Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

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 … Read More

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 … Read More

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. … Read More

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 … Read More

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 … Read More

Affiliate Fight Night with Randy Couture

When it comes to affiliate marketing conference parties, it seems like ClickBooth‘s job is never done. This time around they are putting everything on the line and they are ready to fight for it!

In what other industry can self made millionaires, nerds, gurus and everyone alike mingle with the likes of Randy Couture and have one of the best networks around flip the bill for it! Simply priceless!

Here’s everything you need to know.

Monday, January 9, 2012 / Time 10:00pm until 3:00am

Affiliate Fight Night at Xtreme Couture MMA with Randy Couture
Live Fights!
Meet UFC Champions
VIP Open Bar-Go Go Dancers
Hot DJ
*Transportation provided to and from!

Join in on the action at the Affiliate Fight Night Facebook Fan Page!

19 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Summit 1 Comment

Three Ways to Increase Your Click and Lead Quality

When it comes to online advertising, it’s all about the “click“! However, the dynamic of what makes the person click is what is really important. When you are promoting an offer on a pay per click basis, it’s extremely important to keep your quality at a higher rate, but the same results apply when pushing a cost per action based offer too. The bottom line is, you want to be providing quality traffic for your advertisers. The better traffic and leads you can send their way, the more likely they will increase their ad spending with you, and will have a much longer and successful relationship.

Let’s look at three different ways you can start increasing the quality of your click throughs and leads generated.

Stop Trying to Trick the User

Remember those banners that would flash non stop and say that you were the millionth visitor and were awarded a prize? Those banners were doing exactly the opposite of what we are talking about here. They were going after as much traffic as they could possibly get, then sending their visitors to an email/zip submit type of offer. The data provided usually has a very fast turn over rate, and is sold to multiple media/ad buyers.

Instead of trying to trick your audience into clicking on a link, think about the ways that you can relate to your audience and make them want to convert. While an insane blinking banner may bring in a lot of clicks, the conversions might be terrible. Spend more time on targeting the right audience and giving them banners they want to see and can relate to. Your cost per click may be higher, but you will also see higher conversions and provide the end advertiser with better quality leads.

Make the User WANT to Click

One of the best ways to find an audience of people who are anxious to click on your little blue text links, is to provide them with exactly what they are looking for. Let’s take review and coupon sites for example. How many times were you searching for a product or service to buy, and you were just looking for the right review or coupon code? Once you found the information you were looking for, you would gladly click on a link in their web site to go forward with the sale or purchase.

This is exactly why coupon and review sites do so well. When is the last time you did a search for “web hosting reviews” on Google? The web sites paying to rank for these terms are paying a lot of money for where they rank, but all of the traffic to these sites are high quality. Sure, the site owners are probably getting $100+ in commissions per sale, but they know they can convert their traffic because they are providing exactly what their site visitors are looking for.

Pre-Sell Your Audience: Withholding the Click!

Another excellent example of getting high quality click throughs is through the use of video marketing. We can relate to this method all too well. How many times have you received an email from another guru/marketer, and you have to wait and watch their annoying video before being able to click to the next page and/or place your order?

It’s annoying, but it works! By making the viewer not be able to click away from the page, it’s actually making them listen and watch your video, with is continually selling them on the dreams of what their product can do for you… further increasing the chances they will stick around and buy once that final “Click Here to Purchase” link becomes available.

What Type of Traffic Are Your Providing?

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a market and business of cheap, dirty and crap leads… but when you are looking for long term and high end commissions, lead quality is where your focus should be. When promoting any ad campaign and pushing volume, it’s important to keep in touch with your ad network or the advertiser directly. If you are pushing quality leads that continue to convert on their backend, they will gladly send a few more dollars your way to increase the volume and reward you for your efforts!

17 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money 8 Comments

Branding and Pay Per Click Marketing Through Email

According to Inc. Magazine, the average employee sends about 38 e-mails a day. How many emails do you send and receive on a daily basis? Now think about how many you send over the course of a year! Better yet, think about how much extra exposure you could be receiving through all of those thousands of emails if only you had some form of customized or branded email with your personal message or company information. That is the goal and concept behind WRAP Mail.

For years companies have tried to create a platform that could easily be sent through email, without the hassles of getting blocked by filters, while also making it a big frustration for the email users to send/receive mail. WRAP Mail is that solution.

The best way to explain what WRAP Mail can do for your business and branding, is to show you. You can visit the WRAP Mail web site and watch the short video on their web site, which is quick and fun, but also shows you how easy WRAP mail is to use, and how it works.

In short, WRAP Mail…

Turn every day emails into brand marketing
Wraps your emails with a unique interactive letterhead
Shows your email recipient your regular text email, with a great design
Reports to you “Click Alerts”, which tells you who is where on your web site.
Provides benefits for any type of business, web site or personal use

Driving New Sales & Customers with Daily Emails

Now as I mentioned earlier, the average employee sends 38 emails a day… If you only send around 27 emails a day, that’s still over 10,000 emails a year! Using a system like Wrap Mail can dramatically increase your business by putting your brand and advertising right in the face of your customers. If you were to only convert 1% of the people reading your email, with the additional branding and links within your wrapped email, that’s an extra 100 leads. Depending on your sales or lead generation, this could actually be much higher.

