I’ve had a craaaaaaaaaazy couple of weeks… and I’ve got crazy couple more to come!

Not only am I in the middle of moving again (after an incredible year in Canada in 09, Elysia and I are moving again to live in Mexico for 2010!) but…

Those of you who know me will know I haven’t released a truly NEW product (besides free stuff!) for online marketers in a while… to be precise almost 2 years now! We had Firepow 2.0 this year which was very special but it wasn’t that same rush of releasing something completely new that you’ve been working on for so long without knowing what people’s reactions will be like.

In about a week’s time, that’s going to change…

Let me give you the full run down, what you need to know and what you need to do…

I’ve partnered up with a lady who alot of you know, Colleen Slater (60minuteaffiliate.com) to produce what I think is the most comprehensive training resource available for very specifically affiliate marketing niche bloggers.

More specifically, people who want to use free traffic to make money with affiliate marketing – that means no PPC allowed

I’m talking covering finding niches and offers, setting up perfect wordpress blogs, getting ultra fast search engine rankings, making high converting blog content, maximizing your dollar per visitor with right monetization, generating wads of free traffic from the highest quality sources… and LOTS more…

If you haven’t heard about it yet, you need to get the lowdown at http://nicheblogginginstitute.com

There’s a free presentation for you there with 3 very important reasons niche affiliates fail and how you can beat them to make maximum income from free traffic and affiliate offers.

There’s also another 2 presentations if you liked those ones that you can check out at

http://nicheblogginginstitute.com/2

http://nicheblogginginstitute.com/3

(NOTE: Those pages look the same but the video on each IS different )

What you need to DO is… if you’re interested in making money with blogs (not “being a blogger”) enter your name and email in the form on the videos above so you can check out Niche Blogging Institute when it goes live and see if it’s that little something that’ll take your affiliate income to the next level.

One of the main things I’m excited about with NBI is that it’s going to be super low cost. Something that’s nice and affordable so despite the economic climate, everything can be involved… somewhere where everyone can get the training they need without having to pay a fortune for it.

Finally… I’ve just released a REALLY cool free report that basically lays out Colleen and my complete niche blogging, niche finding, traffic generation system FOR you. You don’t even need to opt in to receive it

Download the report by clicking below:

http://nicheblogginginstitute.com/blogcash.pdf

I hope you get a chance to check out NBI and I look forward to seeing you on the inside!

You wouldn’t know it with some of the things I’ve written in the past about social media… but I DO find social media valuable… in fact, extremely so.

I can’t credit a dollar I’ve made in my life to it, but as well there’s some things I can ONLY credit social media for… and it’s these things that lead me to the conclusion that MAYBE this is what social media is good for…

You know what it is?

And it’s funny because I have a feeling this is what social media was intended for…

MEETING PEOPLE!

Since Elysia and I left Australia, we wouldn’t have made one single new friend if it weren’t for Twitter. The coolest people and the best friends we made this year came after random Twitter meetups with people who we learned through Twitter were doing cool things online and happened to live nearby.

On the business side, I’ve become closer to a bunch of people also in online business that through the year I’ve learned alot from, met at seminars and had a reason to begin a conversation with or that have introduced me to other cool people.

All these are relationships that without social media, wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be so strong.

Personally, I can’t say I’ve met anyone who’s become a JV partner, something that I could claim as an “ROT” (return on time) from Twitter, but I don’t doubt that at least a few relationships solidified through Twitter could become JV partners in the future.

So maybe that’s what social media is REALLY good for… maybe that’s it’s purpose. Not traffic, not revenue boosing… just good ol fashion networking!

And it’s interesting because networking is something that all business people do… no one ever tries to measure the ROI of it (how many dollars you make per hour spent networking at a conference) but most agree that (depending on the business) it’s a valuable and a worthwhile thing to do…

Maybe a bit of food for thought for today.

Yeah, social media’s all the rage these days… Yeah you have to be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and 15 0ther communities if you’re a business owner… Yeah it’s changing the way marketing happens online… Yeah, yeah yeah!

I’m not immuned. I think these things,I do all these things, I believe it…I’m active in these channels, I’m tryin to make it happen…

But somewhere in the depths of my brain, my psyche perhaps lives a little Andrew, a pseudo Andrew… a timid little fellow who hides under the blankets through every conversation about social media. He’s scared. And the more I think of him, the more I think he has a bloody good reason to be!

