I’m finally settled in to my new place in Coral Gables, which is a suburb of Miami.

Check it out…

The food, the culture, and just about everything else in Coral Gables ROCKS! For Shilpi and I it’s been a total upgrade from the condo we had in Boston.

As soon as we get back to Boston in 6 months we’re going to start hunting for a condo in Back Bay that will top our place in Coral Gables. Once you upgrade your lifestyle, it really bites to have to take it back down a notch.

None of this would have been possible if I wasn’t a super affiliate. The rent on our Coral Gables place is double the mortgage payment on my place in Boston, which by the way I’m still paying in full.

Even if I was a big shot in the corporate world and had the money to cover a hefty rent plus a mortgage, I wouldn’t have the freedom to move down here.

Affiliate income represent REAL FREEDOM. There’s nothing like it in the world!

Shew! Finally, moved into my new place in Coral Gables. Exhausted today, tomorrow I’ll give you a video walk through of my new place - it’s AMAZING. Miami is Amazing, my wife and I absolutely love it here.

I’m going to make this short and sweet, since I’ve been completely slammed the last week with moving in, and I’m still tying up some lose ends.

Here’s the Super Affiliate Tip for today : In PPC Affiliate Marketing there’s a Secret to every niche you go into. Once you discover this Secret, you’ve unlocked the key to making massive profits in that niche.

Really.

For a while now I’ve attempted to automate the process of going into completely different niches and cranking out campaign after campaign. Every time I’ve attempted this I’ve failed.

Every time I’ve taken time to carefully study a niche, dropped a bunch of money just testing it from different angles, I’ve succeeded.

So how do you crack the secret to big profits in an affiliate niche?

Whether it’s ringtones, dating, herbal remedies, or whatever, here’s what you need to do :

Test content vs search. Some markets do really well of content and poorly on search, some do great on search but suck on content. Some do great on both. You need to TEST THIS.

Test your Google Adcopy. This is a REALLY important and it’s amazing that most affiliates don’t take the time to really do this rigorously. You need to understand the emotional hot buttons in your niche and put them into your ads.

Getting your ads right can spell the difference between being highly profitable and losing money like a sieve - this includes what domain name you choose.

Keyword Research : Have you thought of all the different types of keywords you can bid on for your niche? Do you know what types of keywords generate the best conversions? Does having state/city names in your keywords help? Do keywords with words like “buy”,”discount”,”sale” in them convert well?

Understanding what types of keywords convert best in your market and making sure your bidding high on these keywords is CRUCIAL.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure you put together a REALLY thorough keyword list that’s nice and broad.
2. Carefully tracking which keywords are converting and look for PATTERNS. Use what you learn to expand your keyword list and come up with new keywords ideas.

Bidding on the right keywords and getting good ad placement for the keywords that convert is a BIG part of the Secret to any niche.

In most cases newbie affiliate are missing 80%-90% of the converting keywords. They’re either not bidding on these 90% of keywords, or their bidding too low on them so they get barely on impressions for them without even realizing it. BIG TIP : Keywords that convert really well have a higher CPC.

Landing Page :

Do you know what type of landing page works best in your market? Review site, optin page, or straight sales page?? Look at what your competition is doing, and if necessary test several different types of landing pages to see what works best.

Do you know what type of copy or page layout will pull your visitors in to click through to the merchant and make a purchase? Keep testing until you find something that works.

I’m not going to lie to you, testing and studying are niches is not always fun. And sometimes it can be quite expensive.

But let’s put things in perspective, let’s say you bust your butt and spend a good 2 months testing and trying different angles on a market you knew is profitable. You finally found a landing page that converted really well, high CTR/high converting Google ad copy, and what type of keywords are pulling in all the sales.

Now you’re making $500/day in profit -> that’s $15k/month!

Do you think it was worth it?

PS Once you’ve cracked the Secret to a market you need to totally focus your effort on building up your campaign and scaling it like crazy. Don’t go into another market until you’ve squeeze every last cent of profit out of that market and have created a solid income stream that will last years.

I’m a firm believer in the power of nuggets. Information nuggets that is - not the mystery stuff you order from a “value” *cough* menu with a large fries and shake.

