“What other traffic sources are out there that are similar to Facebook Ads? I’ve been thinking about stepping foot into the search engine PPC realm (MSN Adcenter), but wasn’t sure of how to go about it.”

Facebook Ads, for a majority of affiliate marketers, is a source of demographically targeted traffic. That differs from search engine traffic because, first you must do some demographic research/testing to find who will convert on what offers. Men or Women? 18-year-olds or 40-year-olds? East coast Americans or those on the west coast? These variables, among thousands of other combinations, can be the breaking point in profitability or an empty pocket.

Similar sources of traffic aren’t difficult to find. Media buys on membership style sites, social networks, or any other website that gathers some valuable demographic data from its users usually gives you the option to only advertise to those specific demographics you are looking for. Myspace is always a simple alternative (but I’m not sure if click-fraud is still a giant problem there or not). I believe Friendster also has a self-serve platform (good for international traffic as it’s not as huge as the others in the States. PlentyOfFish also has plans to integrate a self-service platform, as well.

There are several tools you can use to gain demographic data. I think I’ve gone over them at least 2 or 3 times in posts over the past months so start reading up! Data gained from these tools can be used on media buying and PPV/CPV campaigns.

As for getting in to search engine PPC, I covered steps for that in yesterday’s post -

“What are some steps to take? Just like a rebill campaign, or any other campaign, you’d do the same thing. Choose an offer you think will perform well, keyword/demographic research, competition research, build landing pages, write copy, design ads, launch campaigns and split test, split test, then split test some more. There are no short cuts I can give you without just giving you my profitable campaigns. Don’t count on that!”

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but we’ll save that for another post.

The question is -

“As for a question that many people might have, given the war on rebills, what are some simple steps for a person to be profitable, even on a small scale at first, with non-rebill offers.”

First off, this war on rebills isn’t actually a war on the offers. It is a war on the methods that are being used to market them. Fake blogs, fake news sites, fake testimonials, invalid statistics, and celebrity endorsements that aren’t really valid are tactics being used by affiliates to promote these sort of offers. It’s very unethical (and probably illegal. I’m no legal expert so don’t ask me about that), but very profitable. But, if you want to avoid that crowd all together, there are several other types of offers you can promote.

If you don’t want to run rebill offers, I’d suggest running shorter lead-gen offers. These are affiliate programs that require less usually don’t require a credit card to sign up or get info for. Newsletters, dating sites, and online game downloads are ussually very simple offers to start and scale campaigns with.

There are also longer style lead-gens you can get in to with a little more experience. Insurance, loans, plastic surgery, hair loss, some dating offers, and many other niche programs have lead-gens where people must fill out multiple forms in order to achieve a conversion.

Of course, there is also CPS. These are generally a bit more difficult to promote to a demographic target, and better put towards those in a buying mood (”Buy Chicken Nuggets Online Now” might be a good keyword to use if you wanted to sell chicken nuggets online). That’s usually so because some products cost a lot of money that consumers don’t want to put on their credit card. It requires a good pre-sell and the right targeting to get a sale.

What are some steps to take? Just like a rebill campaign, or any other campaign, you’d do the same thing. Choose an offer you think will perform well, keyword/demographic research, competition research, build landing pages, write copy, design ads, launch campaigns and split test, split test, then split test some more. There are no short cuts I can give you without just giving you my profitable campaigns. Don’t count on that!

Image Credits: The National Guard

“Are there any techniques you could share for targeting specific races of FB? If I have an offer that’s demographics lie within a specific race, what can I do to target on FB?”

This really shouldn’t take long to explain. There are a couple ways you can go around doing this.

Number 1 is keywords. If you don’t know what keywords your race is that you’d like to target, I’d suggest going in to Google and typing in something like “(race) forums” or community, social network, website, blog, etc. Take a look at the keywords in the meta-tags. Target those. Also, take a look at what is being discussed on the website. If they are talking about ex. Fishing, add fishing to your keyword list. Target one keyword per ad and track conversions by that keyword level.

Another simple way is to take a look at census data. Target on the city level. Check this out: List of U.S. cities with large African American populations. Target cities that contain a high percentage of the race of people you are trying to target. Or, target home countries if the offer allows international promotion. That’s a no-brainer, though.

Colleges often publish demographic data as well. If you find a college with a high density of one race, chances are the surrounding area/city can also be included there.

There are also “work places” you could probably target, as well.

And that is how you racially target. I’m sure there are others out there that know some better tactics, but I’ve found this usually works for me. I’ve heard people turning large ROI running racially targeted campaigns with LPs built specifically to that race.

You can ask here or reach me on the contact page.

Also, I’m looking to kick off Deeboo and need some writers to help write, mod the forums, etc. If you’re interested in helping out, don’t have a blog of your own and want one, and want the potential to be part of what I know will become a huge blog for the industry, just let me know.

