If you’ve followed my blog for a while then you know how IMPORTANT cranking out and testing affiliate offers FAST is if you want to be successful.

Here’s a Simple FACT: The faster you can test affiliate offers, the faster you’ll find a HOT one and start lining your pockets with cash.

The problem is that with Google’s strict quality score guidelines you’re VERY likely to get slapped unless you have a REAL site. Of course, building a real site takes time and really puts a drag on the process of testing.

And honestly how many of you are web design pros? Honestly, I still don’t know how to put together a website that looks even half way decent.

Well, there’s an amazing solution…(there’s been a TON of buzz about this you may have already heard of it)

Affiliate Theme is a new kickass service that allows you to effortlessly create a customized wordpress site for your affiliate offer in minutes, even if you don’t know how to make a simple “Hello World” webpage.

Click Here to Get Started with Affiliate Theme Now (NOT an affiliate link)

I wish I had access to a tool like this before, it would have made the process of finding winning affiliates offers WAY WAY easier.

My only complaint about this tool is that it seems to be targeted towards mostly CPA offers. But honestly there so many different possibilities that you can, with a little more work, customize these templates for any affiliate offer.

If you’re seriously about becoming a super affiliates, you’ll get this killer website building tool right away….

Click Here to Get Started with Affiliate Theme Now (NOT an affiliate link)

PS In the interest of full disclosure:UniqueBlogDesigns, the founders of Affiliate Theme are the same company that made my REALLY cool design for ProfitSwami.com. So yeah I like their shit, they know how to make killer Wordpress sites, you can’t go wrong!

As you may know PPC Classroom is launching tomorrow at 12pm EST.

We’ve got some VERY exciting news for you…

Click Here to Discover the SHOCKING News

Check out the recording of the PPC Classroom pre-launch webinar I did last night entitled “How to Quickly & Easily Skyrocket Your Affiliate Income to the Stratosphere”

Click Here to Watch My Webinar Right Now

We have 5,800 people fighting to get on this webinar with only 1000 lines avaliable through gotowebinar. For the lucky 1000 who got on, the feedback was TREMENDOUS. Click Here to watch the webinar NOW.

PPC Classroom launches Feb 24th, so mark your calendars!

Okay, a lot of you have been asking “Amit, we want a video tour of your new place!”

Well here it is in this video…

Click Here to See My New Place

In this video I also talk about how to develop the mindset to become a millionaire through affiliate marketing, so be sure to eliminate all distractions and walk the WHOLE thing.

PS If you haven’t check out our Hollywood-style trailer for PPC Classroom 2.0, here it is:

Click Here to Watch the COOLEST Pre-launch Video EVER!

Hey, do you want to know the fastest and most efficient way to LOSE boatloads of money with ppc affiliate marketing?

Well, honestly, being a complete dumbass isn’t just enough anymore to literally go bankrupt and have creditors knocking at your door. Now with the sophistication of Adwords and Google QS it takes a surprising amount of effort.

No worries I gonna reveal the EXACT step by step process to empty your bank account at jaw dropping speeds.

Of course there’s many strategies to going bankrupt as an affiliate, I’m going to share of the most effective ones I’ve uncovered so far.

Here’s one you can get started with today:

1. First, launch an affiliate offer, set your daily budget REALLY high no matter what you’ve read to the contrary.
2. Now, treat your affiliate offer like a new born baby. Be sure to bank everything on this ONE offer. Don’t make the mistake of testing lots of offers where you only spend up to $50 per offer to test it. If you do that you may actually risk making money!
3. Now spends absolutely $1000s of dollars on this offer even if it’s making zero sales. Of course, you want to hope and pray that it will make a sale one day. And if it makes a sale then jump up and down with joy, even if you’ve dropped $1000 and made ONE measly $20 commission. Now with that one sale under your belt you can confidently let it run for few $1000 dollars more.
4. No matter how much money you lose (with virtually zero ROI) on this offer, keep trying different strategies to make it work. Spends MONTHS on it. Hire an outsourcer and spend $1000 making a website for it and relaunch it, spending $1000s more on Adwords AGAIN (this step is key if you’re serious about losing it all).
5. Whatever you do keep believing this one affiliate offer will magically start converting one day and make you bucku bucks.
6. If other affiliate on forums, even super affilaite, tell you to immediately pause the offer, refuse to do so. Say that your “collecting statistics” and still need it to let it run longer.
7. After you’ve been forced to move out of your house because you lost so much money with this one offer, pause it and repeat the above steps for another affiliate offer. Keep repeating until you’re completely bankrupt.

