A media buyer, at least a good one, is not only responsible for buying media…

Skilled media buyers should be helping you strategically plan your entire campaign.

If a media buyer is doing any less than a marketing director would in strategically planning your campaign then you have the wrong media buyer.

On a typical campaign that I do media buying for, here are just some of the things on my mind:

• Strategically planning the entire campaign.
• Figuring out the targeting down to demographics, behavioral patterns and other details that could pertain to getting the right eyes on the campaign.
• Ensuring that the entire path is efficient enough to begin. This means that I need to look at landing pages and sales processes to make sure that we’re not going to send a bunch of people to sites that aren’t going to convert.
• Ensuring that proper split testing operations are in place. Let’s face it, even the best of us don’t know everything, split testing’s job is to make sure that we are constantly learning new things about our audience and product, and making sure it continues to convert over time. Without split testing, you are at a serious disadvantage.
• Creating the actual media, whether it’s banners, emails, ppc ads, etc. These need to be split tested too.
• Discuss and plan everything with the client or if it’s my own project, a partner.
• A good media buyer should be looking at the stats of a campaign consistently as well as in an overview sense.
• A good media buyer should also be good at negotiating, to get good rates on buys.
• Quite a few other things as well!

As you can see, us media buyers have to have skills in quite a few different areas, and we have to understand how it all works together for the common goal of making the client (or ourselves) more money by spending money, and all of the various elements in between.

My personal biggest commodity that I feel I posses is my time.

It is really the most valuable thing to me, in all aspects both business and personal life.

In business, time is used to create revenue streams and in turn that improves the ability to spend more time on my personal life and make more money in business.

I love it when something gets to “autopilot” , but I don’t allow myself to get too comfortable because autopilot can turn into laziness and laziness can turn into disaster.

I value my time tremendously. And, I dislike anyone that doesn’t respect it.

I think that some people time isn’t necessarily their most valuable commodity, if they don’t value their own time.

Time wasting activities can be one of the biggest fatal flaws in online marketing. And, it’s so easy to get caught up in them.

You have every temptation from social environments to games and entertainment. I dont want to paint a picture too negatively of social because you can certainly use social for business.

Do you have people in your life/business that are time wasters?

Is time your most valuable commodity?

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, struggling or just need a boost this might be a great opportunity.

I promise that by the end of the personal lesson you’ll know exactly how to go out and spend that $100 to make it count.

The contest basically works like this:

• Sign up get 1 contest entry
• Refer your friends with your unique link, get additional entries
• For every friend/person you refer, you’ll get an additional entry

Click here to enter the Contest.

These changes have left people high and dry and many sites that were ranked well before are now nowhere to be found.

My response? So what! This is nothing new at all. When I started doing Internet Marketing over 10 years ago now (wow does time fly), my VERY first lesson was not to rely on someone like Google to give me all my traffic for free through SEO.

The very first successful web business I had relied heavily on organic Google traffic. I had hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month and was doing quite well on Google Adsense (and eventually Affiliate Marketing because of that “Free” traffic).

Then, I got “hit” like a lot of SEO people are right now. I got hit and my sites vanished from Google, no where to be found and my Adsense income went from REALLY good to practically nothing overnight.

I have friends today that have been hit by Google really hard in the past few months. Some of them lost astronomical amounts of money.

And, it just re-affirms my belief that you need to be a media buyer not a person that relies on “free” traffic. Google is a business, if they deem that changing up their search algoritm every month or so will cause SEOs to panic and stop gaming the system, then so be it. And they can certainly do that since it’s a private company that does not owe it to us to give free traffic that way.

One of the outspoken Google execs has even said recently that the best thing you can do is just ignore the “changes” lately and keep building quality content.

This has been my motto from the start. I rarely ever try to optimize my sites too much for search. And some of them rank pretty darn well for just focusing on quality content.

High quality sites are getting thrown down in the rankings and everything is getting shuffled up.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened either.

In fact, Google’s current algorithm is so bad that a legitimate site can be penalized by competitors intentionally trying to de-rank it. This has been tested by some SEOs and proven that it’s extremely easy to damage a sites rankings right now.

So, let’s think about this from a logical standpoint.

Google makes money from people like you and I buying advertising from them on Google Adwords.

They don’t make a dollar when we get organic traffic from the search engine.

Traditionally, their search results have been able to be earned and high quality sites with good content and popularity were rewarded with good rankings.

But now, good sites are getting ranked lower than spam sites, sites are constantly being shuffled and some of the smartest SEOs in the world have basically come to the conclusion that Google is intentionally shuffling things around randomly with no rhyme or reason.

So basically what is going to happen is that companies aren’t going to be able rely on SEO and getting organic traffic from Google, and they will be forced to focus on other search engines and buy traffic from places, including Google Adwords…

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Google shuffles up the results so SEOs can’t do their job, people spend more money on Google Adwords, they make more money at your expense. Slick eh? Nope. I don’t think so. I think it’s going to just drive people to be fed up with them and focus on Search Engines that actually rank the best stuff with an obvious algorithm that will let them know how they determine what the best thing is in a clearer fashion AND they won’t spend their money on Google Adwords.

