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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.

You know, there’s a lot of affiliate out there telling people that direct linking no longer works, and that they shouldn’t waste their time with it.

I was one of these affiliate.

But in the paste several months I’ve come full circle.

Here’s some success stories :

1. I meet two guys at Yanik’s Underground. One guy is NETTING $50k/month with all direct linking campaigns. Another guy is making $100k in revenues a month with direct linking (with HIGH ROI).
2. One of my students is netting $1000-$1300/day profit from just 3 direct linking campaigns he launched. He used the strategies I taught him combined with some genius insight into what markets to promote.
3. Another one of my students is netting $500/day profit - her first big success, following the EXACT strategies I laid out in my coaching program and in this post.

Also, I’ve just recently launched a direct linking campaign, it’s already profitable, and continues to quickly grow as I split test my ads and add more keywords.

The biggest advantage of direct linking is that it allows you to quickly test a market without a huge invest of your time. No matter how much market research you do, quickly testing lots of affiliate offers is really the best way to find the big winners.

So if you’re struggling to make landing pages, I recommend that you FIRST do direct linking and get 10-20 campaigns going.

You can easily launch 5-10 campaigns a week if you’re focus and disciplined.

Once you find a big winner, reinvest your profits into hiring a decent web designer and writer to build you a site. Once you have a real site up, your traffic will go WAAAY UP!

And so will your profits!

The biggest drawback to direct linking is that you’ll only get about 20% impression share (in most cases), however, this problem is easily solved with your own site.

Many of you have been asking for case studies, I’ll be doing several case studies in the beginning of May showing some concrete examples, so stay tuned!

Now I know I’ve been talking about a lot of advanced topics recently. I’ve had a number of readers ask : “Hey Amit, all this is great, but I’m just getting started. What you do recommend that I do?”

Now based on the amazing success that many of the students in my coaching program are having I recommend starting affiliate marketing with direct linking campaigns promoting clickbank products.

Why?

First off direct linking requires no website, that right, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate id through clickbank and you’re good to go - it takes 2 minutes.

Building a website is probably the biggest hurdle many affiliates face when getting started in this business, that is, unless your a professional web designer! I know it was a HUGE hurdle for me, it took me weeks to learn enough html to make a simple webpage with tables that didn’t look like a 5 year old threw it together!

Needless to say, I don’t make my own sites anymore. I have people who actually know what they’re doing handle that!

Now what’s direct linking? If you don’t already know it’s where you simply put your affiliate link in the destination url of your Google Ad, taking the visitor right to the affiliate site.

How cool is that?

As long as your commission are greater than your click costs you’re making a profit.

This is by no means a long term business strategy, but it’s the FASTEST way to learn Adwords, and direct marketing, for that matter.

Here’s a few basic steps to take to get started :

1. First a relatively obscure niche in clickbank, a highly competitive niche will be difficult to break into with direct linking. Obscure little niches work great with direct linking though, as long as they has a decent sales page and a viable market.
2. Use a tool like Keycompete.com or Keywordspy.com to dig up a nice broad keyword list
3. Clean up junk keywords out of your keyword list
4. Use EfficientPPC to setup a ONE keyword per adgroups campaign, with two unique ads per adgroup
5. While you’re setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC, Setup clickbank tids for each keyword. There’s a number of ways of doing this, the easier way is to simply assign a number to each keyword and use that number as your tid (since clickbank severely limits of the tid to 8 characters you can’t use the keyword itself). This is critical to your success, you need to be able to track which keywords are actually making sales.
6. Launch your campaign on Adwords with a starting bid of 0.20. Closely monitor your campaign. (1) if you’re getting virtually zero traffic, up your bids. (2) If your getting lots of traffic ( > 500 clicks) and zero sales, you’ve probably got a dud, move on (3) If your getting traffic and consistent sales, you’ve got a winner, now you need to optimize and make it profitable!

I don’t have time to go into more detail in this post, but I’m planning a simple direct linking case study where I pick a clickbank niche and show you what I do, step by step, and how to make it profitable.

So stay tuned!

This is a guest post by Melanie Tan.

Hi all! It’s a privilege to be able to end the year with Amit’s loyal friends and readers. Keeping in mind the spirit and true intention of this blog site, I hope that this post puts you in the right affiliate marketing MINDSET for 2008…

So what has 2007 been like for me in this wonderful world of online marketing? It has been a BLAST! So many things happened. Some of them, quite frankly, I never even thought was in the realm of possibility…

Early in 2007, a client of mine wanted a series of SEO articles that made use of the principles outlined in The Secret. He sent me a link so I can watch the movie online.

