Joel Comm is Giving Away his eBooks for Free
February 9, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzJoel Comm, the best-selling author, host and creator of The Next Internet Millionaire, and more recently of The Joel Comm Show is now giving away 4 of his eBooks away completely free.
These are eBooks that used to cost money (he sold thousands of copies of his AdSense Secrets eBook at $97) so here’s your opportunity to get a lot of great content from one of the Internet’s earliest big marketers.
There is absolutely no catch. You’ll be added to Joel’s mailing list, of course, but that’s hosted on AWeber meaning that you can easily opt-out at any time.
Here’s a quick summary of the 4 eBooks that are now completely free:
AdSense Secrets 4
Link: Adsense Secrets
Kontera Secrets
Link: Kontera Secrets
Chitika Secrets
Link: Chitika Secrets
Build a Website Fast
Link: Build a Website Fast
Enjoy!
Our Experiences With Commission Junction
February 6, 2010 Posted by WhatsGoodBlogThis article was written by Josh Bucher (Jay Booshay) and Ian Sherwin (The Sherwinator) of What’s Good Blog. What’s Good Blog is your one stop site for up to date reviews of technology, sporting events, TV shows, movies, electronics, cell phones and everything that is important to young adult professionals.
A little over two weeks ago, we decided to finally move to our own host and domain. We spent about 8 months on BlogSpot but eventually decided it was time to move on from the free hosting days. As we expanded our website capabilities using Wordpress, we also decided to expand our revenue earning beyond the horizon of Google AdSense. While AdSense was great for beginners who do not really have any experience with affiliate marketing and content based ads, eventually you will need to incorporate other methods to start earning revenue.
We decided to experiment with Commission Junction Affiliate Marketing, located at www.cj.com. Commission Junction is basically a hub where you can search for companies by name, type, theme, genre, category, etc… that you are interested in promoting on your site. Once you find companies that you are interested in working with, you have to apply and be approved by the company itself before you can continue the process. Some applications take a few days for a response, and others take only seconds. Some of the higher end companies require you to have had your website running for at least several months and also frequently require you to have at least a certain amount of unique visitors per day. Each company varies.
Once you are approved for an affiliate program, you will receive an email from the company itself introducing themselves and discussing how their program works. Many of the companies offer commissions in the range of 2%-15%. Once you decide that you want to work with the company (after being approved), you then click on their link, where you are then taken to a banner generator. Often, you can decide what size banner you want, what color, whether or not it’s in flash or html, etc. Each company provides their own advertisements and sizes. Once the code has been generated, you can place it directly onto your homepage/main page, directly into an article, or wherever else you may desire. (Check out the affiliate section of our homepage)
After the banner has been added to your site, you can track clicks, leads, sales, and more right through Commission Junction’s control center, much like you can in either Google AdSense or Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing Program. Right off the bat, in our first month of using Commission Junction, we have had more clicks than we ever had using Google AdSense. At this rate, Commission Junction could become our main advertising utility.
Be advised though – its not that simple. Most of the advertisers only pay commissions and not for leads or clicks. So in order to really make any money, you have to have lots of clicks in the hopes that some of these clicks will result in a product purchase. A good idea is to incorporate these ads into your articles that deal with similar content. For example, I included a Bplay ad in an article about a Blackberry App (check it out). This is a great way to utilize Commission Junction’s affiliates to the maximum.
Commission Junction also offers great performance reporting based on individual ads and days. We have been using this to optimize our ad placement and ad selection. For example, we have several ads that have been getting a very high percentage of clicks per impressions (over 50%). We have been swapping ads in and out of the website according to these statistics. These can track not only individual advertisers but their individual ads that you place in your website.
Unfortunately, you cannot view the exit page of the ad. That would be a really helpful tool, especially when learning of the ad placement. In less than one month, we have already had 84 clicks out of 14,792 impressions, far surpassing our performance in Google AdSense. However, keep in mind, most advertisers only pay for commissions and not clicks.
Overall, Commission Junction is a great affiliate program with huge potential when its used effectively. The variety of advertisers surpasses many other advertising venues and the potential commissions are at very competitive rates. Give Commission Junction a try and let us know what you think.
