The funny thing about affiliate marketing is, you never really know that the next big thing is… but when it does hit, get ready! Here’s a list of the some best and most heavily promoted affiliate offers over the past few years. You can still promote these bad boys today to make some loot, or get ready for whatever is next!

TRUE.com
The TRUE dating network is still one of the biggest money makers around in the dating space, but when they first started out it was even crazier. I remember seeing this offer on the networks paying $7+ per lead for free dating signups. This was simply due to the web site going live and needing to build up a massive database. If you are still promoting the offer today, think about how nice those extra few dollars per lead would have been.

Make Money Online / Gov. Grants
It was only a few years ago that companies and advertisers finally caught on about the power of FREE SHIPPING and FREE TRIALS. Whether it’s a home based business offer to teach you how to make money online, or a package promising you to glory of government grants… every network seems to be loaded up with low cost, free trial or free shipping offers that only require the user to submit a credit card, for you to get your massive $30+ commission. Good for you, usually bad for the consumer…  who will then get auto-billed if they don’t cancel or return their unwanted service/product.

Crush / SMS Cell Offers
Let’s not forget about social marketing and how to take advantage of it. We all love those annoying flashing banners that say “You have 1 message”. Sure, we as marketers aren’t stupid enough to click them.. but you know they are working, as they are still everyone. Instead of signing up for a web site, the new hot trend is for people to input their cell phone to get dating tips, celebrity gossip or even funny jokes on their phone, while getting billed $10-$20 a month. While the offers may be less advertised in the US now, they are super hot across all foreign advertising networks.

WuYi Weight Loss
The weight loss craze that started it all… and also one of the longest sales pages around, proving they work! When Wu-Yi first came out, commissions were in the high $20s to lower $30 range. Now with everyone in the world having promoted this offer, payments are all the way up to $40 per signup, just for a free trial! ($40 CPA offered at Convert2Media)

Acai Berry
After the WuYi / Green Tea craze… someone had the brilliant idea to add Acai Berry into the mix. With possibly even more promotion than WuYi Tea, Acai seems to be every where. Just search any of the main search engines for terms on “acai berry” or “weight loss” and you will see fake testimonial pages every where promoting these products.

All of these offers were super hot and converting like crazy when they first came out, and still are. The big question is… what’s next?

As if Facebook advertising wasn’t awesome enough, it just got better. Earlier today I received an email titled, “Announcing New Facebook Advertising Metrics“. Now usually when you receive an email from an ad network or stats place that they have improved their stats tracking… it’s usually nothing big, or just some new crappy stats. With Facebook, they actually have provided some value here.

Here is a breakdown on the different new reports you can pull from your Facebook advertising account:

“Responder Demographics” report: Facebook users spend a lot of time connecting with friends and family on Facebook – uploading photos, writing on each others’ Walls, posting notes. Now you can find out who is interacting with your ads. This report provides the aggregate age, gender and geographic location of the users who have clicked on your ad.

“Responder Profiles” report: In addition to age, gender and geographic location of the users who have clicked on your ad, we’re happy to provide psychographic information of these same users. This data is aggregated from user profiles and shows common interests, favorite TV shows, movies, books and music.

“Advertising Performance” report: This report will give you a downloadable version of the performance information you already see online– impressions, clicks and click-through rates—as well as a new section for performance data by unique user and performance data specific to your ads that contained social actions, if applicable.

So what does all of this mean? Basically you now has an amazing amount of new data to work with. You can download the files and open them up in excel and breakdown the type of visitors your ads are attracting. To see that Facebook has opened up and allowed this information to be accessed through your account is simply awesome.

Being able to see what your users are interested in, and what they are doing within Facebook, will give you even more of an edge to making your ad campaigns more successful.

In the announcement email, Facebook also says “these reports are only the beginning“. It will be interesting to see what they offer next.