The whole process of building a campaign is down to your personal effort and the amount of work you are willing to put in to it to make it profitable. You can spend 3-4 hours a day working on getting 1 campaign a week profitable, or 1 – 2 days working 12+ hours getting an affiliate offer to put more money in your pocket.

In almost most no other career can you depend on your money coming from the amount of effort you put in. Split test tens or hundreds of combinations of traffic sources, landing pages, ad copy, images, and offers to find which one is the most profitable. It takes a lot of time to become an affiliate your managers love, or you can struggle for mediocrity, hoping that one lucky combination of the above will stay profitable more than a few weeks without need to change anything up.

Fact is, I used to do that. For a few months, I rode off my success with Facebook ads. I got lazy, going from making $1000+ a day for a month, then$500 a day for a couple weeks, still content, then to $0 when the offer died and traffic to the ads trickled. I wasn’t interested in split testing new landing pages or other offers. I didn’t even take it to other traffic sources that I knew would work. I enjoyed what I had, what was coming in, but was completely out of the loop when that all stopped. I literally had to relearn the whole system because I wasn’t keeping up with the latest tactics. People I knew, that were struggling when I was doing xxxx dollars a day, were now doing 5+ figures a day in pure profit.

Constant work, keeping yourself up to date on new traffic sources and lead/sales generation strategies, and a positive outlook are the most important things you’ll need to be and stay successful in the industry. The guy making $30 a day working his ass off and doing constant research will most likely be the guy banking off your one-hit success campaign someday. Unless you’ve got the work ethic to stay ahead, you’ll only get knocked down.

Anyways, I’m up and back at work now. The new connection is a lot faster than what I’m used to (I’m streaming like… 20 pornos at once here without the need to buffer. WOO!), so it’ll be great for refreshin’ my stats and all that. If you haven’t added me on Facebook, you should, and you can see pics of my new place, otherwise check them out here (low quality, Blackberry Bold photos. My camera was stolen and I’m too lazy to buy a new one. I’d hardly use it).

It’s bigger and less expensive than my old place. So, that’s all good and dandy. I’ll have a few extra hundred dollars to invest in my business every month. The bedroom view sucks during the day, but I only go in there to sleep and… yeah… but at night all the buildings lit up is pretty cool. I like it.

• Yo Justin! I saw you do a lot of stuff on (traffic source). I’m trying to get started there now. Can you share some tips? Thx man peace -Bob
• I’ve spent 12 dollars on this offer on (traffic source) and I still don’t have any conversions. What gives!?
• Hey. Just wondering if we could chat. I do a lot of stuff online and want to make more money. Hoping you could help me. Thanks
• How much do you charge for coaching? I want to hire you.

Alrighty. You’re probably wondering why I won’t reply to you. Here’s why: I don’t work with freeloaders. I won’t help people that aren’t willing to spend some time (and a reasonable amount of money) to get results. I don’t have much time to sit back and chat. And I’m no ho (I don’t sell my body, huns).

If you want an answer from me, let me know who you are. I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass if you read my blog and love it, but thanks for that comment anyways. Be direct. Be specific. If you want me to be able to answer any questions, you’ll need to give me details. I hate broad general questions with answers you can probably find on Wickedfire. In fact, run a search there before you come running to me.

Also, chances are if I don’t know you very well, I won’t be the most willing to help you out. If you have something you’d like to share with me, go for it. I like to build relationships with people that know what they are doing. If you have lots of experience in one area, and need a leg up in a newer area, then maybe we can trade intelligence. But like I said, I’m not open to much to random people just saying they know stuff. Trust is something I don’t do something fast anymore.

Those people that ask me questions like why they aren’t making money on $X – $XX spend a day, obviously don’t have the budgets to split test every possible variable. That is why you aren’t making money. If you don’t have the experience to set up a campaign and have decent ROI, you need to gain that experience and data yourself. Myself, and most others, are not going to hand out our knowledge free. We spent thousands to get it, and you should too if that is what you want.

So if you still feel like you have a decent reason to contact me, do so, but know the above reasons might be just some of the reasons I won’t reply.

So why should you get one? Well these are the reasons I want one.

I’d like a VA, number 1, to help me create/write content. It’s so god damn hard to find a decent writer that isn’t going to skip out on me. Over the past month, I’ve outsourced about 10,000 words of writing to 3-4 different writers. Only one writer completed their work, and submitted it about 3 days later than I expected. Lame as shit. The thing about the content I need is it doesn’t even need to be fantastic stuff, just original filler for a few SEO and hub sites. Most VAs in India and the Philippines have decent English language knowledge and can writer 500 – 1000 words per hour. It takes me 2 minutes to go through that much, correct any grammar and fix it. They get their hourly wage and I get my yummy content.

