My Blog Readers have Earned Over ONE MILLION with Neverblue

Over the past decade I’ve had the task of working with many different affiliate networks. Some thrived, died, went out of business and a few also went on to be acquired and become parts of larger companies. One of the few successful and very profitable networks I’ve had the joy of working with, has been Neverblue. From what started out as a small affiliate company, has now grown into one of the top, thriving affiliate networks in the game today.

Since the inception of this blog, Neverblue has also been a proud sponsor and I’m thrilled they have seen such an amazing ROI. Through banner ads and mentioned on the blog, I’m proud to announce that over ONE MILLION DOLLARS has been earned through new referrals Neverblue from this blog ($1,191,700 to be exact). This not only shows that Neverblue is still one of the best networks to generate revenue, but also that the readers of ZacJohnson.com know how to make some good money for themselves.

Breanne Storey of Neverblue had the following to say.

“Congratulations Zac on surpassing the $1 million dollar milestone! The Marketing department at Neverblue is always thrilled to see the number of referred Affiliates Zac provides us with. To date Zac has been responsible for delivering over $1,000,000 in referred earnings to Neverblue! I am looking forward to seeing the quality Zac can continue to bring to our Affiliate referral program”

- Breanne Storey, Marketing and Communications Specialist, Neverblue

I would like to thank Neverblue and all of my readers for making achievement this possible!

30 November, 2009 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Summit, Blog Earnings, Featured, Web Developement

Breakdown of a Profitable Facebook Ads Campaign

With the latest backlash of articles coming up on TechCrunch about deceptive and scammy ways to make money on Facebook, I wanted to provide you with a full breakdown on how to create a successful CPA Facebook ads campaign. Step and step details on a campaign I had running months ago.

The best way to do this, is by looking over an old campaigns that I have on pause and aren’t running anymore. A lot of the offers I have on pause are still available, but I never went on to monetize them enough to bring in a higher ROI. This campaign in particular is just under a year old, but the offer is still running actively on ClickBank. The product is for an ebook on skateboarding tricks and easily gets passed through the FB Ads team. During this $300 test campaign, the ROI was around 10%, and that is with very little monetizing and real targeting. Yes, I know… 10% isn’t much of a margin, but this wasn’t monetized or split tested at all. Instead of continually tweaking this campaign, I moved onto others. Now it’s your turn to turn it into something better.

Setting Up the Ad Campaign
When I first setup this ad campaign, I’ll threw together a bunch of ad copies and spent a few hundred dollars to see what happens with it. Go ahead and use the ad images and text copies from my campaign and see what type of profit margins you can hit.

Here is the direct ad copy and targeting that was setup for the campaign. I go into more detail below. You can download the top four CTR ad images used here. (Ad1, Ad2, Ad3, Ad4). Recreate an exact copy of this campaign, or get creative with some new copy.

Campaign Stats
3,746 clicks
1,505,202 impressions
0.249% CTR
.08 average click
$301.14 spent

ClickBank Skateboard Stats: $330.21 Rev

Deep Targeting; Picking the Right Keywords:
No matter what type of campaign you are setting up, the key to success is in your “keyword targeting”. For this skateboarding campaign, I only targeted users interested in “skateboard” and “skateboarding“. Just off those two keywords, you are hitting 192,860 18+ users. I just went through and looked for new skateboarding terms and there are lot more to play around with. The list below contains a few keywords available on Facebook for targeting skateboarder.

FB Skateboarding Keywords: skateboard, skateboarding, skate, skateing, skateboardin, skater, skate park, skating, tony hawk, rob dyrdek, rob dyrdek skateboarder pro, rodney mullen, ryan sheckler

Getting a High Click Through Rate
If you are familiar with Facebook Ads, you already know that one of the biggest goals is to achieve a high click through rate. This is mainly a result of your ad copy text, ad image and your keyword targeting. The screenshot below shows my ad campaigns sorted with the top CTR% on top. Once you achieve CTRs in the .35%+ range, you can usually get clicks for pennies each. “Secrets of Skateboarding” was the best performing title. The top four CTR% ads below are a mix of the ad text shown at the top of the post, and the downloadable ad images.

