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I’m at the Chicago O’hare Airport on my way back from a 2 day coaching intensive (me and about 5 other people) with none other than Mr. Perry Marshall, world renowned authority on Google Adwords.

First thing I can tell you is that Perry is a very down to earth guy.

We all met at his house, and I expected it to be a palatial mansion in an upscale part of Chicago, with Lexus LS430, and a Ferrari Enzo parked in the front. Perry lives way below his means, he drives a Toyota Camry and lives in a middle class neighborhood. He’s also very easy to talk to, and just and all around good guy.

His office is on the top floor of his house, windows all around, multiple computer, and what impressed me most were the 1000s of books in his personal library. Perry is extremely well read (there’s a BIG tip in that, success people read a LOT).

Over the two days everyone had the rare opportunity to be on a hot seat with Perry for several hours. We could basically ask Perry about anything we wanted regarding business or marketing.

I’m not allowed discuss what we talk about, all highly confidential. What I can tell you is that we discussed things that you’ll never read in any ebook. Stuff that would blow your mind!

Perry knowledge about business and marketing extend way beyond Adwords, and honestly I didn’t ask him that much about Adwords. My goals was to understand how the man thinks, his mindset, what strategies he uses to dominate markets, his process for making long term decisions for his business, etc, etc.

I was also blown away by how successful and sharp the other members of the coaching program were. All of them had successful business: Don was a successful ophthalmologist (and one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met), Larry owns a multi-million dollar industrial crane business, and Micheal & Danna are super successful information marketers.

Here’s another tip: the number ONE way to succeed is to associate with other successful people.

Thursday evening Perry took everyone out on the town. We headed to downtown Chicago to an incredible seafood place, where I had Alaskan king crab legs. Yum!

Afterwards, we all headed to a Broadway show, “Wicked”, an awesome show-an excellent twist on the Wizard of Oz.

Perry has agreed to be a guest speaker for the Super Affiliate Mastermind Counsel that Miles Baker and I started. We will record the call and I will post it on the blog. So stay tuned!

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile then you know how strongly I feel about ONLY promoting affiliate promotions where you have access to a proactive affiliate manager that will work closely with you. As I’ve said in the past you want to build a relationship, really a friendship, with your affiliate manager.

However, I should warn you, this is a double edge sword.

Now I’m not speaking for the industry as a whole but there are some affiliate manager out there that will bend over backwards to help you, they’ll even tell you what other successful affiliates are doing.

REALLY?

Yes, but guess what? They’re telling other affiliates what you’re doing as well!

Ouch!

Now this is a serious breach of client confidentiality, however, I suspect, like myself, most affiliates don’t really turn it into a legal issue. That is, as long as it works both way.

This gets into a gray area. Is this affiliate manager really working in your best interest, or does he or she want a bunch of affiliates to slug it out, making the affiliate company richer while hurting the profit margins of the ppc affiliates who have to pay a big bill to Google every month.

Here’s some other not so honest tactics I’ve seen affiliate managers use:

1. Lying about what their top affiliates make
2. Not notifying affiliates (or a much belated notification) when their server is down, or some other major change that affects conversions
3. Downplaying when sales are in downward spiral across the board

Of course they’re doing this to keep affiliates motivated. And inexperienced affiliates may fall for this bs, but I don’t. I know when my affiliate manager is lying to me, and I think it’s pathetic. I’m driving massive amounts of sales for you, IF THERE’S A PROBLEM, I HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW!

Honesty is really the best policy, and the only way to develop real trust. And with real trust comes REAL loyalty. And if I can really truly trust my affiliate manager then when there is a problem we can work together to quickly solve it.

I have a lot of affiliates asking me, “Amit, what affiliate networks are you on?” As if there’s a special affiliate network out there were all the “big dogs” are making a killing.

Well, there some truth in that, which I’ll explain later in the post.

The fact is you can succeed on any of the major affiliate networks out there, whether is: CJ, clickbank, shareasale, Azoogle, or whatever.

There are two things to look for when evaluating an affiliate network:

1. How good is their analytics and reporting? Can you add tracking ids (sid) to your affiliate link? Can you sort your sales by product and vendor?
2. How often do they pay? Do they do direct deposit? Do they hold your money for future refunds?

As far as affiliate management goes, that usually depends on the vendor and not the affiliate network, in most cases. It’s REALLY important that you work with a proactive affiliate manager that will get on the phone with you several times a week, or everyday in the beginning if needed.