What I like to do is bookmark the video clips, interesting interviews, etc. I come across while online and then pick a time to sit down and marinate on them. I search for the “nuggets” that I can pull out and apply instantly to my life in some way.

Here are a few I enjoyed you might want to check out.

Sir Richard Branson - interviewed by Joe Polish. I have much respect for this man. Humble, successful and an all-around great guy.

Interview (part 1) Run Time - 21:47
Interview (part 2) Run Time - 19:44
Interview (part 3) Run Time - 23:24

Warren Buffett - His greatest secrets in just 7 Minutes. Forget black cards, Warren rocks a MickeyDee’s GOLD card so he can eat free forever The best advice in life always seems to be straight forward and simple. Why do we always have to complicate things when we should just shut up and listen to those who have the results?

Warren Buffett Video Run Time - 7:23

Kiva.org - Yes, you and I are selfish and we have it good. Kiva is a brilliant idea and a great example of the benefits of technology. Next time your frustrated with your current ROI and might have to wait until next week to buy that 65′ inch plasma, go micro-finance a real struggling entrepreneur. It will make everyone feel better.

Check out how Kiva works Run Time - 3:55

- Thomas

This is a guest post by Miles Baker.

Yesterday I noticed someone asking a question on a forum about how to organize all their affiliate login information. It reminded me of years ago, how I used to set up file folders and I would actually print out each page of login information and attempt to keep all my affiliate information in a giant filing cabinet. Of course, that was 10 years ago and much has changed since then, I hardly print out anything anymore. In fact, over the years I’ve been constantly refining my process of getting organized and keeping track of everything, and if you were to see my office you would be astounded how quickly I can find anything I could possibly need within less than a minute or two tops and how quickly I can get things done.

No matter who you are, even for a part-time affiliate there’s so much login information, passwords, bookmarks, todo-lists, receipts, emails, and other things to keep track of it can be completely overwhelming. Therefore, I thought I would share some of my best productivity tricks, tools, and methods with you that will help you get organized, keep everything in order, and save you countless hours and headaches!

First, you must have Roboform, if you aren’t using Roboform get it now! It keeps track of all your sites, all your login information, and you can also use it to store your address, credit card, and other information so when you go to buy something you click one button and the entire checkout form is filled out for you. I have over 400 logins in mine, and it definitely beats my old file folders and mountain of paper! I can’t even imagine how much time this one tool has saved me over the years.

Another program I’ve recently feel in love with is called Linkman. It’s a bookmarking tool that resides on your own PC. I used to love and recommend FURL, which did a lot of what Linkman does online, but after they were acquired by another company the site got so sloppy and slow, it’s now more trouble than it’s worth to bookmark something or find what you are looking for with it. So let me give you the rundown on Linkman. I use this tool to build my own Google essentially. I bookmark any site I think I may want to return to in the future, then I give that bookmark a quick set of tags. Let’s say I am going to bookmark SuperAffiliateMindset.com. I would bookmark the site, throw it into a category I’ve created, and then tag it with “amit, mehta, affiliate, marketing, super affiliate, mindset, blog, tips, adwords, ppc, lifetyle”. Now whenever I want to find something I can type in any one of those terms and my bookmarked site comes right up! It’s my own, ever-growing personal database of sites, and whenever I want to find something I click on the little icon in my system tray, type in a couple of words and it’s instantaneously ready for me!

So now that you’ve got your bookmarks in order, and all your passwords and login information, let’s talk about email. This is probably one of the largest, most unorganized messes people have on their PC. I use Thunderbird and by itself it’s a great email client, but it’s the add-ons that give this program possibilities and flexibility beyond any other email client I’ve ever used. Without getting into too much detail and writing 5 other articles, here’s a quick list of the add-ons I use to help productivity and organization…