The movie blew my mind NOT because I thought I was losing out and was in the wrong mindset but because I never knew how powerful some of my CURRENT habits were. That’s right; I was doing many of the principles in The Secret without even realizing it!

So I began to focus more and ‘fine-tune’ my thinking and business goals and before I knew it… lo and behold…

• As clear as day, a ‘niche’ presented itself to me and I acted on it. I built a website (I owe this one to Tom), and made it EXACTLY what people wanted. I didn’t market it, didn’t even have time to issue a press release; but since Day 1 of this site being online, I NEVER had a ‘lull period’. There are ALWAYS clients clicking the Buy button and ordering the service provided on that site.

• In May, I was in Asia and out of the blue, I got invited to Singapore to check out the World Internet Summit. I went and got the chance to meet Armand Morin, Ewen Chia, and other affiliate marketing heavyweights. Personally, the best was seeing Jay Abraham on stage. The guy gets paid thousands of dollars PER HOUR by Fortune 500 CEOs and here I was – front row – listening to life, marketing and business ‘golden nuggets’ of information.

(Side note: I even got into a telephone conference with Jay Abraham months later!)

• Michel Fortin. Michel Fortin. Michel Fortin.

I know this is a story you can relate to… You’re a beginner and you’re looking up to someone who’s already ‘there’, a mentor if you will (for many of you, that would probably be Amit:). And you really hope that this mentor is a REALLY nice guy; that you won’t be disappointed by the ‘person’ behind the ‘packaging’.

Well, I WASN’T when I came under the tutelage of Michel Fortin, one of today’s BEST online copywriters. For one whole month, I was coached one-on-one by Michel Fortin on just about every aspect of making killer website copy that sells 24/7. I thank Michel for being a great and generous mentor! Thanks to him copywriting clients are pouring in (as well as online sales from our affiliate sites).

• Google Quality Score changes…

For me, quality is ALWAYS over quantity so I never overbook myself with clients. However, when the Google Quality Score changes kicked in and almost every affiliate marketer realized just how important unique and relevant content is… well, clamor for our article writing services went through the roof!

Who am I to deny good mojo?!? Do you really want to say ‘Wait! I need to catch my breath’ or ‘I’m not ready’ to opportunity? Me? I hired and personally trained more writers to accomodate the need.

There are so many more things that happened both professionally and personally but I won’t bore you with all the details. Just focus on the fact that what I outlined above were just some of the opportunities that presented themselves to me. And I truly believe that they were the result of me focusing, working and achieving things that I did list down at the beginning of 2007. So the list above? A bonus from the universe!

And imagine, in between all of these, I traveled, took breaks, and even took a month-long vacation one time!

Through all of these, this phrase from The Secret comes to my mind, again and again and again…

Discover what you really want… once you get your act together… and commit to achieving your dreams… the Universe will bend over backwards to support you.

So don’t say “I wonder what 2008 will bring…”.

Instead, IDENTIFY what you want to happen and say “These are the things I will achieve in 2008…” AND DO THEM.

This is the Super Affiliate MINDSET you need to thrive in 2008.

Good luck!

Melanie Tan heads an online content provision company that provides thousands of SEO articles, autoresponder messages, online press releases, and other e-content annually. She is also a professional copywriter who specializes in affiliate marketing landing pages.

First off, special thanks to Amit for the invitation to contribute a post to his blog. Amit has set the bar high for good content on his blog, and I hope to live up.

I think this is a good follow-up post to Miles’ excellent post. As I read his post I started reflecting on my own business - you know, what I’ve done well, and what areas need improvement.

Well, in my own business there’s one area that could use improvement: more outsourcing.

I know, you’ve heard it before, right? Of course. But it’s true. If you analyze your business and find that you’re single-handedly running the show, congratulations - you’ve just identified your own bottleneck!

If you don’t start looking for ways to outsource some tasks now, eventually it will limit the amount of profits you earn and probably contribute to burn out as you struggle to keep up with everything. If that sounds like you, this post is designed to help you get started.

Where should you start? Website design and article writing.

Website Design

But wait, why would you pay someone to create a site when there are HTML editors available for free? Well, unless you are very comfortable with HTML and you have good graphics skills (i.e., you know Photoshop or an equivalent program), I don’t recommend building a site yourself. Let’s face it, affiliate marketing is only getting more competitive. If you want to compete in most markets today - you’re going to need a professional looking site with graphics - period.