Here are my thoughts on Clickbank & CJ, two affiliate networks I’ve had the most experience with:

CLICKBANK

Pros:

1. Clickbank is a great affiliate network for a newbie “wet behind the ears” affiliate who doesn’t have an affiliate site, or even now how to make an affiliate site, for that matter. You can start a clickbank account in about 2 minutes and promote any of the 1000s of digital products they offer. There’s no website approval process to promote a product, insert you affiliate id in the vendor hop link and you’re good to go.
2. You get biweekly payouts as well, which is so freakin’ sweet!
3. Digital products have high commissions, up to 75%!

Cons:

1. Since there is no barrier to entry in clickbank you have 1000s of affiliate out there promoting everything under the sun. As a result of lot of markets on clickbank are completely saturated, with newbie affiliate-who don’t know what they’re doing-pushing up ppc bid prices. Of course none of this is a problem for a savy super affiliates, however, with new automated programs designed to rip off super affiliates (I’ll get into this later!) no one is really safe.
2. Clickbank holds 10% of you paycheck for 3 months!?!? They say this amount is to cover for future refunds, which is a bullshit reason, since refunds are directly debited form you paychecks. The fact is they’re making a fortune holding this money (I’m sure they’re investing it). Clickbank is currently holding over $40k of my money!?!?

Some more thoughts on clickbank…

If you decide to promote clickbank products, STAY AWAY FROM PROMOTING MONEY MAKING EBOOKS (unless you’re an experienced super affiliate). Not only is this market completely saturated, a lot of newbies think it a great idea promoting a money making ebook like GoogleCash-they get clubbered so bad that they decided affiliate marketing doesn’t work.

CJ

Pros:

1. Great reporting, lots of great merchants to choose from.
2. I have a good friend who’s a CJ top performer, and from what he tells me, they treat their top affiliates REALLY well! For that reason alone I’m thinking seriously of hitting up some markets on CJ.
3. You have to have a real website to be approved for a lot of CJ merchants, and you need to really know what you’re doing to make money in these markets using PPC. In other words in a lot of these markets you won’t be competing with a ton of affiliates (lots will come and go, but few will stick). Good for the experienced affiliate.

Cons:

1. You have to have a real website to be accepted by a lot of CJ merchants.
2. A lot of CJ merchants have ridiculous rules and restrictions for ppc affiliates, some of these merchants think that ppc affiliates are ’stealing’ their sales. Here’s a tip: AFFILIATE ARE MAKING YOU MONEY! Think of it this way, would you rather have an affiliate bidding on a trademark term or bidding above your ad position, or would you rather have your competitors taking that ad space???? In which scenario will YOU make MONEY!?!

WHERE TO REALLY MAKE A KILLING

Personally, here’s what I recommend.

Stay away from big affiliate networks that everyone knows about. Go to SES, Affiliate Summit, Ad-tech, etc, etc and find some smaller less known affiliate programs that are in HOT markets. There are super affiliates quietly making a killing in outside of the major affiliate networks.

Think about it, there’s less competition, and most importantly you won’t have 500 newbie affiliates using the latest affiliate ‘detective’ program to scrap all your keywords, ads, and landing pages.

Yeah, you’ve all heard of these affiliate ‘detective’ program that a lot of unscrupulous gurus are pushing these days. These program will not only rip off your keywords, but your ads, and landing pages. Affiliates are using these program to exactly duplicate other people’s campaigns, campaigns that someone put 100s of hours of effort, blood, sweat, and tears into. These programs even come with automated tools to take all the ripped off data and run an Adwords campaign based off it, at the press of a button.

Now if you’re an affiliate who’s doing this, then I will tell you right now, you’re dead in the water!

That’s no long term strategy for building a real affiliate business. The problem is that you’re not actually learning anything. What more if you think it’s that easy, you’re wrong. There’s a lot more than just copying everything someone else is running on Adwords. If you don’t understand the nuances of maintaining, optimize, and building a campaign, your profits won’t last long.

Anyway, back to my original point, these affiliate detective program target the major niches and major affiliate networks. By focusing all you attention on these major networks you’re going to be a target of some unscrupulous affiliates who want to rip you off. And with the proliferation of detective program, you can expect your site to be ripped off MULTIPLE times, especially in certain hot markets. What do you think that will do to your profits and ROI?

Don’t think it can’t happen, it’s happened to me multiple times!

Now that summer has started I’ve noticed that several of my niches have really taken a hit, not just in lower traffic, but lower conversions. For whatever reason people are just not in the online buying mode during the summer like they are the rest of the year.