Keep the Good Ads, Remove the Bad
If you prefer to setup your campaigns on a CPC basis, setup a ton of different ad copies and run them for a while. Once you have a good amount of data and impressions/clicks, pull out the best ads and moved them over to a CPM model. If you do this properly, you should end up getting clicks at a cheaper rate.

Finding the Right Offer:
The end offer I was promoting for this campaign was through ClickBank. If you go into the market place, type in “skateboard” and you will come across two ad campaigns. The campaign I was promoting, “Secrets of Skateboarding” was the better of the two… however you might be able to come across other skateboard training / affiliate programs elsewhere.

Secrets of Skateboarding pays out $14.33 per lead, and requires a credit card. This means you will need to get cheap clicks, as it was converting around 1 in 160 clicks for me.
view landing page

How to Improve Campaign Profitability:
As mentioned earlier, I just threw this one together real quick and wanted to see what numbers were produced. With new programs available like 4 Hour Affiliate, you could monetize the hell out of this campaign with age/gender sorting. I was targeting male/female 18+. Users under 21 are less likely to have a credit card, while users over 35+ are less likely to still be active skateboarders. Closing the gap and selecting an age range between 21-35 may bring much better results. Don’t forget to also sort by age. Another last peice of advice is to build your own landing page, before sending the user to the sales page.

I can’t promise you the same results, but this is the exact setup I had to obtain a small profit on the campaign. Take what I had running, and make the changes I recommended and it should work out for you. If I get some decent feedback on this post, I’ll do another campaign breakdown soon.

03 November, 2009 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook, Featured

Create Killer Landing Pages – Free Template

I get questions all the time about landing pages and what are the best ways to create them. Instead of writing a post on what you should focus on, I will simply take an existing ad campaign from MarketLeverage, and made a real landing page out of. I also made the base template design for the landing page, so you can save it and use it for any future campaigns you want to test. The campaign that this landing page is going to focus on, is for NiteTrim, which is currently paying $25 per lead through NeverBlue, and you get paid on the user paying for shipping and handling.

Landing Page Template

First, let look at the default template and what we are going to do with it (below). What I did was create a default landing page that can be used for almost any offer you want to promote. All you need to do is rewrite the text to make it apply to the actual offer.

Now that we have a base design, all we need to do is modify the design to match the NiteTrim offer and make it appeal to the visitor. After adding a new “targeted” picture and content, you will see the custom landing page template now looks like a full dedicated offer landing page for NiteTrim. Play around with colors and wording for the best visual effects.

Golden Tips for Testing Landing Pages

- Rotate & Test Images: Right now I have an image of a girl measuring her waist on the landing page. After I would go live with this ad campaign, it would be smart to build several other landing pages with a different picture of images. Possibilities include, actual product, other weight loss pictures, different girls and more.

- Add Testimonials or Legitimacy to Your Campaigns: On the landing page created for NiteTrim, you will also see that I created an image to show the product was features on several well known tv shows and new sources. To stress the product even further, I added a full testimonial and before/after pictures.

- Call to Action: Probably the most important feature of your landing page, is the “Call to Action“. What text are you going to use to convince your users to click further and hopefully convert them into a sale. “Lose Up to 10lbs. in Just 7 Days” is an excellent header right in their face. Then the “Claim 1 Month FREE Supply Now!” and the “Try It Free Today” are stressing the point even further.

FREE LANDING PAGE TEMPLATE
I already showed you how to make an awesome landing page out of a template design, now it’s your turn. Click here and download/save my custom default template and create your own landing page.

Also included in the download is my NiteTrim landing page. I’m also going to extend this landing page post, by allowing you to use the “NiteTrim” landing page that I created, to promote the campaign yourself. If you aren’t already an affiliate with NeverBlue, join now, then grab any affiliate offer and start promoting the program using the landing page I created, or change it up and test what different image and text changes can improve your campaign performance.

Article Links:
- Join NeverBlue to Promote Affiliate Offers
- Download my Custom Landing Pages ZIP File

Resource: MaxFoundry has an excellent landing page creation plugin for wordpress. If you would like to create killer landing pages without racking your brain and wasting a ton of time, check them out!

