Well I finally logged into my rss reader to check and see what the top affiliate bloggers had to say, when I saw Shoemoney’s Contest.  To give the brief overview, Jeremy Schoemaker and Azoogle Ads are teaming up to hook one lucky reader up with the following:

• 1 Platinum pass to Affiliate Summit (by Affiliate Summit)
• 3 Nights hotel paid in full (by Affiliate Summit)
• Airfare – up to $500 in airfare reimbursement.
• Roll with me to some super badass private parties

Now, since I have never been to an ASW event, I’m pretty stoked.  The opportunity to meet some of the greatest minds in affiliate marketing has definitely made my heart beat a little faster.  My goal for 2010 is to be able to generate a full time income via AM and this will be an amazing tool for me to learn.  On top of that, I live in Ohio so the warmer weather will be awesome.

Here is a brief overview of the judges for the contest.

Jeremy Schoemaker – Probably the best know of all the judges (don’t be offended).  His enormous Adsense check has been seen by thousands of people and according to some is a great photoshop job.  He also founded AuctionAds which was eventually sold to Media Whiz.  Shoe currently resides in Lincoln, Nebraska and is a avid MA fan.  (BJ Penn is a freak.)

NickyCakes (Nick Koscianski) – One of the blogs I started reading a little over a year ago (Right before he started traveling and stopped posting).  He is nominated for the Pinnacle Award at this years ASW.  This is a huge honor.

David Dellanave – Chief Technical Officer for Shoe Money Media Group.  He definitely knows how to code, designing AuctionAds.  (Vote for me, I’m an Eagle Scout too.)

Erin Hughes (AzoogleAds AM) – Erin, it was really tough to find any info on you since you aren’t my AM.  I hope Vandy sweeps their 6 game home stand just for you.

George Avery (Get Ads) – George is the founder of Get Ads.  I’ll be honest, I never heard of you until today, but I’m going to check you out.  BTW, I never really considered Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie.

Neil Patel – I first hear about Neil about a year ago after I read an article on Crazy Egg.  This software is awesome because it shows you where customers are focusing on your site.  I cracked up when I saw this pic.

Barman (the one and only) – Sorry you got the small pic, but I can′t wait to party at Grandma’s House.

Ok, I’m through trying to kiss up.  On to the important stuff.   Once I get to Vegas, I’ll put my $2,000 down on some Roulette.  Go Big or Go Home, Right? And just so you can schedule me in, my flight lands at 7:15.

I was browsing some books on marketing at Barnes & Noble today when I noticed one titled “Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top”.  I picked it up and was surprised to see a $200 voucher program for Microsoft AdCenter (Bing).  Now I don′t know anyone that wouldn′t be interested in getting $200 of advertising for $34.99 (price of the book) so I decided to share it with everyone.

If you haven’t heard, Tracking202 was acquired today by a company named Boosky.  Tracking202 was started a couple years ago and has grown tremendously into one of the premiere tracking companies around.  If fact, they even started their own network in the past few months.  Basically, the company grew to such a point that they couldn’t handle the growth on their own.  Steven and Wes are planning on staying around to help keep Tracking202 the company it is today.  If you have never been to their site it is definitely worth checking out.  http://www.tracking202.com

First I want to make a disclaimer that I am not a member of PPC Bully.com.  That being said, I just downloaded their free toolbar today and I am really impressed.  This toolbar is an invaluable tool to research new campaigns and affiliate offers.   The PPC Bully toolbar gives options to search for new affiliate offers and products, do keyword research, check trends, demographic info, view google ads, and find articles on the topic you are researching.  Naturally, they do have a few limits with the toolbar since it is free.  They limit some of their keyword research with the intention that you will subscribe to their tool.  If you are looking to get started in PPC, I would definitely recommend trying out the free tool bar.  http://ppcbully.com/toolbar/

One of my new favorite networks is MaxBounty.  I have only been with them for a couple months, but they have been great.  Any questions I have are answered quickly and I have never had any issues with tracking.  In the last 30 days they updated the MaxBounty interface.  Offers are extremely easy to find and payouts are top notch.  MaxBounty is currently running the contest below.

