Alright I can see this may be a lengthy post, so if you want the cliff-notes and don’t want to read the explanation :

General access into UberCamp is now free. The forum is still invite only, and you still have to apply in order to be accepted. Applications will now all be looked at again and if you make the cut, you’ll be sent an invite. If you get an invite, you have access to the forum an all it’s content for free.

There WILL be a single Premium Private forum ($99/month), which will include :

-Discounted access to one of my landing page designers. He normally charges $99 for a page, but if you’re a member of the paid section you’ll get pages 50% off, at $49.

-Landing page designs. I hired one of my designers to work for UberCamp designing pages at the users request. He’ll whip them up and we’ll release them publicly.

-Unique affiliate marketing tools. I’ve teamed up with a really awesome programmer and he’s designed some tools that will make your lives easier and more efficient. These tools haven’t been released before and are being saved until the new launch.

-Any other perks that I feel paid members should get.

So there is the short version of what’s going on. So get over and apply. Now for the explanation why…

So when I first started UberCamp, I wanted to make a really tight knit community of smart guys that could all brainstorm together and would have some awesome conversations. That definitely happened. We have some GREAT guys in the forum that give away a ton of the tips they’ve learned, and I’ve participated in almost every thread, helping where I can.

I made a post a couple days ago about opening up applications again and getting a new designer. After really thinking about how the forum was growing and the general reactions to it, I decided to pull the post and go a different route. If things were so great, then why the sudden change? A couple things influenced it :

• Time constraints and pressure. This was probably the biggest factor. In order to run a huge operation like this all by myself, I needed to invest almost all my time into it. I tried my hardest but I had so many of my own things going that ate up time like a mother, working on UberCamp just felt really pressured. I don’t want people paying and not getting what they expect, that’s bullshit and the main reason why things are going to be free.
• Thoughts and opinions from other people. Although most people have a retarded way of getting their point across, others can be constructive and I took all of the opinions into thought. I can’t count all the hours I’ve spent on this blog writing for you guys, and I don’t make anything from it (aside from the few bucks I make from selling my cheap ads). A lot of people just saw UC as a little project I started to take advantage of all the people I’d influenced through my blog. Stupid reasoning but if I truly want to give and help, it should be free or partially paid like it is now. The setup we now have is MUCH better for everyone.

I don’t want to drone on about it because it doesn’t really matter. I created UberCamp and ran it wrong from the start, the setup we have now is how it should have been from the beginning. Enough said.

If you’re wondering about the members that have already paid for the first couple months, they’ll all be getting lifetime access to the premium forum at no charge, as well as some private AIM time with me to talk about campaigns and whatnot.

So UberCamp has been around for almost 2 months now, and so far it’s going great I think. Of course there have been criticisms and people that think it’s not worth it, but I guess that’s not up for me to decide. I haven’t let in any more members since it’s first launch, but I’m not opening up applications again, primarily because of the newest addition.

I always want to think of ways to make it worth the $199 monthly fee so that even if you hate the content, you’ll still get the value out of it. Now I guarantee you won’t hate the content, but I’ve brought something pretty valuable to the table.

UberCamp gets a designer.

I’ve hired one of my designers to work full-time for UberCamp, and there are some AWESOME benefits to be had. Here’s an example of one of the free pages he’s done, to see his quality of work.

1) He’s going to design pages at campers requests all month long. He’s already designed 4 in the first week I’ve brought him in, and everybody loves the quality. Everyone gets them along with the .PSDs just for being an UC member.

2) He will design private pages at only $49/page! That’s pretty insane and you probably won’t find pages that cheap anywhere else, especially at the quality they are. Sure you can find designers for cheap, but this guy is VERY quality and will work on your page until you’re satisfied…he works for me I know from experience . A member started a thread about it and said the following :

Let me tell you, not only is this guy talented, but he’s fast as well. Had my LP done within a few hours. As many of you know, I tried one of the most poplular LP designers around, waited weeks, paid a fortune, and got crap. Tyler responded quickly to PMs and was VERY reasonable price-wise.

So even if there’s no content on the site, you’re paying $199 and getting 10+ free landing pages every month, and access to private page design way cheaper than anywhere else.

Forum Update

Now how are things going in the forums? The only thing I’ll do is be completely honest. We had a TON of posts in the beginning and activity from guys excited to get tips, and it was great. After a month, activity slowed down. People had less questions, they were working on their campaigns, there was nobody new, etc. We ran the first case study and the offer was breaking even, but it simply wasn’t worth it to continue. There was a pretty big delay on the second case study, but I just built the page and that’s going to start up late this week.

