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

In light of banks going under left and right AND in light of my last post, I let me ask you this question :

Is your income dependent on Google Adwords?

Because if it is, you need to start thinking about how you can diversify your income ASAP.

In general, it’s dangerous to have your income all coming from ONE source. If that one source is Google, you’re flat out playing with fire.

If you’re just doing ppc affiliate marketing then the best way to diversify is to transfer your campaigns to Yahoo and MSN ASAP. If you’ve been waiting for the right time, well, the right time is NOW.

I spend a LOT of money on Yahoo and MSN. Only trouble is that Google still has most of the traffic, so without Google you would still take a big hit, but you’d be okay. I know super affiliates who do well over a million a year in revenue just from Yahoo and MSN.

No doubt in the short running, I believe ppc affiliate marketing is the BEST way to make money.

In the long run, however, you want to think about how you can create a more solid stable income that is NOT dependent on the whims of a merciless mega corporation like Google.

In this post I discuss a bunch of long term strategies.

Now if you’re just a newbie, just focus on building a full time income with ppc and affiliate marketing. But if you’re a full time affiliate it’s time to start thinking long term.

For those of you who are wondering, YES, my Google account is active. However, I’m now using completely seperate accounts for my new affiliate campaign that I’m launching - just to be on the safe side. Of course, I’ll have to rebuild my account history, but that’s a small price to pay for piece of mind.

For most of the offers that I promote I typically have between 5%-7% refund rate.

5%-7% is actually pretty good. A lot of affiliates get hit with 10%+ refunds, depending on the offers they’re promoting.

Even if you have just a 5% refund rate here’s why you need to be careful…

Let’s say you have a campaign that’s pumping out a 100% ROI, then a 5% refund rate will cut out 10% of your net profits.

Now most affiliates typically work on 50% margins, if that’s the case with you, then a 5% refund rate will reduce your net profit by 15%.

If you increase that refund rate to 7% on the 50% ROI campaign then the drop in profits jumps to 21%, if you increase the refund rate to 10% the profit drop is 30 freaking percent!?!

This is a big wake up call for those of you who are running offers on slim margins. For example, one of the offers I’m running took a big dip over the summer with 38% margins (still making great money because the search volume is very high). However, the refund rate was about 8%.

That 8% refund rate dropped profits by a ridiculous 29%!

Btw, here’s the formula for calculating the percent drop of your profits as a function of ROI (before accounting for refunds) and your refund rate.

% Drop in Profits due to Refunds = (1+ROI)*(Refund Rate)/ROI

where ROI is your ROI before you take refunds into account.

So are YOU tracking the impact of your refund rate?

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!

I gotta tell you, it’s nuts down here in South Florida, people are stocking up and preparing for what could be a category 1 Hurricane, Hurricane Fay, hitting us hard. Shilpi and I are ready-well as ready as well ever be for our first hurricane.

Now how do you prepare when your affiliate sales get hit by a storm? What I mean by that is your affiliate sales take a major beating between Google slaps and market slowdowns.

I know for a fact a lot of affiliates are hurting right now. My affiliate sales have been particularly slow this time of the year. I’ve seen market slowdowns before but this is NUTS. Don’t feel bad for me, overall, my affiliate profits are doing very well, thanks to some new offers I launched earlier this year that are picking up the slack of the other offers I’m running.

Will the market rebound? Most certainly, however, my philosophy is to leave NOTHING to chance. When sales slow down I get busy.

Here’s an action plan :

1. First lower your bids on your existing campaign using advanced ad scheduling. The idea is to improve your profits and ROI while the market is down.
2. Start researching more keywords for your niche - I’ve found this to be one of the most effective ways to breathe life into an apparently dying campaign. Time and time again I’ve been able to recover lost search volume and sales doing this.
3. If your offers are all running on Google, start testing Yahoo and MSN, and vis versa. If you’re doing Google Search only, test Content Network as well, and vis-versa. Get busy testing more and more avenues of traffic generation.
4. Launch more offers. I know, this one’s a no brainer. It’s also a good idea to WAIT until the market begins to turn around (Sept, Oct, etc) before you launch a new affiliate offer. However, you can start setting everything up now and even upload your campaign paused into Google, ready to launch at the click of a button!