• XNote - This is an awesome add-on as it allows you to add sticky notes to your emails. I use my email inbox as a partial todo/action box. What I do is I archive/filter all emails out of my inbox and leave only emails that require action. Then I use XNote to add any notes to either help remind me or add information to the email. I used to forget that certain emails were waiting on a reply or what an email was regarding, not anymore with Xnote.
• Archive - Since I get rid of everything in my inbox as fast as I can, anything I want to keep I archive. I use this add-on to add a button to the top of Firefox and then when I get an email I don’t need to do anything with but would like to keep I click the ‘Archive’ button. Much like Gmail works, however an added benefit is if you have multiple accounts you can archive to different folders.
• QuickText Pro - This is the Big Daddy of Thunderbird Add-ons when it comes to productivity. Use this to create email templates that you can use with the click of a button. What’s REALLY cool about QuickText Pro is that you can create a template with variables. For example, you can click a button, it will bring up a prompt for any variable, you fill in the information like a name or something, then it creates the rest of the email. For more details check out their site, I highly recommend this time saving tool.
• Tags - Thunderbird comes with Tags that you can customize so techincally this isn’t an add-on but an existing feature. Anyway, a good example of how I use tags is for my affiliate sales. I am an affiliate for tons of affiliate programs, ebooks, software, etc. that only make me sales sporadically. I filter all those sale notification emails into a separate folder called “Affiliate Sales”, and then when they come in I tag them with an ‘Unpaid’ tag so I know I should be expecting a payment for that. I also use tags for emails that I am waiting for on a reply on, among other things.

These add-ons are all fantastic, but don’t forget, no matter what email client you use, you should be sorting emails into folders and using filters to put email into its proper place. Also, turn off any features that notify you of new messages, either sounds or pop-ups, they are only distractions.

So now let’s talk about organizing your business. I personally love to write/type everything down that’s in my head, anything that I want or need to do. I even have a list of future blog posts that I keep so whenever an idea comes to me I write it down, then forget about it until I’m going to write on my blog. I find by getting everything out of my mind and into the computer let’s my mind relax and focus, and I never have to try and remember anything.

I use an AWESOME program for organizing everything I need to do. It’s called Swift ToDo List Pro, and it’s incredible. You can organize different todo lists, I organize mine by site or project. In addition to that, you can add notes to each task, attach files, include links with it, etc. You can organize your lists in a variety of ways, but what I find important is just having everything that needs to be done organized and remembered for me. It’s by far the most productive and time-saving tool I use, and it’s helped me to remember so many things I normally would have forgotten about it.

So there you have it. Use these tools to save time, be more productive, and get organized. I guarantee that using these tools will make your business move faster, and you’ll find yourself getting much more accomplished in less time.

Miles Baker is a 10 year Internet marketing veteran and full-time affiliate marketer. For more information on him visit his website MarketingWithMiles.com

This is a guest post by Melanie Tan.

Last Saturday, I stumbled upon a site that was promoting an affiliate day close to where I live. It’s “Affiliate Dag” in The Netherlands! (Sorry folks, text on site is all in Dutch.) I read that the keynote speaker is none other than Kris Jones of Pepperjam and so I knew that this was something worth a visit so I signed up ASAP (it’s going to be held tomorrow).

Heading over to Kris’ blog, he mentions this… “Did you know that by 2010(ish) the size of e-commerce in Europe is predicted to be larger than the United States?“

I have heard so many times that Europe is the next affiliate marketing BIG thing and I really do see that more and more around me. A couple of years ago, if I mentioned I worked from home and earned not only a decent income but an income I would never earn had I pursued my corporate career here in The Netherlands, people had no idea what the hell I was talking about. Now, one of my neighbors is a work-at-home, full time, web designer!

I have yet to really look into Europe as the target of my affiliate endeavors so I’m keen to see what Affiliate Dag has to offer. One of the things I see as a potential stumbling block is the language barrier.

For instance, I know that the Dutch, Germans, and French would at least prefer to purchase products available in their own languages, while other European countries are quite ok purchasing US products from English-language sites. Luckily I speak Dutch but I do realize that the buying mindset might be different (i.e., ads need to be different, landing page color schemes and calls to action might be different, etc.).

Even if I don’t get any mind-boggling insights from Affiliate Dag, I’m quite happy to note that the affiliate marketing community around me is growing and growing well. I can’t wait to meet other affiliate marketers and compare notes! But seriously, I realized that sometimes, you really don’t need to look far for encouragement, inspiration, support, and advice. It could just be in your own backyard.