Have your profits taken a dip as a result of summer slow down?

We’ll I want to talk about some practical strategies you can use right away…

First and foremost, you should always be split testing your landing pages, and if you’re not then this is a great time to do it.

Don’t just change a headline, try a complete different landing page, add an optin box, or even add video. Try something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!

If you find something that converts, say, 50% better, then you’ve not only recovered your pre-summer slowdown profits, by the end of August you should have record profits!

How here’s a really cool trick I learned…

A lot of ppc advertiser lower their bids during the summer to adjust for the lower conversion rate and maintain a good ROI. The only problem is if you have over 1000s of adgroups like myself it’s a pain in the butt to go through and lower all the bids by 10%. What’s worst it will be a pain in the butt to nearly impossible to restore the original bids after the slowdown is over, since I’ll probably have adjusted bid prices on certain adgroups, and added new adgroups and campaigns between now and the end of the summer.

In other words it all becomes a BIG mess!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just lower your bid prices 10% across the boards during the summer, and then increase it back to it’s original level after the summer, all as easy as flipping a light switch?

Well You Can! Check this out….

What I’ve done here is use the Adwords Advanced Ad Scheduling feature to lower my bids 10% across the boards for an entire campaign (now I left the bids unchanged on weekends, since those are my best sales days).

What’s useful about this is that I can instantly my lower the bids across an entire campaign within seconds, consider many of my campaigns have 100s to 1000s of adgroups this is a real time saver.

Now what’s also neat about this is that I can adjust bids, launch new adgroups, between now and the end of the summer as it there was no slowdown going on, since I’m automatically lowering bids at the campaign level by 10% (or more if necessary), this takes in account the lower conversions during this time period.

Now at the end of the summer I just re-adjust the advanced ad scheduling to 100% from 90%, in effect automatically taking my bids back up to their original levels.

This goes both ways, in December, when sales are hot for a lot of affiliates, use ad scheduling to increase your bids by 10%, 20%, or even 30% across the boards.

I can’t wait until December!

One of the coolest new features that Adwords has recently added is a feature called dayparting or ad scheduling as Adwords calls it. If you go to campaign settings, you’ll find it under ‘Advanced Options’:

Before I explain what this feature actually does, think about this: have you noticed that your campaigns do better on specific days of the week (weekends, or may be the middle of the work week)? Have you also noticed that your campaigns do better or worst ad specific times of the day? Perhaps you get a lot of browsers in the morning, but most people buys at night.

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you could have adwords automatically adjust your bids so it could raise your bids when sales are hot at a particular time of day or day of the week, and lower your bids (even pause your ads) when sales are slow?

We’ll that’s EXACTLY what dayparting allows you to do!

Check out the screen shot below….

Here’s what I’ve done. In this particular Google campaign I’ve noticed over the course of months that the middle of the week is really slow, especially Wednesdays. So I set the ad scheduling feature to lower my bids by: 90%, 80%, 90% on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday respectively. Now this market REALLY picks up on the weekends so I had my bids increased by 10% on Saturday and Sunday.

Pretty awesome, huh?

This is a great way to increase your ROI and profits.

Now you can also setup ad scheduling to increase bids, lower bids, or even pause your ads at different times during the day.

The trick here is getter proper statistics as to what your conversion rate is at different times of the day.

The best way to do this is to make 4 IDENTICAL copies of your campaign (it’s easy doing this with Adwords editor), set each campaign to run at different times of the day. One from 12am-6am, one from 6am to 12pm, one from 12pm to 6pm, and one from 6pm to 12am. This is fairly easy to do with the ad scheduling feature.

Now let these 4 duplicate campaigns run for at least a week or 2 to get proper statistics, so you know what your conversion rates are at different times of the day. Once you have this data you’re gold! Simply adjust your bids lower when conversions suck, and higher when your conversions are hot.

Here’s to higher ROI!

A good friend of mine, Miles Baker, cannot attend the Affiliate Summit this year for personal reasons.

What sucks is that he already bought a ticket! He’s selling his Affiliate Summit ticket for $840, a huge discount over the current list price.

If you’re interested contact Miles. It’s first come first serve, so act quick!

It amazing how many affiliate fly blind as far as analytics go. Sure they may have Google conversion tracking setup, but a lot of affiliate don’t fully understand what a key metric such as Cost/Conv. even means. Really!