3 things actually inspired this post:

1. I saw some statistic in a Tweet (ironically) that said Ford Motor Company would be, in the coming fiscal year, allocating something like 15% (might have been 10%, might have been 25% – forgive my inability to find the source. Suffice it to say the number was enormous) of their online advertising budget to social media.

2. One of the activities I do for my own social media “presence” daily is to use the service MrTweet to help me add followers to Twitter who are in the same circles as me, who like the same stuff and are followed by similar people. Going through these people it’s just ASTOUNDING to see how many “social media experts” there are. It’s out of control. Every second person is social media consultant, social media expert, social media manager for SOMETHING.

3. Some comments by John Reese in a recent blog post about social media that I think were well over due.

Before we delve into the heart of my “fear” about social media, let’s start with a hypothesis.

I contend that not more than 0.5% of people who claim to have any expertise in social media REALLY know what it takes to create a campaign for a business or individual that will not only result in a positive ROI and ROT (return on time) but a GREATER ROI than a similar investment in a campaign of search marketing, JV marketing, or ad buying.

There, I said it.

I don’t know what it takes, I’m a self confessed social media noob. But I know what it DOESN’T take.

In fact I think I can give you a list of things that despite the hype, are NOT “social media marketing” (meaning, using social media to generate a real ROI that’s significant compared to other online marketing methods)

1. It most certainly has nothing to do with the ability go get followers, friends or any similar alternative. Number of friends/followers says literally zero about what level of traffic you might be able to generate or how that traffic might interact with your site or what you sell.

2. It most certainly has nothing to do with how well you can get people to “share” “retweet” or pass along any message of yours, including of your brand. It doesn’t matter if a million people see your “message” because it was funny or stupid. That doesn’t mean they’re going to want to have a business relationship with you.

We’ve all seen the number of “viral videos” that are lamely trying to capitalize on their success by sticking up a link to buy their shirt at cafepress because they have no clue what else to do.

Take the recent, and in my opinion appallingly shallow, attempt at some press by MillerCoors – donating 1c per tweet to cancer research for everyone who retweeted a message that said something like “MillerCoors is helping fight breast cancer so retweet this”.

I don’t know about their results, but let’s say they got 2 million retweets (highly unlikely) – they effectively paid $20 000 (donated to breast cancer yes, but really it’s just money they’re spending on exposure) to have their brand name on Twitter’s “Trending Topics” and have people MAYBE talk about their brand in a few extra conversations for one single day in time.

Do you think they made a return on that $20k? It’s hard to say. But how did they even test it?? How COULD they test how sales increased from a promotion like that?

Maybe it was an honest (albeit weak) philanthropic effort too, but there’s other companies who are spending much more money than that doing the EXACT same thing for far less altruistic aims.

3. It doesn’t REALLY even mean the ability to use social media to bring visitors to your site. Most people who’ve done testing with social media traffic agree that it’s some of the worst, lowest converting traffic you can find, right up there with that of crappy traffic exchanges. Of course it matters alot to conversions and actions HOW you drive that traffic, through what strategy, and what you do with it, but as a whole…

The point I’m making is that I just don’t think many people yet have REALLY understood social media in the marketing context. I sure don’t, I’m not saying that I do. I’m just saying that I don’t think many other people, even “experts” do either.

Because when you think about it, it’s the most unique form of “media” that’s ever come into existence.

Looking right back to the printing press, and the TV you get an insight as to it’s uniqueness. These are things that came from within the establishment, BY the establishment, totally “centralized”. It was obvious to the creators of the TV for example, how this device could be applied for the benefit of business; how it could be leveraged to increase business profits..

But social media started at the grass roots, totally decentralized, completely by the people. And it’s put business and marketing minds on the back foot. Suddenly they’re trying to catch up. All the people are using this new form of media and they have to hustle to work out how to make it work for them, and they don’t have much experience in doing that!

And that process, I think, is still playing out. In fact it’s in it’s absolute infancy. BUT…

Why It Scares Me

It scares me the same way all kinds of people jumping onto the web, investing TOO big into the web, and making rash decisions about buying websites would have scared me if I was in online business before the tech bubble of the 90’s.

People are getting TOO into this social media thing before they really understand what they’re doing or why.

They’re spending 10% of their ad budget just because everyone else is doing it; Because it’s the new train comin through town and if they don’t hop on they’ll be left behind!

I bet the tech bubble was built by people claiming to be “internet experts” too. People who had all the answers for how you could start up a website and exit in a year’s time with millions in buyout profits.