Research is the most boring part of the day. Digging further and further through keywords and ad targets can steal hours of your affiliate marketing life away. Get your VA to do that shit for you. Send the 10 links to offers you need researched. Hand them demographic site tools to help them find new, relevant targets for you. Give them access to your keyword tools and tell them to mine deep for keywords, and cut out the shit. As long as you aren’t hiring a 12 year old, they should be able to understand the difference between a good keyword/target and a bad one.

A virtual assistant can keep you up to date on important emails. Checking these damn emails all day wastes about an hour of my day. I get so much spam and emails like “Hey Justin! I was just wondering if you could teach me to make $15.93 a day. Thanks man TTYL LOLOLOLO OMGWTFBBQROFLCOPTER! – Steven”. Getting my VA to keep those email accounts open and checked for me gives me about an extra hour a day to spend playing xbo… Brainstorming new campaigns I mean. When I get an important message, he IMs me, summarizes it, and can even respond for me. The easy life, bro.

Optimization. Once I get a campaign set up, its basically a test of time and money to see if its going anywhere. With some of the stuff I’ve been doing lately, I get a lot of volume in just hours after being launched (We are talking x,xxx – xx,xxx clicks an hour). It takes a lot of time to sift through keywords and targets and getting rid of the fat that isn’t converting. That’s where Mr. India comes in. He constantly keeps his eyes on my campaigns and analytic software, pressin’ F5 every two minutes. He sees things that don’t convert, logs in to the traffic source, and pauses anything that sucks. I wake up and see Mr. India just saved me $1,000 by pausing that, and subsequently, I am now running a positive ROI because of that. Thank you, Mr. India. I send him a $20 bonus and everyone is happy!

Now there are a lot of problems you can run in to here. How do you train a VA if they don’t know what the hell you are talking about. How do you really trust someone with access to your financial info when they are halfway around the world. Can you really count on someone you don’t know and will probably never meet face-to-face? These are all questions you’ll have to confront, and something I am doing now.

With that said, if anyone is interested in working for me, or knows a good source to hire VAs, please let me know.

Remove icon for ad copy and images. Now you can remove unwanted images and ad copy from your setup. (Before you had to make a whole new campaign, or wipe out all the images/texts. This removes that requirement and allows you to individually remove things. A huge time saver.

- Image previews. See small icons of your images in the sidebar. (So you can see which images are what, rather than having to take a guess, or browsing through your folders to find the image you were using before.)

- Variable insertion into the url. Use the same insertion variables as the ad names to customize your urls. eg: url.com/?sub={country}-{gender}-{age}- (This will make it incredibly easy to track ad conversion rates.)

- Continue subids. Enter in where you want to start your subids. (Say your connection crapped out on the 20th ad, but you’ve still got 30 more to go. Enter 21 here and that is where the subID count will start up again)

For international ads, script files are now encoded to support international character sets (ISO-8859-1). Also, you will now be able to enter in city/state info for other countries – if they are supported, I’ll leave it to you guys to see if Facebook allows this for the country you are targeting. (There is huge money in Facebook’s international traffic. Use foreign languages and get more ads approved because Facebook staff can’t read Chinese!)

I’ve also added several measures to make sure the script doesn’t hang or freeze in case of a bad connection or Facebook stubborn-ness. (Hopefully helps a lot of you experiencing problems with the interface).

For more on the FB Ad Manager, read my post on it here. It’s got tons of tips and tricks to help you succeed!

If you are ready to purchase the tool, head over to 4HourAffiliate and buy it now!

• Landing Page Templates (As many as 1-3 new releases per workday) – We know affiliates get lazy and steal landing pages, so most of these would be templates. The header banners, testimonial images, etc would all be interchangable, and we would provide you with editable header banners and any other quintessential parts you could change on there: button packs, badges, etc.
  • PPV (800 x 600 px in size)
  • Review Style
  • Flogs
  • Farticles
  • Squeeze Pages
• Banners (To use on AdWords or in Media Buys)
• Exclusive Tools
  • Keyword Research Tools
  • Keyword Grouper
  • PPV Campaign Builder
  • Facebook/Myspace Ads Scraper
  • Prosper202 mods
• Others
  • Ebooks (including my Facebook book (whenever I decide to finish that >.<))
  • Exclusive forum
  • Live chat room
  • Technical guides & FAQs
  • Private case-studies
  • Blog

All the elements requiring design (landing pages, banners, headers, graphics, etc) would be created with my insight, someone with success in affiliate marketing, so they’re likely to get you a basic foothold in the affiliate marketing game. Designers would be my full-time employee, another professional designer and personal friend (He still charges me more than $300 for a 1-page landing page.), and others would be hired to create “guest” designs.

I’ve also got some excellent programmers on hand to help in creating new tools for the website. Should be some great things included to help you guys start up new campaigns quick and easy.

My questions are: What am I missing? And how much would you be willing to pay? Oh yeah, and would you sign up for it? All of my mailing list subscribers will get a lifetime discount if you are on the list before the official release.