Marketing | Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

ReviewMe vs. PayPerPost

It’s only been a day since I added my blog to the new Review Me Marketplace. Instead of having to find bloggers that I want to write about my blog, I can simply add my blog to the marketplace and bloggers can accept to review my blog on their own. Once a blog is reviewed through the marketplace, you will receive an email on it’s completion. Today I received three emails from Review Me on new bloggers reviewing this blog. I wanted to see what it looks like as a "Blogger" to login to ReviewMe, so I quickly made an account. It looks like there are currently three other Review Me Marketplace reviews up for grabs… coincidently, mine is on top… and all are at the base rate of $5 per review.

Here is what you will see as a blogger when you login into ReviewMe.

Below is the list of the first three reviews received through ReviewMe Marketplace.
- Yep, You Can Make Money with Zac Johnson
- The Sapheyerblu Review – Zac Johnson
- John Chow, Zac Johnson. Review Me
(English Translated Version)

After only the first three reviews, I have a decent amount to comment on. The first blog I read was "Yep, You Can Make Money with Zac Johnson". As I have felt with a few other paid reviews through PayPerPost, it feels like the bloggers are looking at your site for only a second, to get an idea on what to write up, then simply link to your blog. I felt this way when I read this blog post. The write up could almost be used for any money making type of blog, then simply change out the site/link name. There wasn’t really anything specifically pointed out in this post, to show the blogger actually read my blog. I’ve seen quite a few blogs like this through PayPerPost, and it’s disappointing when you pay to have a review on your blog/site. You want to actually see what they thought of your site, but when you read it… it’s just "blah"…
(Update: Blogspire.com made a post on this site’s comments section letting me know he was
upset I was not happy about the review and said he did actually read through my blog. I appreciated his honestly and went back to his site to re-review his review. Looks like he also updated his original review as well. Shown below:)

"This isn’t all that Zac Johnson does! He is prepared to put his money where his mouth is. He actually paid money to several paid to blog sites to test whether you were getting your money’s worth, damn if I didn’t fail the test :redface_wp:

. Still you live an learn, and hopefully I will become blogger for it.

The one thing I learnt is that I should have probably searched through his blog more to see all he had to offer. The problem was he had so bloody much to offer and I only looked at his home page and should have covered some of his categories of which he has many, like how to go about affiliate marketing, or possibly even his list of bad companies. Gee I could be here all day talking about Zac Johnson, but the truth is I only have to give 5 bucks worth."

The second blog post was "The Sapheyerblu Review – Zac Johnson". I was happy with this posting. The blogger actually spent more than a minute at the site and listed key points, such as the different categories, pointed out affiliate marketing and even some posts on the stock market. Just based off the written content, I am happy with this review.

Finally, the third post was from "John Chow, Zac Johnson. Review Me". ReviewMe definitely needs to add some options to their Marketplace setup. PayPerPost has a lot of options, but being able to select what language is a must. If I didn’t know about babelfish to translate this one, I would be in trouble… but what about everyone else. This is a foreign language blog. The translation reads very poorly, so it’s a little hard to understand. However, I can still distinguish that the blogger did take time to review the site, and is pointing out my "Review Me & Win Cash" promotion. When the option is available, I would want to select English only blogs.

I’ve already tested out the
PayPerPost setup and have had 15 blog reviews done through their site. I offered the base rate of $10 per review for both Review Me and PayPerPost. This comes out to $5 for the blogger, and $5 to company, a 50% split. I’m not going to review my paid posts through PayPerPost, as there are quite a few. If you glance through them, you will notice a variety of different quality reviews. A few have the same problem I mentioned earlier, which was a low quality quick review, and some of the reviews are also exhibit poor english and bad grammar.

- Make Money with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson
- Make Money with Zac Johnson
- Make Money With ZacJohnson.com
- Super Affiliate Zac Johnson
- Would You Like to Make Money?
- Zac Johnson–Make Me Some Money!
- Make Money with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson
- Make Money Online; It Can Be Done. See How.
- How to Make Money
- Maximizing Your Affiliate Revenue Potential
- Make Money with Zac Johnson
- Where are the super affiliates?
- Make Money
- Question: Who is the Super Affiliate?
- Make Money with Zac Johnson

Another very big point to bring up is that these are $5 reviews to the bloggers. If you are looking for a high quality blog review or expecting a lot of traffic, the ReviewMe Marketplace is not the right place to do so right now. On PayPerPost, a blog review for $5 is basically anything goes. If you are looking to limit your blog review to higher pagerank sites, better alexa rankings, and high traffic sites, it will cost you more. The higher the quality, the more you pay for the review. Right now these options are not available in the Review Me Marketplace. You might be saying that if I want higher quality reviews I should pay more. This is true through PayPerPost, but without the ability to set any limitations on blogger quality, I would just be paying extra money to any blogger and to Review Me through their new Marketplace. I am sure they will quickly add the select options / limitations soon.

In short, the comparison between the quality of paid blog postings from ReviewMe vs. PayPerPost are the same for now. Both have their own pros and cons. Hopefully as the "review me" and blogger marketplace grows, we will see a move towards more standards coming into place on the quality of blog postings. I have another 7 reviews up for grabs in the ReviewMe Marketplace. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are a bit better quality considering future blog posts will (hopefully) include this new posting as well.

06 May, 2007 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Marketing, Site Reviews

Review Me Marketplace

I was accepted into review me a few days ago as a blog reviewer. For now the review rate is set at $50. I’m not big on plastering ads all over the blog like most, so this will be a new source of income for the blog, while making an interesting new resource for sites.

