So two of the most famous dot com idols had a showdown…who could get more RSS readers.

To start out the competition, John Chow was falling behind. On top of that, Shoemoney pulled out a $13,000 RSS contest. The contest included a total of $13,000 worth of prizes you could win if you subscribed to the contest. Basically you could enter the contest through certain blog readers such as Google Reader each day. 

John Chow, had a much smaller contest, $1800 in prizes, and stole the lead! Both of the blogs are really amazing reads, however I think that John Chow’s lately has been providing more informational posts, rather than Shoemoney’s journal about his life. Sign up for John Chows RSS feed here, and read how you can win some amazing prizes!

Both of these guys really seemed to take this seriously! However it still seems that John Chow is going to take the victory on this one.

So if you like Shoemoney, or want John Chowto remain in the lead, visit their site and subscribe to their feeder!

Happy Friday!

Popularity: 8% [?]

SEO and PPC marketing. Almost an oxymoron right? SEO is really geared toward ranking higher in the search engines, generating more traffic for certain keywords free. PPC is basically for the people who just want to pay to be on the first page of the search listings. However, what happens when you combine the two?

Many people have different opinions on if you should do SEO for affiliate marketing or not, and if it really matters or not. Personally, I think it matters a great deal. For me, and like everyone else, I want to have the highest quality score I possibly can for all my campaigns. This is easily done by certain strategies and methods when creating the landing page, adgroups, keywords, and ad copies. However, if you throw in a little SEO, and get some back links for your new landing page, your QS will be alot higher.

How do you do this? There are plenty of places where you can buy links. A really popular website is www.textlinkads.com where you can choose the websites in which you would like to place links on. You can also find website owners on popular webmaster forums willing to sell you some links on their site.

But what if you don’t want to pay? Simple, social bookmarking. There are tons of new social bookmarking websites out there that allow you to create an account, and submit a link. Within the link, you can usually add meta tags/keywords relating to your website. Make sure these are really targeted, not extremely broad keywords!

Here is a nice list I found of some of the big social bookmarking websites:

1. 30daytags
2. BlinkBits
3. BlogHop
4. BlogLot
5. BlogMarks
6. BlogMemes
7. BlogPulse
8. BmAccess
9. browsr
10. Fark
11. CiteULike
12. clipclip
13. clipmarks
14. Complore
15. Connectedy
16. Connotea
17. de.lirio.us
18. del.icio.us
19. digg
20. diigo
21. fantacular
22. Feedmarker
23. Feed Me Links
24. Furl
25. Gibeo
26. GoKoDo
27. Google Notebook
28. IceRocket
29. Kaboodle
30. linkaGoGo
31. linkfilter.net
32. linkroll
33. Listible
34. Lookmarks
35. ma.gnolia
36. Netvouz
37. Newsvine
38. openBM
39. RawSugar
40. reddit
41. Rojo
42. Rollyo
43. Scuttle
44. Shadows
45. Simpy
46. Sitetagger
47. Smarking
48. Spurl
49. StumbleUpon
50. taghop
51. TailRank
52. Ticklr
53. unalog
54. Yahoo My Web 2.0
55. yoonoo

Enjoy, and remember anything free is free for a reason. It will take some time to do this manually, and create accounts.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The world revolves around money. Some people go to work every day, have a boss, and make a respectable income from doing this.

Affiliate marketers are a completely different breed. Personally, I work whenever I feel like it, whether is 10:00 AM, or 4:00 AM. Many affiliate marketers are like this, and there are so many different ways to make money online!

A very popular way to make a little extra income online is to set-up a blog. It is so simple to do, there are millions of blogs out there right now. Some of them making $xx,xxx each month! Just look at bloggers like John Chow, or Shoemoney, they make tons of bank for writing an article or so each day. How are they making money? Selling advertisements on their websites. Many of these people have “sponsors” who pay them a flat rate each month to display the sponsors ad throughout the month. However, if your blog is not really that popular, you need to try a CPM program.

Basically, a company will pay you for the amount of impressions that you give a banner/ad. Also, there are pay per click programs where they pay you each time a user clicks on an ad on your website. A very popular program like this is Google Adsense.

A new program called WidgetBucks.com was recently released. Basically you install some code on your blog that allows ads to coincide with what you are blogging about. So say you blog about expensive designer clothing, then your ads would be for clothing. Simple!

This program would be great for someone looking to make just a few extra dollars a month to put back into promoting their blog. Also, if you sign up right now they will put $25 in your account! Definitely check this program out, and make some money.

Popularity: 8% [?]

