Well that was a loaded question haha.  The last few days I have been talking with someone who had a campaign and thought he was out of traffic.  Now I will admit he definitely had everything optimized extremely well and had really taken advantage of adwords.  However…adwords isn’t everything!

Just talking PPC alone here, I had him expand to Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Adcenter, Miva, and Looksmart.  Now I won’t tell you which one didn’t make money but every source we tested except for yes…ONE…added profit on to the campaign.  He is now making almost triple what he was making with that exact same campaign as he was less than a week ago.

Now this post is short, but its short for a reason.  Sometimes the BEST tips, are the absolute simplest things we take for granted.  You know how to market, now go find the audience (traffic source) that is perfect for you.  Don’t get so one minded thinking you have to do everything in adwords.  This is something I see happening all the time.

Until next time, spread your campaigns out among some new traffic sources and start earning some more BLING BLING!

Here is a great youtube video of Poetic Prophet rapping about search engine marketing (sem).  Everytime I see this video it puts a smile on my face so I thought I would pass it on to the rest of you incase you haven’t seen it.

I would LOVE to see someone else break out some internet marketing rhymes!

**UPDATE** April 30, 2008 - Updated news on LinkValu **UPDATE**

The other day out of the blue I received a call from Debi Rabin over at LinkValu.  As soon as I heard the words "LinkValu" I was quite stunned to be honest.  What stunned me even more was that Debi started the conversation off by apologizing for how I was mistreated by my previous contact from LinkValu.  She went on to explain how LinkValu made some personnel adjustments and that a big part of the problem was misunderstandings and miscommunication.  Either way, Debi apologized repeatedly, and persuaded me into giving them another shot.  I haven’t had any time to personally test out any offers yet, but if you have any sort of traffic related to insurance/life insurance LinkValu definitely has some good offers you should test out. Debi went over a lot of their offers with me over the phone and was really happy to help me get a roll on things.

So if you read my initial post, and were biased towards hating linkvalu.  I urge you to give them a chance.  They may not be so bad after all.  As soon as I get some spare time I will certainly be giving a few of their offers a shot.

It takes more guts to call someone up and apologize for something, especially when it wasn’t you that caused the problem.  I would have to say Debi did a great job of contacting me politely and respectfully and doing whatever she could to help make up for the problem that had occurred.

** END OF UPDATE **

While I was in Vegas at Affiliate Summit West I ran across a lot of people and companies wanting me to come check out their networks or hoping I could get them traffic.  One of these companies was LinkValu.  When I got home I went to the network, signed up, waited for my call to confirm the account.  Note that I have never ever been denied from any network and I am in A LOT.

So I get a call a couple hours ago from a friend asking me if I have ever heard of LinkValu.  I said no other than the fact that I had just signed up a few days ago to check them out.  He was telling me how they called him up and just made no sense, treated him like shit, then denied him.  Ok…whatever….certainly not a good way to do business but that’s their choice, doesn’t mean they treat everyone that way.

I am not kidding you within 15 minutes of my friend telling me about this situation…I get a call from LinkValu.  I don’t remember who I was talking to but he starts off telling me he is from LinkValu.  Asks me how I plan on sending traffic.  I explained I would be sending almost all of my traffic through PPC.  He then starts explaining how they have these insurance offers and that they only make a couple sales a year…yada yada…..I mentioned that I already run a couple different insurance offers so I’m familiar with that sort of traffic.  I don’t think he even quit listening to his own voice to hear me say a word because I certainly wasn’t acknowledged.  Next he asks me how much I spend monthly informing me that they only deal with people who spend over $20,000 a month in ad costs.  I told the linkvalu loser that I did around $200 a day which was only $6000 a month.  He stuttered a bit then said "actually that doesn’t come out that high in my calculations".  Come on dude, $200 x 30 = $6000.  That is a very simple formula.  Now as if all of this wasn’t just stupid enough….the guy than says.  Well we don’t generally accept blogs either.  Are you serious?????  I JUST GOT DONE TELLING YOU I SEND ALL MY TRAFFIC THROUGH PPC! 

Anyways, I didn’t feel like wasting my time arguing with some network I had never heard anything about so I told him to please disregard my application because I no longer wanted to join their network and I hung up on him.

There are many things to be said here.  First of all, if they can’t treat the average person with a little bit of dignity, how do you think this network will treat you when you are their affiliate?  I guarantee the first time a problem arises you will be taking it in the ass…not them.  Second of all…..when are people going to figure out it isn’t about your ad costs.  I can either a) lie about what i spend a month or b) actually be effective at what I do being able to maximize profits while keeping my ad costs extremely low.  It just goes to show how little some of these networks really know.