I ditched the private mentoring thing, it was way too expensive for people and would have hindered my available time to work on the main forum. Bad idea I can admit it.

Excluding the off-topic forums, there are 1,882 posts in the affiliate sections. There truly are a lot of great tips and advice, not just from myself but from other members. I’m opening applications up again because as expected we had people drop out, and then everybody else got kind of busy so the posting died down. With a fresh group of guys, activity should shoot back up and especially with the addition of our designer we should be cruising.

Anyways, things are looking pretty cool and if you haven’t applied, you can do so now. I’m also working on getting a keyword tool produced, it’s not going to be your conventional scraper but it will definitely be cool. Anything that adds value to the forum.

So I guess a pretty big question when thinking about your affiliate business is what type of business do you want to start up. Do you want to focus all your efforts on a site that will bring in consistent money over the long term (6+ months)? Do you want to go on a super-hot tip and make a lot of money with a short term business (>1 month)? Or do you want to try to find what’s hot and run it for a couple months and then accept when it dies?

The inspiration comes from a campaign that I ran in the short-middle term range. I primarily want to talk about it because most “gurus” out there will tell you that it’s all in setting up the long term, “mini website” blah blah. That’s not the only strategy out there. I just got out a niche a couple weeks ago that made me $6,000 profit/day on average, but I only had it up for 17 days before it died. Although this only lasted barely 2 weeks, I still made 100k, which is a nice salary nowadays.

Another campaign I ran back in the day was dating…everybody thought they were cool because they though they found the only niche I ran. Well not the only, but dating was awesome for around 6 months (peaked around 20k/day for me…about 8k profit margins were lower).

After the dating buzzed died when spring rolled around, I broke into another niche and did 4-5k profit/day on that…that only lasted for around 2-3 months.

My point with all these examples isn’t to sound tough saying I made a lot of money, it’s to get the point across that running a long-term business isn’t the only way to make a lot of money. For the past year or so I’ve ran on short-medium term niches. Sure I have long-term sites that have been making less money but over a longer period of time. I’m actually in the process of building out a slower, more long term niche, so we’ll see how that goes and I’m sure it’ll do fine.

So when you ask your friend about this way to promote something and they say “uhh yeah that probably won’t last too long it’s probably not worth it”, that means they’re banking on it and you can hop on and ride the money train as long as it lasts…just don’t get upset when it dies.

Anybody get one? I don’t really keep up with news that much and didn’t find out that they were open for registration until about 16 hours after the fact. Still I grabbed a few domains and will probably do nothing with them. Some of the ones I got :

Drummers.me (might do something with this one just for fun)
Mints.me
That.me
Credit-Report.me

Just fun to play around with I guess, but the minimum 2 year signing at $20 is kind of ghetto, ended up spending ~$500.

Not going to just repeat ‘ol Google, so just check it here.

Now you can see an approximate search volume chart from Google herself. I compared this to the SEO Book Keyword Tool volume indicator, which pulls from WordTracker. I did a search for “dogs”…here are the monthly volumes :

Google – 1,000,000 searches
WordTracker – 793,259 searches

Fairly close results (I did the exact match option in Google and I’m guessing that’s what WT does).

This is a guest post by my good friend Wes Mahler from Trackin𙌢. He also wanted everyone to know that there is a San Fran Bay Area meetup on July 26th for webmasters and marketers, free pizza for everyone. You can read more at Meetup202.

Although most of us know that you can receive 5% cash-back through Yahoo Search Marketing up to $500 a year if you use an AMEX Business Credit Card, but did you know that you could also receive 3% cash-back as-well with MSN AdCenter up to $500 a year too if you use a MasterCard Business Credit Card that is enrolled in the MasterCard Easy Savings Program?

You can earn a lot of extra-cash by using credit cards that have rewards, however, I think everyone already knows this for the most part; so what we are going to share with you today is on how to get a-lot more from your rewards cards than you might have imagined possible.

I’m going to skip over the basics; you should already know as a PPC affiliate that you should be using credit cards with rewards! And if you do not use a rewards credit card already you will see in this post why you should!

Forewarning: This post is probably be most helpful for affiliates who are spending between $2,500 to $50,000 a month on PPC through their credit cards, the tips shown below will show anyone with that amount of ad-spend to earn an extra couple thousands of dollars by doing a-little extra work.

MSN AdCenter

So if you are using MSN AdCenter and you are not currently receiving 3% cash-back on your ad-spend get it started.