09 June, 2008 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Featured, Make Money, Marketing, Pay Per Click, Web Developement

Insider Secrets to a Making a Million Dollar Web Site!

A few days ago I released my first post on “How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!“, along with the picture of my $306,373.24 check. Due to the massive exposure and questions generated from the post, I thought I’d bring you the second installment to How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months! This time we will go with a Q&A theme.

What is the web site you made all this money with?
The site I was able to have so much success with is MySpaceNow.com. There is no programming on the site at all, and it’s made up of over 10,000 pages of content, such as images, myspace layouts and social networking applications/flash. Yes… you can imagine how long that took to put together. However, when you are seeing results, you just want to keep making your project bigger and better!

What is the current status of your site?
My myspace resource site is still running and still turning a decent amount of profit each month. The traffic is lower than it used to be, but that’s expected. I was one of the first to get into the “myspace resources” niche, and now it is more saturated than ever.

What is/was your site traffic?
I first started the site from scratch and with no traffic. The first method of advertising, were a few text links on a couple of my other sites. Next was to get the word out on MySpace and other social networks. Once the users started to grab content and link back to my site, it was golden. The high point for site traffic was around 185,000 uniques per day. Currently the site receives around 15,000-20,000 uniques per day. Yes, this is quite a drop… but as mentioned above, I haven’t focused on this site in over a year now.

Having Multiple Dedicated Dell Servers to Manage Traffic was a Must.

When was the last time you updated the site?
I’ve been quite busy with many other projects, so realistically, I haven’t touched or updated the site in nearly a year. Meanwhile the site still receives several thousands of visits per day, while also earning several thousands a month. My only maintenance is monthly servers fees, which are much lower than they were back when I was working on the site full time.

How did you make so much profit over costs?
The myspace site I created was a huge viral success. Once a few sites picked it up, the traffic was tremendous, and search engines were sending me a ton of traffic as well. Since I did not have to worry about marketing costs, I could focus on providing content, managing ad space, and making sure the site was always accessible. The main costs in running a site like this (outside of the hundreds of hours of time spent), are server costs. Over $100,000 was spent on shared hosting, buying new Dell servers and hiring a server management team to make sure everything was always running.

What were your advertising and hosting costs?
As mentioned, the site was pretty much all viral. After running the site for several months with no advertising costs, I decided to give Google Adwords a shot. I was able to target towards some pretty cheap traffic, since my Quality Score was super high, and this was a niche market that wasn’t oversaturated (yet) and click prices weren’t insanely high. Marketing through Google Adwords brought in over an additional MILLION clicks. Even after $27,721.89 in adwords cost, the site still had no problems clearing seven-figures. Hosting costs ranged per month from $300 (when first starting out), to up to $10,000 a month, before buying my own Dell servers and hosting myself.

I was able to generate over 1 MILLION clicks using Google Adwords!

What other ad networks did you use on the site?
In my last post, I focused on some of the big earners from the site, which were Yahoo Publisher Network, NeverBlueAds, CasaleMedia and ValueClick Media. Other earners on the site were Interclick (which is another cpm banner network), Miva (which provides screensaver/wallpaper downloads), Google Adsense (generated nearly six-figures in revenue), AuctionAds (I posted multiple times on my earnings with them), WidgetBucks (another new program, which I also posted earnings on)… along with a few other networks. All of these advertisers combined generated over seven-figures in revenue for the site… which clearly covered the hosting costs, making this a seven figure profitable site.

You made a lot with Yahoo, but what about Google Adsense?
Originally I had no expectations for the success of this site. I was providing a service and it exploded quickly. Once the traffic was flowing through the site, it was time to test different ad placements and to see what worked. Luckily, the Yahoo Publisher Program had come out (and accepted my site), just a few weeks after my site went live. I was originally running Google Adsense, then started running Yahoo Publisher Network instead. After comparing numbers, Yahoo was providing much better numbers. I would continually rotate advertisers on the site and see which performed best. While Yahoo earned nearly seven figures alone on the site, Google Adsense accounted for nearly six-figures in revenue as well.

Google Adsense in itself generated almost $100,000 in Extra Revenue.