I’m sure the parallels aren’t perfect, but for me, or at least, for that little Andrew deep down inside me, they are similar enough to be cause for alarm.

Weird title, but you NEED to read this post.

This is about how the actions you take to improve your search rankings actually influence your results… and also how they DON’T. Furthermore it’s an important distinction on statistics and analysis that you might just find helpful throughout your life as a whole!

I really can’t think of an appropriate introduction for this subject so I figure we’ll just launch into it…

I often get questions from Firepow members and others to this effect:

“Yesterday I submitted my site to to a list of web directories, and today my rankings have dropped from page 2 for my keyword to page 100! What’s going on?! You recommended me do that and now you’ve screwed me!”

Or in the news, you might hear something like this…

“As Taliban millitants continue to resist the occupation in the southern provinces, Afghanistan’s civilian death toll rises to the highest level since the beginning of the war.”

Each of these statements is saying something “behind” the words…

The first is saying:

“The reason my site lost it’s ranking was because I submitted it to these directories.”

And the second is saying:

“The reason the Afghan civilian death toll is so high is because of the Taliban’s continued resistance”

Here we uncover a potentially harmful verbal and mental phenomenon.

The phenomenon I’m talking about is:

To mistakenly assume that the link between two factors is CAUSAL rather than Co-Chronological. (actually I’m pretty sure Co-Chronological is not a real term. What I’m meaning is, two things happening at the same time.)

In other words: Just because two things happen at the same point in time, doesn’t mean one causes another! They MIGHT well be proven with testing to be causal, but the mere co-existence of them at the same point in time says nothing about how likely one is to have influenced the occurrence of the other.

Am I sounding like a crazy person yet?? Let’s go back to our fictional examples.

1. Just because you submitted your site yesterday, and your rankings dropped today, doesn’t mean the submission caused the drop. Most people who ask questions like this have very new sites, and it’s common knowledge that when your site is new in the SERPS your rankings bobble around all over the place. There’s constant reindexing, constant shuffling. Some people have called it “The Google Dance”.

2. Just because the Taliban are resisting today and the Afghan civilian death toll is at it’s highest point, doesn’t mean their resistance is the reason for the death toll. Just like the search engines, there are other critical factors in play that haven’t been mentioned in the inference.

The real point of this post for online marketers, particularly those looking for free organic traffic is to… (and I seem to be giving this advice alot lately)

RELAX!

Relax, and don’t judge what something means too quickly, particularly before you have all the information. Especially when you have a new site and you’re doing many different things to improve your rankings, don’t freak out and make an incorrect assumption of a connection between two factors unless the connection:

1. Makes Sense (it doesn’t make sense that getting backlinks from quality site directories would harm your rankings)

2. Corroborates with other evidence, experiential or proven (Have you seen this happen before? Have other people reported it happening before? Is it documented?)

And even then it’s something to be TESTED, not decided upon (with the exclusion of the “proven” category from above)

And in the rest of your life?

When you hear something like:

“Gas prices have risen since the beginning of the Obama administration” (I don’t know if that’s true or not)…

You’ll know to see past the inane inference and think “That doesn’t mean anything the administration has done has been the cause of that… I need more facts to evaluate that statement properly”. And then you’ll realize “I sound like a total nerd right now and I need to get back to work”

I hope this makes you think a little more, both as you build your search engine presence and as you go about every day life.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably heard something about the new FTC changes that are set to affect the way bloggers, affiliate marketers and info product marketers do business online.

I was hesitant to even post about it up until now because for me, being a non US affiliate and online marketer, things are even more complicated than for everyone else. Now finally I feel like I understand it enough to be able to at least share some of my thoughts with you on how it will affect your business and what you need to do about it.

First let me offer the token and obvious yet necessary disclaimer:

I am not a lawyer or legal expert of any kind and before you take any action related to these changes you should consult with a lawyer of your own.

That said…

I was fortunate enough to be invited as a presenter to a webinar last week with Jim Morris of NicheBOT.com discussing the FTC changes and in particular, good practices for affiliate marketers and bloggers in light of these changes.

The webinar was fantastic and you can actually download a copy for free from this link.

In my opinion, here’s what you need to know/do about all this.

1. This one would be a DO… and can be summarized in a word: RELAX!

Yes, this is a big change, it will effect us, but the sky is NOT falling! Some people are talking about giving up affiliate marketing, changing their business model completely, or flat out quitting online business.