Remember the key is PERSISTENCE. Being a complete moron is not enough to really screw yourself over.

DISCLAIMER : You may risk stumbling upon an offer that actually converts and makes a profit BEFORE you go bankrupt. I’ll discuss ways around a sticky situation like this in the next post. So stay tuned!

Plew…PPC Classroom 2.0 launch complete! We’ve now shut our doors and will now shift our focus to helping our students succeed.

We had over 6000 scramble to join PPC Classroom over the last 7 days and many are ALREADY having success.

Now it’s time to get back to my regular blog posting…..

Here’s a very typical scenario…

You find a HOT affiliate offer, it convert well, you’re making a profit and then you just focus on just building up that offer.

Well, let me ask you, did you bother testing similar affiliate offers in the same niche to see if they convert better??

Sure the offer your promoting may be convert well, but you may be missing out on a better offer and as a result leaving a ton of money on the table.

I’m made this mistake a ton of times! Yeah, I know it take MORE time to setup a seperate landing page for different affiliate offers and rotate them to see which bring in the most $$.

But you know what?

In a lot of cases you can just direct link to 3,4, or 5 different offers in your niche and see which one converts better before you bust out a landing page.

Here’s another instance where you want to start testing affiliate offers….

Let’s say you’ve been running an offer for a long time and suddenly it plummets, conversion go into the toilet. Chances are the offer your promoting has reach the end of it’s life cycle - it’s DEAD. And I’m NOT talking about seasonality here.

Now you could just drop the whole niche and move onto something else, BUT if you know the niche is long term and profitable then start testing other offers in that niche and hey you may find one that converts really well and revives your dead campaign.

This is a really smart strategy since you already have a ppc campaign and affiliate site in place. You just need to change your page so it’s pushing the new, higher converting offer.

Let’s face it, bidding on trademark terms-especially on major brand trademarks is BIG money for PPC affiliates. This includes trademarks for the offer you’re promoting and competitor trademark terms as well.

Trademark bidding may be highly profitable but it’s also equivalent to playing Russian roulette with your affiliate income, especially if a large majority of your sales are coming from trademarks!

Why?

Let me illustrate with 2 stories…

At Affiliate Summit Boston, I had dinner with Jeremy Palmer, John Hasson, and Ajay (all PPC super affiliates).

Anyway, Jeremy was telling me about an affiliate who made $2 million last year (no joke) all from bidding on ONE trademark term (plus misspelling and variations of course).

Well, the merchant suddenly decided to no longer allow trademark bidding for affiliates!

Now the guy who make $2 million last year is now LOOKING FOR A JOB!?! Apparently all of his income was coming from that one trademark term.

Scary, isn’t it?

There’s always competitor trademarks, right?

Wrong!

A friend of mine who was running a very profitable offer ($1k/day net profit) was forced to pause his campaign after the merchant threatened to freeze his account if he didn’t stop bidding on COMPETITOR trademarks.

Now, I’m not saying don’t bid on trademarks, I bid on trademarks all the time.

What I’m saying is don’t DEPEND on trademark bidding as your sole source, or majority of, your affiliate income.

Ask yourself : “How stable are my affiliate campaigns? Can they be wiped out by one policy change from the merchant?”

If the answer is YES, you’d better get busy!

For those of you who didn’t have a chance to see me live, click here to see the slides to my talk.

For those of you who are wondering, YES there is a lot of overlap with the talk I did last year. I did add some new material and took out some old stuff. My goal is always to provide the most relevant and useful information, EVEN if it’s a little repetitive.

Happy 4th of July!