Recovering from an Affiliate Storm is actually not that hard, the hard part is keeping your emotions in check.

Don’t freak out! Remember if you’re seeing a seasonal downturn your sales WILL GO BACK UP, even if you do nothing.

Remember ultimately YOU are in control of your success and your future.

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.

About a month ago I talked about the New Microsoft Adcenter Desktop Tool. I was one of a handful of advertisers who got access to the beta release of this tool.

The major limitation of the first beta release of this tool was that you couldn’t download stats! Well, Microsoft just released a new version of this tool with stats downloading capabilities.

After playing around with newly updated Adcenter Desktop I figure out how to optimize the bids on all of my 20k active keywords based on CPA data, all in about 30 minutes. I don’t have the time to get into details of how I did this, however I can tell you this: the trick is to output all the data into an Excel file and then use the 3rd part import feature to upload your changes in the program.

Unfortunately, this tool is not yet avaliable to the public, however, if you want to apply to beta test this tool go here.

I suspect Microsoft will releasing this tool to the general public very soon, it’s looking REALLY good.

Now it’s time for Yahoo to come out with a desktop tool!

Over 4th of July weekend Shilpi and I spend 3 days on Little Palm Island, one of the most AMAZING resorts in the world, located right in the Florida Keys.

Little Palm Island Resort is a tiny little island that’s only accessible by boat or float plane. The idea is total seclusion: there’s no alarm clock, no cell phone usage allowed in public areas, and no TV! The idea is just to relax and unwind!

The first night we had a romantic dinner on the beach :

The food was incredible. I had some grilled fish that they had just caught that day.

The following day we went on a snorkeling tour on a coral reef out in the open ocean. I’ll be honest, I was scared at first, I’ve never been snorkeling out in the open ocean before. It didn’t help that the water was a little choppy.

However, after I overcame my fear the view was absolutely STUNNING. I saw at least 10 types of fish & coral, barracudas, and a sting rays. I wish I had pictures to share, however, I didn’t have an underwater camera on me.

Later that day we had a chance to explore the island and see : a lifesize chessboard, a zen garden, the tide coming in, and some of the wildlife that inhabits the island.

Check it out :

The following day we went out for flatsboat fishing. I’ve never been fishing before in my life so I was more than excited when I caught a hammerhead shark.

No joke :

I won’t bludgeon you with what a weekend at this resort will cost you, let’s just put it this way, there NO WAY I would be going to Little Palm Island Resort if I was still working at MIT.

There’s NOTHING better than the Super Affiliate Lifestyle. It really is the ultimate dream life!

Don’t you just love summer time?

It’s the time of the year when traffic and conversions take a hit, and even a big hit depending on the market that you’re in.

If you’re new to the game and have hit the Summer Slowdown for the first time then rest assure that profits will pick back up in the fall.

Here’s some tips on how to best deal with the summer slowdown :

1. Don’t Panic or do anything rash, such as completely pause your campaigns or make drastic changes that you can’t undo. It’s really easy to lose perspective when your profits take a dip. Instead of trying to fight market trends its better to go with the flow.
2. Use the Adwords Ad Scheduling Feature to adjust your bids down by 10%, 20%, or even 30% (across the boards) depending on how much of a slowdown you’re seeing. This will improve your profits and ROI. And what’s cool about Ad Scheduling is that you can easily restore your original bids once the market rebounds in the fall.
3. You may want to consider holding off launching new campaigns during the slowdown period, since it will be much more difficult to make them profitable. Keep researching new markets and offers, setup your landing pages, and your campaigns, but wait until the markets swings backup to launch your campaigns. I’m sure there’s also markets that do well over the summer, you can also consider focusing on those.

If you have solid campaigns running on autopilot like I do here’s what I suggest: drop your bids and take the rest of the summer off!

My wife and I are off to another mini vacation tomorrow, it’s an amazing resort on a tiny island only accessible by boat. I’ll tell you all about it next week!