None of those things are needed and here’s why:

a) It has to be noted that what’s been announced by the FTC are changes to REGULATIONS. These are not LAWS that if you break them, you’ll be charged. They’ve made changes to the way they RECOMMEND affiliate promotions and testimonial marketing should be done online, that’s all.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore them but it does mean you can relax and not worry so much.

b) The FTC representative has openly said that they AREN’T going to be patrolling the blogosphere like Big Brother and that they’ll be mostly filing lawsuits against offenders on the basis of complaints.

c) Even then, they’ll be operating on a “strike” type system where you’ll get 2 warnings before striking out and having them bring the pain… so to speak.

Again, I’m not saying that this means you can IGNORE what’s happened, but it does mean you don’t have to make any stupid rash decisions about your business because of it.

2. Understand The Regulations

Make sure you watch the webinar to understand the new changes completely, but basically there’s 2 parts…

First, affiliates have to disclose relationships they have with merchants. So if you promote a product as an affiliate, you have a relationship with that merchant and you have to tell your readers about it. In essence what they want is something akin to saying “if you click this link and purchase, I’ll make money”.

And second, product merchants who use testimonials have to disclose with each one, what is the AVERAGE result likely to be obtained by using their product. (ridiculous when you think about it…)

3. Be Careful With Your Affiliate Promotions

Now for what you need to NOT do as an affiliate or blogger …

a) In your affiliate pitch (presell), blog content, or articles, DON’T make any claim about the results of using the product.

Like I said in the webinar, this is something you shouldn’t ever do as an affiliate ANYWAY.

If you’ve got a piece of content promoting a product as an affiliate where you’re saying things like:

“This cream will solve your eczema once and for all” – You’ve gotta quit it, and really you should never have been doing it in the first place.

Your job as an affiliate is to REVIEW the claims of the product seller, not MAKE them. It’s to share your experience or your research on the claims, not to confirm or deny them. It’s preselling 101… you remain neutral and informative and let the MERCHANT do the selling. Making these changes you’ll probably find your conversion rates increase too because you’re not pissing off your readers by sounding like a salesman instead of a reviewer.

b) Cut out testimonials completely

If you had any testimonials in your affiliate pitch/presell content, just cut them out. They’re another thing you shouldn’t have been doing in the first place (they’re not PREselling) and now they’ll flat out get you into trouble, so quit it. End of discussion.

c) Disclose relationships

The big concern with this one is that including some text somewhere that says anything like “I get paid if you click here” is going to kill affiliate link click through rates. And that’s highly possible.

In the webinar Jim gave some great tips on creatively integrating a disclosure of relationship into an affiliate pitch in a way that may NOT have the above effect, but the bottom line is, it’s up to us to TEST.

It’s unfortunate that they haven’t made a specific request about HOW they want you to disclose a relationship and where but we can make some reasonable judgements on it and hope for the best until more information is released.

For example, you could integrate a disclosure into your affiliate pitch content itself OR leave a short note below your affiliate link or banner. I think the TEXT of your disclosure will be important too. Whether it’s “mysite.com is associated with xyz product and is compensated for customers who find xyz through our impartial reviews” or something similar, it’ll be important to portray the relationship you have with the merchant in a positive light rather than “I’m a slimy commission seeker who wants you to buy from this link before anywhere else so I get paid”.

So the wording and the positioning will be important, and something for those more inclined than me to test thoroughly for their effect on click through rates.

d) Offering Incentives

Where it’s allowed (many promotions don’t allow incentivized traffic) you can give the people a tangible reason to buy through your link so they don’t even CARE if you get compensated from their purchase.

Again, this is something that’s just a staple of good affiliate marketing anyway, but now, it could offer a good way to retain more of the people who may have been otherwise offended by your new disclosure.

e) If you DO want to use testimonials

Another thing I mentioned in the webinar is that if you DO want to use testimonials, there’s a type that’s less offensive in the FTC’s eyes and that might just improve your CTRs. That is, a testimonial for YOU rather than the product.

There’s 2 types of testimonials someone can give me:

One is “Andrew, I made XYZ dollars with Firepow in the past month and I LOVE IT!”

That’s the type that’s gonna be a pain from now on.

The second kind is:

“I’ve bought every product Andrew has ever released and I find him to be a marketer of the highest integrity. Anything he does is top notch and I’d trust him with my life etc etc”

It’s a testimonial to your character, your credibility. How can anyone argue with that? It’s not making a claim about results, it’s just saying that you’re a good guy.