To qualify you need to use a MasterCard Business Credit Card, but the card must be enrolled in the MasterCard Easy Savings Program; this is a free program to join. You must enroll each of your individual MasterCard Credit Cards to the program one at a time if you have several. Once you do both of this you will be eligible to receive an extra 3% cash-back for simply using your MasterCard with MSN AdCenter, this is good for up to $500 per year.

Although most affiliates, including myself, would agree that AMEX is generally the best card for PPC, but it may not be true for MSN AdCenter. As you can now get a MasterCard rewards credit card which despite may have less rewards than an AMEX in general; but because you can now combine the MasterCard Rewards card with the 3% MSN AdCenter cash-back you are getting about the best deal you possibly can.

So of course when you do decide to setup the MSN AdCenter 3% cash-back deal, you might consider using a MasterCard Business Rewards Credit Card for obvious reasons. And you may consider getting several cards and the reason why will be explained as you continue to read the rest of this post.

Yahoo Search Marketing

And of course, Yahoo.

Yahoo has the 5% cash-back deal for anyone who pays their Yahoo SEM bills with an American Express Business Credit Card, they will pay up to $500 per year for each card used.
So just think, while your getting 5% cash-back for using an AMEX Business Card with Yahoo SEM, you could also combine that by using an AMEX Blue-Cash Card and receive an additional 5% cash-back on-top of the other 5%!

To make it even better, what if you used as well a voucher code worth $100 when signing up for the Yahoo account? Talk about getting the most bang for your buck.

Although I should warn you, the Blue-Cash card only gives a 5% cash-back bonus for the first $17,500 spent on the card, after that it will drop to 1.5%. So that’s why after you get to that point you switch it over to the AMEX Plum Card which has an unlimited 2% cash-back forever, as long as you pay off the balance at the end of each month.

But the best route, if you were really smart—you would use both cards, and maybe a few other cards as well!

After one card maxes out the $500 potential cash-back earnings, you switch it out with a second card and get the $500 cash-back again, and then after that’s done you swap it out again to a new card, and so on and so forth!

Remember, the MSN Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing deal will only give you up to $500 cash-back per year, which kind of sucks. Although there is a loophole in the system that there is no restrictions on how many cards you can use. So if you used ten different credit cards, you could essential get $500 cash-back for every card that you used.

So lets run through an example: I have three AMEX cards currently, all AMEX Business Cards: an AMEX Business Platinum, an AMEX Blue-Cash For Business, an AMEX Business Plum Card, and finally I’m in the process of getting another AMEX card as well!

So at first I had the business platinum card, I received my travel points, plus after I maxed out the $500 extra-cash from Yahoo, I switched it over to the business plum card and got my 2% cash-back and another extra $500-cash from Yahoo. Now after that is depleted I switch it over to my AMEX Business Blue-Cash card and get 5% cash-back from the regular card rewards program, and the extra $500-cash back again from Yahoo. And we keep just switching the cards left and right, max them out, move on, max them out, move on and keep going to maximize the most value we can possible get out of our points.

And let’s say I used all my business cards up and got my $500 cash-back for them all, I could even lastly switch it over to a personal AMEX blue-cash card, and get another 5% cash-back and max it out to the $17,500 limit, and finally switch off to the PLUM Card which will for the rest of the year give me 2% cash-back.

So you can do this for both Yahoo SEM and MSN AdCenter, you receive up to $500 cash-back per card on your ad-spend, and Ad-Spend, and you could use as many cards as you possibly have. And again, you get the extra-cash back on top of the additional rewards that the credit cards provide as well.

Conclusion

Start ranking in extra money today, by using lots of cards, taking advantage of both Yahoo SEM 5% cash-back,and the MSN AdCenter’s 3% cash-back. You can apply for a new credit card every other month if you wanted to, as long as you make your payments you’ll probably get accepted more often than not.

Always use a rewards credit card, if you want to travel the next year, use a travel card, if you want cash-back use the cash-back cards. If you combine the cash-back from the PPC networks, with regular cash-back from the rewards cards and also use PPC vouchers you will be positioned to make some positive income!

Lastly, we will leave off with a few of the rules, as there are requirements to be eligible for both programs. Basically they both require Business Credit Cards, if you don’t have one, you might consider registering one.

The Rules

Yahoo Search Marketing gives a 5% cash-back rewards to anyone using an American Express Business Credit Card, they will pay up to $500 back per year. [source]

MSN AdCenter gives you 3% cash-back rewards to anyone using a MasterCard Business Credit Card, which is enrolled in the MasterCard Easy Savings program. [source]

Some Good Cards To Use

AMEX Blue-Cash (business & personal) 5% cash-back up to $17,500 spent, after that it switches to 1.5% cash-back.

