There’s a lot of products on the market promising a push button simple system to building a profitable ppc affiliate campaign. These products usually consist of a software program that do most of the work and a simple step by step tutorial to walk you through how to use the system.

Now I’m not saying that these program don’t work, in fact, for the point of our discuss lets assume that these programs do work.

Let’s take a deeper look at this: do you think any simple push button system for making online will last? If there’s a 1000 affiliate using the same system do you think it will effect your profit margins?

Moreover, how easy do you think it will be for someone to copy everything you’ve done if it’s all based on simple system anyone can go out and purchase? Do you have any real competitive advantage.

These types of easy money affiliate products are designed for newbie opportunity seekers who are looking to make a quick buck. I don’t know a single super affiliate who uses these programs.

What’s your goal here? To build a long term sustainable business or make a fast buck?

A long term sustainable affiliate business is based on a unique strategy that YOU develop, something that cannot be easily ripped off. Yeah, some dummy may be able to rip off your landing page and even some of your keywords. But any ppc super affiliate who’s worth their salt knows there’s WAY more to building a successful affiliate campaign then landing pages and keywords.

The entire focus on my affiliate business is to, develop strategies, and focus on markets, that will yield long term profits. This is why I’m VERY selective as to what offers I promote, and I’m continually developing was to improve my processes for building and optimizing affiliate campaigns.

I don’t care if you’re just starting out, focus on building a long term business and ignore the sirens of fast affiliate profits with no work or thought necessary.

I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. It’s an amazing talk, full of pearls of wisdom.

Check it out…

I really connected with his address, in many ways.

He is so right when he said that you can only connect the dots looking back and not looking forward. Looking at my own life, if you had told me back in 2000 that I would strike it big in affiliate marketing, I would have given you a funny look.

Back in 2000 I didn’t even know what affiliate marketing was, and I had no plans of being an entrepreneur, financially independent, or anything like that. My plans were to become an academic, a physics professor.

A few years later I discovered that being an academic was NOT my true passion. Nevertheless, I finished my PhD and about 1 year after that point I went full time as an affiliate marketer.

Not only am I truly passionate about what I do now, but I can connect the dots back to everything I learned back in my physics days. As a physics major and later as physics graduate student I developed and fine tuned my problem solving and analytical skills to a very high level.

These skill sets have proved incredibly valuable as PPC affiliate.

As a graduate student I did a lot of work with computer simulations and I learned the importance of obtaining statistically relevant results before jumping to any conclusions. This is yet, another very important skills for anyone who does PPC.

As a physics grad student I never knew the skills I was developing would make me rich one day. It’s funny how things work out!

It’s so important to pursue your true passion in life and leverage your strengths, if you want to be truly successful. Chances are if you find something you’re passionate about it’s because it’s something where you’re leveraging your strengths.

There’s been a lot of talk, and some controversy, about the Performance Marketing Alliance.

Well, I had a chance to interview Rebecca Madigan, founding partner of the Performance Marketing Alliance, to set the records straight…

Click Here to Listen to the Interview

Rebecca and I talk about a whole range of issues in this interview:

1. Do we need a unified voice representing all affiliates?
2. Can we, as an industry, clean up our reputation? How do we deal with the blackhat crowd?
3. With the advent of the New York “affiliate tax” do we need lobbies to push on interests?
4. Do we need industry self-regulation to keep both merchants and affiliates clean and in line with an agreed upon industry standard?

So what do you think? Do you think we, as an industry, need an association to represent our best interests?

Here’s a technique I’ve been using a for awhile that’s extremely powerful, and yet VERY simple.

You’ve probably heard of mind mapping. If you’re into mind maps you’ve probably used them for outlining a book you’ve read or a seminar you’ve listened too, etc, etc.

I want to tell you about a unusual way of using this really powerful technique : minding map your affiliate business.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Get a blank sheet of paper and draw a circle in the middle that represents your business.
2. Now draw a line out from this center circle and make a circle for each and every project or affiliate campaign you’re currently working on. Put the name of the project in the circle.
3. Now for each project circle draw lines out for each sub-project or to-do item within the bigger project
4. Depending on the complexity of a given project, keep branching out as necessary.

Now sit back and take a look at what you’ve created: you’ve mapped out your ENTIRE business on a sheet of paper.

Pretty cool, huh?

This is a great way to step back and get a birds eye view of what you’re doing and where you’re headed. I get great insights on what steps I need to take next to hit my long term and short term goals just by creating and studying my business mind map.

This technique will give you tremendous clarity and insights into your affiliate business. I don’t care if have a small business or are just starting out, get into the habit of mind mapping your business and taking time to THINK about your business as a whole.