Particularly if you’re an affiliate, this kind of testimonial can be helpful. Eg “AndrewsReviews.com is a source I always trust when it comes to looking for credible info on ABC”. That raises your credibility and doesn’t make any claims that could get you in trouble.

Conclusion

Once again, the conclusion I’m taking from all this is that it’s not time to quit affiliate marketing but we do need to make changes to our approach.

At the end of the day, like we discussed on the webinar, if you’re committed to this business, this news should be a reason for celebration rather than fear. Because it’s another thing that will kick a few of the less committed folk out of the game and leave more room for those of us who are serious about their business

I hope you’ve found this valuable. Any questions, feel free to comment and I’ll try to answer.

After trying to pin him down for approximately a year, I was finally able to nab an interview with article marketing expert, SEO guy who previously ranked for “make money online”, and serious down to earth internet entrepreneur Josh Spaulding…

We had a killer chat about SEO, article marketing, niche marketing, and his new strategy guide Info Product Success Formula. Check it out by clicking the play button below!

I highly recommend checking out Josh’s Info Product Success Formula report PLUS…

**Josh is giving listeners of this call a special discount on his already far too CHEAP report that will last just for ONE WEEK.**

Check out the special discounted offer on Info Product Success Formula here.

Got a great email today from Richard Legg (super smart online marketer if you haven’t seen his stuff) who received an email from someone HE’D referred to Firepow…

Email said…

I just wanted to send you a quick line to say thank you for all your
free advice and help.I can say free because the only thing I have
purchased through you is a subscription to Firepow.

Since following your advice I have had some great results, this
morning after only 2 weeks I found my site ranked No2 out of
10,200,000 for one of my main buying keywords.

Secondly I took what I have learnt to my ex employers who are fitted
kitchen suppliers and retailers in the UK and took their  site from
the back pages of Google to no3 on the front page.

They are over the moon, website traffic has increased by 500% and
showroom traffic has increased by over 60% resulting in a massive
increase of sales of designer fitted kitchens valued at £50,000 plus
by 48%.

The real beauty of all of this 4 months ago I knew nothing
about IM and had and still don\’t have any technical knowledge so I
have to outsource all the design work etc.You have proven to me that
even a middle aged techno phobe can make a living following your
advice.

============

So cool to hear.

Anyone can do it people. Will YOU be next?

—>> GetFirepow.com

I was reading a book today unrelated to marketing where the author shared a strategy he uses to keep on top of an endless flood of information that’s required to process in order to be a professional in this particular field.

The idea is simple but I thought certainly worth sharing…

The problem is, and it’s particularly true with online marketing, that even if you try, there’s more new information than you can keep up with, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

There’s new strategies every day, new developments at Google, new social media sites, new techniques for generating traffic… it’s too much for ANY one person!

But imagine if you had your own group of people who were like spies, hunting you down the best information that THEY came across, so they did the filtering for you.

That’s what this guy has.

Basically he said he has developed over the years a little information network.

It’s simply a group of friends and people he’s met who take a little time each day or week, to send everyone else in the group a list of web links, or print articles in the mail that are important that they’ve come across.

So you help everyone in the list with the research and learning YOU do anyway… and they all help you in return.

This makes sure that if anything of important breathes in the world of traffic generation for example, chances are you’ll hear about it even if you didn’t come across it in your own research!

The key is to have the best people in your group, people with alot of knowledge who can be the most discerning about what’s information you really need to know, and what’s not.

How do you get one started?

Easy!

You pick some people in the industry that you like or respect (if you don’t know anyone else who’s into online marketing you’re at a big disadvantage… go join a social network ASAP) or friends you’ve met online who are doing the same kind of things, and you start sending THEM the info YOU find each day or week.

You don’t say “hey I’m sending you this article, so can you send me cool stuff when you find it too?”…

No, you just send them because you really want to help. Maybe they’ll start sending you stuff back, maybe they won’t, but you can bet your bottom dollar your kindness will be reciprocated in one form or another.

Start doing this with as many people as you like. Since it doesn’t take any time to add another person to your CC list, why not spread your net wide? People will surely appreciate the help!

Over time you’re network will grow and before long you’ll be on top of the game like never before.

Moreover, in an industry like ours, having this kind of group can be an advantage for more reasons than this. This can become your mastermind group, the members can turn into JV partners down the track, or anything… you never know!

So start it today, start sharing what you’ve got and watch what happens. You’ll thank me later

If you use the All in One SEO plugin for your Wordpress blogs, the results of a little test I did this past week might be of interest to you.