But isn’t that going to cost a thousand dollars or more? I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to know that you can find people on Elance and/or Rent-A-Coder that will deliver a simple but professional looking site for $150-$250. Additionally, you may be able to reuse the same website template as you tackle other related markets. So, that one time investment may pay off two or three times.

Article Writing

Article writing is another good task to outsource. Whether we like it or not Google has forced us into becoming info publishers. I think Amit mentioned that he’ll have at least 25 original articles on his site before starting a new campaign. I do the same thing. The good news is that it’s not hard to find good article writers on Elance. In case you’re new to the process of outsourcing your article writing, here are some guidelines I use:

• Start small. When looking for a new provider, I’ll usually start with an order of no more than 10 articles. If the project turns out well, then I’ll try a larger order.
• Always go with a provider with good feedback. I like to go with people with a 90% or better positive feedback rating.
• Look for a provider with writing samples. When working with a new provider I like to see a few samples and I look for someone with “SEO” in their description. This indicates that they know how to write good articles for the web (e.g., Good and balanced keyword use in the title and throughout the article body).
• Only use original content. State in your project description that all articles must contain 100% original content. I’ve never received plagiarized content, but I’ve heard from others that it happens. Picking a good writer with good feedback will reduce the risk.
• How much should you pay? I generally pay about $10 an article. This seems to be the going rate for my markets. Bonus tip: if the person did a good job with the articles, make sure to leave positive feedback and tip over the agreed price. You want to start building relationships wih your providers.
• Find 2-3 providers. I like to have 2-3 “go-to guys”. In case one is too busy to take my project, one of my other preferred providers is usually available. I’ve also had providers disappear from Elance for whatever reason. This is another reason to use more than one provider.

Anyway, those are just a few tips and recommendations to help get you started. Of course, if you’re just getting started you may not have the budget to hire anyone at any price. That’s understandable. But really make it a goal that you will start to outsource at the very first opportunity.

If the idea of outsourcing sounds a little overwhelming or intimidating, don’t worry, once you get your feet wet it becomes easier.

Thanks for reading and here’s to a happy and prosperous 2008!

- Doug Partridge

There’s one serious mistake that almost every newbie affiliate makes, and I made it a bunch of times when I got started. Once I realized I was making this mistake, I completely changed my strategy to ppc affiliate marketing and my business started to really take off for the first time.

So what’s this one serious mistake?

We’ll let me tell you about a conversation I had with one of my students on a group coaching call just this week.

Let’s call him Joe.

Joe was really excited, he wanted to know how to find a programmer on Elance to build him an affiliate site. He told me how he had found a high traffic keyword that had very little competition for the affiliate offer he wanted to promote.

He wanted to build an entire site around this ONE keyword.

I asked him if he had tested this keyword by just writing a Google ad going straight to the affiliate link (Googlecash).

He hadn’t!

So I asked him : “So Joe, you’re going to hire someone off Elance to build an entire site around 1 keyword that you’re not even sure will convert??”

Do you see where I’m getting at here?

Here’s where Joe went wrong :

1. NEVER base an affiliate campaign on ONE keyword (or just a few keywords). You’re building your house out of straw, and the big bad wolf (Google and your competitors) can come by and blow your house down!
2. NEVER assume that because a certain high traffic keyword has little competition that it’s going to be a goldmine. Chances are that this keyword has little competition because : it doesn’t convert OR Google is slapping all the advertisers for this keyword with high minimum bids.
3. NEVER build a whole site around a niche, an affiliate offer, and/or a keyword WITHOUT first testing to see if the market is viable. Doing a small scale campaign with a simple landing page or just going direct to merchant is a great way to test a market before you go gung ho and build a whole 30 page site for it.

The idea that you need to find all the keywords that have less than 8 ads and bid on them since they have little competition made sense when Google Adwords had first started and there were still a lot of great keywords that most advertisers had completely missed (and very little competition overall compared to now).

Now that Adwords has really matured don’t expect to find high converting keywords that have less than 8 ads (unless Google has tightened the quality score requirements for that keyword).

Here’s my strategy, bid on EVERYTHING, that is, every relevant keyword in your market and see what converts. More often than not, you’ll discover that the HIGH CPC keywords convert the best and usually have the best ROI.

Why is that?

Think about it, keywords are high CPC because they convert well! Advertisers bid higher on keywords that are making money. Now as an affiliate your goal is to have your ads on the bottom of the first page for these high converting keywords, where you’ll pay a fraction of what the advertisers in the first 3 positions are paying.

