AffDollars BlogAffiliate marketing is like the art of war.

Tracking your online media buys and optimizing based on performance is a must for everyone regardless how much money they have invested. Ever wondered which metrics are most important and which of these statistics you need to track and optimize when doing a media buy? If so this post will give you some insight into the basics.

The following statistics are the key components that will make or break your campaign:

#1 – Creative Impressions - You want to track the overall impressions that your advertisement is getting; be it a flash video, a GIF image or a simple JPG you always need to find out how many people are viewing your creative. This data can later be used to calculate your click through rate or “CTR” and other useful statistics.

#2 – Creative CTR - Your creative CTR is simply the click through rate % of your advertisement meaning the percentage of people who click the advertisement compared to those who are just viewing it. With this vital information you can pinpoint which creatives are performing best and eliminate those which are not getting you many clicks.

#3 – Presale page CTR - You absolutely need to know your click through rate on the presale page. If you are direct linking you won’t be using a presale page and this won’t apply to you. If the presale page is lowering your conversions compared to direct linking it should be improved upon or eliminated altogether.

#4 – Sales Offer Page CTR - Once the visitor has reached the sales page there maybe multiple offers to choose from its important you know the click through rate to each individual offer if possible. Find out How many people are clicking through to each offer.

#5 – Conversion Rate - One of the most important metrics is the conversion rate, this is simply the amount of final sales or actions that result.

What to do with these key media buying statistics:

The next step is to use your statistics which you tracked to optimize your campaign. Once you have tracked all your metrics you will have a proper overview of your campaign and will be able to eliminate the bottlenecks which are holding you back from success.

Optimizing Impressions: To find out the amount of impressions you can expect on your advertisement talk to the webmaster or sales representative for the website in question. You will also want to use tools such as www.quantcast.com to find out how many impressions you will be getting from your media buy. If you see that your impressions are lower than the webmaster originally told you and didn’t have anything in the contract you can try and negotiate with them to try and get some extra impressions for free.

Optimizing Creative CTR: If you have a very low click through rate on the majority of your advertisements simply make more and make them different. Try using more flashy, eye catching designs, use shock tactics or stronger calls to action to increase your click through rate.

Optimizing The Presale Page: If your presale page is not getting a very good CTR you will need to do a better job preselling. Test different designs and different layouts, use new fonts, new headers and new titles, split test your results and see what comes up as the winner. You may just be surprised what works best. Be aware that using a presale page will usually lower the amount of people seeing the offer page but if done correctly can increase conversion rate dramatically.

Optimizing The Offer / Desired Action: If the offer just isn’t converting or your can’t get the visitors to complete the desired action try switching it up to something else. Rotate new offers, try different calls to action and sales text or try unique, different ways to get them to complete the desired action, use incentives and any tools at your disposal. Remember to always stay within the limits of the rules at all times or you may forfeit your commissions.

That’s pretty much all there is to it! Once you have the tracking in place to study these metrics you can easily identify what is causing your campaign to fail or what areas need to be improved upon. Simply increasing the CTR on any of your stats by 0.5% can mean the difference between a failing and successful money making media buy.

Final Tip: For best media buying results always try and find the best creatives, presale pages and offers BEFORE running your campaign on a large scale. Using Google content network is a great way to study and improve on metrics before taking it to the next level with a large scale media buy.

Recently this blog started taking a negative turn, it was my own fault for the type of content I posted without verifying the information behind it. Apologies to Ron Douglas

Although AffDollars.com is not a priority for me and rarely gets updated I feel its important to keep things on this blog positive and to share valuable lessons that can help you succeed as an affiliate / online marketer. Remember that these 10 rules below can potentially help you in many other aspects of your life as well.

Making money online is not easy. In fact, contrary to what many ‘gurus’ might tell you making a full time living or even getting rich online is getting harder and harder for most affiliates who jump into the game.  Hopefully these next 10 rules will help you step your game up to the next level and put you in the mindset to become a successful affiliate marketer.

#1 – Never Give Up - When you first start trying to make money online even banking $1 might seem like an unreachable goal. Remember that as long as you have determination and drive to reach your goals you will eventually get there! Know from the start that while you are trying to reach your goals you will face many obstacles along the way be they financial, mental, lack of time or any of the many other road blocks.

#2 – Manage Your Time Wisely - Remember that time is what you make of it, you need to break down and complete tasks throughout the day quickly and efficiently. Just about every successful person on the planet focuses on time management and how they can squeeze more out of their day. Using a calendar and a daily schedule will help you manage your time more wisely and increase productivity.

#3 – Take Full Responsibility For Your Life - This means no more blaming other people for problems and failures. Understand that only you are responsible for your situation so take control of it and do what you need to do to reach your goals!