Let me explain the theory, then my little test, then the results…SEO guru Jerry West pointed out in a post that I was reading that when Google is looking for duplicate content ON YOUR SITE (not external duplicate content which we should have cleared up by now) it’s hard for them to exactly compare, sentence by sentence the total text on two separate pages, so a big factor in influencing their search for duplicate content is similar page titles on your site… that is.. the title that appears at the top of your browser bar or, what goes in the Title Tag of each individual page.

Now…

If you’re a blogger with Wordpress, you SHOULD be using a plugin like All in One Wordpress SEO to pretty up your page and post titles, meta descriptions and keyword tags, not to mention beat duplicate content on your category and archive pages.

The thing is, the default setting when you install All in One SEO is for the the title of all your blog posts and blog pages to show up as below…

Notice that “BLOG TITLE” is inserted into the title tag of every page and post. If you have a long blog title, like I do for this blog, it can mean that the majority of the words in your title tag can be THE SAME on every title tag of every page (post) on your site, resulting in what Google might more easily because of this, judge as a page of duplicate content.

For example if I happened to write 2 posts called

Opportunity Hopping Sucks

and

Free Traffic Rules

The titles on these two blog posts would be:

Opportunity Hopping Sucks – Andrew Hansen Dot Name – Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Free Traffic

Free Traffic Rules – Andrew Hansen Dot Name – Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Free Traffic

See how similar those look?? Even to a human eye not a computer algorithm, that could be mistaken for duplicate content.

So what about my test?

What I did was simple.

I’d had a couple of sites that’d been floating round the front page in the SERPS for a particular term. I tried changing the post and page titles to remove the BLOG TITLE from every post and page. It looked as below:

What was clear was that on both pages (different sites) I made the test on,  their rankings grew by at least 3 places on page one, basically as soon as Google recrawled and reindexed the page. This is a small and definitely not comprehensive enough test, but it makes alot of sense why it happened and would be proven to happen systematically as a result of G’s algorithm.

FURTHER THAN improving the rankings by eliminating what could be viewed as duplicate content, this tweak has another clear benefit.

When your blog title appears on the title of every page and post, that title appears in the search rankings as the title of your listing! It makes for a very unclickable title, almost always resulting in elipses (…) at the end of the listing title, which is proven to decrease CTR on your listing.

Making this tweak ensures your blog posts titles and hence listing titles are clean and more often elipses free… something short and to the point that a real person can click on!

The accumulated effect of Google viewing your site more favorably as my test indicates AND increasing the click through rate of EVERY POST and page that you have indexed in the search engines makes this a SIGNIFICANT change and one that you should DEFINITELY make if you use Wordpress and All in One SEO.

We’ve changed it to be the default setting for all blogs created with Firepow and I recommend you do the same.

To your success!

It’s happened a couple of times in the 5 years I’ve been online and I’m sure it’s happened more in the history of online marketing as a whole…

But it’s certainly happening right now.

That is, a resurgence in the popularity of “CPA Marketing”. In other words, marketing CPA offers. What we’re really talking about is a resurgence of hype about CPA marketing, the reason for which we can only guess.

I was asked last night if I’d gotten much into “CPA” and I caught myself saying something that should be the subject of a blog post…

An expanded version of what I replied was…

I don’t know what all the FUSS over “CPA” is.

What people are calling “CPA” is simply promoting affiliate offers where you get paid for a person signing up and giving some of their contact details rather than making a purchase.

But the WAY people talk about it, is as though CPA itself is a STRATEGY. It’s like saying “affiliate offers” is a strategy for making money on the net… of course it’s not… it’s one component of a strategy!

“CPA” is not a method of generating traffic… it’s not a method of building websites… it’s not a method of converting more visitors to people who earn you money…

It’s just monetization. That’s it. It’s the last step in the process of making money with the affiliate marketing model.

What SHOULD be recognized is that there is tremendous opportunity in CPA offers. There are some killer offers from reputable companies that are being sold through quality landing pages in markets of relative low competition to targeted audiences of interested buyers. This equals high conversions; any affiliate’s dream.

But if you don’t know how to build a site and get targeted visitors to it, CPA itself is nothing. It’s not going to help you.

So remember that the next time you get a pitch for a “cpa secrets” course.

Whatever the content, it’s pretty likely that to implement it you’re going to need the same old skills of online marketing , building sites and driving traffic that everyone should learn and that all they can say will relate to the monetization, the final step of the process.

I hope this post helps you avoid shelling out a couple of extra unnecessary dollars