Okay, here’s Part II of the Secret to Affiliate Success Part I post I did.

This time I really want to talk more about scaling and WHY that’s a big secret to success in affiliate marketing. I already talked about HOW last time.

If you really think about it, building scale is an important part of any business. If you own one hot dog stand, you’re very limited in how much money you’ll make in one day, and on top of that it will consume all your time.

So how do you scale a hot dog stand?

You hire out someone to run your hot dog stand, heck, franchise it out, give then 90% of the profits and you take 10%. Now do this 100 times, and you’ll be making 10x more than you were with just one hot dog stand and have free up all of your time (except for possibly training new hot dog stand owners)!

Now you can imagine the enormous time and money it would take to sell a 100 hot dog stand franchises to people and get them up and running.

In most traditional businesses it’s REALLY hard to scale. Even in online businesses, outside of affiliate marketing, scaling can be a pain in the butt.

Think about it.

Even if you’re selling a software product online, how difficult would be to take your company from $1M/year to $10M/year? With 10 times the sales you’re going to need 10 times the customer support, ten times the server capacity, bigger office space, etc, etc, etc.

A lot of start ups go belly up because they face fast growth in the beginning and they can’t handle it, that is they can’t scale fast enough to handle the growth. Now that’s a scary thought!

So what makes affiliate marketing different?

If you take your affiliate business for $500/day in sales to $5,000/day in sales you don’t have to worry about : hiring more employees, getting more office space, or anything like that.

Now the only bottleneck you may face here is your credit card limit, if you want to make $5,000/day in sales you’re most likely going to have to spend $2,000-$3,000 A DAY on ppc to hit that. If you get an American Express Gold card and build up your history you’ll have nothing to worry about (BIG TIP).

The ability to easily and rapidly build scale is what makes affiliate marketing a really unique business model.

I mean, what other business can you go into and start making $10k/month profit in within 3-6 months?

Now, last time I talked about how you need to build a team and a system to do the work of building scale in your affiliate business. I realized I talked above most people’s heads, so let me give more practical advice that newbies and intermediate affiliates can start applying right away.

Lets say you have success with dog training, you understand what keywords convert, what copy works. You’ve setup a nice review site, where you review various dog training ebooks etc.

So how do you scale this?

Easy, promote other types of pet training ebooks using the same methodology you used for dog training. You can go into cat training, bird training, etc.

In different markets you need different strategies to be successful. You want to milk one market as much as you can before you go into another market, pet training is a perfect example.

So if you’re just starting out don’t get overwhelmed by Part I of my post, just do this:

1. Find a good niche, you’ll know it’s a good niche when you start making consistent profits!
2. Build on your success by split testing your landing page, split testing your Google ads, adding more keywords, and expanding your campaign onto other PPC search engines.
3. Now go into closely related niches (ie dog training, cat training, bird training) and use the same strategy you used in the original niche and duplicate your results.

It really is THAT simple!

I often get this question : “Amit, I love your blog and all the info you give out, but honestly already what’s the secret to being a successful super affiliate?”

As I’ve said before there’s really is NO secret to becoming a super affiliate, however, there are two concepts, idea, or whatever you want to call them, that if you understand these 2 concepts, I mean REALLY understand them, then you’re either already a super affiliate or quickly on your way to becoming one.

So what are these two concepts you need to understand??

TESTING & SCALING

What exactly do I mean by testing and scaling?

Here’s what I mean by testing:

Assuming you understanding the basics of ppc affiliate marketing, and most of you do, whether you want to believe it or not.

You first goal is to test, test, test.

Test different affiliate offers, test different keywords for your affilaite offers, test different landing page copy, test different Google ad copy, most importantly test different strategies for successfully launching & growing a profitable affiliate offer.

Once you found a good affilaite offer and tested enough keywords, Google Ad copy, and landing page copy to produce a consistently profitable affiliate campaign (even if it’s only $25/day profit), your next goal is to SCALE your campaign.

What most affiliates do at this point is they jump up with joy at their $25/day campaign, and then go into a completely different niche with a completely different strategy.

THIS IS A BIG MISTAKE.

If you have been busting your butt optimizing an affiliate offer and got it to $25/profit you need to LEVERAGE everything you discovered while making that offer profitable. This is what I call scaling your affiliate business.

You want to do everything you can to MULTIPLY that $25/day into $300/day or even, in some cases, $3000/day.