Traditionally there have only been a few places to get solid information on Affiliate Marketing beyond what’s available for free here and on other affiliate marketing blogs.

In fact, there’s a reason that we can’t post different case studies and exact advertising campaigns on a public blog, because they will get overrun almost immediately with the masses of people that read blogs.

That’s where private training forums come in… they have a smaller audience and can actually post stuff that’s not going to be seen by 40,000 people a month, or some equally large number of people.

So, I’m on a journey to find the best private affiliate marketing training forum out there.

There are a couple I have on my list to review and look at. I’m not sure if I’m going to register anonymously or use my real name when I get around to each forum. I haven’t decided on that yet.

My question to all of you… which forums should I review? Which ones are you curious about? Which ones have you already been to and are they any good?

If you don’t want to post your real thoughts publicly on the comments, feel free to email me directly with your experiences on various forums/training sites for affiliates.

It continues to boggle my mind that nobody seems to understand variance, probabilities and basic math.

Here’s a quick lesson on variance using an example you gamblers will understand.

When you sit down at a blackjack table at a casino you are probably somewhere around at 1-10% disadvantage (unless your name is Don Johnson.) This means that 51-60% of the time the house will beat you. It also means that 40-49% of the time, you will beat the house (using the figures from this example.) So, let’s say you walk in and play 1 hand and win, you just fell into the 40-49% bracket and won, but if you continue to play over an extended period of time those numbers will eventually change to 51-60% house advantage. Variance, for the purpose of this post, you can think of as winning over a short period of time when the odds are against you, AND it doesn’t mean that you will continue to win – using the blackjack example you will (eventually) lose more than you win at the given chances of winning.

If that didn’t make any sense then think of it like this. If you buy 100 unique visitors and send them to a landing page and 1 person buys something then that doesn’t mean that if you buy 1,000 that 10 people are going to buy. The 1 in 100 buying, could be variance. In fact, if something was tested over millions of unique visitors and it only had 1 sale in 1 million visitors, that 1 in 100 could be variance from the 1 in 1 million. It doesn’t mean you are going to get 1 sale for EVERY 100 visitors that you send to your landing page.

I’ve heard far too many arguments lately of people assuming that things are going to continue without a large enough sample size. Sample size means that you have TONS of data (like the 1 million number in the above example) as “enough” sample size to reasonable expect something to continue. Also don’t forget that if you get a large sample size and you start to understand the typical results over larger volume, that doesn’t necessary mean that some kind of outside factor (like a competitor or a world event) can’t change those original expectations.

I personally like to do things a bit different. I like to run a single traffic source, get it down really good, optimize it very well and then and only then move onto another traffic source. I do this because the insight I get into my niche, demographic, and other insights are invaluable. It usually ends up saving me a lot of money vs trying 10 traffic sources at once. If I try 10 at once, sometimes up to 9 of them don’t work as well as they could have with some initial data.

The other tidbit here is that it usually has very little to do with the actual traffic source, and a lot more to do with the demographic. I mean, you could certainly make the argument that PoF has a certain demographic already there and Facebook has a big demographic as well that you can obviously tap into… but that demographic and how they are going to respond is what matters. Targeting them properly, interrupting them from what they are doing with something that isn’t too far off from what they are already doing. Otherwise, it can be hard to get a typical person on PoF in a “certain mindset” to take a look at something that’s very far off from that mindset.

I see that as also a big problem, people don’t try to bridge the gap between what someone is doing and what they want to sell them. They just assume that since they are in the demographic they are automatically going to bite. Not always true.

I’m noticing a lot of changes in the past few weeks that have made things a lot harder for marketers to really get a lot of traffic from Pinterest.

Basically, it’s phasing from the Wild Wild West to more of a Fort Knox. They are desperately trying to stop what they consider “spamming” on Pinterest.

For now, I think it’s pretty tough unless you are willing to do some risque things to get traffic.

Perhaps soon they will introduce an advertising element so marketers won’t continue to try to game the system with any means necessary.

I do think it would be a wise move for them, the amount of money it costs people to “spam” they could use the same money buying legitimate ads or “sponsored pins” if they were to introduce something like that.

Come on Pinterest, marketers just want traffic, why not sell it to them and cut out 85% of spam?

Basically what it is, is a wordpress plugin that allows you to run a contest.

Now, that’s not the interesting part.

The interest part is that these contests have a viral element to them, you get X points per entry, meaning if you post your link on Facebook, Twitter or tell your friends you get a new entry for every person that joins the contest.

So, for example you could give away a free product, software, ebook, etc and then people are more motivated to go out and post it on their Facebook because for each person that opts in through their link they get another entry into the contest. It’s viral at its purest form plus the incentivzed aspect which makes it even stronger than traditional viral marketing.

The plugin installs in seconds and its very simple to set it up. I got my copy set up in literally a few minutes, it wasn’t bad at all. It directly connects to popular email services like Aweber and auto integrates for you. You don’t even have to manually copy and paste your codes, it just directly connects to Aweber which is quite brilliant.

Here’s a screenshot of what your contest page can look like:

Try out Contest Domination, it’s pretty slick!