Ian Fernando » affilaite marketing

Direct Agents and Bidz.com Affiliate Challenge

Guest Post — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:35:37 +0000

Direct Agents has recently released an affiliate contest and it looks very interesting. I have recently joined Direct Agents after ad:Tech New York. I ran an offer on their network and got very good support form my affiliate manager.

Direct Agents does not have that much offers but they do have popular offers that do convert across over other networks. But lets talk about this contest for a bit and I will give my insights on Direct Agents right after as well.

Yesterday, Direct Agents released an affiliate challenge to the public called the the Bidz and Direct Agents Affiliate Challenge. Bidz.com and Direct Agents have teamed up together to provide a special Caribbean trip to a lucky affiliate. It is fairly easy, all you have to do is sign up under Direct Agents and run the Bidz.com offer on their network. The contest is from February 15th to April 15th, you are given more than enough time to earn as much as possible over your competition.

Even if you do not win, they have great follow-up prizes as well. 2nd prizes wins a 42 inch flat screen tv and the 3rd prize wins a $300 gift card! So they are not just thinking about the big guy but others that participate and want to get in the fun as well.

I also suggests to read the Terms and Conditions of the contest so you can have a better understanding of the contest and how you will be rewarded.

My Experience with Direct Agents

I have worked with DA after ad:Tech New York and definitely enjoyed the support they have. My affiliate manager is on point with me and is ready to solve issues the next business day. I can contact him at night and get immediate response via email or phone call. The best part with my AM is he knows my concerns and how I do business, making sure what I do will help him and me at the same time.

I definitely like the support me and my AM has because of the response time. I would find a problem or ask a question and we would get on a call the same day or next day with the tech team or advertiser to discuss the issues at hand.

As I stated they do not have the most offers but definitely has the right offers that will convert. Their staff is very friendly and informative, one of their AMs comes to my IANteract meetups to discuss and learn more about affiliate marketing. It is great to see AMs bond with their affiliates.

Win that Trip!

That is it! Go and win that Caribbean trip! If you are in the cold, make sure you win so you can get some sun!

Using Polls to Gather and Convert Traffic??

Ian — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:43:19 +0000

So I started to play around with Polls, my good friend AdHustler introduced it to me a while back and I never found it interesting or see the reason why it would work – it is deception really. Then another blogger mentioned it to me, Jeremiah Cooper. He has been using it and says he is making a good amount of money from just polls. He also introduced me to a neat and easy product to use call Poll Control. I bought it and started a case study on Polls and offers.

So first I figured people vote and get taken to an offer, I figured it would be simple 1 field submit offers. I doubt after voting and making their vote to count they wouldn’t want to fill out an insurance quote. It is a quick system to get quick conversion but how big is the ROI and how effective is it? Well I decided to do a case study on it and see how effective it really is.

First thing I did was blasted selected networks to provide me with a list of their 1 field submits in the United Stated and on 1st page convert. Market Leverage and NeverBlueAds responded and I started to rotate offers between these networks. The reason why I didn’t chose one network is because of payout and type of offers. I wanted to be very general and not assume anything with this case study.

Below is the screen shot of what my traffic looked like and the earnings that I received. This is about 4 days of stats.

So I received 477 CTR from the poll to the offer. From the screen shot above, I am using Prosper202. I also kinda messed up with the settings, as you can see forgot to add in the CPC. Ehh, I learned my mistake and created a new poll with using the right settings and stuff.

But you will see all the offers I got from the networks (2 offers are blackedn out because they were not part of the poll case study). So I decided to just take a bunch of 1 field submit offers and rotate them among the poll and see what converts and what doesn’t. Even though not a lot converted I can take the data given and concentrate on the offers that did convert. Soon I will be filtering through the offers that I have chosen and just rotate the offers among each other, the ones that converted.

So these stats tell me a couple things:

Majority of the offers that converted were email submits
Conversion average is about the 5% mark
Free Money or Gift Cards didn’t converted (IMO – I thought it would do much better, more generic)
Baby stuff converted better and rewards – guess everyone gets pregnant around this time of year.

