Drawing The Line in Affiliate Marketing
Now I’m not entirely white hat with all my methods, gray is fine, blackhat can be frowned upon, but when you’re going to any length just to get clicks you’re going to make enemies and generally give yourself a bad name. For example, I recently got a message on my Facebook wall from a friend of mine that looked liked this;
Obviously this a faper (fake newspaper article). The top is geo located and says the name of your city, it’s got the usual shitty copy and of course a host of fake comments (some even dressed as spam for ‘realistic’ comments). They’ve obviously gone to some effort to make this sack of shit, but when you’re compromising peoples Facebook accounts through applications or the API, that’s just too far.
Now I have no evidence that this was the person who owns the sites fault, maybe he paid some 3rd party for clicks, but judging by the lack of tracking from the status’ I doubt it. So what will come from this? It’ll be reported to Facebook, everyone sees that it’s obviously not legit and spammy and it’ll get an awful name for itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if they compromised the wrong Facebook account and ended up DoS’d offline. Hell maybe a rival did it so people would DoS it, doubtful however.
Learning where to draw the line in Affiliate Marketing is crucial, blackhatting the search engines and so on isn’t good but it’s better than stealing your potential customers phone ringing all their friends and telling them about the weight they lost with Acai Berry.
It’s All About Connections
Time and time again I’m reminded of what makes affiliate marketing so much easier, it’s not just a good affiliate manager, the latest, greatest tools to help streamline your Facebook campaigns or even hiring someone to help you manage your campaigns.
While all these things do help greatly, what really can make or break an affiliate is his/her contacts. This last month I’ve been building up my connections in the industry and got in touch with a few famous names and a few not so famous names, made friends and added them to my contact list. What I now have is valuable connections in the industry that can help me with campaigns, tip me off about upcoming niches or just have a friendly chat with.
Sure everyone wants to be best friends with ShoeMoney and John Chow, but there are new big names in affiliate marketing springing up all the time, so getting in touch with that small time blogger who comments on your blog could be worthwhile because they could be the next big thing.
Now what I’m not saying is try and use people and milk them for what they can do for you, but get in touch and do them a favor, such as commenting on their blog or pointing out a problem with their site(s) and offering a solution. If you can help others, others will help you.
You don’t have to share your keywords and offers with the world, just remember to reach out to others and offer advice, you were probably once in their shoes, who knows maybe they’ll do you a big favor when they make it?
This post is inspired by the fact I’ve began work on a project with a fellow affiliate marketer (secret, of course!) but the collaboration between us is really motivating and a breath of fresh air, something I’ve been needing in this industry for a while now!
Say Hello to Holly!
So following on from my previous post, she’s now in my garage at home (I’m away at uni again) under a big blanket. I spent all wednesday replacing the tail unit, seats, brake lights, indicator and I spent some of this morning before my train journey repairing holes in the exhaust. There’s a crack in the exhaust pipe I need to have welded and also it needs a new set of nice tyres and she’ll be ready to MOT and get on the road (then I just need a license! 
)
She looks and sounds great, nice loud exhaust that sounds gorgeous through the range (well, I took it to 10k on my drive). I’ve pretty much mastered clutching it out the garage and around the drive, can’t wait till I can take her on the road and really open her up!
More pictures after the jump!
Check Out My New Toy!
Well it looks like all my efforts with affiliate marketing will have to be SEO now as I have less than £0 in my bank account =D Why you ask? Well I’ve always always always wanted one of these in black and red and it’s very rare they come along. I spotted this on eBay for a fairly low price as it needs a teeny bit of work, but that’ll keep me busy until I can afford to get lessons for a license to ride it! Say hello to Holly!
I’ve gotta get a train home tomorrow to have her delivered to my parents house, I’ll spend all day wednesday polishing it and assessing what I need/want to do to it then I’ll be storing it in my garage under a blanket (and many many locks and chains) until Summer 2010 when I’m planning on getting my full license. Needless to say a sneaky ride up and down my road isn’t out of the question 
I might be a little idle these next couple of days as I travel to Notts to pick it up, lovingly polish it and return home on the thursday, I can’t wait to get her, she really is my dream bike!
Woohoo!
Affiliit Review
First of all I’d like to start off with a quick note. If you read my Affiliit vs PPC-Coach post, you’ll see it got a few comments from the owners of both the sites. Since that article a few things have happened. I’ve been asked to remove my signature from PPC-Coach which had a subtle link to this blog, I’ve been banned from the moderators only forum and I’ve had some pretty lame PM’s from Will (PPC-Coach).