So BlogRush went through and apparently banned over 10,000 blogs this past update. Wow, that is alot of different websites and blogs that they weeded out! They are really making BlogRush spam free, and free of all the low-quality automated blogs out there.

 However, I don’t understand what makes a blog worthy of having the BlogRush Widget on their blog. I read today on www.johncow.com, which is somewhat of a spoof off of www.johnchow.com, that they were indeed banned from BlogRush. According to the guidelines, basically all you need is your own unique content, so that you are not just automating other peoples posts and redirecting them to their site. JohnCow.com has their own unique content, and most of the time some helpful hints. I mean look at the awards they have been nominated for! Seems strange to me…

Either way, my blog passed and I am happy for that, and really like the widget actually. Sends me some traffic!

If you want to sign-up for BlogRush, simply go to their website and submit your blog. It will go through a manual approval process, and if you are approved you will get the code to add to your blog.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Finally Friday again, time for some partying!

Quick update with a few things, remember when I posted about the crazy nice landing pages at only $45? Well he has a website now and that website is http://www.sitestomp.com/. Check it out and get him to design you something for your next campaign!

Also, if you are interested in some sick-nasty crazy sweet web hosting, then you need to RUN over to DreamHost.com and take advantage of their 10th birthday deal. 1 year of some crazy hosting, for $9.30 with a domain registration included! Yeah, $9.30 for the full year, not just each month. Here is a screenshot of the specs:

Wow! This hosting is perfect for the PPC marketer and the blogger. They offer one click installs for wordpress, which if you don’t know much about databases, is a huge plus!

Happy Weekend!

Popularity: 9% [?]

So your campaign has suddenly slowed down, and it is not across the entire network, it is just you alone….what do you do? Well first email/IM/call you affiliate manager, ask him/her what the offers current EPC is doing across the network. Get that number, check your EPC, and then your keyword bids. If you are bidding more than the networks average EPC (earnings per click), you are doomed to fail(not always…)! Never bid higher than the average EPC of an offer when it is just starting out. When I first started, I learned some very valuable information. That was bid the MINIMUM for each keyword when testing! Bidding $0.10 per click is your best bet when testing, because if your offer is paying $20, you have 200 clicks before you break even. Now, if you are writing decent ads, have a great landing page, and have very nice keywords you are bound to make money!

Easy experiments/tests for your offers:

1. Change up the landing page - Do a little re-designing, order a new one, or simply writing new content could really make the difference between 5 conversions daily, and 50 conversions daily. Your ads are the hook, your landing page is the line, and your offer is the sinker(assuming it is something that people actually want). If your missing one of those three, your never going to catch any fish.

2. Raise your keyword bids - So say your offer is paying out $20.00, and you have been bidding $0.10 a click, so you have 200 clicks and still no conversions. Well something is obviously wrong here, and it could be something as simple as where you are ranking in the search engines. If the niche you are in is really saturated, it could really pay off to up your rankings a little bit. However, trying to get a better ranking is not always how much money you are spending, you could always do some small SEO work yourself, or improve the quality of your landing page. Doing these things, will naturally allow you to increase your quality score and rank higher with lower bids.

3. Play with your ads - Normally I write around 10 ads per ad group. You really don’t need that many, but I always like to play around with my wordings and titles. Maybe add a keyword placeholder to your title so that the consumer sees the exact thing he or she typed into the search engine. Try asking a question in your ads, or allowing the keyword you are bidding on to show up in at least three out of the four lines for maximum boldness! Here are some examples of what I mean:
    <–This is an example of an ad with boldness in all four lines.
    <–This is an example of an ad with NO boldness.

 Easily, the one with the bold letters catches your eye more right?

Three simple ways to improve your campaigns, while allowing you to experiment. The best thing to do with search, is to test, test, test, until you finally find the perfect ads, or the perfect keywords that are converting out the roof!

I hope this helped a beginner PPC marketer out there, and if anyone actually reads my blog, leave me a comment or somthin’!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Ok, so we all know about Facebook’s Flyers Pro PPC platform they launched last month, and how people really jumped on it in the beginning. Well, people exploiting the system made ass loads of cash and ruined it for the rest of us! They got rich, the ones who missed it got screwed. Facebook has ended up basically banning any website that has to do with an affiliate offer. They have also banned most words and phrases from popular affiliate programs in the ads and domains. SO, basically Facebook ads blow now, and really are useless(to me at least :(). I then think to myself, yeah Facebook knows that they are worth shitloads of money, and could easily sell to Microsoft for billions, but it makes me think……don’t they want to make trillions? I mean it has been proven that targeting this specific demographic (poor college kids) will make tons of cash with some of these easy “form submit” affiliate offers. So why doesn’t Facebook want us affiliates to spend tons of money on their website? Weird! Don’t believe me that it was once super profitable? Check out UberAffiliate.com’spost about how he was making 5 figures daily exploiting FaceBook Flyers Pro in its early days.

