1. Dress for success

Don’t wear whatever you feel like when meeting with clients. I like to meet their accepted dress level in the profession. If I am meeting with lawyers or any professional, you better believe I am bringing a suit out for them. The local burger shop? Jeans and polo shirt worked fine for them.

Pay attention to what you wear very carefully, as what you are wearing is the first thing a client sees. Dress properly and successfully and you will feel that way. And make sure your clothes actually fit properly!

2. Take care of your hygiene

This is essential for many of you keyboard warriors. Make sure to take care of basic hygiene before you go out for a meeting. Brush your teeth. Comb your hair. Trim your nail. Shave. Or if you have a beard or facial hair, make sure it is trim and appropriate. Nothing is more of a turnoff for people then bad hygiene.

3. Walk and sit with confidence

When you walk into your meeting, walk in like you own the place. Be confident, hold your head high and make killer eye contact with the gatekeeper. Your confidence will transfer to her and the rest of the visit will go great. Make a good, firm handshake, not a limp-wristed one I have seen so many times. Keep your shoulders back and posture good and you will exude confidence.

4. Don’t be intimated

No matter who you are meeting with, you are the professional still. They are coming to you for services or advice. Show them you are the best (or at least sound like the best) and you will win them over. You may not be the best technical person in your area, but if you talk confidently about what you can do, they will trust you and want to employ you. Just remember, you are a business owner too. Make your client feel that way!

The long definition would just go into a bit more detail. There are really two main parties in affiliate marketing with another party that is also involved largely. First, you have the advertiser who is looking for people to buy their product or for people who are interested in a certain service, such as attorneys looking for new cases, car insurance companies looking for new clients, etc.

Then, you would have the advertiser, who is the one looking to get their product promoted for a price. They enlist affiliates to go out and market their product alongside their own marketing efforts as well. This is often a cost-efficient method, as you pay for results instead of a typical advertising campaign.

Often, there is something called an affiliate network, which often works with advertisers to facilitate a large number of offers for the affiliates. In this case, the affiliate network takes care of collecting the payment from the advertiser so that you don’t have to. Often, you can get lots of larger advertisers when you belong to an affiliate network because they have the power to offer large amounts of traffic to these companies.

To sum it up, an affiliate is responsible for all advertising of the product/service, including costs. The affiliate network provides the offers for the affiliates and pays the affiliate out of the money they collect. Finally, the advertiser is interested in getting a 3rd party to promote their product, thus needing affiliates and affiliate networks.

PPC, or pay-per-click, is a traffic generating advertising platform used by many large sites. Just as the definition says, it is a system where you can place ads and then only pay for each time a person clicks on that ad to visit your site. Read more about how PPC works.

Long Definition

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most popular forms of advertising on the Internet, only behind probably banner ads, or CPM ads.

I have a full explanation of how PPC works in an earlier post, but I will still go over the basics here.

Many popular sites use a PPC platform in order to maximize their advertising revenue while keeping their costs in check. If you had a popular site with only banner ads, those ads would be very expensive due to the large amount of traffic that you receive, so naturally, you command a higher ad amount.

However, that limits the market as well. And with general sites like Google or Facebook, it is hard to buy banner ads that actually will do well for the consumer. That is where the idea of PPC was born.

PPC always advertisers to just pay for actual clicks on their ad, thus guaranteeing visitors to their website. This type of advertising will usually bring in more advertisers, as they are more willing to pay for something they know will give them the results they are looking for.

Another reason why PPC is so popular is that it lowers the barrier to entry greatly, meaning small websites can now advertise on the largest sites in the world and ultimately compete with worldwide brands. While it is not that simple, in some niches, it can be very affordable to compete with top companies in that niche for certain items.

Finally, PPC lowers the management costs and maintenance that banner ads do. While most companies have a team that reviews all PPC ads, it is much better then having to constantly pay salespeople to search out large advertisers and then have to pay them a large commission.

PPV, or pay-per-view, is a type of advertising where you pay a service to display your ad and you pay each time your website or landing page is shown to a potential visitor.

Long Definition

PPV is a unique type of advertising that has come to light more and more recently. It has been around for a long time, but only recently has it been realized as a very profitable source of advertising if done properly.

But how does PPV advertising work? When users install adware, like Smileys or MyWebSearch, their activities are highly tracked. So, when they visit a certain site, often times those adware companies will then sell pop-up ads to increase their companies revenue.

While people may think that no one clicks or even looks at pop-up ads, you may be right. Many of us don’t, that is not the general user. If someone is searching a site and another site pops up that pertains to the site they are looking at, there actually is a good chance that people will click on it.

That is how PPV works! You pop-up the ad to the consumer and hope that they will find it interesting enough to click on it and do what you want them to do on your site. You do pay each time it is shown, so you have to make sure it is targeted, or you will burn through your entire budget quickly.

Also, with PPV, advertisers offer you targeting either based on keywords or URL. So, if you want people with adware installed on their computer to see your ad when they visit ESPN.com, you can target that URL. You pay on a bidding system, just like PPC, and the highest bidder gets the bulk of the traffic.