As you may already know, I like having others review this blog as well. Review Me just went live with their new Marketplace, which is what they were missing to compete with PayPerPost. Now bloggers will have the ability to log in an choose what advertisers they would like to blog about, and get paid for it. Review describes the service as:

“A campaign is a 30 day standing order available to our bloggers who choose whether or not to review your product. You set up information on what you would like reviewed, the number of reviews you’d like to receive and how much you would like to spend per-review.”

If you log into your blogging account with ReviewMe, you should see that I setup a campaign for 10 reviews for this blog at the base rate. I had done some testing with PayPerPost and the quality of the reviews were so-so… a few good… but most were average, with poor page rank/alexa. Of course you can pay more for higher quality and page rank bloggers, but I was looking for a lower cost test across the board. I will post any reviews done through the “Review Me Marketplace” and let you compare them to the PayPerPost reviews I had done. Then you can decide on quality.

05 May, 2007 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money, Marketing, Site Reviews

Digg HD DVD Processing Key

Have there been any after effects for Digg after they have been published all over the internet the past few days for their HD DVD Processing Key post removal? If you haven’t heard already, a Digg user had posted a story featuring the HD DVD Processing Key. HD DVD is an advertiser on Digg and was not too happy about this, so they asked for it to be removed. Digg was initially against removing the post, but money rules… and they listened to their wallets (and advertiser). The story was removed from Digg, then the users got really angry. At one point Digg even had to remove their submission form for new listings, but quickly set the function back up again.

While this is already known by most, what isn’t known by many is the after effect on Digg. Did it hurt them, are users leaving, or could this have helped them? While going through some Alexa stats I came across the Digg’s chart and you can clearly see the effect on it’s site traffic since the whole HD DVD Processing Key fiasco. (click the image to the right for full view) Their traffic rank power went from their 1 week average of 81 to an amazing 48! This just goes to show you… sometimes even bad news is good news!

04 May, 2007 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Marketing

Great Friends and Money Making Blogs

I always stress how important networking is to your personal and business growth. I would not be where I am at today if I didn’t make the sporadic decision to attend CJU 2000 in California with my father. This was my first big networking event and gave me a ton of new contacts to work with. From CJU I went on to meet a lot of influential people and make some very good friends. These friends would also lead me to Affiliate Force, which would soon become Affiliate Summit… what is now one of the largest affiliate networking events. Today I wanted to make a list of some of my good friends and their blogs, along with some other great blogs that I visit daily and this you would find useful.

Affiliate Tips by Ola Edvardsson
Unfortunately Ola does not focus or update his blog site anymore, but I had to give props where due. At my first CJU event I went to talk to Ola after his presentation and he took the time to listen to a teenagers story and aspirations for making money online. Since talking with Ola that day we have been great friends since. Ola has also been a speaker at many other events as well, including Affiliate Summit. If you are starting out online are are lucky enough to find someone like Ola Edvardsson when you are starting out, you are golden!

Affiliate Tip Blog by Shawn Collins
I’ve known Shawn for a while now and even went to a bbq at his house a couple years ago. He is also lives in NJ, just like me. Shawn is one of the most well known affiliate marketers/managers in the business. After spending a lot of time working with ClubMom.com, he decided to start working on AffiliateSummit full time. On Shawn’s blog he discusses what’s new with Affiliate Summit, his visits to conferences and any other important industry news and opinions he may have to offer.

Marketing Ideas Online by Jim Kukral
I first met Jim through AffiliateForce/AffiliateSummit and we have been good friends ever since. Jim was recently awarded “Blogger of the Year” at the last Affiliate Summit West conference. Through Jim’s blog you will read about all many different web site projects and what else is going on in the industry. You may even find a few ways to cut some costs with his web hosting discounts and marketing ideas.

Make Money with John Chow dot Com
While I don’t know John Chow personally (yet), I wanted to make sure others knew about his site as well. John has one of the fastest growing money making blogs and has some very useful information on the site. In addition to his many reviews on web sites, best programs to make money with and cool wordpress tools, you will also find he has a quality selection of posts on fine dining and cars!

There are many other quality blogs online, but these have been a few of my favorites! Enjoy!

28 April, 2007 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money, Marketing

Motivation for the New Guys

I’ve been making money online for over 10 years now, and the reason I started this blog is because I want to share valuable information with everyone so they can start doing the same. Making money online can be fun and exciting, but very intimidating in the beginning as well. For the first couple of years I was making money online without spending a dime on advertising. How is this possible? What I would do was focus on designing very high content quality celebrity sites. This was a very time consuming task as I was still fairly new and made hundreds… if not thousands of straight html pages. Where did I make money? The celebrity content was mainly made up of content from Amazon.com, as I was in their associates program. The content from the site would index so well in the search engines, that’s where I would get all of my free traffic. I ended up producing over $100,000 in sales for Amazon.com and earning at commissions at their 5%-15% rate. During this time they were only selling books, movies and music. Back then it was funny because Amazon.com sent out quarterly reports, they didn’t have the login area for you to just check stats whenever you wanted. In addition to Amazon.com sales, I was also able to place "free trial offers" on the site as well, where I would be paid a small commission per lead. I would go on with this process over the next couple years and continue tweaking my sites more and more as I learned more about making money online as well as new offer types came out.

The point of this post is to let you know that some serious money can be made online without having to spend big bucks or worry about setting up big advertising campaigns. You simply need to think of a great idea that is unique or something everyone could want and use. It also doesn’t hurt to work on something you are interested in. I’m sure if I was making a ton of pages on a boring topic I wouldn’t have been as motivated to make the pages. With celebrities you always have a cycling of new search engine activity as new movies come out and whom they star. I actually had fun working on pages and seeing all the different movies that celebrities had been in. Do what you enjoy and the money will follow… same applies for making money online!