Before you throw stones at me for not talking about PPC, hear me out! Amit asked me to do a guest post today because he’s out enjoying his ridiculous lifestyle while leaving the rest of us to work

The concept I’m about to share today is something I taught Amit a few weeks back, he found it useful enough to implement the very next day. I thought it was a safe assumption that if he enjoyed it, so would his readers…

Most PPC affiliates I know really look down on article marketing. Mostly it’s not enough “bulk” traffic for them and it takes too long to bring results.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is no way you’re going to get 1,000 clicks starting day 1 from article marketing, unless by luck you get syndicated on a major website, but that’s highly unlikely. What’s more likely is that you will get 50-100 visitors within the first few days and continue to get lingering traffic from that article that slowly builds over time (as the article spreads through the internet).

So, First of All, Why Even Bother With Article Marketing?

Well…why not? It’s still free traffic. If done right, it can be highly converting traffic while also helping build your brand.

But, here’s the best reason…

You’re not at the mercy of Google or anyone for that matter. Even if I WANTED to shut my article marketing traffic off, it would be impossible. There is no way I can possibly contact over 100,000 websites that have my articles on them and ask each of them to REMOVE my link.

The Biggest Downside To Article Marketing Is The “Work…”

To really get the most out of article marketing, you need serious discipline. When a site is brand new, you need to submit at least 1 article a day to the top directories. Even after a few months, you want to make sure you continue submitting a few a week to keep building.

Compare that to the concept of pumping a bunch of keywords into Google and simply tweaking and checking every day (rather than writing and submitting) and I start to understand why PPC affiliates don’t care for article marketing.

But what if you could automate it all? What if you can make your article marketing into more of a science where you even calculate things like ROI for each article?

Now, do I have your attention?

The Art of Outsourcing Article Marketing

Let me start by saying that when you’re first starting, outsourcing article marketing is not easy. You’re likely to get burned a bit in the beginning as you learn. Why? Because you need to find INEXPENSIVE QUALITY writers who can produce work fast (that’s a lot to ask for).

So, here are some tips:

1. Use www.Guru.com (I find the best quality writers here at the lowest prices).

2. Never use anyone that has no feedback or rating.

3. Always ask for sample work - make sure they’ve written articles SPECIFICALLY for article marketing.

4. Find out if they have staff and if they can commit to X articles a day. People that have staff never tend to work well for me.

5. Buy articles in lots of 10 (at a minimum) - you get better pricing.

6. Supply the writer with the following: article title, keywords and length desired (keep it around 450 words).

7. If they’re late or submit bad work even once, move on - trust me on this one.

8. Ask them to write the articles in NOTEPAD - easier to copy/paste into directories. Word puts in weird characters.

There are other tips too, but those are the most crucial.

Now, for the MILLION dollar question - how much do I pay the writer?

Calculating Article ROI…

Before you can figure out how much you can pay a writer, you’ll have to figure out what your article ROI is. To do that, you’ll have to first write a few articles yourself, submit them and track your success.

It’s really dead simple.

I create a unique landing page for an article where all my affiliate links use SUB ID tracking so I know which article referred the sale. I write about 5 articles, so I create about 5 unique versions of the page.

I submit the articles, give it a few days and go in and calculate my sales.

Typically, here is what I find…

Of course this is going to be very different based on the NICHE, but when I do my research PROPERLY using my own self-created techniques, I’m usually able to achieve the following results…

NOTE: I tend to prefer promoting Clickbank products when I do article marketing OR high converting and high-paying CPA offers.

I usually can count on each article generating roughly 1 sale/lead for me. The sale will typically average $25 (if it’s a CB product).

However, that one article probably creates much more “lifetime” income for me, but I’m too lazy to track that far - this one sale that I’m talking about typically comes in within the first 3-5 days.

So, let’s say each article is worth $25 to me…

If I search well on Guru, I typically can find great writers willing to write each article at about $6-7 an article (given that I bulk buy at least 10-20 articles). Additionally, I have built a small “submission” team that submits all of my articles, I estimate that it costs me about $3 per article to get them submitted the way I want.

So, now I’m spending about $10 per article to get it written AND submitted (all I’ve done myself so far is checked the quality of the article and written the title, not too much work so far).

