It also seemed that the trend was to throw small private parties to do networking in smaller groups. The Affiliate Ball and the Affiliate Fight Night although both extremely cool, were also extremely crowded and you couldn’t really do much networking. The Fight Night in particular was very impressive in terms of entertainment.

David’s Aff Playbook meetup was really good. They had a nice suite at the palms and it was a smaller controlled group. It was a good size to the point that I played a game of pool and there was more than enough space, not person to person packed in like sardine cans like some of the “everyone’s invited” parties. They had delicious cookies too!

Aaron Kelly also invited me to the Badger Ball, which was also fantastic. They had a funny event occur during the night, which we all thought was just some crazy drunk guy that snuck in off the street but it turned out to be a prank, it was pretty hilarious. Some guy waited for Aaron to be around and then had face planted onto the floor (ouch?) and when asked how he got there or who he was with, he pretended to be ridiculously drunk. He did a good job, he fooled me too as I was standing right there.  The networking was great there too, it was a small but quality controlled group of friends, business acquaintances, etc.

Affiliate Fight Night was amazing entertainment. It brought back a lot of awesome memories from when I was involved in the Ryan Bennett Memorial Fund years ago, raised a ton of money for his family and then they showed thanks by having a private dinner with Randy Couture and Big John McCarthy for us. Randy then drove us to his gym now know as Xtreme Couture, which at the time was only half finished and not even open. We spent the afternoon with Randy and it was an awesome time. Great memories, thanks Affiliate Fight Night.

I noticed a lot of the same problems that affiliate networks, traffic companies and others are facing at these events. They don’t really know how to put on a good promotion to get results from their conference spend. They setup these elaborate booths, and then their “pitch” is horrible, and they have no real “draw” to get people there in the first place (or to get them to stay) other than lame gimmicks. One recurring gimmick that I see every year is “Win an iPad” (or similar prize) by dropping your business card. The companies think that they are getting leads by doing this, and they are, but they are getting bad leads mostly. Of course everyone and their uncle is going to drop a business card to win an iPad, but that doesn’t mean they are targeted leads to what you are selling.

Affiliates are smartening up and realizing which networks not to work with, and which ones are around for the long haul. At this point, if you’ve been in the affiliate game for any length of time you are savvy and know how to spot a scam or low quality network a mile away. A pretty obvious point is when you see “standard” sales pitches and sales messaging. It’s a pretty obvious sign of a start-up network. And if that’s the case, you have to be really careful that you’re dealing with someone that’s not just going to go out of business when the first advertiser blows off a payment for 6 months or more. Too many affiliates are left footing the bill lately when advertisers don’t pay and networks can’t afford to float. I wouldn’t work with anyone that couldn’t afford to float some money and is making me wait for their advertisers to pay. That’s the whole point of the affiliate network!! Otherwise they are doing absolutely nothing for you that you couldn’t do yourself with a direct deal!

I ended up catching a few sessions and I was pretty impressed with Shoemoney’s closing Keynote. I thought the message he was trying to get out was great for new people to the industry. I thought his message also applied to entrepreneur’s in general, which I think was a good think.

I’ll be back for the next Affiliate Summit, no doubt about it!

I put a little guide together that should make you a lot of money next holiday season if you start now.

This is a pretty simple process that won’t take you much time at all over the next year, and you’re sure to make some serious cash next year in the 4 to 5 figures for hardly any work. You could even try to catch the end of “return season” this year, which is the weeks after Christmas when everyone returns stuff and gets other stuff. In fact, you can use this for all holidays and it applies to birthdays as well, all the more reason to start right now.

It boggles my mind at the little competition for long tail keywords. Its mostly because the keyword tools are showing the regular monthly volume, not the holiday season volume! That means that most people pass up SEOing phrases like “cheap diamond jewelry gifts for women”. There’s not a single phrase targeted result on the first few pages, which means you could probably compete with that phrase pretty easily and get some significant traffic over holiday season next year if you start now. Thousands of dollars sitting on the table for minimal work. Rinse and repeat phrases like this and you’re looking at thousands of highly targeted visitors every month especially during Xmas.

The next step should be pretty obvious as affiliate marketers. Get a content, a feed and some banners from popular jewelry affiliate programs and create a site where you get paid from product sales from the feed and product sales from the banners. Nothing fancy required, the simpler the better.

The real key here is keeping the site closely related to a niche topic, such as diamonds and women’s jewelry in this example that I’m giving. There are hundreds of other niches out there that will also ensure that your SEO strength is high for your long tail niche keywords.