On the flip side, I only joined Affiliit to see what it was like and write an honest review, Clint Lenard (clenard – owner of Affiliit) insisted however that I see all the months they have to offer and granted me an account to check out some other months, pretty fair – now I can see all the months of PPC-Coach and a few of Affiliit, with this in mind I wrote my review.
It’s pretty lame that PPC-Coach can’t handle a bit of competition, the sites are similar and are both trying to hit the same goal, it’s just in my opinion that Affiliit does the job much better, however it seems everyone is not entitled to their own opinion and therefore I have quit PPC-Coach due to the unprofessionalism and lack of any decent content. I know quite a few Affiliit members who have moved over from PPC-Coach too and are glad they did. Anyway I didn’t want this post to be another flame war – just clearing up my views and what’s happened, on to the review!
Affiliit Review
So I’ve been at Affiliit for two months now and I’ve got to know the community, tools and content quite well. So why do I think Affiliit is worth the $1 trial?
Right off the bat, the community is fantastic. Even if you’re already earning with PPC, Facebook, SEO or anything else, it’s great to have a community of like-minded individuals encouraging you to meet your goals, share tips and tricks and hear about others success (great motivation!). So far I’ve made some great friends and my network of fellow affiliate marketers (one of the most useful, priceless tools there is) has grown vastly and my address book has thickened quickly!
The tools on offer are really useful, they take a bit of learning at first but there’s a video for each tool to make sure you’re not on your own, once you learn how to use them once they save you a ton of time in future!
Speaking of the videos, there’s a lot of videos on pretty much every subject you need to get started and you can be up and running within hours of signing up. I knew a lot of the stuff they were teaching before I actually joined (no I didn’t learn it from PPC-Coach) and so the videos weren’t entirely relevant to me, but after watching I picked up a few useful tricks even I didn’t know.
For those unfamiliar with these types of programs, each month you receive a new chunk of information and videos detailing how to do something new, each month a little harder than the preceding one. What I love about Affiliit is how each month builds on the last one meaning you’re constantly learning to build and scale, rather than 50 different techniques with no clue of which to use.
Probably my favorite thing about Affiliit is their focus on alternative traffic sources such as SEO. With programs such as PPC Classroom or PPC Coach you learn just PPC (obviously) which is a bit focused, plus most new people don’t have much money to begin with so starting with some SEO techniques alongside paid techniques makes a lot of sense. I spend most my time in the SEO forums helping out and… being helped! Everyone is willing to share their landing pages and successful SEO sites to help you improve yours which has really helped me improve my own!
If you’re wondering whether or not to try Affiliit, it’s 1 dollar. $1. That’s cheaper than a Big Mac. I mean seriously, just try it out for a few days and see what you think, chances are if you don’t use the tools, videos or months – just getting help from the community will improve your online income in one way or another.
Check out Affiliit whilst they still have their $1 trial on!
Keeping Your Eggs in Separate Baskets
You’ve heard the saying “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket”, the same holds true for your online ventures. Keeping all your sites, email servers and software in one basket (or server) can cause an absolute nightmare should your basket fail.
Up until recently I’ve been a bit lazy with my organizational skills online, all my analytics was under my personal Google Analytics account, all my sites were on one server and all my social bookmarking was done under one account.
Now I’ve started dividing things up in to projects. Example; Let’s say I’m promoting TV’s for christmas 2009. Originally I’d create the sites, add them to my Google Analytics (and various other tools) and go get some backlinks, write some articles and what not. However, foraging through my tools such as Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Tracking 202 and a few others for these sites was getting rather cumbersome and frustrating. So I came up with a new method.
For my TV sites, I buy a new reseller account from HostGator (use coupon code; ‘garfield’ for your first month free!) and stick all the different TV sites under that reseller. Next I create a single email address, such as admin@panasonic-1234-review.com. I create a new Google Analytics + Webmaster Tools account under this email and add all my TV sites, I do the same for Tracking202.
What I have now is a system where (on the downside I have to remember a few more logins than usual) I can login using an email for a project (TV’s in this case) and see all my stats for my TV sites.
I bet you’re thinking that this doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, it doesn’t, but so many (myself included) new affiliate marketers shove everything under one account and that’s fine at first, but once you start getting lots of sites it really bogs you down and slows down productivity!