That is just a quick glance of the stats. What do you see? But with so many clicks on the LP and click through to the offer, I thought it would convert better. My poll was very generic too and it is getting a good amount of traffic. It is a simple “Who Will Be the Next President?” It has both their pictures and their names, when they ‘vote’ an overlay popups saying in order for their vote to count they must complete the offer.

It seems people do not just enter their information, it has to interest them. So the traffic isn’t bad traffic, because I assume the end user is interested in the offer and completes it. The reason why more specific 1 field submits did better than the generic ones, email submits and not zip submit. So users were willing to provide their email address because they were interested in the offer and not just submitting their zip code.

So now I will filter the offers out and only put in the ones that converted , have it more concentrated on the offers that converted, still rotating but filtered. I will leave it up the poll until the election is over, which is another week or so which should give me good data to test again. Hmmmm might have to write an updated version for the poll study.

Do you use polls to gather and convert traffic in affilaite marketing?

Why is ClickBank the Most Talked about Network?

Ian — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:40:36 +0000

When I started with affiliate marketing there was so much hype about ClickBank and their affiliate network. I remember back in the days I was promoting and all into ClickBank and their digital products. I even have a blog review website about ClickBank products because I felt it was the best way to make money and it did good – but now I am re creating and editing the website and concept.

So my main question, why is ClickBank viewed as one of the higher affiliate network. A lot of beginner ebooks are always talking about promoting digital products, even PayDotCom was built to be in competition with ClickBank. A lot of sales page show ClickBank stats and never a Azoogle Ad stat or even a CJ.com stat. Take a look below (this is not my screen shot):

I am not sure if it a marketing thing or marketers are out there to spread the world of ClickBank so their eBook can be sold and promoted.

But most sales pages are all showing their ClickBank stats and never another network. Ebooks about Adwords or PPC or affiliate marketing talk about or at least mention ClickBank.

I do not know if it is the easiest network to join or the easiest thing to promote. Digital information is popular but I do not think it is the easy thing to convert and market, even with PPC.
But for me I do promote ClickBank products, I get checks from them – but it is not my biggest source of income. I personally think digital products are easy to promote if it is a smaller niche. A crowded/saturated niche maybe harder to get higher conversions. But digital product is very popular on the internet, but hard to sell and promote, especially an ebook. I have written some on my own and have sold my own – since it is unique. But anyways…

I was searching some blogs about affiliate marketing; I like to find new stuff about it – since someone’s experience can be my own. I always find people talking about ClickBank – not sure why it is so popular. Again, when I first started on the internet I did only hear about ClickBank and I was super focus on promoting popular ClickBank products.

I think ClickBank is just seen as a super easy network to promote what everyone is looking for – information. This is a HIGHLY saturated market – which is why I think so many ebooks exists. But ClickBank is not only known for eBooks but scripts as well and other digital products. Which I think it is very popular among users. Promoting scripts from their marketplace is what keeps the ClickBank checks coming every month.

Also, ClickBank is easily used all around the world. Many networks do not accept users from UK, Singapore, Australia, Dubai, etc. It is easy for a beginner to start affiliate marketing by simply joining a network where there is no pre screening – you are auto approved. Where as the other networks you are pre screened by affiliate managers who will be working with you. So there is some what of a pressure with other networks.

ClickBank is also a good place for beginners in affiliate marketing to start and understand what affiliate marketing is, another reason I think it is always mentioned on blogs and ebooks. Simple stats and tracking can help understand what some of the affiliate marketing terms. It also gives a window of oppurtunity to beginenrs because almost all of the commission for each digital product is at least 50% or higher. But is higher payout better than lower payouts?

The higher payouts easily attract beginners in affiliate marketing and thinking they can easily make their money within a day. It is the perception of seeing a higher commission which makes us want to promote something we have no clue about. I fell into this trend and thought to myself, ‘Hey high Commission means more money for me!’, not really.

But in my experience I find Clickbank marketplace a good place for beginners and I still promote several items within the marketplace. I am not in the marketplace all the time but I do promote specific scripts and ebooks. Now I have expanded my experience I found more networks which can easily earn you your first 5$ from affiliate marketing.