#4 – Write Down What You Want To Achieve - Writing down your long term goals is a technique used by just about every successful person. Think how you want your life to be in the future and write it all down; write as much as you can in great detail. Then everyday work towards completing your goals and eventually they will become a reality!

#5 – Don’t Listen To Haters & Doubters - Along the road to success some people won’t believe in you, wont understand what you are trying to do or might just decide to all out hate on what you do. This is a normal part of life, don’t let it bring you down and don’t worry about! Never give up and don’t let the negativity of others hinder your progress. Surround yourself with people that want to see you succeed and ditch the people bringing negativity into your life.

#6 – Prepare To Make Sacrifices - Depending on your goals and priorities you may need to make some sacrifices, especially at first. If you plan on making $10, 000, 000 by the time your 30 years old you certainly shouldn’t be out getting slammed at the bar every night. Stay on your grind full time and only kick back once you’ve really earned it!

#7 – Outsource - You can’t do it all yourself so don’t try. It may seem like the job never gets done properly when you outsource but keep trying to build connections and network with people you can trust and eventually you can rely on them to help you build your online business faster and more effectively.

#8 – Never Delay Your Progress -You never know how long you have to complete your dreams or accomplish your goals, life is constantly changing; what is available to you today may not be obtainable tomorrow. That’s why its important to take as much as you can from each day and drive as hard as possible to reach your goals as quickly as you can.

#9 – Taking Action Is Key! - You can read all day about how X method is extremely successful and will bank you X amount of dollars in 30 days but until you try it for yourself you will never know for sure. Don’t be one of those ‘information whores’ who reads blogs all day and buys every single marketing eBook they can get their hands on, although its very important to stay up to date on the newest marketing techniques taking action on what you already know is the most important part and is what will make you money.

#10 – Promote Something Interesting - Try and find something you are passionate about, many affiliate marketers including myself  are guilty of pitching whatever product has the highest EPC. Instead why not find a product that genuinely sparks your interest and looks like it offers real value to the consumer, then you will find a true winner!

This is by no means a comprehensive list but I hope these tips help you find success!

Disclaimer: This post is based on my observations and may not necessarily be solid fact although I believe everything written to be true.  For legal reasons please assume there is an “allegedly” before every sentence.

MarketHealth is the CPA network formerly known as Joebucks, it was founded in 1998 by Gary Mcnelley. If you are considering pushing their health based offers you might want to think twice, MarketHealth is a network based on scamming their own affiliates.

Lets start this story from the beginning when MarketHealth was still known as JoeBucks.

Back in the JoeBucks days affiliates would complain that a percentage of their affiliate links would be redirected to another affiliate account and almost everyone was experiencing the same problem! This seems like a serious issue that need to be solved right? Not to JoeBucks.. apparently they couldn’t care less.

Why didn’t JoeBucks care that their affiliates were getting shafted and scammed out of hard earned money? The general consensus among the affiliate marketing community was that they were stealing affiliates sales for themselves.

A network that wants to scam affiliates should at least keep it under the radar and design their networks tracking and linking system in a way where no one could ever find out. JoeBucks on the other hand didn’t care how obvious it was and simply told affiliates that they were not using the links correctly.. Hey JoeBucks its placing an affiliate link on a website not following schematics to build a god damn space shuttle. Who is going to buy that piss poor excuse anyways?

So anyways, long story short JoeBucks was later exposed on their own forums by a programmer who showed everyone that their affiliate links were in fact being redirected to a master affiliate account. The forum was closed down only hours later.

Fast forward a few months in time and JoeBucks decided it was time to ditch their negative image and return as a ‘brand new network’ with a fresh clean name – MarketHealth. Since they got outed for scamming their own affiliates its no wonder they wanted a fresh name and new image.

Do you really want to invest your hard earned money into promoting MarketHealth.. a network who’s owner has repeatedly been accused of fraud by affiliates?

Has MarketHealth changed its scamming ways and stopped screwing over affiliates since the JoeBucks days..? I doubt it. They are likely still up to the same tricks just doing a better job of covering their tracks since their network is now based on a new platform.

I always keep track of all traffic sent to affiliate networks with accurate 3rd party tracking software. If MarketHealth is legit than why is it that I have stats on my end showing me I’ve sent 5000 visitors but their affiliate control panel only tracked 1500.. I’ve contacted MH and they told me my tracking software is off. Riiiiiiiiight…

Does MarketHealth pay? Yes they will pay you. But be aware you might not be getting paid what you deserve if they are secretly shaving your sales.