Would you have sold your site if you had the chance?
The opportunity to sell this cash cow of a web site did come into play around the 7th or 8th month of it’s existence. I wrote a post about this a while ago, which was called “To Sell or Not to Sell“. While I was offered nearly a seven figure package deal for the site (more/less depending on performance), I’m still glad I never accepted their offer. The parent company that was interested, was purchasing up a bunch of Social Networking Resource & Entertainment sites… which they then all turned into crap sites. I also heard that this company screwed many of their “partners” on payments owed from their buyouts.

Why did you wait until now to post your check?
I’ve never been one to look for attention, or brag. The intention of posting my check was not to impress anyone, but to stress to everyone the possibilities before you. Yes, the check was received back in 2006. However, keep in mind… this blog is still less than a year old. I have literally spent the last year debating on whether or not I wanted to be put in the spotlight, if I was to post this check. But I decided to take the risk… my intention is the same as always, I want you to succeed, make money online and live the dream that us affiliates and ppc marketers are living.

Why didn’t you post your resource site in your original post?
The main reason why I didn’t like my resource site in my original post is because this is a blog, and it’s purpose is to keep people coming back and giving them more. A lot of people were leaving comments, asking what my site was. You were not being ignored… you were part of the process. Not only have I released my site information, but also how I promoted the site, my advertisers and actual earnings numbers.

Is this your only big and successful web site?
I’ve been making money online for over 11 years now, since I was 15… and have never had any other job. A one-hit-wonder I am not. Over the years I have adjusted to every market change there has been. I’ve done freebie sites, permission based email marketing, ran my own ad network along with my own network of entertainment sites. Was this site one of my biggest and fastest money makers? Yes! I saw an opportunity here and made the most of it. I am now focusing on several other different niche areas and projects.

Aren’t you worried people will copy your site idea now?
They say being copied is one of the highest forms of flattery… well, when you own a web site, and you’ve been copied… IT SUCKS… but, I’ve been copied plenty of times before. There is still plenty of money to be made in this market, but it’s also plenty saturated! You want to make a resource type site? I say “Go for it!”.

As mentioned before, I’ve been making money online for over a decade now, (since I was 15!) and have some close friends that advise me on what I should post and what I should not post on my blog. There are risks associated with everything. Some have warned me about giving away too much information. However, if I didn’t meet up with these people in the past, that took their time to help me along the way, I wouldn’t be where I am today… I only wish to do the same for you and all of my blog readers. Yes, it may be risky providing the amount of information that I do, taking risks and trying different things is how I got to where I am today. I’m willing to take that risk to benefit my blog readers.

20 February, 2008 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Featured, Make Money, Marketing, Web Developement

How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!

First off, I would like to make it clear that this post is NOT to impress you, but to impress upon you what’s possible! This is a quick review on how I went from one of my worst years of making money online to my best year, and all it took was one big idea, one web site and several hundred hours of effort along with many sleepless nights. This is “How I Made $860,538.38 Profit in 4 Months!“.

MARKETING EXPERIENCE & RIDING THE WAVES:
Time and time again, I talk about how you must change your marketing niche every once in a while to continuously make new money online. Over the years I have done everything from content web sites, to sweepstakes and freebie type sites, to running my own affiliate programs and even permission based email marketing. In early 2004 I had one of my best years with making money online, then later on in the year things started to slack off and this continued on through most of 2005. At the time I wasn’t making much money and it was quite depressing. It’s very tough to get back into the groove when you hit a few underachieving projects in a row. In short, I was in a dip… and at the bottom of my latest successful wave. It wasn’t until October 2005 that I came up with my next big idea that would soon bring me my best months and year!

FIND A NEW IDEA & TAKE CONTROL OF IT!
Social networking was just starting to catch fire and for months I knew there was a way to profit from it, but I just hadn’t come up with an idea yet. MySpace had millions of users on their network 24 hours a day, there had to be a way to take advantage of this. Soon enough I realized, instead of trying to sell to all of these users, why not offer them something for free. I ran through some ideas and came up with my own site to provide free content for social network users. To make a long story short, my site and my content went viral extremely fast. Instead of having users upload their own content or have to search around for what they were looking for, I provided everything for free. In no time I was receiving thousands of users to my site daily. At max points I was pushing up to 180,000+ unique visitors per day, while pushing TERABYTES of data bandwidth. Imagine hosting thousands of images, viewed by millions across several different social networks!