In review, How to Make Money Online off of Christimas:

1. Pick a niche.
2. Pick a bunch of long tail phrases (and makes sure to keep in mind that a lot of keyword tools give averages and holiday season traffic might be higher!)
3. Get some cheap or free links for your keywords so they rank, make sure they are low competition long tail phrases.
4. Setup a simple content/feed site with affiliate links and banners.
5. Profit.

You have no excuse not to make some serious coin off of the next holiday rush online.

Saturday January 7th

Sunday January 8th

• StackThatMoney Meetup – The Hangover Hotel Room @ Caesars Palace - 4-7pm
• Aff Playbook – Ads4Dough – Dream Marriage @ Palms Place Hotel & Spa (Penthouse) – 7:30pm-10:30pm
• ShareASale Under the Stars Party – Chateau Nightclub @ Paris Hotel – 8pm-midnight

Monday January 9th

• Affiliate Ball – Crown Theater at RIO – 9:30pm
• Affiliate Fight Night – Xtreme Couture Gym – 10pm-3am

Tuesday January 10th

Wednesday January 11th

Please leave a comment below if you have or know of a party that I missed!

Affiliate Summit is the best affiliate marketing conference out there, held on Jan 8-11th 2012 in Las Vegas.

Here’s how you can win a Gold Pass:

1. Comment on the blog, on any post. All comments will be entered into a random drawing to select a winner. The more comments, the more entries you get!
2. Link to a post on Daily Conversions and automatically get 10 entries. Just send an email to brian@dailyconversions.com or comment on this post with the link, and we’ll add 10 entries to your tab.
3. Post on Social media about a post on Daily Conversions, again, this will get you 10 entries.
4. Do something innovative to promote Daily Conversions. This will be at least 10 entries, with no limit as to how many entries you can get if you come up with something great. Just email or comment with what you did!
5. The drawing will take place on Christmas.

Good luck and see you at Affiliate Summit in Vegas!

If you are an affiliate you might be saying to yourself that you have no idea because different affiliate managers do drastically different things, with different approaches.

Here are a few things that are crucially important in the role of an affiliate manager:

Helping you to make more money

This includes everything from campaign optimization, to support, to getting you a better payout when you need it without turning up the scrub or shave dial

Getting you what you need

Whether that’s payouts, or offers, they need to be able to get you what you need when you need it.

Super affiliates need more attention.

This only makes sense. If you are making a lot of money, you are going to need more attention. An affiliate manager with 1,000 affiliates is probably not a good match for the super affiliate. I know a lot of super affiliates that are very demanding from their AMs, in terms of attention and speed in getting them what they need. If you’re not on top of your game and very fast, that alone will make them jump ship.

Don’t text message me about irrelevant things unless I’ve done the same to you first.

This always bothers me when an affiliate manager takes it upon him or herself to start sending me text messages about irrelevant things. Do they want to make money or do they want to talk about sports? It’s a conflict of interest. There’s of course exceptions if we’ve met in person and become real friends, then its a little different, but if you are my affiliate manager I probably won’t want to be friends (no disrespect) I want to make money together as the primary focus.

You work for me, no if ands or buts.

This is kind of the laughing joke of affiliate marketing. And this is how you know where you stand on the totem pole. If your affiliate manager doesn’t 110% treat you like they work for you, you need a new AM. No question about it. They should be at your call. Also, if you’re a super affiliate or making a good amount of money, they should be offering you payout bumps (without shaving more) without having to ask or they are trying to take advantage of you. If you’re sending $1,000/day and you haven’t been offered a single payout bump, something is wrong.

Want to test your AM and see if they are treating you fairly? Ask for a payout bump when you are in a position to ask for a payout bump and see how they respond. If they immediately say no and get defensive, that’s a bad sign. They always have bosses that they can ask. If they haven’t even spent 20 minutes asking the boss on your behalf before telling you “no”, then that’s bad. In fact, if they tell you “no” at any point, that’s horrible. They should be giving you criteria of when they or the boss can give you a bump, so you have a goal to work for. If they tell you no, you are probably going to get mad and possible jump ship. This is a sign of an inexperienced AM. They should never say no.

What else?

• Don’t argue with me over payouts. Obviously you can’t give me $10 on something that was $.80, but most people are smart enough to know that you probably have at least 30% margin to play with. And if I’ve got massive volume and you can’t do anything for me, there is another network out there that can. This goes with the whole ‘dont say no’ but give some criteria mindset. And don’t make this up either, give real goals or I will be mad and leave.

This post is mainly written for affiliates but also for network owners to know how to train their AMs properly. We’ve been doing a lot of training of AMs lately and these are some of the common things that come up. Also, if you are a network owner make sure you give your AMs fake affiliates that are there just to test your AMs skills. It’s done in every other job in every other business, why not here? If you find out too late after they have ruined 100 relationships when you could have figured it out with 1 test case, then shame on you.

