How I made $1,000 in 3 days With Affiliate Marketing

I Can't Stress Enough The Importance

My dear friends and readers. I know this sounds cheesy but you guys are awesome... I love my followers and the people that post comments and send me private messages, you are wonderful. I want to talk to you a little about my methods and what you need to do to follow. I know that you can make money online, I've done it, and you can too! I want you to shift your perspective a little... start to steer away from SEO and PPC... SEO is a true way you can make some money but PPC is nearly impossible unless you have your own product. But, you are an affiliate marketer and you need to do the things that will reward you the most. I don't want to sound like I'm beating a dead horse but you really really need to get into banner advertising. This is where you can be rewarded as a marketer... As I stated in an earlier post, the reason that PPC is so high is because the marketing has already been done. Somebody has already advertised a product or service well enough that somebody will go into Google and actually search for it... That's why it's so expensive, the work has already been done. Banner advertising rewards you for doing that work.

With banner advertising you have the opportunity to get in front of somebody and convince them to visit your offer... you have the chance to make the sell. They aren't searching for it and you now have a small window to convince them.

You can take that small window and convince them to click and it will cost you PENNIES in comparison to PPC... often times with banner advertising you can get people to click through for under $.20, even as low as a nickel! That means that with $5.00 you can have up to 100 clicks! If your offer converts at better than 1% and pays more than $5.00 you just found a profitable campaign and you only risked $5.

I ran a CPA offer over the last few days (read the post "CPA is the way" if you don't know what CPA is). The offer paid $.85 cents for a zip submit. This meant that I'd get paid 85 cents every time somebody put in their zip code... seems small right? Well I did a test of only $3 with a banner ad. It turned out that I was getting a 33% conversion rate... meaning 1 out of every 3 people that visited the offer put their zip code in. My clicks were ranging from 12 to 15 cents...so worst case, I'd spend 45 cents but I'd make 85 cents... that's almost double my money... Yeah but that's only 40 cents profit big deal right? It is a big deal when you do that 300 times in just a few hours and make 120 bucks!

You need to learn banner advertising... it works with both CPA and Affiliate offers like Clickbank products... I am hear to help and value your questions and input... please let me know if you need anything!

Banner Blindness

We live in an extremely over marketed world... The only time we are not bombarded with ads is when we're asleep and even then (if you're a banner advertiser) you dream of ads... there is no escape. So how do you avoid falling into what I call banner blindness?

Most sites we visit have banners throughout... often times we don't even see them. They get more and more sophisticated with animations and catchy phrases yet they still seem to disappear. How can you create a banner that doesn't fade into the background like the rest of them?

I don't have the perfect answer, but I do have a good one. Most sites we visit tend to be well designed and the banners fit in nicely. Everything is nice. When you're looking at a sidewalk what do you notice? The cracks. So my suggestion to you is this: Create a crack in somebody's website. If the site that you want to advertise on is nice and pretty make something not so nice and pretty... give it hard edges and regular old arial text. Make it somewhat dull. It may not look great but it gets the attention and it's all about the CTR's isn't it? The same principle applies to ugly sites... make a banner that is beautiful... that cracks the sidewalk.

Answers To Recent Questions

First for ReggieMax26... Your question was: What is CPA?

I actually just addressed this in an earlier blog, scroll down when you're done reading this post and read "CPA is the Way" That should answer your question... let me know if you have anymore.

Footbag_Man... You asked: Do you use contextual advertising (PPV) to market your CPA offers?

Actually no I don't. I specifically use banners. I start with CPC to see if my CTR is going to fly with CPM and when I see that it does I switch over. I create my own banners and it seems that the simpler the design the better the ad.

For Margaux25: You said "You can't get to see the types of products they have over at MaxBounty unless you register? What types of products do you support and how do you market them? Only Banners?"

No you can't see the products they offer until you're a member. CPA is fairly exclusive, it doesn't cost anything to join but you'll have to be interviewed so make sure you know what you're talking about. I stick with short forms. This means, I promote products where I get paid when a surfer puts their email in a field or their zip... the shorter the field the better! And yes, I only use banner ads... Check out banner ad blueprint... there is a link to the right... I highly recommend it. You don't have to buy it through me but I wouldn't be upset if you did :)

Let me know if you have any other questions, I like to help! Be sure to join my list, I don't spam... I just send invites to come back to my blog or to check out other interesting posts.

Thanks

Ryan

Please... Not another Clickbank product

I'm not one to push Clickbank products too much... Most are done to death and super tired. The one draw to Clickbank is those stupid bars... they are such a powerful marketing tool. Anybody who sees those bars either gets really excited or turns green with jealous rage (from one of my favorite movies, Hot Rod). There are several other affiliate networks out there that offer much better products but their "bars" are never as exciting as Clickbank's.

Anyway, enough about that. I am going to throw out a plug for a good program. Alot of people have been asking me how I'm making money in affiliate marketing and I can either teach them, which is a pain, or send them to a place where I know they'll get the information. I don't have time to teach, I don't really want to either, too much time on the phone. So I typically send them to Banner Ad Blueprint. Everything I do to make money in affiliate marketing is taught in that video course. It's still not easy though. You still have to do your research, test, and then test some more, then test again, then on top of all that, you have to test 20 more times.

But, if it was easy (as stated in an earlier post)the companies wouldn't pay us (the affiliate) to drive the traffic, they would do it themselves.

