Over the past month, I noticed that PeerFly has been busy adding a lot of new features to their affiliate network.

One of the distinguishing characteristics about PeerFly is that they have always been built upon 100% custom code; they have never used software or services from 3rd party companies such as DirectTrack, HasOffers, or HitPath. This allows them to offer features and services that other networks can’t or won’t.

Here are 4 great new features PeerFly have added to their site during the past month:

Emergency and Early Payments

While not everyone may want to admit it, a lot of us live very close to the margin and can get ourselves into situations where we occasionally need money fast.

Especially when it comes to affiliate marketing, there are times when waiting for Net-30 just won’t do and you need money right away to pay off a credit card or other bill. Or perhaps you ran into the perfect opportunity to acquire a site but need fast and can’t wait 2-4 weeks to get paid.

Whatever the reason, PeerFly now offers an emergency (within 8 hours) and early (3 days) payment request feature. Whether your request will be granted or not will depend on your traffic quality and general history with PeerFly (as well as $50 minimum), but as long as your account is in good standing you’ll more than likely be granted your request.

Now, there is a caveat. Requesting a payment within 8 hours will incur a 22% penalty fee, and requesting a payment within 3 days will incur a 17% penalty fee. Most of you can probably understand and expect a small fee for this service, but may be surprised at how high these fees are.

The reason behind this is risk. PeerFly, and all other networks for that matter, are paid by the advertisers usually on a Net-15 or Net-30 basis, after the leads and/or sales are processed and confirmed. If PeerFly pays its publishers before they get paid by the advertiser, they are taking a risk that the traffic may turn out to be fraudulent, of low quality, or that the advertiser themselves go under or simply don’t pay them.

I know of a publisher I referred to MarketLeverage who sent them quality traffic, but one day the advertiser refused to pay MarketLeverage. MarketLeverage had already paid the publisher for the month, which was around $120,000 or so, and so you can see just how much of a risk an affiliate network takes when paying out their publishers early. Fortunately, in this example, MarketLeverage did the right thing and worked out a deal with the publisher (I think they ended up agreeing that the publisher would give MarketLeverage back 50% of the $120,000).

However, while I understand the risk factor, the fees still do seem quite high, especially if someone needs an early payment request of a larger figure. For example, 22% of $18,000 works out to just shy of $4K in lost money to the publisher.

It would be nice to see if PeerFly could lower these fees a bit, and/or make the system more sophisticated so that users with older accounts and a consistent quality traffic history can get lower fees.

In any case though, this is still a nice feature for when you need money in a pinch. I know of a case where one guy requested money using the “within 8 hours” option, and got paid within 8-minutes instead. Now that’s fast!

Tiered Payment Schedule

PeerFly now has a tiered payment schedule system whereby you are eligible for faster payment turnaround times based upon how much revenue you generate each month.

For example, if you generate under $1,000 a month with PeerFly, you will be paid on a Net-30 basis. However, if you generate over $1,000 a month you will be paid once every 2 weeks.

Likewise, there are other tiers such as if you consistently generate $5,000+ a week you will be paid weekly.

PeerFly already gave faster payouts to larger affiliates previously, but now it is all clearly laid out when you log in and is implemented right into your account as opposed to being done manually.

PeerFly Stats Firefox Plugin

Luke, the guy who is pretty much everyone’s affiliate manager at PeerFly, recently developed a free plugin for Firefox that displays your current day’s total as well as unpaid balance in the bottom right corner of your Firefox browser.

I installed the plugin this morning and I really like it.

The plugin is very simple and easy to use and is a great timesaver for people like me who are addicted to constantly checking their stats.

RSS/XML Feeds

Programmers and developers will really like this feature. PeerFly has now made available to all members, RSS and XML feeds of their system data. This is actually how Luke created the Firefox plugin above.

You can use there feeds to get the following information:

• All Offers
• Popular Offers
• Paused Offers
• Account Info
• Daily Earnings

Here is some more information as stated from the PeerFly blog:

“There is a lot that can be done with this information from a developer standpoint.  We are actually using these feeds ourselves at PeerFly to develop some new features.  For example, when an offer goes down you will be automatically notified if you’ve run any traffic to it in the past 2 weeks.  So, if you have any creatives ideas and would like to attempt to develop something based off of our feeds please feel free to give it a try.  If you have any questions or need any assistance you can comment below or contact us.”