I use it here on Daily Conversions and I’ve done it on experimental sites as well.

Now, comments are not the only part of this. It’s about using social comments, like Facebook’s comment functionality. We may integrate that here on Daily Conversions (again) pretty soon.

There are pros and cons of social comments vs regular comments.

PROS:

• Friends of people that read your site will see their friends comments, when they leave a Facebook comment on your site, if you have it integrated.
• You will most likely get more traffic, though we will talk about this in the CONS as well.

CONS:

• Less people may use it, because they know that it’s going to go out to all their friends.
• If you’re in an industry where people don’t want their “real life friends” to know about that side of their business life, they may stop commenting all together, or be turned off by it.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? It’s a flip of a coin, depending on the niche you are in. BUT, if you are in the right niche, in a social niche like Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, or something along those lines – you could see incredible boosts in traffic.

Another element that I’ve noticed with Facebook comments in particular is that they tend to be more “real” than regular blog type comments. This is because they know all of their friends are going to see it on their FB feed, so they tend to make sure it’s accurate and not too edgy. You’ll rarely get a negative comment with FB comments, which can be a pro or a con.

All in all, it can be very beneficial for both you AND your users. I’ve noticed readers of sites with FB comments tend to appreciate the comments much more because they know that it’s most likely a true comment compared to anonymous comments that can be left using a regular blog commenting system.

Most companies seem to think that simply showing that their prices are better (or payouts are higher) or that their product is better (offers convert better) is going to make them beat their competition.

The Expert (Witness)

A “witness”, sometimes an expert in a particular field, like a professional baseball coach would be to knowing baseball. He’s going to be the one that says Brand X is better than Brand Y and compare the two. And, in some cases just endorse one over the other or endorse several for different reasons.

The Expert is very important, because without being a trusted expert, why else would I believe you? Of course, you, the person paying for the ad, post, article, commercial or whatever is going to say that you’re the best, but why would I believe you? You need an expert to make yourself more credible, a third party credible source that’s a proven expert in that field. I believe them, not you. And this applies to the vast majority of consumers as well as internet users (and affiliate marketers!)

I have personally conducted studies (which I may publish at some point if I get clearance) that over 50% of people ignore affiliate networks ads and marketing messages that don’t have an credibility or experts behind them.  I mean, why would I believe you that you’re better than someone else just because you the person trying to make money off me say so?

The Price (or Payout)

The classic problem in pointing out that an affiliate network has good payouts in affiliate marketing is that a better payout is not important for newer marketers as it is for super affiliates, because if a newer affiliate can’t get any conversions what does the payout matter?

Let’s assume for a minute we’re promoting an affiliate network to mid level affiliates and higher. They do care about the payouts, but they also care about other things like not being cheated (shaved/scrubbed). This comes back to credibility. You could have the best marketing message on earth, but if I don’t see enough credibility (from sources that I deem credible and trusted) and I’m worried about being cheated then I’m not going to do business with you.

Expert Testimonials used correctly aren’t 100% positive.

I can’t tell you how many affiliate networks contact us here at Daily Conversions and want to force a 100% positive, clearly exaggerated review post of their network down our throats. I mean, do you really think people are that stupid? It just doesn’t work. The better way is to get an HONEST review, and if you’re affiliate network is half way decent the 80-95% positive comments from me are going to outweigh the 5-20% negative stuff and make people sign up. Also, it looks more believable if it has some negative stuff in there too. Otherwise, it’s just a paid ad and you’ve removed the credible expert (me) from the equation by force feeding 100% positive down my throat. On the contrary if you give the truth (which is all I post on here) then people take interest because they know they are only getting the truth no matter how good or how bad it is.

Fight the urge to put up fake reviews and pay experts to put up your fake positive reviews, and have them write a natural positive review and you’ll see vastly better results This applies to virtually any business you can name.

The time is here to tell you anything you ever wanted to know about affiliate marketing, the brutal truth.

Let’s go in the order of the most common questions I get from newer affiliates.

Question: Do people really make {insert random number} per day from affiliate marketing?

Answer: The answer is generally a giant, YES. I wish I could tell you exactly what we do in each case, but it obviously varies and I could write a book about any given niche or offer

Question: I hear that Affiliate Networks sometimes “shave” my leads and I don’t get as many conversions as I should. Is this true?

Answer: Unfortunately, yes. I’m not going to say that every network does it, but a lot of networks do it. And, you won’t have any clue unless you split test across many networks. And if they are all shaving you may never know.

Question: I heard that a lot of bloggers (and others) pretend to be successful to grow their blogs is that true?