Why don’t you see what affiliate marketing or online business organizations are near you? Like me, you might be surprised at just what you find out.

Melanie Tan heads an online content provision company that provides thousands of SEO articles annually. She is also a professional copywriter who specializes in affiliate marketing sales letters/landing pages.

My Condo’s almost empty, mover are here right now clearing it out.

My wife and I are moving to Coral Gables in Miami, Florida! For the next 6 months I’m going to be soaking in some sun in South Florida. We’re renting out a luxury penthouse apartment, it’s about 1400 sq ft and on the 17th floor.

Miami is VERY different than Boston, it’s more than just a change in scenery, it’s a whole different culture down there. Will be fun!

Now if I was a high level corporate stiff neck I could possibly make as much as I’m making now as super affiliate. However, not only would I be working 80 hrs a week, I’d be stuck living in ONE place. I wouldn’t be going to Miami, or anywhere else for that matter, unless the company decided to relocate me.

You see, there’s a lot more to this business than making a boat load of money (although I have to admit that’s a nice perk!) I don’t care how much money you make in your job, there’s nothing in the world better than having the freedom to do what you want, where you want, with whom you want.

Since I’ve been a full time super affiliate it seems that my wife and I have been traveling non stop and loving every minute of it! Paris, Alaska, Bermuda, London, Austin, India, Monoco, Miami,etc, etc… We spend 4 months in 2007 traveling.

Our travel schedule is actually light compared to several members of my super affiliate mastermind, who take frequent 2-4 month vacations!

I really don’t like using the term ‘vacation’, my wife and I don’t take vacations in the normal sense of the word, we’re just living & enjoying life in a different location. Vacations are what job people use to recover from the daily stress of being in the rat race.

Have you ever thought where you would live if you had NO restrictions? If you could run your whole business off your laptop, where would you live and what parts of the world would you travel to?

PS While I’m busy moving I’ll have several guest bloggers who will be filling in for me, including Anik Singal, founder of Affiliate Classroom and big time super affiliate. So stay tuned!

So you bust your butt for months and finally find a hot market and you’ve actually build a kick ass landing page/site that converts better than the merchant site.

You’re as happy as can be, raking in $350/day profit, then you discover some loser has not only ripped off your site, page for page, but is copying your Google ad and is bidding above you! Now you’re mad as hell, blowing smoke.

Ever happen to you?

It’s happened to me a couple times, and yes I was mad has hell!

Now if someone copies your site exactly, including your google ads, you can usually contact the affiliate manager and they’ll put a stop to it. In most cases the culprit will only change things around a little bit - they’re still ripping you off!

So how do you deal with affiliate rip off artists?

The best way to combat these losers is to have a killer system for continual improvement for your affiliate business, that should include :

1. Continually Split Testing Your Landing Page Copy and Google Ad Copy
2. Regularly Adding more and more Keywords to Your Campaigns
3. Systematically Adjusting and Optimizing Your Keyword Bids
4. Building Out a Substantial Value Added Site around Your Affiliate Offer

What you need to understand is that a copy cat affiliate is only copying a single snap shot in time of your site and campaign.

They can’t copy your system!

Think about it..

It’s unlikely they captured how you segmented your keywords and structured your campaigns, and even the most sophisticated scraping tool won’t get all your keywords.

Chances are the copycat will only make a small fraction of the profit you’re making, if any, since they really don’t understand what they’re doing.

Having a solid system for continually improvement is the only true competitive advantage in affiliate marketing and the best way to protect yourself against rip off artists.

There also one other big element that an affiliate copycat can never copy : your mindset and decision making process.

Without the right system, and the right mindset and decision making process to execute that system, no rip off artist can ever truly copy your affiliate campaigns. As long as you have a solid system in place and know what you’re actually doing.

Also ,Check out this awesome post Kirsty did about this same topic.

My Coaching Program :

A number of you have asked about joining my one-on-one coaching program. Here’s the thing, at the moment I only have ONE one-on-one coaching student, and he’s paying me $2k/month for 30 minutes of one-on-one time a week + email support & access to all of my training material.

Honestly, this is a beta test, and it’s going really well. I have a fantastic student who’s progressing very quickly, he already has 2 profitable campaigns!