For those of you who have not seen it yet, this post is NOT a spoiler, so no worries.

Dark Knight was sold out in over 90% of Movie theaters this weekend and broke into the record books with a $155 million weekend! Fortunately, Miami was not sold out so my wife and I had a opportunity to catch a Saturday morning showing.

I went in with my doubts, don’t get me wrong I LOVED the ‘Batman Begins’, but all to often sequels disappoint-remember the sequel to the Matrix? I was also doubtful whether ‘Dark Knight’ could live up to all the hype.

Well, all I can say is that I was COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY! This is, by far, the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen.

An absolute masterpiece.

Heath Ledger, who played the Joker, freaked me out! He did an outstanding job playing this role. If you didn’t know already, Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdoes of sleeping pills! Very sad and unfortunately, apparently he had trouble sleeping. Some have suggested perhaps he got too much into character playing the Joker, and it was effecting him. Well never really know!

Dark Knight will have your heart pounding till the very end as the Joker puts Gotham city through hell and forces Batman to do some soul searching. The story line is very well done, and the acting is some of the best I’ve seen in an action hero movie. It’s a MUST see.

Only downside to the movie was Batman’s fight scenes with the Joker. In reality, Batman should have been able to easily take out the Joker in a one on one situation. In the movie it’s pretty clear that Batman is holding back when fighting the Joker. I realize they wanted to show a tough fight between Batman and Joker, but it was TOTALLY unconvincing.

Here’s 3 reason I like Batman:

1. He’s a ninja master. As a black belt in karate, I think this is very cool.
2. He’s super rich and using that wealth to do good by fighting crime in a very cool way. Yes, deep down I secretly wish, once I’m as rich as Bruce Wayne, to master ninjitsu and fly around in $300k Bat suit! LOL
3. He’s always in style. Whether he’s riding around in his Lamborgini, wearing his Italian cut suits at lavish parties, or fighting crime in his Batman suit.

If you don’t know already, I’ll be speaking at the Affiliate Summit in Boston going on between August 10-12th. My talk is Titled : “PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You MUST Know”

If you’re planning on attending the Summit in Boston, be sure to check out my talk.

Funny thing, when the Affiliate Summit was in Miami last year I was in Boston, now that I’m in Miami this year the Affiliate Summit is being held in Boston!

While I’m back in Boston I plan to stay for an extra few days to scope out some luxury apartments in Back Bay. Shilpi and I don’t plan to move back to our small condo in Brighton that we bought back when I was working a job. Instead we’ve decide to rent an apartment in Back Bay for a year before we buy a Back Bay condo.

Staying in an apartment for a year will give us some time to shop around and find something we really like. As for our place in Brighton, we plan to rent that out until property values start going back up - I know, that could be a LONG time! LOL

I hope to see YOU in Boston this August!

I wanted to do a follow up post on recent post I did about the latest Google Slap.

After taking a closer look at my Google account, I noticed I actually had been hit by this most recent Google Slap. For several of my search campaigns I discovered that almost half my min bids had shot up from 0.05-0.20 to 0.50 or more.

Luckily this slap had only effected a few of my campaigns, all for one affiliate offer. This is why I didn’t notice the slap until I took a closer look.

At first I couldn’t understand what had happened, I had everything Google could possibly want:

• Targetted landing pages
• A real site with 100s of pages of unique content and fresh content added every week
• Lots of incoming links and page rank
• Etc, etc…

Finally I took a closer look at the adgroups that had gotten hit, and them it struck me:
ALL of the adgroups that had gotten hit all had ads going to aliased domains!

Here’s the thing: for this niche I have about 30 or so aliased domains. Having aliased domains that contain the keyword you’re bidding on is a great way to dramatically increase your CTR and even your conversion rate.

So if I had an adgroup about green widgets that was getting a lot of traffic, I would buy a domain like : get-green-widgets.com, and use this domain as an alias to my root domain. This way I could use this domain in my display url for my Google ad and get a SUPER high CTR.

It was all working great, until now!

I decided to dump all my aliases for my slapped campaigns. I switched all my ads over to my root domain and BAM, my min bids went back down right away.

I had a great discussion about all of this with Tom, one of my top partners and advisers, here’s what we concluded:

1. Google sees using aliases in your display url as spam, after all would ebay or amazon use an aliased domain? I suspect this is what Google thinks, I don’t agree with it though.
2. Every time Google rolls out a slap (Quality Score Update) they’re raising the bar as to what it considers a quality site. The bottom line is that Google is looking for advertisers that are building a long term business & a real site off of one or a handful of domains. Google does NOT want advertisers that are launching one thin site after another, just to make a quick buck.