Blog, post, tweet about MaxBounty and get publishers to sign up through your affiliate referral link. By bringing new publishers into the network, you’ll not only earn 5% of their revenue for a year, you’ll also be included in the contest. (You can find links for the referral program at the bottom of the main MaxBounty.com page once you log in.) We’re reporting the totals in real time for all to see on our scoreboard and those with the highest numbers win. Previous referrals don’t count towards the contest, only new affiliate sign ups count, and of course these publishers must be approved into the network.

MaxBounty – Highest Paying CPA Campaigns

Prizes are as follows:

- $650 for generating the most referral income
- $250 for generating the most approved referrals
- $100 randomly selected from all participating.

The contest is live right now and lasts until Nov 30th with prizes awarded on Dec 1st. So post that review of MaxBounty, use us as your message board signature, get the word out and hopefully you’ll win! To entice potential new affiliates into signing up for MaxBounty, we now offer a conditional $1,000 sign up bonus. Feel free to mention that in your attempts to recruit.”

I’ve been meaning to write about Convert2Media for a while. I have only been advertising with them for  couple months now, but they are hands down my favorite affiliate network.  If you do any research on them, you will probably find out that they only have a handful of employees.  Don′t let this concern you.  They are more proactive on helping their affiliates succeed than any other network I am a part of.  The margins they are keeping are really small which means that they have much higher payouts than a lot of other networks.  I switched an offer from another network to Convert2Media in December because there was a $5 payout difference for the same promotion.  That is ridiculous!  The owner of Convert2Media, Ruck, started out as an affiliate like you and me.  He had a blog CashTactics.net that I stumbled across about a year ago that really got me started in affiliate marketing.  Now he continues to blog several times a week on the Convert2Media blog giving examples and ideas on how to promote certain offers.  They also have a great forum with some very knowledgeable people that gives some great “best practice” information.  How many affiliate networks do that?  Bottom line – check them out, you may not realize what you are missing.  Convert2Media.com

Ok, I wanted to give enough time for my ad to run and let me see the full results.  Here is what happened.  I paid $21 for an ad in a cheap classified paper for testing.  I managed to successfully turn this $21 into $7.    What I learned here is that:

1. My ad sucks, or
2. My offer sucks, or
3. No one reads that classified paper, or
4. A combination of the above

The next step in this process is going to be a larger scale classified.  I′m going to do a lot more research  on the local area and generate a more tailored offer.   The only way to get ahead on this ios through testing.  I′ll keep everyone posted.

I’ve been talking to some people that are doing some “outside the box″ advertising and it really has me thinking.  What would some offline advertising do for my sales?  I decided to give it a try on a small scale.  I know there are people usingsimilar advertising to generate large amounts of revenue, but since I have only used online ads thimay need a little tweaking.  I’ll be sure to let everyone know the results.

I have been playing around with a few new methods of gerating targeted traffic over the past couple of weeks.  One of the best places I have found is Yahoo Answers.  I don’t know how many of you have ever been on Answers, but there are a lot of people out there searching for different answers.  The great thing is that we have the answers.  They made be trying to figure out how to build a website.  Give them some quality information along with your affiliate link.  You would be surprised with the conversion.  Just don′t SPAM everything.  That will just turn people off and your account will get banned.  For the last two weeks this has generated me over $30 per day with as little as 15 minutes work a day.

I’m sorry it took me so long to make a new post, this past week has been extremely busy for me.  I have been working on a game plan for my next couple promotions.  In the mean time, I have had some really good success with a couple campaigns from HydraNetwork.  They have a huge selection of email/zip submits that convert extremely well.  Most of my campaigns have been direct links to the offers that have offered an almost 70% return which I think is great.

On another note, I saw a very interesting landing page this week.  Someone set up a page complaining that his girlfriend had been cheating on him.  He added a couple pictures, then offered several nude pictures if you brought X number of people to his site.  Alternately, he gave you a quicker option.  Enter your email in the box below (which happened to be an iframed affiliate offer).  Very sneaky.  Since most people won′t want to wait to see the photos, this is going to be the obvious choice.  A word of caution, be careful using this method because it may get your leads scrubbed since it is an incentivized offer.

Always make sure that you are trying to think outside the box when you are setting up offers.  There is no specific way you need to set up your landing pages, but make sure that you are tracking your clicks to make sure they are converting.