What Will Your Wrapped Mail Look Like?

After talking with Rolv from WRAP Mail and looking through the different options and services they offer, it’s quite a great looking program. Nearly any web site or business can customize their emails with a wrap that represents the look and feel of their business, while also increasing the bottom line.

The Wrap Mail design team can built a customized look for your web site or business. Just take a look at some of the custom designs posted on their site from current customers.

Yes, You Can Even Earn Money with WRAP Mail Too!

With such a unique and fun service, you would think there would be an ad serving network attached to it, right? Well, there is! WRAP Mail is in the process of rolling out their new advertising program, where clients can earn money for users to get paid when people click on their links and complete offers or decide to sign up for a product. This platform will be similar with Google Adsense, in that the users of WRAP Mail can opt-in to receive a pay per click rate based on their recipients clicking on advertisements placed within their email wrapping. Since many people are using WRAP Mail as a personal choice and looking to customize their email, and not specifically promote their own business or web site, this introduces a whole new world when it comes to emailing. You can read their latest press release on this announcement here.

What Does it Cost, and How to Get Started?

Surprisingly, WRAP Mail PRO is free for companies and individuals looking to use their services, as long as they are less than 100 employees. It’s easy to signup, all you need to do is fill out a short form and you will get started immediately. If you would like to set your 100+ employee company up with an account and custom email design, simply contact WRAP Mail directly.

14 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Web Developement 1 Comment

How to Study, Break Down and Promote an Affiliate Offer

Gone are the days when you simply throw up a bunch of affiliate offer banners and hope for the best. Well, you still can do that, but you are destined for failure, and why would you want to anyway? With all of the information and targeting that you now have right in your hands, how can you pass up on the extra due diligence to make sure your ad campaign succeeds.

A new pet affiliate network that I’m working with has a wide variety of affiliate offers that any pet lover, pet blog or resource web site would love. While looking through their selection of offers, I thought it would be a great idea to take one of these offers, then show how you can study what you know about the offer, then start promoting it through different sources.

One of the well branded offers on the network is PetCareRX, which is a discount pet supplies and medication web site. The offer pays $30 per signup and is only for email promotion, but there are plenty of other offers on the network which allow other methods such as banners, social and web site advertising. Since PetCareRX is a well known brand, let’s go through some of the different ways we can research the company/offer, then build a campaign around their site.

Quantcast User Demographics

First let’s run over to Quantcast.com and pull a demographics report on the type of visitors that are going to PetCareRX.com. Right away we can see some key figure in the chart below. The ones with blue have the majority of percentage for each demographic. At a quick glance it looks like we have mostly females, who are 35-50+, caucasian, have no kids and a mid range income. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it’s a great way to get a quick feel on the type of demographics that might perform best with your offers.

Plenty of Fish = Plenty of Pet Owners

Next let’s head over to ads.pof.com and create some ad campaigns to promote PetCareRX. We aren’t going to focus on ad copy right now, but instead how easy is it for you to take what you learned from Quantcast, then put it into action at POF.

Check out the screenshot below from within the POF ads manager. How cool is that? I just targeted all of the demographics that were pointed out above, but I was also able to go even a step further and target only pet owners!

Facebook Ads = 1 Million Pet Lovers

While Plenty of Fish doesn’t tell you exactly how many pet owners they have on the network, the next best thing is to head over to Facebook Ads and create a campaign targeted to people that already have an interest in “Dogs” and “Cats”… and by the way, just targeting those two terms in the US brings in over 1 MILLION users! You can even target “PetcareRX” on Facebook interests, and reach 6,000+ die hard fans. Think about all of the other popular pet web sites and interests that could be targeted.

Google Keyword / Site Search

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what keywords and search terms PetCareRX were bidding on to bring people to their site, or what long tail keywords people are coming across in the search engines, and getting to their site? Sure enough, we can do that! Head over to the Google Keyword tool and run a report, but not under the keyword section, but instead for the petcarerx.com web site. Google will then pull up a massive report of relevant keywords that you can use to advertising your landing pages and search engine marketing.

Help, I Need More Banners & Ad Copy!

It’s a growing trend that affiliate networks are not providing as many banners and ad copies as they used to. For such a scenario, you can usually head over to Moat or MixRank and pull up a ton of banners and creatives that are running through out the web. Unfortunately neither of these sites had any banners or creatives for PetCareRX… what to do? Get old school and head over to Google Images and perform a search for the domain name / site you want to advertise, then use the “Exact Size” feature and you will probably find some banners that you were looking for, like the screenshot below.

Putting Everything You Know into Action

Woah, we just covered a mega ton of information on how to promote an offer. Best of all, this same process can be used to break down any affiliate offer or web site out there. In this example, PetCareRX was only available for email promotion, but imagine of how many other campaigns are out there for social networking, cpv, search and banner advertising… a ton! Never before has it been so easy to break down WHO is buying WHAT, and how you can TARGET their exact DEMOGRAPHICS in an ad campaign.