An Update on my Submit Campaigns: Day 10
February 4, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzI’ve been continuing to focus on my e-mail submit campaigns during the past few days. It’s rather addicting actually.
I’m really loving the change from promoting $30-$50 offers to promoting e-mail submits. I can find out if a campaign is working or not within hours, my risk is far less due to the low payout, there are countless submit offers out there to choose from, and I can direct link.
Being able to direct link actually saves me countless hours. When I built landing sites for my $30-$50 offers, they’d take me between 7-12 hours to build. Now I can launch 10 e-mail submits within 15-45 minutes.
$1,000+ Extra Profit per Month
Based off of 2 of my best performing e-mail submit campaigns from yesterday’s data, I profited $34. That works out to $1,000 a month.
Even being new to submit offers, after just 10 days from starting on them, I now have 2 offers that can bring in an additional $1,000 profit a month. That’s $1,000 extra cash each month I found out of nowhere, and it only took a week-and-a-half!
Now, this is of course assuming that those 2 campaigns can stay like that, but e-mail submit offers are usually “evergreen” campaigns in that they aren’t seasonal or won’t dry up overnight.
While I’m starting to see some profit come in, I’m by no means going to stop here. I’m only getting started. While there are limits to how much volume I can push with my traffic source, I have seen good progress since I started so I’m certain there is still more room to profit more.
One of my goals for 2010 was to hit an average of $100/day profit from affiliate marketing and I think that these e-mail submit offers may just be the key.
Here’s another screencast video of me showing and explaining my offers. You can skip ahead to around the 10-minute mark if you want to get straight to all the number talk:
If you’re reading this in an RSS viewer or via E-mail that you will probably not see the above video. In that case you will need to visit my blog via your browser in order to watch it: http://www.tylercruz.com.
Below is a screenshot for those who don’t want to watch the video:
Proof PeerFly Rocks
As mentioned in the beginning of the video above, PeerFly continues to prove why they’re one of the best affiliate networks out there by implementing the requests I made to their reporting stats.
I can now see the EPC, SubID’s of each offer, and the grand total at the bottom. This makes optimizing and evaluating my campaigns 10x easier (especially with the SubID addition).
If you haven’t signed up to PeerFly yet, you don’t know what you’re missing.
An Update on my Submit Campaigns
February 2, 2010 Posted by Tyler CruzI haven’t done a post in 5 days because I’ve been preoccupied with working on my submit campaigns and playing Mass Effect 2. But, I’ve beaten Mass Effect 2 last night (that game is way too short; get Dragon’s Age: Origins, that’s an awesome game and very long) so I have more free time to put towards work again.
I spent the majority of the past few days trying to scale my zip and e-mail campaigns. The traffic source I’m using is rather strange in how it works so it took a lot of trial and error with a lot of campaigns to finally realize how to scale them, as simple bid increases weren’t very consistent with extra traffic.
But late last night I finally discovered how to scale my campaigns and traffic started to pour in. While I’m getting a lot of traffic now, my profit margins have certainly taken a hit as a result. Now that I know how to scale my campaigns properly, my focus will be put towards profiting.
The good news is that I already have a lot of data to work with (to know what is working and what isn’t). Therefore, my efforts will largely entail trying to increase my CR as well as find the right balance for my bids to where I can get both good traffic and profit. That will take a bit of testing and cash to do.
Below is another screencast update on my campaigns:
If you’re reading this in an RSS viewer or via E-mail that you will probably not see the above video. In that case you will need to visit my blog via your browser in order to watch it: http://www.tylercruz.com.
Here’s a screenshot of my stats for those who wish to just have a quick glance. It’s my stats for February 1st up to 4PM. The number is red is the average gross earnings I’m receiving per click. I’m spending anywhere from $0.02 – $0.08 per click:
I’m using PeerFly as my main affiliate network and highly recommend them. Those are the stats from my PeerFly account too, so now you know which offers to avoid 
They currently have 116 Zip/E-mail Submit offers (with more added all the time) so there’s certainly no shortage to choose from
I’ll give you guys another update in another few days. I hope to report some decent profit numbers by then. Stay tuned!