I’m learning a lot about the process of teaching someone how to do ppc affiliate marketing. Using everything I learn from working with this student, a handful of other one on one students I’ve taken on in the past, and my super affiliate accelerator program, I plan on launching something BIG. I can’t reveal the details, however, you’ll hear more about it in the coming weeks and months.

Affiliate Summit :

I’m excited to announce I’ll be speaking at the Affiliate Summit Boston this year (August 10th-12th). My Session Title is : “PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You MUST Know.” Hope to see YOU there.

Has Your Amex Card Been Declined?

I got a call today from friend and former student of mine - he’s now a successful super affiliate in his own right. His Adwords account was put on hold, dude was making $1k/day profit!

Here’s what happened…

Amex has put his Gold Plus card on hold requesting tax returns for last year before they reinstate his card. It will take 7 business days before they can reinstate his card, OUCH!

Apparently Amex is cracking down right now. Check out this recent post on Amex-Black.com about this situation.

Have YOU been hit?

PS Check out this interview I did with Amex-Black.com! It’s a very cool site, great example how you can make money as an affiliate blogger.

I’ve recently taken on a one-on-one coaching student. He’s doing very well, he has 2 profitable campaigns right off the bat!

There’s something he said that really struck me : One of the reasons that he wanted to work with me on a one on one basis was to avoid getting confused.

What did he mean by that?

Think about all the enormous amount of information about ppc affiliate marketing out there, let alone affiliate marketing in general.

Just to list a few courses/membership sites : adwordmentor.com, googlecash.com, payperclickformula.com, wealthyaffiliate.com, ppc-coach.com, ppcclassroom.com, quityourdayjob.com, etc, etc, etc!?! These are just a few I remember off the top of my head.

All of the above courses (more or less) teach different strategies for doing ppc affiliate marketing. So which one do you follow?

On a related note, I was sharing some of my ppc strategies with Anik Singal and he told me flat out that me and Jeremy Palmer have totally different strategies for doing ppc affiliate marketing. Both Jeremy and I are both very successful affiliates, so who do you follow?

Here’s the deal…

There’s more than one way to slice and dice an onion and there’s also more than one way to do ppc affiliate marketing successfully. The worst thing you can do is buy 5 different courses and try to follow all of them - especially if they have conflicting advice - i.e. bid your add to the top, no keep your bid prices low!?! That’s where confusion kicks in.

Overloading yourself with information and getting confused will paralyze you and your business. Follow ONE system and try your best to make it work before you jump to another system for doing ppc.

Once you find a system that works for you, run with it. In time you’ll develop your own system for doing ppc. In my opinion that’s the mark of a true super affiliate, someone who has reached a level of expertise that they are coming up with their own techniques and strategies.

Here’s a quick thought for you :

PPC affiliate marketing is an much art as it is a science .

I talk a lot about :

1. Optimizing your bids
2. Split testing ads
3. Split testing your landing page
4. Setting up your campaign properly
5. And tracking your metrics

This is the scientific, or analytical, aspect of affiliate marketing. And as a former scientist I, no doubt, really like this aspect of the business.

Now here’s what I’ve realized : you can be a quiz at the analytical left brain aspects of this business and still struggle to make it work!

Why?

Because there’s a right brain creative aspect of ppc affiliate marketing that’s just as important as the analytical one.

So what’s the creative right brain element to ppc affiliate marketing?

1. Understanding the USP (unique selling proposition) of the offer you’re promoting
2. Understanding what the emotional hot buttons are in your niche
3. Understanding consumer buying patterns in your niche
4. Writing your copy so it speaks the language of your demographic, whether they’re new moms, single male yuppies, or whatever. Do you even know what your target demographic is?
5. Overall, understanding the psychology of your niche and getting into the frame of mind of the customer

By really doing your homework before hand (5 point above) you’ll be able to write really effective Google ad copy (that will get a high CTR) and landing page copy (that will get a high conversion rate), and even do much more effective keyword research. Just doing this will often spell the difference between success and failure.

Have YOU been doing your homework before you promote a new affiliate offer, or are you like most affiliates who just jump in a niche and throw up a campaign as fast as they can hoping it will convert?