Since I’ve already laid out everything for you on how to make money with pet affiliate offers, why not head over to PetAffiliateNetwork.com and check out what other offers they have on the network.

12 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money 5 Comments

Holiday Sales Trends and How to Profit From It

There’s no better times than the holidays… not just from a personal perspective, but also for running a business and making money online! The amount of money that people spend during the holidays is quite ridiculous and this year’s spending has been breaking records, as people are spending more than ever! It doesn’t matter what the economy looks like, people still want to shop and buy things for themselves and others. Knowing what products people are buying is the difference between having a killer holidays season for sales, and missing out on the next big thing.

Through holiday sales figures, you can get an inside look on what the hottest toys, games and products are going to be, and how you can start making money with each. Let’s break down a few different places that you can start using when doing your holiday due diligence. Even if you missed out on the massive buying this holiday season, you always have next year… and the year after, and after!

Amazon is Your Friend

The business of Amazon.com just keeps growing and getting better every year. While it’s a customers dream to log on to their web site and be able to order virtually anything they can think of at discounted prices, it’s just as much of a dream work for online marketers.

When Christmas and the Holidays come around, Amazon.com is ready and they are cranking out the top / most wanted gifts like crazy. Even when it isn’t the holidays, you can still browse through their web site and break down virtually any type of product or brand in the order that they are selling best.

Internal Ad Networks and Consumer Buying Trends

Amazon isn’t the only place you need to visit to see what people are buying. There are plenty of ad management companies out there that are willing to share their data and buying trends that they are seeing on their back end. VigLink, a contextual marketing company, has compiled a few lists of their top 10 best selling products during the holiday season. Since they are currently serving ads across millions of web sites, they can weed out what products are selling and getting the most clicks.

After looking through the lists, you will notice that many of the top selling products are brand names and items that are top performers every years, such as Apple/iPhone, Video Game Titles, Barbies and Movies related Toys. Building a niche web site for each of these products or brands can deliver holiday traffic and sales year after year.

As a holiday promotion, if you register and install VigLink before Dec 15th, you’ll be entered to win one of the top 2 products on each list that are featured on the top selling holiday products that were listed above.

National Sales Reports & Buying Trends

As you can see, nearly all of the shopping and advertising companies already do the work for you when it comes to reporting what the best selling items are, and the forecast from buyers during the pre-Christmas holidays. Know where people prefer to shop online and where they feel safest with their order processing, can play a huge part in your overall marketing efforts and conversions.

Just take a look at some of the highlights and stats provided by the retail industry and news/research organizations.

Black Friday Weekend Sales Results According to the National Retail Federation (NRF):

$52.4 billion was spent over Black Friday weekend
226 million shoppers were in stores or on websites making purchases over Black Friday weekend
Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers spent an average of 9.3% more in 2011 than the same weekend in 2010

Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday Online Sales Results, According to market research firm ComScore:

$816 million was spent online on Black Friday 2011, which was a 26% increase over black friday 2010
$479 million was spent online on Thanksgiving Day 2011, which was an 18% increase over Thanksgiving Day 2010
Year-over-year Cyber Monday sales were up 22% in 2011, when compared to Cyber Monday 2010

Cyber Monday 2011 Results According to IBM Smarter Commerce:

Year-over-year Cyber Monday sales were up 33%
The average purchase amount was $198.26, 2.6% higher than the Cyber Monday purchase average for 2010

Cyber Monday 2011 Internet and Mobile Shopping Results According to IBM’s Cyber Monday Benchmark Report:

11% of shoppers used a mobile device for their Cyber Monday shopping, an increase of 3.9% over Cyber Monday 2010
6.6% of all Cyber Monday purchases made on Cyber Monday 2011 were made from mobile devices
The Apple iPad was the mobile platform which generated the largest number of retail sales on Cyber Monday
The percentage of sales from mobile devices was higher on Black Friday 2011 than on Cyber Monday 2011 (9.8% and 6.6% respectively)
Online shopping peaked at 2:05 PM EST on Cyber Monday (during regular working hours for most)

Did You Miss Out This Year?… It’s Not Too Late!

With Christmas just a couple weeks away, it’s probably too late for your to make a big pay day this year, but don’t get discouraged. With many customers still relying on last minute buying and still unable to get some of the hottest products of the year, getting creative and advertising through social networks like Facebook Ads, can get your ad campaigns and web stores right in the face of potential buyers.

If social advertising isn’t your forte, and you are more focused on web sites and ecommerce, take what you’ve learned from this year’s sales figures and put them into action for next year. Everyone is looking for coupons and review sites. Look at the top selling products for the past five years, and many of these items will be top sellers again next year.

The bottom line is, many businesses are built around the concept of making a ton of their money during the holidays, and if this isn’t one of your focuses, you need to see what you are missing out on.

10 December, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing 4 Comments