One other type of targeting that you can use with PPV, although I don’t recommend it, is keyword targeted, just like PPC. If you use the keyword sports, your ad will show to any site or page that is related to sports. I don’t like this because it is too broad. With URL targeting, you know exactly where your ads are showing at all times and what is or isn’t working.

Read about the best PPV networks or reviews about PPV networks on my blog.

CPM in online advertising means cost per thousand impressions.

Long Definition

CPM, or cost per thousand (the M comes from the Roman numeral system, as M means 1,000), is an online advertising term that is often used when describing how much a banner ad will cost an advertiser.

Also, it can be used to show a publisher how much money they are making per thousand impressions as well. One place it is often seen is in Adsense, where it will show the publisher exactly how much CPM they make overall and per channel as well.

So how does CPM advertising work? Basically, if you want to advertise on a website, the owner often will sell space per thousand impressions on their website. So, if they are charging say $4 CPM and you want to show your ad 10,000 times, then you would pay $40 for that ad spot. Then, your ad is set to show 10,000 times and when that is done, so if your advertising.

Email marketing is where you mail clients and potential clients emails highlighting your products or services.

Long definition

Email marketing is one of the easiest and inexpensive ways to keep in constant contact with your past clients. Also, it gives you a great source to continue to talk with potential clients in the near future.

While email marketing may seem simple, there is much more involved then simply just sending out an email to people and watch the money flow in. That can happen, but not until you first build a large email list that is trusted.

The first step in email marketing is to build your email list. People do this in a variety of ways, but the most popular is through a subscription form on a website when a person signs up for a site or they find an interesting site and want to receive updates from them.

Once you have someone’s email address, you then will start sending them marketing emails to further promote your brand or service.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Is it good to be a loner of some type in this industry? Don’t successful businesspeople have tons of connections and are well known all over their industry?

For the most part, no and yes. But there are always exceptions to the rules, and you can be a loner with few real connections and still be extremely successful, especially in this industry. In all reality, you can be very successful at affiliate marketing and never have to make any real face-to-face connections with anyone in the industry. And there are more people out there like this then you may think of. In fact, the most successful people in this business are people who never have heard of and more then likely will never hear of.

I am a lonely affiliate and I actually wish I wasn’t at all. However, that is how it is right now and it won’t change that way for awhile, and I am fine with that. I do have reasons for this, and it is not just me being introverted, even though I am just a bit at first. Once I meet someone and talk with them I am fine and love talking with people. So this is not the reason I am like this.

I am a lonely affiliate due to 2 major things. One is that I live in the middle of nowhere. Now this doesn’t have too much bearing on it, as I can travel a couple of hours and be in DC, Baltimore and other larger areas. But the other reason is I have a family of 4 children to take care of, 2 with autism. I think the autism is what makes it the hardest. My son is high functioning but still little, so it is hard to travel with him in new areas. And my 6 year old daughter has moderate to severe autism and can’t fly or do anything out in public that requires her to sit and understand how to act appropriately.

I wish I could go to Affiliate Summit or other conferences, but flying and then leaving my wife with 4 children in a hotel is not an ideal situation. We don’t have a strong support system at home, and they definitely could not be an overnight solution. So we are stuck here with each other, and while I love being with them so much, I sometimes feel it may hurt my career.

What am I getting at here? Well, I wanted to get this off my chest a little bit and also share with others that you can have a very strong career without the networking portions. It just gets very lonely at times. I have no one to talk with about my strategies, and I usually just have to try things on my own and see how they go. I don’t have any one to really bounce ideas off of in the online space, which hurts and sucks to be honest. But you can do it. Just remember that you have to work your butt off to get there and you will fail a ton of times. I have built thousands of sites in the past 6 years, and I have about 150 or so in my network that actually make me money. I have sold sites, yes, but that doesn’t equate for the other thousands of site that I have failed in.

Take away from this that you can be successful by yourself. You just have to be a bit more accountable to yourself and be prepared to maybe fail a bit more then others. I hope I didn’t lose anyone with my ramblings today!

If you are even slightly involved in SEO or have an ear to the industry, you will know that Google did a massive algo change that killed tons of small time sites that were mostly run by SEO’ers. It seems the main target was possible over optimization, specifically for anchor text. Basically, tons of comment links, profile links and other links were more then likely either devalued or given a negative number to. This hurt tons of people and small businesses online who have spent years (or months) building sites that rank in order to turn a profit. Basic SEO, right?

I hate to see this happen, and I always hate to read about Google updates because it always hurts some businesses really hard. However, for every business that it hurt hard, it increased business for another company. So while it sucks for the ones that it hit hard, just remember that someone else is making money on it. Now it is time to adapt and get your sites either back up the rankings or start over, depending on your thoughts.

Personally, I barely got hit by the update. I have built hundreds of sites up for strong content and I have been lucky I guess to not get hit hard at all. In fact, many of my rankings went up instead of down, including this blog. All the major terms I rank for stayed the same or got better, including the term “affiliate marketing blog” from which I was #6 and I am now at #4.