Now what would a real site, that you’re building a long term business off of, look like?

Would the site have more than 5 pages?

How about unique content? Think a real site would have a lot of it?

Do you think fresh content would be added to such a site on a daily or weekly basis?

If it’s a real site, any chance it would have incoming links and a decent PR (overtime)?

If you’re still wonder how to build an affiliate site that won’t get Google slapped, I JUST TOLD YOU.

Whether you listen to classical music or not you know that Mozart, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, all have their own unique & distinctive styles of composing. All very different but yet all completely amazing!

How in the world does this relate to affiliate marketing?

Every PPC super affiliate I know has a very unique style to how they do everything thing form keyword research, to how they setup their campaigns, how they optimize their campaigns, etc. They all have disparate methods and approaches, yet at the end of the day they’re all making big profits.

They’ve found their music.

There’s a million ways to “compose” a ppc affiliate campaign, but to create real music (ie a profitable campaigns) takes some skill.

How do you find your music?

Honestly, it takes a lot of trail and error, testing different methods you’ve learned, and experimenting with different approaches. Getting all the elements to work in harmony will take time.

I know it took me a long time before I found my music.

When I finally started striking the right cords, and start making big profits, I had produced something amazing: a unique style of ppc affiliate marketing.

It took about 6 months AFTER I went full time as an affiliate before I really found my music, my own unique style. I was doing okay as an affiliate using fairly standard methods that I had learned, it was only after I found my own unique approach did I start making big money.

To be a true blue super affiliate you’ll need to find your own music. Modeling someone else’s methods and techniques is a good start, but it won’t make you a true super affiliate.

Have YOU found your music yet?

You may have heard, or hopefully not experienced, the Google Slap this week! Looks like Big-G is planning on quarterly slaps.

I was basically unaffected, as usual-my strategy of building authority sites seems to be working. In some of my campaigns I saw my min bids inch up a little bit, but that’s typical.

In some of my other campaigns I saw my traffic increase and my CPC drop! I know for a fact in those niches that there were a number of affiliates running one page landing pages. I can imagine that all those affiliates got whipped out. Less competition means more traffic and a lower CPC, at least until these affiliates get up and running again.

What I can’t understand is why anyone would run a one page landing page for more than a week or two? If you know your offers is a winner after testing it, INVEST INTO BUILDING A REAL SITE.

Sure you can re-upload your campaigns or change your domain and get things running again. However, you’ll have to do that every 3 months (remember quarterly Google slaps). Every time your campaign gets slapped you lose history and the guy who took the time to build a real site gains on you.

Don’t bet a quick fixes working in the long run either, Google will eventually come up with a way to slap your site so fast it won’t be worth even running a one page site just to test an offer.

Once you’ve a super affiliate, and you’ve achieved a lot of your initial goals, such as quiting your job, not having to worry about money, having a better lifestyle etc, then you may start thinking about where you want to take your affiliate business in the long term.

This is something I’ve put a lot of thought into this in the last 12 months.

I mean do you really want to launch one short lived affiliate campaign after another for the rest of your life?

Here’s some ideas on how you can take your super affiliate efforts to the next level and develop a long term solid business model:

1. Once you’ve launch a successful campaign in a solid niche that you know will be around for a long time, build an authority site around this niche using your ppc profits to fund its development. Overtime your authority site can have as much natural search engine traffic as ppc traffic. If your site has compelling content, it can develop a following with people coming back over and over again.
2. If you really enjoy the PPC side of the business, you may consider starting an agency. Kris Jones started out as a super affiliate and went on to launch Pepperjam, one of the most successful internet marketing agencies in the world!
3. If you’re very successfully promoting a particular product as an affiliate, you may consider making your own version of that product and selling it yourself. Not only will you get 100% of the commissions, you can now recruit your own affiliates and make 10X more money. You’ll also have a customer base now that you can sell to over and over again. This strategy works best for digital products.
4. If you like to teach you may consider jumping into the world of info marketing. You can sell ebooks and courses that teach others how to succeed at affiliate marketing. This is not only a lucrative strategy, it’s also very personally rewarding - it’s a great feeling to help other achieve the same success you have.
5. My last suggest is to build a system to crank out profitable affiliate campaigns based on unique techniques and methods that you’ve developed. This system can be comprised of a combination of automated software and outsourcers assigned to do specific tasks. This may seem a little far fetched, but I personally know several super affiliates who use this type of strategy to make millions, one of these affiliates make over $10 million a year in revenues.

I’m actually now employing several of the strategies above in my business model.

So what’s your long term affiliate business strategy?