I Don’t Just Talk the Talk, I Walk the Walk

I really love PeerFly. They’re just an awesome affiliate network. I only wish that all companies were like them. In fact, I wish PeerFly would launch a sister-site for CPM ads and become a CPM ad network as well.

Anyway, last year I made over $33,000 with PeerFly, and no – those aren’t all referral commissions – I run all of my affiliate offers with them as well.

As you can probably tell by now, I highly recommend PeerFly and encourage you to sign up with them if you haven’t already!

As explained in the screencast below, I paused all of my campaigns on February 11th as I didn’t have the time to focus and optimize my campaigns due to being busy with many of my websites such as revamping Movie-Vault.com.

One of my work goals for 2010 was to hit an average of $100/day profit from affiliate marketing. Based on the past 7 days, I made that goal. Now, I obviously won’t consider the goal officially reached until I can consistently average $100+ a day profit for several months straight, but I’m trying to be optimistic.

During the past 7 days, my affiliate marketing campaigns brought in a total of $739.94 profit which is a new 7-day record for me. Most of this was due to my main campaign converting an an insanely high 23.47% conversion rate, but my recent foray into e-mail and zip submit offers contributed as well.

Several days ago I started to do some extensive split-testing on my secret traffic source, and came up with some very interesting results.

Below is a 30-minute screencast in which I go into great detail on the split-testing, how I plan to scale, as well as explain my e-mail submit strategies. I also divulge a very effective bidding strategy/tip that many super affiliates use these days on Facebook to get a lower CPC:

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 are 2 screenshots for those who don’t want to watch the video:

I’ll try to keep you guys posted on how my e-mail submit scaling goes, as there is a lot of potential there as explained in the video.

You may also recognize his name from when we competed against each other in a weight loss challenge last year. He’s also one of my blog link partners.

Jonathan Volk is a well known name in the affiliate marketing industry as he is a true super affiliate, regularly generating around $400,000 a month. Okay sure, that’s gross, but you could still assume around $150,000 net profit each month. That’s $35,000 profit a week!

Oh yeah, and he’s only 23.

For the first time ever, Jonathan Volk has written an e-book which is a comprehensive affiliate marketing guide. It covers everything including the absolute basics (such as defining what affiliate marketing is), demographic analysis, social media, PPV, PPC, media buying, etc.

Best of all, the guide is completely free. You simply need to give your name and e-mail and the guide is completely yours.

Download it now, for free.

Since Jonathan covers all the major aspects of affiliate marketing in this guide, this is the perfect opportunity for those of you who always wanted to get started in affiliate marketing but never wanted to pay for an online course.

What’s nice, too, is that since Jonathan just wrote this guide, that means it’s up-to-date. The affiliate marketing world evolves and transitions pretty fast, so having a recently written guide is paramount to avoiding saturated sources, marketing tactics, etc.

Below is a list of the guide’s sections:

• Section 1. Introduction
• Section 2. What Is Affiliate Marketing?
• Section 3. What Is An Affiliate Network?
• Section 4. Recommended Affiliate Networks
• Section 5. How Does All This Come Together?
• Section 6. The "Pregame"
• Section 7. The "Pregame" Pt. 2 – Know Your Demographics
• Section 8. The "Pregame" Pt. 3 – Setting Up Hosting / Domain Name
• Section 9. Setting Up A Simple PHP Redirect
• Section 10. The Landing Page
• Section 11. Affiliate Marketing Methods (Basic Overview)
• Section 12. Social Media Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Section 13. Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Section 14. Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Section 15. Media Buying Affiliate Marketing Guide
• Section 16. After Your Campaigns Are Ready To Launch
• Section 17. Conclusion

Jonathan Volk is such a beast in the affiliate marketing industry that you should really hear what he has to say. The guide is free and Volk knows his stuff, so download it now and learn a thing or two

Last week, both Microsoft and Yahoo! sent out e-mails to their search marketing advertisers, announcing that they have now received regulatory clearance to form a search alliance. So it looks like things are moving along and this merger is really going to happen.