I actually even wrote an article for FeedFront a few months ago about surviving a Google update, and while it included pretty basic tips, it really is a blueprint that I follow for each and every site that I build. Really, you just need to follow those tips and you will be good for the most part.

In the meantime, here are some other post-Penguin tips that may or may not help you get back to where you want to be.

1. Vary up your anchor text

And I don’t mean three variants. I mean hundreds. I mean every single variant that you can think of. Make it as natural as possible. There is a theory that anchor text was a large factor, so take it as you want. But, when you think about it, when people naturally link to you, they don’t use the same three keywords. They all use different variants of a keyword. Use that to build up your links.

2. Build a “brand”

This one is a bit tricky, as people who “branded” their sites also got hit. But, the more visible and branded you are, the better chance you have of being viewed as a site that is trying to provide real content. Branded sites mean you have a physical address, phone number (don’t use Google voice!), privacy policy, disclaimers, other policies and anything else you can think of that most businesses have. Include your site in the local yellow page sites like Yelp and such.

3. Make real content

There is nothing better and more natural then actually having a natural site. I know you can’t produce all the content for your sites unless you have one huge site that is your main source of income (which is dumb anyways as you can see from these updates). However, you can hire people to produce readable, useful content that is not spammy. Spend an extra $1 per 100 words and get quality content and not some spun crap.

So I was checking on my cash rewards on my Capital One business card the other day and seeing what I could do with my cash rewards. I have a decent amount saved up, so I thought it might be time to take advantage of them for a nice night out for our anniversary. Anyways, I get to the page with the rewards on it and there is a section that says Earn More Rewards. Right when I saw that line, I knew exactly what I was going to uncover, and I did. You can extra extra rewards on top of your normal rewards when you shop at certain stores online by clicking a link. Sound familiar? Of course it does!

This is beautiful and I truly love when companies know how to properly maximize their revenue potential. People love shopping at the stores they have, so it is a huge value for the customer to shop there. The customer gets extra rewards for shopping, the company gets extra money by referring the sale and everyone is happy! That is the perfect affiliate marketing transaction, hands down.

This particular type of advertising is incentive advertising, which many affiliate networks do not like to work with unless specified. However, many of the pay per sale companies will accept this type of traffic since they are just giving back a portion of the sale. Basically, it doesn’t matter to them if you are paying people to buy stuff, they are still getting the same amount of money either way. So if you are thinking about incorporating this into your business, you have to make sure the network or company is okay with offering incentives to the customer in return for a sale.

One of the main reasons for this post is just so you can open your eyes a bit and look to see new opportunities every day. Capital One is just capitalizing on their current customer base by encouraging them to buy products they already would through them and nowhere else. That is great affiliate marketing, and it really shows they have their finger on the pulse of the industry. So many other companies do this in order to be profitable, such as the Farmville or almost any Facebook game really. Papa John’s at one time sold subscriptions to magazines after you checked out in order to receive a discount on your net order.

In short, I know this isn’t ground breaking and that tons of companies do some sort of in-house affiliate marketing, but I want this to be a message that affiliate marketing is not going anywhere. Companies will continue to use, adapt and profit from this concept, whether it be online or offline.

Well, if you are having problems jumping into direct lead selling, there is a company out there in the payday loan space that can help you get started. LeadsMarket.com is known as a huge advertiser in this vertical and they are amazing to say the least. The reason I like them so much is that they are not a network so to say, even though they act as a network. Confused? Let me explain.

LeadsMarket.com is the advertiser, but they are more of a market to choose to where to sell the leads since you promote many different types of offers if you so choose. And the best thing is that they are the advertiser, as I said, which means direct payments. You know what that means, right? That is right! No middle-man equals more commissions in your pocket and better support since you are basically in a direct business relationship to help each other out.

Their payday loan affiliate program pretty much accepts any type of legit traffic, meaning email, PPC, PPV and organic sites can all use the program. When I read about their program being launched, the biggest thing that caught my eye and really impressed me was the following excerpt:

Affiliates can choose how to send leads to any given offer. Options include sending traffic to great looking / fantastically converting website, easily integrating the form to affiliate’s website, XML host and post, ping and post, or sending traffic to custom made website exclusive to the affiliate. Affiliates can choose from different payout options that include: flat payout per lead, revenue share, or tier structured payouts.

I love this, because it shows they care and that you really are in control of your leads, just like you would be if you negotiated a deal with a company on your own. Instead, LeadsMarket.com is helping to cut out the stress that is involved in acquiring and maintaining a good client.

Another problem affiliates seem to have when they are dealing with local companies is receiving payments promptly. Payment is never an issue either with them, as you will be paid on time without any problems through various means, such as wire, direct deposit, check, Paypal and I think even Payoneer off the top of my head.

Finally, they are just a great company to work with overall. I mean, you always hear from affiliate networks that they provide the best support and the best payouts, and you don’t really believe anything they say because that is a tired, old slogan every network uses. However, I will say they do have amazing support, everything from PPC advice to email tips to killer creatives to choose from. And like I said before, their payouts kick butt compared to other payday offers.

If you want to apply for their program, visit their site at LeadsMarket.com, apply and start making some killer money in a new vertical today!