Over the weekend I was reminiscing about some of my earliest efforts to make money online. I tried a lot of strange things, most are long forgotten, but there are a few I remember. As I look back now, some of those ideas were surprisingly ahead of their time. I always had a full time job so these were just things I tried in my spare time for fun.

1997? – The first website I ever built was called The Downhill Scene. I was heavily into downhill mountain bike racing at the time so I learned HTML and made a really crude site. Compressed images, tables with borders, the works… I had no idea that monetizing a website even existed back then, but it was a fun site. I even had web 2.0 style user generated content with an HTML guestbook.

2001- I had an idea to write what is now known as an Ebook and sell it from a website. It was a 5 page PDF guide on how to secure your PC against spyware and viruses. I put the site up and waited around for traffic, and actually sold a few copies. I was an info product marketer without even knowing it. I even used Ebay auctions to sell it as well as drive traffic back the site to make sales there. I think that might have been against the rules.

2002 – I signed up for a weekly email from Dell computers that sent out coupon codes. I would take the coupon codes and buy notebook computers, usually at about 30% off, then sell them on Ebay. This actually worked for a while and I made about $100 profit on each computer. I would buy 10 or so at a time, store them, manage the auctions, deal with shipping, returns – it was a total nightmare. But I was pretty proud of myself to actually make money on my own.

2003 – This was a big breakthrough when I finally realized you didn’t actually have to have a product to make money online. So instead of managing all the headaches of the Ebay stuff I would try affiliate marketing. I made a website with the coupon codes then got in the Dell affiliate program. I even made a form on my site to collect email addresses to notify people when the codes were released. I pasted those email addresses manually into a spreadsheet and did the emailing manually as well in Outlook. I had no idea at the time, but I was a list building marketer! This was going pretty well, until Dell threatened to sue me for copyright infringement.

2005 – I learned about Adsense and started building all kinds of sites for that. Then I learned pay per click, tied it into affiliate marketing and the rest is history. I never really got serious about making my living online until 2005 , but after deciding thats what I wanted to do things really took off.

What crazy things did you try back in the day?

I get several emails a week asking me if I know any programs or ebooks that are actually worth it for learning about affiliate marketing. If you have been following this blog for a while you know I am very critical of most courses and almost all ebooks. 99% of them sell only hope and hype with no information that can’t be found with a simple Google search.

There is one program I have mentioned before that is the only one I will endorse on this blog. It’s the Black Ink Project 2.0. This course is not some quickly thrown together ebook by a guy looking to make a buck off newbies. This is a 15 session training course that will teach you everything you would need to make money in affiliate marketing. Its not some get rich quick program, you need to put in the effort to follow the steps laid out in the sessions. It’s no different than learning any profession, you have to study the course material and apply yourself. This program is like a college course in affiliate marketing.

The course is delivered in 15 hands on video training sessions with topics like:

• How to Test Your Niche
• Develop a Successful Business Plan
• Creating a Site Blueprint
• Professional Web Design for a Fraction of the Price
• Outsourcing Web Projects
• Finding Profitable Keywords
• Setting Up and Optimizing Pay Per Click Campaigns
• How to Build High Converting Landing Pages
• Tracking Your Success

This course is the real deal, and the author Jeremy Palmer has been in this business a long time and knows it inside and out. I contacted Jeremy and told him I wanted to blog about his course and he even created this exclusive page with $20 off the normal price of $97 for my blog readers. The amount of content you get for $77 is just ridiculous. This is not some rebilling or subscription offer, just a one time $77. In addition to this discount, Jeremy is also throwing in a free upgrade to the Black Ink Project 3.0 which is in the works right now and will be even bigger.

This course is a must for anyone in affiliate marketing, no matter your experience level. Should you get it? Let’s put it this way, it would be hard not to succeed after following the Black Ink Project course.

We are coming into the busiest and what I consider the best time of the year for affiliate marketing. February and March have always been the highest revenue months for me, with December being a close second. If you have been thinking about trying some campaigns, now is the time to get to work.