The days of checking your sales once a week and making sure you made more than you spend just doesn’t cut it in the cut throat competitive world of Adwords these days. You need to know what your conversion rates are down to the keywords and the ad. You need to know what your ROI is everyday and how it’s changing over the course of weeks and months so you can make adjustments as necessary.

I would even suggest studying what your bounce rates are, that is how many people are coming to your site and hitting the back button right away? This is now factored into your landing page quality score.

As far as I’m concerned the absolutely best (and free) analytics tool is Google Analytics. There’s a bit of a learning curve to use this puppy, but once you understand how to use Analytics, it will blow your mind what you can discover about your site & traffic.

I’ll give you a quick story…

Last November I had gone into a new market and was off to a decent start, making a small profit, however, my conversion rate was horrible, less than 1%. When i talked to my affiliate manager about it he said my conversion rate should be about 2-3%. My landing page was good, I was bidding on the right keywords, I just didn’t know what the problem was!

I spend an hour on Google Analytics to see if I could dig up anything of value. When I looked at what countries I was getting traffic from (in the month of December) to my surprise I was getting more clicks from India than any other country!

I thought to myself, this can’t be right! Let’s see how many sales I’m getting from India. I checked my clickbank stats and I had ONE sales from India in the entire month.

CRAP!

The merchant had told me that this product sells great worldwide so turn on all the countries on Google Adwords….BIG MISTAKE!

Upon analyzing my stats I discovered that I was getting 80% of my sales from 20% of my traffic, that is, traffic from US, Canada, UK, & Australia. I shut off all the other countries that were sending me non-converting traffic and the next day my ROI was 1000%.

WOW!

So I increased my bids by 3X to 4X and my sales went from 20-30/day to over 200/day!

I’m have to say that being a ppc super affiliate is probably the most AWESOME lifestyle in the world. The benefits are endless:

1. Work from home
2. Work you own hours, as little or as much as you want
3. I can travel World and run my business off my laptop
4. Making obscene amounts of money, and all of what that brings….

And one of the coolest benefits is having an American Express Black Card! Check it out…

This is the coolest credit card I’ve ever had, it’s made of pure titanium, you could stop a bullet with this card.

The benefits of this card are mind blowing:

1. Free complimentary first class tickets on international flights when you purchase a first class ticket
2. Free first class upgrades on Continental, Delta, and US Airways + free complimentary tickets for domestic flights
3. Your own dedicated concierge and travel agent
4. Free Car rental and Hotel Upgrades & VIP treatment
5. Specially reserved seating at shows, sports games, restaurants, etc etc..
6. Astronomical spending limit
7. And it goes on and on and on…

I won’t bludgeon you with yearly membership fee or what it takes to qualify for a black card, although I can tell you spending $1000s a day on pay-per-click advertising helps!

I have a friend who’s a huge super affiliate, makes 100k+/month in profit, a CJ Top Performer. He has dozens of sites, and put all of his sites on shared servers. He proud to say that he only spends $20 a month (or something like that) a month on web hosting.

We’ll I use Rackspace and pay $400-$500/month for each dedicated server I had setup (I have multiple servers) . I also have 24/7 phone support, a dedicated account manager, the works. Rackspace also has build in redundancy, so you’re guaranteed 100% uptime.

Now my CJ super affiliate friend thinks I’m crazy for spending this much for web hosting. And for a while I thought I was going a little overboard. That was until today.

You see, I recently signed up for a cutting edge tracking/split testing service that actually split tests the response rate and conversion of your site without changing the site at all. I spend $2000 to sign up for this wiz bang space age split test service.

We had to ask rackspace to change the DNS, the CNAME, and A RECORD so that everything went through the split test provider’s server for the program to work. Well to make a long story short, when we switched everything over, over the course of a day we noticed that our site conversions had gone for 3% to less than 1%. It turns out the split test provider’s server was stalling and failing intermittently, we lost an estimated $10,000 in profits.

When we finally realized what had happened we immediately called rackspace to switch the DNS setting back to the original settings, they responded immediately. With any other cheap web hosting company it would have taken 24  or more before we got a response to a ticket.

Thanks to rackspace we were about to get back on track quickly and minimized the damage, another 24 hours would have cost us another $10k in profit.

Do you think it’s worth paying $400-$500/month to save $10k?? Not to mention all the additional sales we get since we have ZERO down time-which easily cover the hosting costs-since this one site that was effected generates $20k-$30k in revenues a DAY.

For no other reason than I thought it would be really cool, I had T-Shirts made with my blog logo on them.

Check it out…

I just bought a new digital camera, so there’s more picture to come!