I’ll get into a lot more detail about this is Part II of my post, but here’s a few ways to scale your profitable affiliate offer:

1. Aggressively expand your keywords list, go wider and deeper.
2. Promote other affilaite offers in the same or in a very similar niche. In this case you’re leveraging everything you learned in your niche, what type of keywords and copy work best, that is. You discover that with different products in that same or similar niche, the same type of copy and keywords work well.
3. Expand your campaign onto other search engines, this is a no brainer, but you’d be surprised how many affiliates don’t take the time to do this. I run some of my top offers on up to 5 different search engines.
4. If your strategy is unique, replicate the same strategy you used to make your affiliate offer profitable in other niches. For example if your bidding on misspelled domain names, and have found a really effective way of doing this that generates high ROI, then duplicate this in as many niches as you can.

An essential key to building SCALE is systemization.

Building scale without a system can be an insane amount of work.

What do I mean by systemization anyway?

What I mean by “system” is a nearly automated step by step process that allows you to dramatically speed up the process of scaling your business.

Here’s an example: I’ve had a lot of success scaling my affiliate offers by pumping up the amount of keywords I’m bidding on, in particular broad keywords. It’s not uncommon for me to add 20k, 30k, or even 50k of keywords to a campaign I’m scaling.

Now setting up targeted adgroups can be a nightmare for 50k keywords, and especially if it’s a BROAD keyword list (that is with lots of related and lateral keywords, and not just long tails combinations).

I have a whole system in place, including a team of people that I’ve trained to clean, sort, & group the keywords. Plus I’ve developed some bulk methods to setting up 100s, even 1000s of adgroups in a very short period of time.

This system has allowed me to take an affiliate campaign that’s maybe making $100/day profit and explode it to the point it’s making $1000+/day profit in a matter of weeks.

Do you have a system in place to scale YOUR affiliate business?

Stay tuned for Part II where I get into more of the nitty gritty of TESTING & SCALING!

In part III of this thread I’m going to blog about my conversation with uber affiliate Jeremy Palmer in a interview I did with him for PPC Classroom. As I did with Felix I want talk about how to be prepared for Affiliate Marketing 3.0, the future of affiliate marketing, next year, and beyond!

Here’s basically what Jeremy and I concluded…

DIVERSIFY YOUR AFFILIATE OFFERS

I’m sure you’ve all read about Google’s new quality score hit list: data collection sites, comparison shopping sites, travels, sites, ‘get rich quick’ sites, etc, etc.

I can tell you this is just the beginning, your niche might be next on their hit list, and honestly there’s no telling who they’ll go after next.

The best way to protect yourself is by making a solid income stream for 4-5 DIFFERENT niches.

Think about it, let’s say you’re making money in the follow 5 niches : ringtones, dog training, diet pills, education leads, & spyware removers.

Now let say next year Google decided to put diet pills, and ringtones on their hit list.

You’re okay-you still have 3 strong affiliate offers going.

DIVERSIFY PPC SEARCH ENGINES

Jeremy told me that he actually spent more on Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter last year, than he did on Adwords!

If you ask me this is a REALLY smart move, especially considering Google is really putting the squeeze on affiliates, with increasingly stringent Quality Score requirements, and as mentioned above, a growing hit list of business models they plan to slap out of existence.

Going back to the above example with the 5 different niches, if your diet pill and ringtone offers are wiped out by Google next year, you still have campaigns for those offers running on MSN and Yahoo.

If you take time to properly setup your campaigns on Yahoo+MSN, you can expect up to half your sales (or more!) to come from there!

And if you didn’t know yet, conversions on Yahoo and MSN ROCK!?!

THINK ONE STEP AHEAD OF GOOGLE

Let face it Google always has new trick up its bag, ready to pull the rug from under your business when you least suspect it.

However, if you try to see things from Google perspective you can get an idea of what you might be in store for for in future Quality Score updates.

Okay we know that Google wants the following from your site to get a good quality score (and therefor low min bids on your keywords):

1. Landing pages and adcopy that are tightly targeted to the keyword
2. Substantial unique content on your site, including outbound links to relevant high trust sites
3. Privacy policy, terms of service (trust factor)
4. Compelling content that keeps visitors on your site (Google looks at the bounce rates)

So Google wants you to have a real legitimate trustworthy (in their eyes) website which leads visitors to a landing page that highly relevant to what they’re searching and has compelling content that keeps them on the site.

But wait, isn’t that the goal of Google’s natural search algorithm?!?

So it doesn’t take a PhD in Physics to figure out that Google quality score algo is moving more and more towards their natural search algorithm.