AMEX Plum (business) 2% cash-back as long as balance is paid off in full every month

Finally:

If anyone has any other great cards to check out, please post them here in the comments so everyone can benefit from you sharing. Thanks!

So apparently yesterday Google went through and did one of their mega slaps on affiliates. I was fortunate enough to have no idea it happened, because none of my sites were slapped. All my QS held up as great and I actually saw much greater profit margins because many affiliates were slapped, ads taken down, allowing my CPC price to fall.

It’s pretty ridiculous either way, I know a guy who has held a site in the #1 position with a 28% CTR for over 5 months…slapped like he was nothing.

Anyways, if you want a quick fix just re-upload everything. You may have to work on getting CPC price down naturally again, but you do the best you can.

Here is one of the top 10 runners up for my MarketLeverage “affiliate mistakes” contest.

Let’s just get straight into it (the list is in no particular order) –

Mistake #1 - Refreshing your stats page every 2 seconds (heck I’m still guilty of this from time to time.) This is what happens -

You get 3 leads from 8 visitors and you get super excited so you up your bids by 300% only to beat yourself about it later. You guys know who you are… In fact, I’m sure many affiliates start out exactly like that.

The cure is to check your stats as few times as possible. So you don’t make decisions based on emotion and statistically insignificant data.

LET THE CAMPAIGN RUN! I’d say let it run a week before you make a decision because an offer might perform differently on different days. Perhaps your offer will do VERY GOOD on the weekends, for other offers it might be during weekdays at work-hours. TEST & FIND OUT!

Mistake #2 – Not bidding high enough-I’m now getting more and more aggressive with my bidding.

This has been beaten to DEATH on this blog. Don’t fear to bid high.

Now before you go off and do something crazy – let me tell you how to do it.

By bidding high, you can do high volume. You then ask your affiliate manager to set you a goal/target to achieve for the month. And if you achieve that target, ask them to retro your previous leads at the new payout.

For example, I promote a $4 offer and generate 100 leads for it every day. That’s $400 a day… But I’m spending $500 to make that $400. That’s a loss of $100 every day.

Ask your aff. manager that if you’re consistent and do 100 leads everyday for that offer this month, then s/he should retro you $6.

By doing this, you’ll have end up making a $100 profit everyday for the entire month.

Why is bidding high so important?

Mike Reninings from ‘The Coming AdWords War’ report (http://www.thecomingadwordswar.com – read page 47-48) did an experiment where he had 2 identical ad groups – one with low bid and the other with high bid strategy. The results were interesting –

In terms of conversions, he found the difference was 53 to 1, that is an improvement of 5,300%.

I’m not doing justice to the report. Please go and read the report in its entirety to get the full picture.

Mistake #3 - Not networking enough- I’ve been trying to figure things out myself using different online blogs, help articles & trial and error. I haven’t networked at all except through IM (with very few people but that’s not the same as meeting someome in person.)

I’ve already had little success with networking. A while ago, I was looking for a cheaper alternative to GoDaddy because they were charging an extra $8 or so to keep my WhoIS info private. I asked this affiliate dude that I knew and he told me about Google’s domain registration -

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/domains.html

You get charged $10 for a domain and it includes whois protection.

Once I’ve registered 100 domain names, that’s a saving of $800 compared to domain registration on Godaddy.com.

Paul himself has attributed a large part of his success to networking so it’s something I must do and you guys reading this must also.

Mistake #4 – Not starting with Yahoo! sooner.

Currently, I’m running a campaign on Yahoo! & Google and Yahoo! is pulling in more leads for me than Google. (This reminds me that I need to set up an account with MSN too and test my offer on it.)

Mistake #5 – Not tracking aggressively some times.

Get a tracking202.com account. I usually only use it for the keyword data. That stuff is invaluable!

(TIP: On one particular offer, I used it to track keywords from 2nd tier PPC engines and I looked at keywords that got conversions. I further researched into that keyword and saw potential so I expanded my keyword list and put it up on Yahoo! & Google. This way you are only paying $0.10 per keywords on 2nd tier keyword and finding the converting keywords. Once you found those keywords, you can expand on them and add them to Yahoo! & Google to get the best volumes for those keywords.)

Mistake #6 – Spending A LOT of time setting up a campaign without doing a quick test to make sure that offer converts.

