared to be a female) are also interested in tennis. Why not sell them some tennis rackets or training videos? Or maybe some sports drinks or other enhancers.
Step 6.
Run to the bank with your cheques.
Every day I bump into people complaining about not being accepted into affiliate networks. Most of them assume that they were rejected due to their country of residence. Being a curious person I actually spoke to a bunch of these guys and asked them to go through their application process with me. I was astonished at the lack of common sense. After fixing some of their obvious mistakes I was happy to see most of them get accepted. Here are a few common mistakes that people make when applying to an affiliate company.
Sound professional
Make sure you communicate in the formal manner. If English is not your first language make sure you get an English speaking friend to go through your application with you. I would not go into business with somebody who can’t string a sentence together, nor I would want to deal with anyone who sounds like an 8 year old kid. Use correct punctuation.
Its all about quality
Affiliate companies look for people that can generate them quality leads/sales. A free Blogger blog created on the day you apply is not going to get you accepted. Get your own domain and hosting. You can start from as low as $30/year. If you can afford internet access you should be able to afford hosting. This will make a whole load of difference. When setting up your website make sure it looks professional, original and has some quality content. I suggest you go for a tech/shopping niche. Most affiliate companies have tons of offers related to consumer electronics and therefore need more people to promote such offers.
Numbers
When asked for traffic stats most people assume that the more traffic they receive, the greater the chance of them being accepted. Most just end up making the number up. Affiliate companies don’t mind if you generate 300 daily uniques rather than 10.000, however they do mind when you start lying to them. Its is pretty easy to get a rough estimate of your traffic. When you say that your brand new blog with 0 backlinks and no internet presence generates 5.000 daily uniques you would get rejected just for your lack of honesty.
Have a plan
Have a plan ready. How exactly do you plan on promoting the offers? Go into reasonable amount of detail, use examples and be specific. With some affiliate companies this level of detail can actually save you from tons of questions later on.
The dreaded phone call
Some affiliate networks might want to speak to you on the phone before accepting your application. For some reason this is the part many people wish to avoid. In reality there is nothing to worry about. The whole conversation usually takes a few minutes. You will usually be asked a few simple questions about your websites and methods of promotion. If you are worried that you won’t be able to understand them, ask your English speaking friend to help you out.
PS: Looks like Google has now given ExposedSEO.com an authority status. Search for exposedseo and see for yourself. I also appear in Google search suggestions for various seo related keyphrases. This is quite funny considering that not that long ago I was spanked with PR:NA. Google obviously had a change of heart.