Why is this such a busy time of year?

Valentines day. This is the mother of all online holidays. There are so many offers that relate to Valentines day, its just a matter of picking one and getting started. The whole month of February is good, but buyers really get into a frenzy as the big day nears. If you don’t already have your V-day campaigns in place don’t wait another day – your competition is already optimizing.

Income taxes season. People start getting their w-2s and February is a huge month for tax related offers. These offers are always strong converting this time of year, and even though there is lots of competition you can always get a piece of the pie. Throughout tax season people are also getting refund check that they are eager to spend online, which is nice for other offers.

School is in full swing. All the popular offers do well when students and colleges are in session. Most of the college crowd offers including ringtones/dating/scholarship offers do great this time of the year. I don’t run any of these personally, but the network reports show high volume in Jan-March.

Super Bowl. (go Cards!) The Super Bowl is a big online event as well as on TV. Try to capitalize on an offer of a company that has a TV commercial during the Super Bowl. I have had great success in past years doing this.

The bottom line is, this is one of the best time of the year to ramp up your campaigns and get to work!

We are making a big push around here in 2009 to automate as many things as possible and make life easier. To that end, we have been testing a lot of new tools lately. Not sales letter page things, but actual tools that I think show some promise. Although most end up not working as advertised, some are actually turning out to be worth using.

With all the emphasis we are putting on building our landing sites for SEO as well as PPC, we needed a fast way to build up links. This technique helps with quality score, bid prices, and eventually free traffic to affiliate sites. One tool we tested that does work as promised is Social Submitter. The software automates the submitting of links to social bookmarking sites. It can submit to 160 social bookmarking sites and is a very advanced program. You can create filters for your submissions, use proxies, and see the status of your bookmark submissions all within the program.

I almost hesitate to blog about this one, because I think its a great advantage to have. This could be used to promote straight affiliate sites, or just bookmark your blog entries to get more exposure for your site.  But with a price tag of $150, most people will pass this one up. As far as I’m concerned though, any tool that helps make money is always worth the price. They have a demo you can use to try the program to a limited number of sites for 3 days, if you want to test drive it. Is anyone else using this software to boost affiliate sites yet?

There is so much misinformation floating around the affiliate marketing and PPC universe, I thought I would take the first post of 2009 to dispel some of these myths. Of course – mine is just one more opinion, so take it for what its worth.

• There is no one secret niche you don’t know about that “super affiliates” are making a ton of money from. Everyone has access to basically the same offers.
• There are no secret paid traffic sources that will make you a killing. Just versions of the basic 3: PPC, social networks, and media buy (display) networks.
• There are no ebooks that you can buy that will instantly make you money. Ebooks sell hope, not information.
• There are no forumulas for quality score that you can apply to every campaign to get perfect quality scores.
• There are no landing page templates that you can apply to every offer to be successful.
• There are no keyword lists that you can steal from your competitors to instantly make you money.
• There is no one technique that works between search and content.
• There is no one technique that works as far as direct linking vs landing pages.

What PPC and affiliate marketing all boils down to is one word: testing. That is the only truth in this industry built on gray areas.

Every niche, offer, landing page, keyword group, and tactic is different and the only way find out what works is testing. The reason I have been successful over the last 3 years is because I didn’t believe a word I read, and tested everything for myself.

There is one other common factor for success and that is hard work. Every person I have met who does well in affiliate marketing has put in countless hours getting to that level.

Want to make it big in affiliate marketing in 09? The only secret you need is start working hard and testing.

We are very focused on PPC at CDFnetworks for ourselves and clients. But I have dabbled in social network content advertising on Facebook and Myspace. There are a ton of opinions out there about social network advertising. Opinions are great, but I wanted to gather hard data on what converts better. I decided to run a case study to see what kind of conversion rates I would get on the Adwords content network versus Facebook.