Answer: Unfortunately, it can be true, they are in that fake it until you make it mindset – though I know a lot of bloggers that have had as much success as I have directly in Affiliate Marketing. The fakers are usually easy to spot if you know a thing or two about psychology or reading people.

Question: How do super affiliates fund their campaigns when they buy tons of traffic?

Answer: Their own money, an investor or good old Amex Plum

Question: Can I become a $x,xxx/day super affiliate and sit in my moms basement with no physical contact or ever picking up the phone?

Answer: Yes, you can. But, it’s going to be much easier if you do some networking. If you are around people making ridiculous cash, you might have success a bit faster.

Stay tuned for more Brutal Truths!

CPA Tank has really impressed me recently. I met them up at Affiliate Summit East 2011 and they are doing VERY well and put a great impression on me. Vito Glazers is the mastermind behind the network. Vito spends a fair amount of time up in my neck of the woods in Hollywood, CA.

What I love about CPA Tank is their confident marketing and brilliant owners. The tank just says it all.  I couldn’t think of a better way to portray confidence, commitment, and running over or blowing a hole through the competition, literally.

It’s not just the marketing either. Shake hands with Vito next time your at an Affiliate Summit and you’ll get that same “tank” kind of vibe. He’s well put together, confident, the whole package. Their entire team of affiliate managers are the same way, confident (with good reason given how successful they are) and ready to get to business.

Engaged Facebook Group

CPA Tank has got a 3,000+ person thriving Facebook group. It really says something to have an active group. Check it out here.

Do you treat your marketing like CPA Tank does?

Honestly, you probably don’t. Maybe you do… I’m not the judge. CPA Tank is, if you get in you’re a big shot, if you don’t well… Just kidding, sort of

Are you literally going to run over the competition? Are you going to blow a hole through the front door to get what you need. Ok, maybe you’re not going to hurt anyone, but I think that mindset that CPA Tank portrays is brilliant. If you aim for the moon and get even half way there, you’re probably going to be doing pretty darn well.

Enough chit-chat and back to war!

I challenge you to square off with the Tank and put in an application at CPA Tank. If they let you in, you’re half way there.

A special shout out to LeadCola, Empyre Media, Affiliate Ball (amongst others) for having such great parties!

There were a lot of interesting things that I noticed and information that I picked up about the state of the affiliate marketing industry.

• Conference presence (or lack thereof) tells a lot about an affiliate network. There are exceptions of course, like EWA/Blam Ads who don’t buy a booth but still make a strong presence. Presence is very important or it’s easy for people to wonder if they couldn’t afford a few grand for a booth and to meet their affiliates in person. A lot of affiliates were asking me why Network X or Y was not there and I can only assume the worst.
• Affiliate networks are realizing the importance of branding. I’m glad to see a lot of networks doing strong marketing campaigns on industry sites and that really comes clear when I walk around ASE and people are inquiring about running ads and getting network reviews from Daily Conversions.
• Affiliates that are blessed enough to have the technical backbone in place to run large email campaigns, are making lots and lots of money.
• Mobile is definitely still doing really well for some networks. We’re talking mid 6 figure a day numbers for some of the top.
• There was a long debate amongst several people/networks about how effective hiring attractive women to stand at booths is. The consensus was that (in general) the attractive woman would entice newbies but mid level and super affiliates aren’t going to waste their time talking to someone that was hired by a network and only has minimal industry knowledge.
• Some affiliates networks use almost the same marketing text on their trade show banners and booths as others. It doesn’t help to use such generic, common stuff, we just think you don’t know much about marketing.
• The sessions at Affiliate Summit are getting better and better each show. They are getting top people to do sessions these days and it really shows that they are trying to not just help the people that already know the business, they are also helping the newbies.
• I wasn’t impressed with what affiliate networks and other companies put in the hand out bags this year. Other years there were much more creative items in them that actually enticed me to take a picture and put it on the blog or look closely at it. This year literally nothing in the hand out bag got my attention. In fact, there wasn’t even a pen in the bag which I noticed a lot of people were looking around for pens. It would be smart of a company to use a pen branded with their logo next time and people would certainly use and see it.
• Affiliate network biz dev. people are getting very good at pitching their networks. I had people find me from networks like Ads4Dough and Empyre Media and pitch as to why I should run an offer with them over another network, if I was an advertiser.
• NDemand gave me a Gucci Mouse pad. I talked with Mike for quite a while and he’s a really down to earth cool network owner. It sounds like NDemand is thriving and becoming a very good sized competitor in the industry. Thanks!
• Hats off to LeadCola who threw another amazing private dinner for affiliates. I strongly recommend checking out their network, they have a very passionate crew and will take care of you.

Stay tuned for more Affiliate Summit East 2011 news…