So, my plug about Banner Ad Blueprint is done, if you want to check it out there is a link over to the right. I don't make money with Clickbank so don't feel obligated to click through.

Have you joined a CPA network yet? You need to, there is nothing greater. Affiliate marketers are so willing to drive traffic to a Clickbank product in hopes for a sale when they could be promoting pages where they get paid when the surfer fills out a form or enters their email... It's much easier to do that than to try and get them to pull out their credit card, trust me. Join Azoogle, Mac Bounty, Clickbooth, Neverblue, or Copeac, apply to all and hopefully you'll get accepted to one or two. Make sure you call and follow up with them, they like to hear your voice. You also should make sure you sound authoritative, tell them you are big into media buys and banner ads and they'll probably let you in... but they may ask where you like to buy media... make sure you can answer that question :)

Good luck, check out Banner Ad Blueprint... you can learn alot even from the "affiliates" page.

*This post was not a sales pitch... if you want to buy banner ad blueprint you don't have to do it through my affiliate link... I'm just recommending it to the people that have asked me so many questions

CPA is the Way

For those of you who aren't familiar with CPA, you really need to read this post and take some action. I'm not talking about your Certified Public Accountant, I'm talking about Cost Per Action. This is where a website owner will pay an affiliate for a particular action that their visitor completes.

For example:

I own a business opportunity website, I want more leads. So, I put my offer in an affiliate network and offer to pay an affiliate $3 every time a visitor fills out a particular field. It's up to the website owner to monetize the new lead, the affiliate has made his commission and is on to the next.

CPA is a great way to make some serious cash, it's so much easier than trying to get your visitor to purchase something and it's much easier to test on a smaller budget.

Let's compare:

If you wanted to sell a Clickbank product that cost $99 and your commission was $70 you'd have to test your traffic for about 3 times that much to see if it was worth it. In this case, you'd need to spend about $210 on ads to see if it will convert well enough to go big... that's a pretty heavy amount to test with.

Now, with CPA, let's say you want to promote a dating site that pays $4 per lead. You throw up a banner or a PPC campaign and test it out for three times the value of the lead or $12. If within $12 you don't see some conversions you know it's not worth your time. Much easier to swallow $12 on a test than $210.

There are several networks out there... Some are difficult to join. My favorites are Max Bounty, Azoogle, Clickbooth and a few others. You first need to submit an application, wait a day or two, then call them. Typically they won't approve you if you don't sound like you know what you are talking about so make sure you do the research. Drop me a line if you need help. The easiest one to get approved for is Max Bounty, there is a link to their site just to the right of this post.

I know I broke my rule about posting on Sunday but I wanted to talk a little about this. I also broke my rule of running ads on Sunday, I started one at about 5:30 pst and I've made over $130 promoting a CPA offer that pays 90 cents a lead. And yes, that's $130 profit, after I deduct my ad spend.

Sundays Off

I take Sunday's off for two reasons... The first being the obvious, I'm religious and it's supposed to be the day of rest... The second reason, is because we all need the time to re-align. We shut down our computers when they start getting slow and they re-align themselves. Why not do that with the most important and powerful computer we have, our brains?

I don't run ads on Sundays because when I'm running ads, I'm working, not resting. I'm constantly checking, tweaking, and making sure the ads are running properly, that is not rest.

and neither is blog posting... so I'm outta here. Just remember, take some time to relax and re-align yourself. You'll perform so much better when you get back in the game.

A Good Day

Well, I've been in the affiliate marketing realm for a couple of years... Actually I should say, I started, quit and came back and all that happened in a couple of years. It's a difficult thing, there are days where I promise myself that I'll never ever launch another campaign or promote another affiliate offer ever again and there are days like today, which are quite the opposite.

Launching a new campaign is always exciting. The idea of showing your ad to thousands and thousands of people, it's empowering. I am a firm believer in banner advertising. This is your opportunity to be rewarded for your own creativity. PPC is boring, there isn't much you can do creatively speaking, it's also very difficult.

With PPC the work has already been done, somebody has already advertised a product so well that it caused somebody to go search for it in Google or Bing or Yahoo or whatever. Nobody searches for something they don't know exists. That is why PPC is so expensive and usually brings an affiliate nothing but frustration. Banner ads, on the other hand, give you the opportunity to create the interest, which is where the money is.

Banner ads are a form of "interruption marketing" which basically means you're getting your ad in front of somebody who isn't necessarily looking for what you have to offer. You have exactly 160x600 or 300x250 or 728x90 pixels to create enough interest to cause that person to click. Which is where the magic happens and that is where the money is when it comes to banner advertising. Anybody can go onto Google and pay for clicks, that's easy, why would they pay an affiliate to do that for them. But not just anybody can generate the interest, that's where affiliates have the opportunity to make cash.

When I first got started in affiliate marketing I assumed that all I'd have to do is log into adwords throw up some keywords for an offer and watch my bank account grow... I didn't realize how disconnected from reality I was. I would look at my account and see that I had spent about $100, then I'd log into my affiliate account (clickbank at the time) and see about the same amount... I thought it was pretty lame that I would spend $100 and make $100, that wasn't going to do anything for me.

It wasn't until I realized that I was doing what anybody could do, why should I earn money if it's that easy?

This post has been a bit all over the place but the point is this, people won't pay you for something they can easily do themselves. If you want to make it in affiliate marketing you have to do something they can't do... so dig deep and find what that is and soon you'll be having days like today... an extra hundred bucks in your pocket for about 10 minutes of ad creation.