Have beef with MarketHealth? Contact the owner Gary Mcnelley using the information below:

Phone: 818-303-9323 Email: gary@markethealth.com

Looking for a CPA network you can trust? My top 4 recommends:

MoreNiche / Azoogle / Copeac / Clickbooth

Moreniche and Copeac are quite easy to join and are good starting networks while Azoogle and Clickbooth have a much more rigorous screening process to weed out inactive affiliates.

Want more about MarketHealth / JoeBucks SCAMS? Read here:

Problems Arising With MarketHealth.com
Markethealth.com – Another Scam?
How To Stay Away From Internet Marketing Scams
MarketHealth Scamming People?

This will quickly help new affiliates find a profitable niche without much competition by using free domain directories.

Lets get this tutorial going.. here are some of the best websites to help you find low competition niches:

• http://www.nsspy.org/ is a great free service that lists all newly registered domains by host server. If you know the host provider of a good internet marketer you can track what domains they are registering and spy on their new niche websites!

Click the image to try researching some niches, its free and its easy!

• http://domain-daily.com/ provides a very similar service except they list domains registered by day instead of by host provider. Click on the image below to search their directory.

Looking through both these sites domain listings I found the following interesting domains in about 5 minutes:
• rucksacksales.com
  shoelacesshoestrings.com
  shoesforshinsplints.com
  shopelectronicdartstore.com
  shortsleevehoodies.com
  tokyoflags.com

All the above are great examples of a low competition niches. Shoesforshinsplints.com has only 187,000 competing results indexed on Google.com and 3 ads in the paid search location. What that means for you is that if you build a website around this niche you will generate traffic quite easily and not only that you have almost no competition and get lots of 0.02 cent clicks when it comes to PPC advertising!

When you are looking through the registered domain results you only need to look for domains that have main keywords in the title, people do this to get higher SEO rankings. Lots of marketers will register domains like leather-dog-collars.com or buygardeningsprinklers.com, these are the ones you want to try and find and research.

I hope you see the potential in this. If someone registered a domain around a set of keywords like the examples above chances are they have done lots of research for that niche and saw it could be made profitable. If you build up a website fast enough you can get a high SEO ranking before they do and establish yourself as the authority of that niche making loads of cash!!! Lots of people will just sit on the domain and build on it later, while you can capitalize on it right away!

Hope you guys like this strategy.. it’s a bit black hat but I like it ;D

Cheers.

Clicksor.com is a sad excuse for an advertising network and its not not just because of the swarms of people lining up to say they promoted clicksors advertisements and never got paid. Advertisers (including myself) have used clicksor with very little success, even when transferring successful campaigns from other traffic sources.

What interests me is when webmasters say that they put up clicksor’s advertisements on their websites and their traffic would get antivirus warnings saying ‘adware was being blocked’.

My thoughts are that clicksor is occasionally running their own ads through their publishers and injecting malicious scripts to infect traffic and spread their adware. Since they rarely pay publishers anyways they get to spread their adware without paying a cent and apparently it spreads without people even clicking the ads!

Does anyone know if clicksor is infecting people with adware through their publishers network of websites? It seems to me this would be illegal at some point, then again with Clicksors lack of business ethics I’m not at all surprised they would try and pull a fast one like this.

Clicksor.com obviously gets their adware onto peoples computer somehow. Since the release of their new URL targeting platform they openly stated they have their own adware. If anyone has knowledge of how clicksor infects users with their adware please share in the comments sections.

Hello reader, thank you for joining me for this very special blog launch!

I’m proud to announce that today is the official launch of AffDollars.com affiliate marketing blog. I hope you are as exited as I am because I have lots of great stuff in store for you! Video tutorials, case studies, marketing tools, eBooks and more are all set to appear on this blog in the very near future.

It amazes me how many new affiliate marketers are jumping into this industry every single day. Unfortunately, the sad fact is close to 95% of these new marketers will fail and leave the industry in a very short period of time without ever making any real money. There are many reasons behind this but the #1 reason is lack of drive or motivation. Some people let the doubts of other people get into their head, some are just plain lazy and unwilling to do any work while others are too scared to make the jump and actually spend money out of their own pocket, others buy every informational money making product on the internet until they are broke.

It seems so many people are having trouble making money online when it really isn’t that hard or complicated. That’s the reason for this blog; to help people who are willing to learn and work hard at their marketing goals but who are feeling aimless because they are missing pieces of the puzzle.

I’ve been studying internet and affiliate marketing for years and have tested virtually every traffic source that has been available to me. I know what works and what doesn’t work and I feel honored to help out the new generation of affiliates who are just getting their feet wet.

Stay tuned for lots of helpful information and free bonuses, have a great day and don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe!