Let’s start at the beginning shall we?  I loaded up the site the day the first episode was released, about 8 hours after it was released, and found what most of you probably experienced… A buffer screen…  After about 10 minutes the show started only to start buffering again after a couple minutes.  I then paused the show and decided to let it fully load before trying to watch it.  I absolutely hate buffer screens!

After 2 hours, yep I said that correct, the episode finally loaded completely.  Also, before you ask, it wasn’t because of my internet!  The site was really that slow!  Again, I know most of you delt with this same problem and know exactly what I’m talking about.

Now, let me talk about the quality of the show.  It is aweful and that’s being polite about it!  I know many of you probably watched Next Internet Millionaire by Joel Comm and while I didn’t think it was the greatest show either, compared to Top Affiliate Challenge it ran circles around it!

Several times during the episode you constantly see the host of the show staring down at her feet, shortly you realize that’s because she is mostly reading from a script that is on the ground.  How can you tell for certain?  Because the frickin’ camera man shows you! LMAO!

The scene to scene transitions are horrid!  There isn’t a smooth transition within the entire show, it’s constantly jagged and uneven.  The text and effects that are used in the show are the same as what you would see from a video production team of high school students from your local school district…Scratch that, middle school students.

They do some of the stupidest things in the show that makes me wonder if they’ve even thought out how each of these things should work…  In episode two, Jason Henderson wins the immunity ring and while the losing team is in the room voting a person off he walks in and says that he has special powers because of the ring and he wants to give it away…The funny thing is, the team has already voted and the person Jason gives the ring to wasn’t even in any danger of being voted off and basically the host tells him what he just did didn’t matter in the least, yet for some reason they still decided to edit it into the episode???  Can you say LAME!

This show promised that it would be better than Next Internet Millionair, that they would actually be showing you how these teams are making money, etc… I’ve yet to see anything remotely helpful in either episodes…and to make things worse, the show is in no way entertaining…

Top Affiliate Challenge is pitiful, boring, mind-numbing, stupid, pathetic, useless, and a downright sad attempt at an internet reality show…  I’m seriously surprised that they haven’t had any of their gurus or contestants walk off the show yet…  Now that would be entertaining!

Thor Shrock…horrible idea!  Thanks for wasting an hour of my life!

This show sucks so bad, I’m not even going to link to the site so if you haven’t seen it and for some reason you really want to, search for it on Google or take a guess at the URL…

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A couple months later I receive another email stating that the niche has completely dried up on them and they can’t seem to get any of their traffic to convert anymore.  They are trying new landing pages, bidding higher…or lower, new ads, etc…

So what happened?  What made this niche dry up?  Did people just stop needing the product or service?  Occasionally offers do dry up, demand lowers, etc…  However, 9/10 times I find out the person made one huge mistake!

They became a complacent affiliate marketer!  What exactly do I mean by this?  Well, let me break it down for you as I feel you’ll get a better understanding of what I mean if I do.

Imagine you work hard on setting up a niche, let’s say you’re in the dating niche, and after weeks of creating your site, gathering keywords, grouping keywords, and writing ads you finally launch your campaign.  Immediately you see a little success, so you start tuning everything, deleting under-performing keywords, raising bids on converting keywords, split testing ads and ad copy, you test multiple landing pages…  Basically the whole sha-bang…

You take your campaign that was making let’s say 10 dollars a day and now its making you 200 dollars a day.  Your excited, this is your first profitable campaign.  Things are going good, in fact, great!  You can’t believe your making this much money working from home.  Then the problem hits…

Before too long, you start split testing less and less, you quit looking at your keyword data daily and finding new keywords or seasonal keywords.  You’re no longer testing new landing pages or testing different offers within your niche and then suddenly it happens…

You wake up one day and realize your campaign has gone to crap!  You’re no longer making 200 dollars a day but instead you’re making 100 dollars a day.  You think to yourself that it’s just a slow week…then month…then before you have even started to try to fix anything your down to 50 bucks a day!

Suddenly you become frantic, trying desperately to fix your sinking campaign!  You start split testing your ads, landing pages, trying new offers, etc only to realize that it has become inevitable… The campaign that you spent so much time on is no longer working for you because you have become complacent aka LAZY!

Needless to say, you now start working on redoing your entire campaign from scratch…

So before you become the person in the scenario above stop and think about what happens when you become complacent aka lazy!

On a side note, don’t you just love my lazy prairie dog?  He’s knows how to relax aye?

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Okay enough of the chit chat… I’m sure you guys want to know who’s the winner!

The winner and receipient of a sleek Creative Vado is Richard from Tame Your Debt.  So if you can contact me with your shipping information I’ll get the Creative Vado out to you as soon as possible.  Thanks again everyone and if you didn’t win, no worries because I have another great contest coming up that I’m sure you’ll all love!  It will be even better!

For those that don’t want to wait for another contest from me, Moneybites.com is holding a contest where you can win $75 dollars in cash paid via paypal to you.

Also, I will still be releasing the monthly blog report today, although I will not be releasing it until later this evening to make sure everyone pretty much sees this thread and it doesn’t get lost in previous posts!

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Winning is simple, simply subscribe to my RSS feed and write a post describing how you will use the Creative Vado and make sure to link back to the contest thread.  It’s that simple!

So get off your lazy butt and get to work and win yourself a pocket-sized video camera compliments of Click Consultants!

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I’m sure you’ve seen this method used over and over on make money online blogs and probably never noticed it, or if you have, you haven’t implemented it on your site or blog even though it’s extremely easy to do!  This post will show you exactly how to go about redirecting affiliate links or any other type of link using php.  This allows you to link to an affiliate offer multiple times yet if you ever need to change the offer, you’d only have to open up one file and change the url in that file.

If you hovered over a link using this method, you’d most likely see a URL that looks like this…

http://www.clickconsultants.com/goto/wordze.php
or
http://www.clickconsultants.com/recommend/wordze.php

So let’s explain how this works.  The first thing you need to do is log into the FTP of your site and create a folder.  You can give this folder the name goto, recommend, or whatever else you may feel works well for your site.

The next step is to open up notepad or any other simple text editor and add the following code to it.

<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.youraffiliateurl.com/' ) ;
?>

You would of course replace www.youraffiliateurl.com with the actual site or affiliate offer that you want.  Next, you simply save this file using whatever name you want that would describe it.  For example, I could link to Wordze and save the file as wordze.php

Next, upload the file into the folder your created above.  You know have a link which would look something like this.

http://www.clickconsultants.com/goto/wordze.php

You can then use this link in all your articles, landing pages, etc and if you ever need to change the affiliate url, you would simply open up the wordze.php file and change the link, thus, allowing you to change the link across your entire site instantly.

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For example, let’s say you’re running an affiliate offer for online dating and you have built your landing page and on your site you’ve included links to several different sub-niches like asian dating, hispanic dating, etc.  So instead of linking to the affiliate offer directly so that others can see that they are being sent to an affiliate offer, you can instead send them to a url like http://www.yoursite.com/asian-dating and when they click on the link it will then redirect them through the affiliate url, thus increasing your CTR% (Click Thru Rate).

Adding this code is extremely easy and setting it up only takes a minute.  Simply open up your .htaccess file and add the following line to it.

redirect 301 /asian-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl

This code will then allow you to link from your landing page to http://www.yoursite.com/asian-dating and then redirect the user to the affiliate offer without them being aware of the affiliate link if they were to hover over one of your links.

You can add this line multiple times using each sub-niche by simply adding each one like this…

redirect 301 /asian-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl
redirect 301 /hispanic-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl
redirect 301 /black-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl

Another great benefit to using .htaccess to redirect your links is that you’re able to add those URL’s anytime in your articles and site and if you ever need to change the affiliate offer you’re using you can simply open up your .htaccess and replace one URL and it will reflect across your entire site!

So, quit changing all your links by hand and increase your CTR% by adding a quick and simple code to your .htaccess file!

In the next post, I will discuss using php to redirect and hide affiliate links which is another great, free method you can use that is very easy to setup as well!  Even if you have never used php or done any php programming.

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Enjoy and make sure to check out Max’s Blog and learn how to earn online.

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Below you’ll find 5 different things that you should be testing when you start to split test your ads!

• Capitalization - What is the best way to capitalize your words in your ads?  Should You Capitalize The First Letter of Each Word?  Should you only capitalize the first word of each sentance?  The first letter of Important Words?  How about your display URL?  Should any part of that be capitalized?  This is something that is very important and by simply capitalizing your words a certain way could change your CTR% by crazy amounts!  Unfourtenly, you must test each of these things as it changes depending on the niche!

• Use of Numbers - Should you use an average number when you’re mention numbers or statistics?  For example if the cost is $49.99 for your service or product should you put $50 instead?  Studies have shown that using exact numbers is typically the best approach as it helps to make your ad stand out from all the other competition thats out there!  However, again this isn’t alwasy the case!  You’ll need to test this yourself for each niche you enter!

• Display URLS - Display URLS can be very important and are often ignored as part of your ad writing process!  Most affiliates feel they have 3 lines to work with when it comes to creating ads, however, if you count your display URL, you actually have 4 lines!  Should you capitalize certain letters?  Should you only use the base URL or add a /keyword to it? Should you include the “www” or not?  Again, the key to figuring this out is to test each way until you find the display URL that gives you the greatest conversions and CTR%.

• Ask a Question - A simple way to increase your CTR% normally is to simply ask an inticing question in your ad.  This will cause searchers to think and if they feel their answer will be met on your site, they’ll typically click through.  So make sure you test several different types of questions and also try not having a question.  You’ll never know which way will work best for any given niche unless you test it!

• Write Specific Ads for Each Keyword Group - As most of you have probably heard your adgroups should be tightly grouped by using base keywords.  Naturally and Simple Enough, your ads should be different for each of these adgroups and include teh keywords for each adgroup in the ad!  You should never ever write generic ads and just throw the same ads into each adgroup and expect the results to be good.

There you have it!  5 things to test when you’re split testing your ads.  By testing these 5 different things you can easily take an ad that is getting a CTR% of 2% and increase it to 8%, 12%, or even 20% depending on the niche and amount of competition you have!

So quit your crying and get to work before I pass you up in the niche you’re working on!

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I know you read all over the place that affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and there are tons of ebooks, paid forums, etc out there that try to tell you that anyone can do it!  However, that’s simply not the case!

Don’t get me wrong!  I do believe that anyone can make money online and quit their day job, however, that doesn’t mean you should be making your money online by doing affiliate marketing.  So, take a look at the traits and mindsets below and decide for yourself if affiliate marketing is the make money online niche that is right for you, because, only you can decide!

Analytical Person - In order to be in this field it is extremely important that you are a very analytical person.  You must be able to read numbers, do math, and like it!  You’ll be crunching numbers from day one.  Also, it helps if you have a passion to where you constantly want to split test things like your ads, or landing pages in order to increase your conversions or ROI.  A very analytical person is going to be able to constantly work on their numbers and increase things like their CTR, Quality Score, etc.  Being an analytical person will definitely help you in affiliate marketing!

Persistent Person - You must be a very persistent person when it comes to affiliate marketing.  This is especially true when you are first starting out!  You’ll fail…it’s inevitable!  However, if you’re willing to learn from the mistakes you made and push forward trying again you’ll definitely make it to the top!  A persistent person will constantly want to persevere and try again and doesn’t give up!  Is that you?

I’ll be honest with you…  Affiliate marketing is not for the faint of heart!  It takes a lot of sweat and tears to build up your business and if you’re not persistent, you might as well not even start!

Willingness to Adapt - You must be willing to adapt to changes that happen.  Affiliate marketing changes constantly!  Search engines improve their algorithms, offers get pulled, new restrictions get placed on offers, etc.  If you’re not willing to adapt to this field, then affiliate marketing is not for you!

I’ve seen so many people lose their affiliate business because they were too stubborn or full of pride and wouldn’t change the way they did things when they quit working!  If what you’re doing isn’t working anymore, then you either need to change (adapt) what you are doing or get out of this field!  No single business model works forever!  This is especially true when you’re talking about Internet businesses!

Sociable - Another very important thing that can make or break your affiliate business is contacts!  Who do you know?  Are you a very outgoing, social person?  Or are you a person that likes to hide in the background and try not to get noticed?  While this works for some people, most people will fail if they don’t network with others!

I’ve seen numerous “super affiliates” mention on their blogs that networking has allowed them to grow, start, and expand their business and if it wasn’t for these contacts, they wouldn’t of been able to!  This has been especially true for me, which is why I believe it to be so important!  Get yourself to a couple conferences, talk to people on instant message or twitter!  Do it now!  I’m not saying to let it get in the way of your work, but instead allow it to help your business!

Willingness to Take Risks - A person who is willing to take risks is a person who is sometimes considered stupid, but other times is considered a genius!  You must be willing to take risks in this business.  Try new things to see if they work or not in order to get on the next big thing before everyone else does!  If you’re not willing to take risks, then you’ll never become huge in this field.  This reminds me of a quote I’m sure 95% of you have heard sometime in your life!

The Greater The Risk, The Greater The Reward

This is especially true in affiliate marketing…Yeah you may lose sometimes, in fact, a lot of times.  But that one time you take the risk and it pays off will probably be the same time you make it big and have your best month in affiliate marketing ever!

Motivation - This in my opinion is one of the most important traits a person needs in order to make a full time income by using the Internet.  You will have the freedom to work whenever you want, take time off when you need it, etc.

However, this can be a huge problem for most people!  The fact is, most people need someone breathing down their necks (a boss) in order to get their jobs done.  If not, they would never get anything done!  Most people will start in this business and fail because they start making good money and decide that they no longer need to work as much.  Then before they realize it, their income slowly dwindles until there’s nothing left!

Motivation will keep you focused, make you work even when you don’t want to, and allow you to push yourself in order to grow!  Without it, I doubt you’ll last very long in this field!

Conclusion

I’d love to hear what you guys think and if you feel that you have these traits or not!  In fact, if you can think of any other traits you might need in order to succeed in affiliate marketing let me know in the comments!

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Step One: Researching Your Niche!

One of the most common mistakes I see affiliates make is researching keywords for a niche when they know nothing about the niche they are gathering keywords for! Understanding your niche is an important step to creating a keyword list that will help you rise to the top in any given niche. Each niche has their own lingo, slang, or sayings that are specific to that niche. Without researching your niche, you’re not going to type in these words in whatever keyword tool you’re using!

Before you even start researching your keywords, you need to make sure that you understand all the terminology for that niche, understand what different sayings mean, etc. Without this knowledge, you will most likely fail!!!

Step Two: Understand How Most Affiliates Research Keywords!

The next thing you need to realize before you even start building your keyword list is the fact that most affiliates, I’d say about 90%, open up a keyword tool and start typing in generic keyword phrases for their niche in order to build their keyword list. If you do this as well you’ll end up bidding on the same exact keywords that 90% of other affiliates are bidding on!
Be creative, think of other ways people might be searching for your product or service! Are there terms you discovered in step one? If so, use those terms instead of the generic keywords that every other affiliate is using! Is there another type of audience closely related to your niche that you can target? Think Outside of The Box!

Step Three: Start On Paper!

When I first start thinking of keywords for a niche, I don’t just open up a keyword tool and start punching them in as I think of them. I first brainstorm my keyword ideas on paper or in a notebook. The reason I do this is so I’m able to look at my sheet of paper and know exactly which search terms I have already used.

This also allows me to focus on making sure my list contains a ton of various keywords and keep my searches as broad as possible allowing me to cover all the bases. Keyword tools are there to help you, but they can’t replace your brain! USE IT!

Step Four: Take Your Time!

Instead of timing yourself and seeing how quickly you can get done gathering your list of keywords, I challenge you to see how long you can gather keywords before you get so tired of doing it that you swear you’ll never use one again!

Again, keyword tools are made to help you get your job done faster, however, if you move too fast you’ll miss out on a ton of keywords because you’re in a rush! Slow down and think while you’re building your keyword list! Think about each keyword you type in and see the results the keyword tool gives you, don’t just add them to your list and go.

By giving yourself a minute and looking through the list as you go, you’ll most likely see a keyword phrase or two that will pop out and make you think of another keyword phrase. By doing this, you’ll turn a list of 10,000 keywords into 50,000 keywords!

Step Five: Make Sure You Actually Use Analytics!

So, you’re proud of yourself because you did everything you were told to do including installing analytics on your site. However, have you actually ever logged into it and taken a look at more than just how many visitors you had for the day or month? Most analytic tools will allow you to see what keywords people are typing to find your site organically in the search results!

By checking this out, you’ll find keywords to put into your keyword tool to expand and grow your campaign even more! Make sure you use this tool to it’s full advantage or you’ll miss out on some great keywords you could be bidding on!

Conclusion:

Keyword research doesn’t have to be a hard and difficult task. However, it shouldn’t take you a couple hours to build your keyword list! Make sure you take your time and do it right the first time and use the tips above and you’ll come out on top with a keyword list that 90% of affiliates aren’t using!

Do you have any other suggestions for keyword researching? Anything to avoid? Let me know in the comments!

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