In the announcement, they introduce us to SearchAlliance.com, which gives more information about the search marketing merger including news and answers to commonly asked questions.

On the site they state:

“Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.”

So it appears that advertisers should be able to take advantage of the merger within this year.

This makes me wonder how this merger will affect pricing, quality score, among other vital factors important to advertisers.

Also, the demographics of Yahoo! and Bing users differ a fair bit. While Yahoo users tend to mimic the behaviours closer to those Google, Bing users tend to be more business-oriented. With this merger, this could effectively hurt many existing campaigns.

Below are some key points as mentioned on SearchAlliance.com:

• Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace.
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies.
• Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by AdCenter) search results.
• Full implementation of the terms of the Search Alliance is expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory clearance.
• Yahoo!’s Sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients, and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft AdCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

It kind of sucks that AdCenter will be the new platform, as I really don’t like it. It’s cumbersome and awkward… I would have much preferred to use Yahoo’s, but maybe AdCenter will undergo some improvements as a result of the merger.

However, there is some good news. The following points are taken from the MSN e-mail:

• Reach up to 150 million searchers and get approximately 62% more search volume than on Yahoo! alone through a new, unified search marketplace combining the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks.
• With just one buy, you’ll reach users on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites, as well as other premium partner sites.

This will make scaling much easier, as now you will only have to work with 2 search engines traffic sources instead of 3.

Then again, the merger opens up traffic to possible competitors of yours who were only advertising on one of the networks, which could possibly raise bidded prices. I’m not really sure how the merger will affect the market in terms of whether or not traffic will be cheaper, more expensive, or stay the same, but one thing is certain: advertisers will now have access to a lot more traffic volume in one unified source.

What do you think about this merger? Share your comments.

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.

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!

I’ve tried running e-mail and zip submits offers several times in the past, such as on Facebook, but any attempts were short lived and never taken seriously. I also never made any money on them.

But this new traffic source, which I’m not going to name for obvious reasons (why give myself extra competition?) seems to be a fertile ground for submit offers. I started by running my bids at $0.02, slowly incrementing my way up to $0.06.

Right now I’m focusing 100% on testing the waters and seeing what converts and what doesn’t. I’m therefore running several dozen campaigns concurrently, and will probably be adding more tomorrow. Once I have about 300 clicks or so on each offer, I will make place a ‘final’ bid on them, just enough to still profit but also get some good volume.

Below is a 16-minute screencast where I go into detail on how my campaigns are doing. I even reveal more than half of the actual campaigns I’m running with my real data from the past 48 hours (how many other blogs do that!?). It’s catered to newbie and beginner affiliate marketers, and anyone curious. I can’t cater to anyone else because I’m still a newbie affiliate marketer myself

It will take me a few days to test the waters before I start to focus on profit, but I think that I’ll be able to make $100/day with this traffic source. That isn’t much, but it does add up, at $3k/month extra revenue. I’m hoping I can scale things higher, but this source has a really weird way in which is funnels traffic so I don’t know.

Anyhow, check out the screencast below if you’re so inclined:

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:

Running Zip and E-mail submits is sure a fresh change from the per-sale offers I was running before. I can have a dozen offers completely tank and only be out a few bucks, whereas with the higher-paying offers I’d be out hundreds if not thousands.

I’ll keep you guys posted on how this turns out. There’s still a lot more testing to be done, but I hope to focus on profit soon.

After my last update, since my main campaign was doing well, I just left it alone and continue to run for a while so that I could make some money before trying something new. I did a bit of tweaking and tried a couple things during the first week of December, but by December 12th I was only averaging a daily profit of $15 for the month.

My main campaign was making me money, but not very much, so I decided it was time again to try a new campaign. I ran the new campaign on Yahoo only (later porting it to Bing), which got some leads but put me into the red for the next week. During the last week of December I tried a ton of stuff, including trying Facebook again, which turned out horribly (spent $440 to make $4, haha I’m so bad with Facebook).