MANAGEMENT OF MASSIVE GROWTH:
Just two months after going live with my new site, I was starting to accumulate some amazing hosting costs. Imagine the cost on hosting thousands of widgets, text applications and images, which are loaded millions of times a day across social networks like MySpace! The only reason why I was able to afford these insane hosting costs, was because of the massive volume of users I was receiving back to my site, not only through social networks, but also from Google and other search engines. You only need a small percentage of a very big number to click on ads, fill out surveys or take any action, to make money. In two short months I went from having a single dedicated server to having over TEN, then with the insane bandwidth costs added in I was paying up to $12,000 a month. At this time I was currently with EV1Servers.net, and leasing all of my servers. Since I’m not a tech/programmer type guy, I also had a server management team watching my servers constantly to make sure they were always running, just being down for a few minutes would have lost $100s of dollars. This server management team was not part of EV1Servers, and cost $1000 a month to manage all of the servers, and keep the servers balancers in place. By the end of the third month, I talked with my server management team and we decided it was time to for me to invest in my own servers and take out the middleman for hosting. I went on to order 17 servers from Dell, which are all held and managed in a data center now.

MONETIZATION IS KEY:
On average, my site was receiving around 100,000 unique visitors per day, and I was generating most of my ad revenue through Yahoo Publisher Network, ValueClick Media and CasaleMedia. It wasn’t until a year later that I would start testing CPA offers on the site. To my surprise, the CPA offers from networks like NeverBlueAds worked extremely well. Originally I had stayed away from promoting a few of their offers because I thought they were over saturated and wouldn’t convert. I finally took their advice and listed a few on the site and to this day they are still pushing some great earnings through the site.

TO EXPAND, SELL OR STAY THE SAME:
Back in April, I wrote a post asking the question… “To Sell, or Not to Sell?“… This was a question I had to ask myself when I was approached by a company that wanted to merge/purchase my MySpace resource site. I not only turned down their seven-figure deal, but I was lucky enough to not be one of the many sites screwed by the company, as they tried buying many other sites as well. Once acquired by the company, they would wreck the site with adult-like video content and I heard from several people on how they got screwed out of their owed money and contracts.

SUCCESS IS FOUND:
Two years, and over seven-figures later… my little site idea that rapidly became one of my most profitable ideas yet, is still running strong. Despite the fact that I really haven’t touched the site in several months, it’s still receiving over 25,000 uniques per day and still making a decent amount of change.

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EARNINGS DETAILS:
As I mentioned earlier, three of the main initial revenue sources I monetized my site with were ValueClick Media, CasaleMedia and Yahoo Publisher Network. While I did use other programs such as NeverBlueAds and Google Adsense later on, these three programs were heavily used during months of peak traffic. As for promotion costs of the site, during this three month period, there were none. No PPC Advertising either, everything was viral traffic and a couple links off my other sites. This write up focused on how I made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 months. The site is now well over two years old and has since earned over seven figures in profit/earnings.

ValueClick Media is a company that buys your web site advertising space on a CPM basis. From my stats chart below, you can see the monthly increase in revenue went from $243.63 to nearly $30,000 a month.

CasaleMedia provides the same type of service as ValueClick Media, but are more strict with acceptance into their program. They also have higher CPM rates, but usually purchase a smaller percentage of your ad space. Peak earnings with CasaleMedia were around $7,000 a month.

One of the major reasons for my dramatic increase in income, was due to the release of the Yahoo Publisher Network. This program, run by Yahoo, is basically their response to Google Adsense. Like Adsense, you are paid an unknown percentage for each click you send to the contextual advertisements displayed on your site.

It wasn’t til about a year after launching the site, that I would start testing with CPA offers from NeverBlue. To my surprise, the majority of offers I listed on the site performed extremely well. Even though I thought the market was over saturated on these offers, there was still a high demand. With the new revenue generated from NeverBlue, the site was able to pull in another $60,000+.