Once, I made a whole Powerpoint presentation for this one particular offer and then recorded the presentation using Camtasia and finally wrote some copy to complement the video which took up a nice chunk of time… Only to send a few visitors to the page and stopping altogether. BAD BAD BAD!

I should have at least tested the offer by aggressively direct linking and seeing if the offer converts. But then again, back then I had very little money and I couldn’t afford to do any aggressive bidding. And it didn’t help that it was a competitive niche.

So I understand the situation some of you guys with no money might be in – to people like these I strongly recommend getting a job and living on minimal expenses. Earn the money and then invest in campaigns. I say invest for a reason (and not ‘waste’)… Even if you lose money, you learn SOMETHING. Always ask – WHY DID THIS OFFER NOT WORK?? Did you pull it too soon? Is the landing page just PLAIN horrible? Are your keywords not targeted enough? etc. etc.

Mistake #7 – Giving up on a campaign after hitting it from one angle only. As I type this, this one particular offer comes to mind that I want to go back and give another try. After running a few clicks to it, I just gave up on it. BAD, BAD, BAD!

If direct linking doesn’t work because the merchant is advertising on PPC, try setting up a landing page. That doesn’t work? Try having an opt-in page strategy. That doesn’t work? Did you try the content network?

Mistake #8 - Not keeping up with the industry. Just drifting to different blogs and trying to pick up tips & news here and there.

Get a Google Reader account and subscribe to all the top industry blogs out there. I’ve just started doing this and I’m already seeing huge benefits. Like for example today I found out a site to get a free £30 Google voucher (http://www.here.org.uk/2008/06/free-google-adwords-voucher-30-free-online-advertising-voucher.html); another thing I found out is the new feature of Google trends that compares website’s traffic (read more here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-layer-to-google-trends.html). And finally I’m writing this article because my Google Reader updated to Paul’s latest post about getting entries in before the deadline.)

Mistake #9 – Not starting sooner with PPC to CPA marketing. Start small but do start! Skip eating out in a restaurant this month – throw that money into different offers and find out what works.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have questions, I might do a follow-up.

Signing off,

‘Aff. X’

When I made my post announcing the MarketLeverage contest, I said that I would be writing a post of my own mistakes as if it were an entry.

Even though I’m becoming more and more experienced in affiliate marketing, I still make PLENTY of mistakes. Some mistakes I’ve been making since the very beginning.

Mistake #1 : Distractions

An oldie but ah, such a goodie. I’m constantly distracted by AIM, my phone, xbox, forums, blogs, and other nonsense that does nothing but hurt my productivity. In a recent attempt to cut the biggest problem out (AIM), I’ve stopped going on. Ever since I stopped wasting my time with 20 IMs at once all day long, I’ve spent a lot more time working and I have been making more money. At the least you should be going invisible so people aren’t IM’ing you. Distractions absolutely KILL you, trust me.

Mistake #2 : Campaign Overload

Another huge mistake I make is overloading my campaigns. I hear so many things from people and affiliate managers on offers that people are killing on, so I want to start everything. I end up starting 4 niches at once and it just becomes a huge mess. Niches seem hot and I always feel like I have to get on every one of them at the same time, because soon they’ll be gone. I would have made a lot more money in the past month if I had just focused on 1 of the new offers I’ve started, instead of working like a madman on 4.

Mistake #3 : Straight Up Laziness

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m one of the most lazy individuals on the planet. I think it’s why I landed in the position I’m in right now; I was looking for a job that involved doing nothing but laying in my bed butt naked. Recently I’ve become a little better at cutting out the laziness and actually doing some work, and lo and behold it’s producing results.

Mistake #4 : Neglecting Yahoo/MSN

There can be some mad money and volume in YSM, and usually all I focus on is Google. Stupid me.

Mistake #5 : Not Split Testing

This goes along with the laziness one. A lot of times when I get a campaign profiting I’m too lazy to continue to split test landing pages and ad copy. An extra 5% CTR here and there can go a long way over the long term and put a lot more money in my pocket. Never stop testing.

Just a few mistakes that I’ve thought about recently and still made. There’s seemingly nothing “special” about them because you probably do one or more of them right now. Fix the simple things and you’ll start making a lot more money.

Sorry to make 2 posts in a row about the same garbage, but I LOL’d when I watched the 3rd Episode of the Top affiliate Challenge. Jon Van Clute is bragging on how he gets 200,000 targeted visitors at a $2CPM, and then for those “uneducated” affiliates out there, the Top affiliate Challenge shows us the math in calculating how much Van Clute spends.

They’re real geniuses, great affiliatez math sЯllz!