On December 30th I thought I found a bit of a goldmine keyword for my new campaign that was running on Bing. I eventually increased the bid to as high as $4 (yes, really!) which is insane, but it really was converting really well with an EPC of $10 which made my high bid justified.

But in the end, December was a really bad month for me, putting me far in the red for the month. It was a real blow when November had been so good, and I thought December would have been good due to Christmas shopping, but I guess more people do their Christmas shopping in November than in December which would make sense due to shipping times. I tried a lot of new stuff in December which didn’t work out such as the Facebook campaigns which were a total bust, which didn’t help matters.

I continued to try new campaigns and tactics in the beginning of January, and was optimizing all of my campaign’s keywords across the big 3 networks daily. On January 5th, that new campaign I had been working on (the one with the $4 keywords) completely stopped converting at all and was really starting to tank so I had to abandon it after all that hard work and money put into it.

That same day I tried adding UK and Australia-only campaigns to my main campaign on Google to see how those countries fared individually (since Tracking202 Pro doesn’t give any demographic information). Those 2 countries didn’t convert at all (I only got 1 lead) so I paused then on January 11th.

Since December and the first week of January were so bad, by January 6th I went back to running only my main campaign so that I could let it do its thing and make back the money I had lost from all my escapades.

While things didn’t go as planned, I know I have to take those risks and keep trying new things otherwise I’ll never grow my working campaigns. It’s a shame because I almost had that new campaign (the one with the $4 bids) working… I may try it again in the future with some changes to the landing page.

New Daily Gross Record: $397

Fortunately, after going back to my main campaign and having optimized it a lot during January, things finally picked up this past week.

During the past 6 days, I’ve netted a total profit of $427.16 which works out to $70 a day. If I can sustain that average, that works out to over $2,000 profit a month, which is some nice extra revenue to have.

Yesterday, on January 12th, I had my highest grossing day in affiliate marketing, bringing in $397 (beating my previous best of $369.75)! I thought for sure that it was going to also be a new daily net record as well, but it fell just a bit short, bringing in $226.66 profit for the day when my actual best was $233.39 from Nov 22nd, 2009. I was only $6.74 short from beating it!

Today (January 13th) is also shaping up to be very good. It might even break yesterday’s record, since it’s already at $176 at only noon with a 324.51% ROI…

As I did in late November, I’m going to let my main campaign run by itself for a bit in order to make back those losses from December and give me the confidence to try some new campaigns again.

I should also mention that late on January 11th I tried changing my main landing page, making it slightly less useful and informational, and a bit more spammy. We’ll have to wait and see if that change contributed to yesterday’s new record, or if it was just a coincidence.

I’ve also had somebody helping me and giving me tips the past few days. I might try to get him to tutor me if I can work up the Tyler charm.

Join PeerFly!

I’ve been running my campaigns on PeerFly for about half a year now and absolutely love them.

I’m currently doing around $7,000 a month with them and am now on weekly payments. I will list in short form some of their many features in a second, but there is really only one thing you need to know: they can match or beat any payout you’re currently getting.

This is the main reason I use them. PeerFly takes such miniscule margins on their offers that they can give crazy high payouts. PeerFly can also get most offers direct which eliminates the network middleman. I’m personally getting about a 10% higher payout at PeerFly than other networks can give. This may not seem like much, but if you do any kind of volume then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

So, if you’re running at another network, it’s a simple change to PeerFly as they can almost always get the exact same offer you’re running and match or beat the payout you’re currently getting.

That’s the main reason I use them, but here are the other reasons:

• Custom Software (with constant improvements and new features)
• Awesome Support (always available and super-responsive nearly 24/7)
• Can get you any offer you want
• Publisher Rewards (just added last week!)
• Can get paid via PayPal with no fees
• Weekly payments (based on $1k/week)

I personally highly recommend them and can pretty much guarantee that you’ll love them if you try them out and talk to them.

I’m on the road to be doing $15,000 a month soon, and am very happy to be doing that with PeerFly.