At $10 an article and $25 commission, I’ve achieved a 150% ROI.

The other thing to remember is that the article will continue working for me for LIFE. The 150% ROI may very well become 300% or even 500% given life-time value.

So the key to making article marketing work for you is to apply some of your PPC discipline to the practice. Be smart when you outsource and know what your articles are worth. But even more importantly, make sure you do research to assure that article marketing will actually work in that niche.

Some niches that do very well in PPC may not be that hot in article marketing (and vice versa).

You Probably Have More Questions…

I hate to leave you at that, but at least I’ve gotten you hungry to start thinking about article marketing. Most likely you have questions like…

1. So, how do I do the research?

2. Where do I submit my articles?

3. What kind of landing pages should I use?

4. Are there any special outlines the articles should follow?

5. What about duplicate content penalty?

6. What other sites can I use to find writers?

If Amit allows me to, I’ll be glad to come back in the future and talk more about all the questions above. The good news is that Affiliate Classroom is working on a detailed report on exactly how to do article marketing that is based on my trials and errors from the last 5 years of doing it.

We’re getting ready to launch our own article directory that we’ve been working on for a year, so we’ll release the report along with that in about 3 weeks (hopefully Amit will let everyone know about it).

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Now, since Amit did not pay me for this post, here are some shameless plugs for where you can read more from me.

1. Affiliate Classroom Blog

2. IwillFIGHT.com - My new “passion” blog (the 2nd domain name I ever bought!)

3. AffSphere.com - The new article directory we’re getting ready to launch (still in BETA).

Before we get started let me define what a long tail keyword is. A long tail keywords is a highly specific keyword containing 4 words or more.

Here’s an example :

buy nike tennis shoes size 10

discount nike running sneakers

red leather high heeled shoes

As you can imagine someone typing in a keywords like : “buy nike tennis shoes size 10″ is READY TO BUY! In other words an effective long tail keywords will have a very high conversion rate.

But here’s the thing, a 4+ word keyword will not get a lot of traffic, maybe 1-2 clicks a month. So the trick is to bid on 30k,50k, even a 100k long tails. You can do the math, the traffic will add up.

These keywords have very little to no competition so you’ll get a very low cost per click. Heck, with a strong list of long tails you can launch a very effective direct linking campaign, and completely clean up.

Sounds pretty simple right?

Well I hate to burst your bubble, but coming up with huge ’smart’ list of long tails (like the examples above) that actually get traffic is NOT easy :

1. Sure you could crack open KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker, but you’ll be disappointed with what you get back. They’re typically not the type of quality long tails that will generate massive amounts of traffic and high conversion rates. Plus everyone else in your market has access to these keywords.
2. The other thing is that the long tail strategy really doesn’t work well in every niche. Niches like retail, travel, insurance, that have massive amounts of search volume, and people are often looking for something very specific, will work well with the long tail strategy.
3. You could make a huge multiplier of terms related to your niche and generate 100k long tail keywords. However, unless you really understand your niche chances are you’ll get a huge list of junk keywords that don’t get any traffic.
4. The long tails for different niches, say retail vs travel, will be very different, so that just one more layer of complexity added in!

So is it worth cracking the long tail strategy for ppc affiliate marketing. Are there really affiliates out there making a fortune bidding on 100k+ long tail keywords?

Every heard of Clicks2Customers (C2C)? They’re the biggest super affiliate company in the world, started by renowned PPC expert, Vinny Lingham. Clicks2Customers (which has now become more of a performance-based agency), specializes in the travel and retail markets with a direct to merchant long tail strategy.

When I mean long tail, I mean REALLY long tail. C2C bids on several million long tail keywords per merchant. And you thought managing your 10k keyword campaign was intimidating!?!

C2C brings tens of millions of dollars in affiliate commissions every year.

So I wouldn’t say long tails are the holy grail of search so much as developing a killer system for generating quality high converting long tails, now that’s THE Holy Grail of Search.

This is a research project I’ve started with a fellow super affiliate. We have some very good ideas, but we still need to test them.