Linkvalu is definitely voted the worst Affiliate network of 2008!  Congratulations guys!

Well I thought I wasn’t going to be able to make it out to Affiliate Summit in Vegas but plans have changed and I just booked my flight!!!  I leave in a few hours and can’t wait its going to be great.  I really hope to meet up with some great people and hopefully make some connections I didn’t have before!

If anyone sees this and is going to be out in Vegas over the 24th-28th get ahold of me,  I’ll be staying at Planet Hollywood.  If you don’t know my number, just pop me an email or send me a message through my contact form and I will get back to you asap.

In case I am to busy to make my daily posts I’m sorry…but I will make it up to you all later!

A while back, I had a friend read over an important email I had written.  He came back at me suggesting something I had surprisingly never heard of.  He explained the reasoning behind why I should do it and it made complete sense to me.  After trying this secret trick out, I noticed a MUCH better response rate to my emails…

Now that was quite some time back, but I ran across this exact information again from a gentleman named Robert Cialdini and wanted to pass it on since I think it is valuable information:

Principle 4 : Consistency
Commitment and consistency.
In restaurants, they have problems with people that make a reservation then don’t show up.

Solution :
Change
"Please call if you have to cancel your reservation"
TO
"Will you please call if you have to cancel your reservation ?"
–> You are now asking for commitment

Public commitment is strong < written commitement is even stronger.

Do you have any super secret simple techniques you use to persuade the mind?  Leave a comment, lets get some input flowing!

This is another one of those questions that I get hit with all the time.  It seems most people will never be FULLY content with the network or networks they are a member of.  I can see why…most of them do suck.

I have been around since the day Commission Junction opened.  I used them (and still do a bit) for quite awhile, but when I really started to make a lot of decent money, was when I switched over and started using a model which consisted choosing offers from CPA networks.  The payouts are usually higher and lean more towards getting paid for an action, such as a lead, or the sale of a specific product or service, which makes it a bit easier to get targeted traffic flowing.

I am in or have joined probably close to 50 different networks.  Out of these networks there are around 10-15 that I regularly push traffic to.  Although there are a few networks that jump around as my favorite network, there are always the same that stay at the top.  Here they are…

Hydra Network

Hydra always seems to have kickass payouts and quite a large variety of offers to choose from.  Not only this but Hydra has been wiring me my check on time since the day I joined.  Hydra also offers an incentive system which can get you some pretty nice bonuses at the end of each month.

On a side note, for any of you who are on Hydra, I won the iPhone they were giving away sometime in november, you may have noticed the email they sent out to the ENTIRE network about this

Maxbounty

Here is another pretty solid network.  They don’t have a TON of offers, but quite a large selection.  I have cranked in some pretty decent checks from these guys and would have to say from what I have experienced their affiliate managers actually care about how you are doing.

Neverblue

I always seem to find offers at neverblue that are unique to other networks out there.  Although they will have many of the usual ones, I would highly suggest just checking them out if you ever feel like your in a slump for finding something new to advertise.  These guys are also really fair with their affiliates.

Advaliant

This is another network out there that seems to have a bit smaller customer base, but they have a lot of offers you won’t find elsewhere and they also treat their affiliates extremely well.  As you can see, that is something that is really important to me, so that is a big part of why some of these networks are being listed here.

Here are some others that I use who haven’t let me down over the years…

Copeac

Direct Leads

Now you know many of the places where I dig up offers at when I want to create or monetize any new traffic.  If your not already a member at these places, go signup, check out what they have to offer, and start piling in the dough.

Well, I have finally gotten around to getting a blog up to start creating a footprint around the internet for myself  I have used blogs for many reasons in the past, but I have never actually had a blog and used it how it is supposed to be used…

For Blogging!

Anyways, now is better than never, and I know many things that most Internet Marketers are looking to hear about, so I think things will go just great. I will be blogging about all kinds of stuff, but most importantly I will be trying to pass on the information I am learning and applying at the moment so that everyone can get some sort of an idea how things work from inside my account. I will probably be posting a lot about PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) since in my eyes being able to generate traffic is one of the most important talents on the internet.

When you can control traffic and direct it where you want, you can do many powerful things. I have been really interested with a lot of the "newer" Web 2.0 stuff. I think this is a really important part of marketing that most people just aren’t taking advantage of.