Here is the good news, Myspace.com is going to launch a very similar program very soon! According to the New York Times, the advertiser will be able to really target their audience. I mean think about everything people put up on myspace…if their single, married, male, female, where they live, their hobbies….etc….etc. You will be able to reach 110 million potential customers! If myspace was a country, it would be the 13th largest in the world!!

Personally, I think this will be huge, and am praying that it is PPC, not CPM, although reports have lead more towards a self serve CPM program….we can all still hope. Also, in the NYT’s article, it says that Myspace’s revenue should almost double monthly, from $40,000,000 to $70,000,000! Wow, with those type of projected numbers, this thing has to be big!

To read the article from the New York Times, CLICK HERE.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I came across an amazing tool from DerekBeau.com today, and just had to write about it!

The program is very similar to SpeedPPC’s product. They both do the same thing, however Mr. Beau decided to be a super nice guy and not charge $497.00 for it, he is offering it for FREE!

How this program works, summed up by Derek Beau straight from his blog:
           “The concept is actually very simple. You take two sets of keywords, set some options, and write some ads. The tool will then create the CSV data required to import everything into your AdWords account. All you have to do is copy/paste it into AdWords Editor. (Check out the SpeedPPC website for more information, my tool does the same thing )

The beauty of this is that it will create highly targeted ad groups with custom text ads for each of them. You really have to try it to see exactly how it works, but it is possible to create, for example, 300 ad groups with 10 keywords and 3 custom ads each, in under 10 minutes. The end result is an expanded keyword list, higher CTRs for your long-tail keywords, and higher keyword quality scores.” (taken from www.derekbeau.com)

What an amazing idea! This will ultimately increase your quality score and allow you to pay alot less per click! To use this program however, you must install it on your own server, and cannot re-publish it as your own product. For the full blog post from him, CLICK HERE.

All I can say is WOW! All this for free? Here is a quick screenshot of the program:

Download it now and try it out, you will not be disappointed! Also, it seems he is working on updates for other advertising platforms such as Microsoft adCenter.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Everyone is on the big three, Google, adCenter and YSM. However, there are so many other small PPC engines out there that have great potential, and alot less competition.

If you are really struggling with the larger tier search engines, you might want to consider something like 7search.com, Enhance.com, Kanoodle.com, or Ask.com’s sponsored search listings. Personally I have dealt with Enhance and Ask, and really like their interface as well as their traffic they bring me.

You might think that these search engines are just low quality no good clicks, however that is not the case anymore. These companies have really cracked down on click fraud and the quality of the traffic they are sending you.

There are many other great features of these search engines. All of them have great customer support! Also, you will be paying alot less for each click, so if it is volume you are looking for then these engines are the way to go!

Enhance.com also has something that I really love, and have mentioned before. If you plan to run a campaign with more than $100.00, then they will write your ad copy, and keyword lists for you! An amazing service and it is free if you sign up and deposit $100.00.

Ask.com has some pretty cool features. They have an upload feature where you don’t have to mark your keywords with “x” around the words if you want to use exact match or broad match, there are simply three different boxes and once you upload your keywords to that specific box, Ask does the rest. Alot easier to do in my opinion!

You really just have to test your campaigns on these engines, it is a must! You never know, you may just strike gold if a certain offer converts really well with a certain traffic type!

Popularity: 13% [?]

When I first started affiliate marketing, it was mostly a hobby and was basically something I did for a little extra spending money. I guess you could say I never really took it seriously.

I recently read a post on WickedFire.com, and listened to a radio show with Zac Johnson, and they both focused on one thing. If you want to start making 6-7 figures a year, you have to re-up with your earnings. It makes perfect sense, and was something I never did when I first started.

Say you spend $100 on search marketing your very first month, and get the hang of it and double your money, so you have $200. Instead of taking that and spending it on material things, invest it back into yourself. The next month, shoot to triple that amount, so you do $600 your second month. Re-invest every penny, triple your earnings again and again, and pretty soon you are making more than you ever thought you could! It is a really simple concept, however myself and I suspect many other affiliates did not invest every penny back into themselves when they first started out.

Popularity: 8% [?]