The campaigns:

It’s very hard to do an exact test of PPC and social network advertising because they are very different animals. I want to single out conversion rate, so I tried to keep as many other variables as possible the same. I ran the Adwords test only on the content network, so both tests were contextual. I used the same ad text on Adwords and Facebook. I also sent both traffic sources to the identical landing pages on the same domain with tracking installed to gather the results. Both campaigns were set up with demographic targeting. Obviously Facebook allowed the use of a photo, which I could not duplicate on Adwords.

Sorry, I can’t show the ads or give away the niche because this is a niche I am still actively promoting.

The total stats for the Adwords content network:

The total stats for the Facebook network:

I was able to get similar spend amounts for the test. However, I received over double the amount of clicks on Adwords due to the lower CPC, and much higher CTR. I had good quality score which allowed me to lower my bids throughout the test. I had to run a pretty high bid price on Facebook to keep the ad running for the duration of the test. But both amounts of clicks are statistically valid for the purposes of the case study.

Conversion results:

The results were surprisingly close:

Adwords:

Total conversions: 1,250

Total overall conversion rate: 4.8%

Facebook:

Total conversions: 449

Total overall conversion rate: 3.9%

I had expected a blowout in conversion rate by Adwords, but they were not that far off. Although 4.8 is a 23.1% increase from 3.9 which is significant. Of course given the lower CPC, the Adwords campaign in this case was much more profitable. If I would have been able to lower the bid prices on the Facebook campaign to a similar amount the profitability would have been closer. The Facebook campaign also produced a huge number of impressions that I could capitalize on with a better CTR.

Bottom line:

Both traffic sources converted, which is the most important thing. But for the money spent, Adwords PPC was clearly a much better result in this case.

Its no secret that on most CPA networks these days you will find offer after offer that is just set up as a way to trick people out of their money using credit card card billing techniques. It used to be, merchants would think of a way to deliver a product or service that people would want and establish a long term customer. Now it seems the whole business model of these merchants is “hope they don’t read the fine print credit card re-billing” offers. The goal being to get that one expensive rebill in before the consumer cancels. Is this legal? Yes. Is it ethical and good business? I say no.

Anyone can see that this is not going to be sustainable. Eventually consumers will grow more and more angry and lawyers will step in – maybe the government. (remember “free” ringtones?) The whole house of cards will eventually collapse. Who’s going to be left holding the bag? Possibly publishers with outstanding commissions, possibly the networks themselves.

If CPA networks want to survive, it’s time they stop accepting these offers on their networks. If the networks can’t self regulate themselves, someone is bound to do it for them. The problem is, when they are making tons of money off these junk offers, no one really wants to cut them off.

As the networks keep adding more of these offers, their credibility will continue to fall. Then advertisers with real products or services will look elsewhere run their offers. So its really in all of our best interest in the long run for networks to stop accepting these offers and publishers to stop running them. There are offers out there that can and do work with the CPA model that actually provide value to a customer. Those are what will make this industry continue to grow and make us all money, not the scammy ones.

What do you guys think?

Direct linking, in terms of affiliate marketing, is linking your PPC campaign directly to the offer page. This cuts out the intermediate step of stopping at a landing page. I did a post a long time ago about when to try direct linking, if you are interested in more info.

The question came up in the comments of a recent post when discussing landing pages versus direct linking. Can you even direct link anymore? The answer I have found is yes and no.

Yahoo and MSN are still not very aggressive with their policies towards direct linking. For the most part you can set up a campaign today, drop your affiliate link in the destination URL, and be up in running in no time. After a while you might get an email that your ads have been inactivated – or you might not. But in most cases, you can direct link with no issues.

Google is very strict about direct linking. They state clearly in their policies that the destination URL must match the display URL. If you get past that one, they have another policy to only allow one advertiser per URL to an offer. So most of the time if you try to set up a direct linking campaign these days, you will instantly find your ads inactive. I recently tried a new direct linking campaign and half the ads got shut down right away, but half continue to run no problems. I also have some older campaigns that have been direct linking for many months.

Like everything in affiliate marketing, you have to test to find out for sure. But I have found direct linking is still possible. How about you?