This is BIG: We’re seeing the convergence of paid search and natural search.

So what’s up next? Here’s a good guess at what Google’s QS (Quality Score) will factor in next:

1. Freshness of your content, and how often it’s updated
2. Your PageRank!

It’s not enough to just do PPC, you must optimize your site for natural search if you want to dominate paid search in the future. Not only will you get a good QS this way, but you’ll also get free traffic!

Before I talk about my conversation with Jeremy Palmer, I want to address a GREAT point one of my readers, Walter, brought up. Here’s a comment he left on my last post:

“Interesting post, but a rather shallow analysis of how to succeed in such a climate. There are a lot more possibilities than just settling for razor-thin margins and becoming PPC day-traders:

1. In super-competitive markets like mortgages some affs are advertising in newspapers, which gets better ROI than paying Google;
   
2. Some affs may settle to break even or lose on the initial offer in favor of building a list and making it back on the back end;
   
3. I’ve seen some make the jump from PPC to SEO’d sites, though that will also get more competitive over time;
   
4. The content network is an underutilized resource, for those that understand how to get results from it;
   
5. There’s Authority sites and how to leverage Web 2.0 to get traffic without going near search engines or PPC.”

Excellent points, Walter! A key aspect of surviving in a high competition, high CPC environment is developing creative strategies to promote your affiliate offers. In fact I’m using several of the strategies that Walter lists above.

Here’s a few more strategies that are hot:

1. Develop a viral facebook application with an affiliate offer embedded in it, some affiliates are making a KILLING doing this. This is HOT right now.
2. Leverage web 2.0 traffic using the contextual network (even facebook offers contextual advertising now).
3. Supplementing your PPC efforts with SEO; this will help your profit margins AND your Google Quality Score. Although I don’t not recommend switching over completely to SEO, unless you REALLY know what you’re doing. Let’s face it ONE algo change can KILL your income overnight.
4. Using Google site targeting creative, ala Adwords180 (don’t worry Disappointed, it’s NOT an affiliate link )!

In regards to building a list, this strategy has been around for a while, the only downside is it only works well in certain markets, in particular info marketing (I RARELY use optins, and have tested them extensively) + Google has tightened the noose on squeeze pages.

Building authority sites that leverage Web 2.0 traffic, is brilliant strategy, and Zac Johnson is the master at this! However, this tactic has been around for a while and this space is also becoming extremely competitive-come on, how many college students do YOU know with myspace layout sites!?!

Not to say that you can’t make a killing if you know what you’re doing.

Bottom line: Yes, by being creative and innovative you can help you stay ahead of the curve and reap a profit. However, the fact is online media and advertising continue to become more and more competitive (and expensive) across the boards, so being creative/innovative alone won’t cut it.

So here’s my revised suggestions from the last post (thanks Walter!)…

Tips to succeed in Affiliate Marketing 2.0 (or 3.0 or whatever!)

1. Develop/learn creative strategies that take advantage of market imbalances and new trends, such as the strategies listed above. If you’ve learned the basics of affiliate marketing then you need stop thinking that doing what the majority of affiliates are doing is going to make you a fortune. Start thinking OUTSIDE OF THE BOX, and experimenting with different strategies.
2. Tweak, optimize, and expand your current profitable affiliate offers to assure long term profitability. Doing proper & thorough keyword research ALONE will significantly extend the lifetime of your campaigns. So start split testing your landing pages, split testing your Google ads, and expanding your keyword list. And if you think you’ve found all the keywords in your market that convert, YOUR WRONG!
3. If you think your one man affiliate show is going to cut it 10 years from how then you’re going to be in for a rude wakening. My suggestion is if you’ve gotten to the point where you are making consistent profits, start building a team now. It doesn’t have to be full time employees, find some good outsources you can work with on a regular basis. You can hire a great web designer in India or Eastern Europe for $10/hr. Elance is a great place to find writers that can crank out articles for you for $10 (or less) apiece.

Building a team will not only allow you to launch affiliate offers at a faster rate, but it will free up your time to develop/learn creative affiliate strategies.

And yes, no matter what, profit margins WILL drop overtime ON AVERAGE. But those affiliates who have the power of a team backing them up so they can: 1) free up their time to develop creative marketing strategies & 2) launch affiliate offers faster than their existing offers lose profitability (and thereby continue to grow their bottom line), are going to dominate the affiliate world.

Don’t be the affiliate who gets cocky and has to end up going to back to work for the Man!

Think long term.