The forum is not very active anymore as he booted people not making more then $500 a month so now we are only around 10 of us. One of those people is a great guy named Gagan who has turned into quite the affiliate marketer as well. He has a a great blog called Niche Affiliate Marketing and to give you a taste of what you can find over there he wrote a pretty good guest post for NeilsWeb.com.

Guest Post: This is guest post by Gagan from Niche Affiliate Marketing.

Now come on, be truthful to your self, you and I know that as affiliate marketers, we always like to keep ourselves occupied with more than one project at a time. Consequently, we burn ourselves and before we know it we got a mess in our hands trying to manage multiple campaigns, 1000s of keywords, dozens of ad groups, sub ids and offers.

So how we keep ourselves from going insane?

Learn to mange and organize your work into small tasks.

What I do?

I basically set a goal for each day that I want to accomplish. Be it starting a new ad group or modifying a landing page or whatever.

What I don’t do?

I don’t distract myself from other ideas that are always popping up in my head when I’m trying to work. “Oh! what if I do this or what if do that?” You know what talking about right

I also never try to do too much in short amount of time or work 4 hours straight. That’s even bad. Give yourself short breaks. Move away from your computer screens for few minutes. It helps.

Why you should set goals?

I set goals, so I know what the hell exactly I’m trying to accomplish.

“My goal is to to expand my keyword list. So, I’ll get just some keywords and set up some adgroups and i’m done.” Sure! but how I’m going go to expand my keywords list?

Divide your goals into tasks

I divide my goals into small workable tasks. Let me elaborate.

Your goal has to be something which will take a day or more. Starting a new pay per click campaign in your existing niche can be goal. Now you have to determine, what do I need to do to start a new campaign? From top of my head, starting a new campaign requires:

1. Building a keyword list (Monday)

2. Grouping keywords into targeted groups. (Tuesday)

3. Building ad copies for each group (Wednesday)

4. Building landing page(s) (Thursday)

5. Setting up keyword tracking (Friday)

6. Launching campaign (Sunday)

What we have done is split our goal into manageable tasks. Each of these tasks can be further split into smaller workable tasks. For example, building a keywords list can be split into

1. Building 50-100 keywords for sub-niche 1 (Monday 6:00 pm to 6:45pm)

Break (7:05 to 7:30pm)

2. Building 150-200 keywords list for sub-niche 2 (Monday 7:35 pm to 8:30pm)

By allocating time, you are organizing your tasks and managing your time. Now you’re obligated to finishing your tasks in those times. When you know you have to do a task but you say to yourself, “don’t worry, I’ll finish it today for sure”, guess what, it never gets done. However, by allocating time, you are more inclined to work persistently and responsibly. Try it, it works!

Don’t lose tracks of tasks

What I do is, write my tasks down (as shown above) in a note book. I check mark each tasks when I finish it. When your tasks is written down like this and when you finish them, you get sense of accomplishment which makes feel good and boosts your confidence in what you’re doing. You know what exactly what you’re doing now and how you’re going to accomplish it. It makes your feel you’re control and that will keep your efforts from falling apart and you’ll be less stressful at the end of the day.

Be in control of your work instead letting your work control you.

To view the rest of the video interviews that the tracking202 team did while in Vegas check out their newest site: TV202.com :
Julian Aceves ( Affiliate Instruction ) - Young Affiliate Marketer
Jason Akatiff ( Smaxor ) - Network Owner ( Ads4Dough )
Ryan Pamplin ( Ryactive ) - Affiliate Operations & Affiliate Deals
Ralph Ruckman ( Ruck ) - Network Owner ( Convert2Media )
Charles Ngo ( Dr. Ngo ) - Media Buys
NickyCakes - General Affiliate Marketing
Kris Trujillo and Andrew Payne ( CashTactics ) - General Affiliate Marketing

Thankfully this aspect of the business gets better after you have some experience under your belt. Just remember it only takes one offer! That’s not very much is it? One offer and you can easily be making $100+ a day.

Once that happens the process is pretty simple, let’s say I finally find an offer and it’s making me $50 bucks a day. Great I’m no longer loosing money. Now I can afford to loose $50 a day more in testing. So I’m making $50 and loosing $50 testing some other stuff until bam… I find a killer offer that makes me $100 a day and I see room for improvement. Work on this offer for a week to scale it out and after some long days of optimizing we are now making $500 a day! Now it’s time to start paying ourselves. Keep 300 of the profit and use $200 to test new campaigns or traffic sources. Get the point? Once you start making money, making more is a lot easier.

1. You have way more confidence
2. You are making money so you can funnel some profits into new campaigns
3. The fear of loosing money slowly goes away.

At least this is what I have noticed through my time as an affiliate. Sure the fear of loosing money is something that holds lots of people back but just remembered, it only takes that one offer to jump start your careered and allows you to go that extra mile!

Now that I have had a few months to put most of my focus on work, and giving the fact that I’m now doing affiliate marking full time I have decided I want to start sharing what I have learned during my time in the industry. I won’t be posting every day, heck I might not post every week, but when I have something interesting I want to share I’ll be sure to write up a post.

Ok, now that that’s off my chest I’ll just quickly go over the updates I made to the blog today. The first thing I did was deleted a bunch of posts that didn’t really have any purposes or useful information. I also updated the blog with a new theme. Let me know if you like it!

- Facebook Owns Your Penis

- Another Facebook Social Ads Profitable Campaign/

Oh and of course… RussianBaller.com

Neverblue has just got a little bit more kick ass by adding an in house designer to their team. Basically if you need a landing page for a particular offer all you got to do is fill out a quick request forum and they will do their best to help you out!

This guys is sick! One of my campaigns had a pretty bad click through rate so I fired an email over to my AM scott and withing 3 days I had a brand smacking new landing page. I just put it online and so far my CTR has gone up by 20%!

The designers name is Kyle and his portfolio can be seen at http://portfolio.kylepickering.com .

Active  sites that he has designed and implemented include:

• http://solarrevolution.ca/ (CMS)
• http://eastersealscamps.ca/ (CMS)
• http://easthillcommunity.com/ (CMS)
• http://payntersfruitmarket.ca/ (CMS)
• http://donateshares.com/ (CMS)
• http://walkcanada.com/
• http://spaghettinight.org/ (WORDPRESS)
• http://kylepickering.com/ http://jenpickering.com/ (CMS)

Keep in mined none of those sites are designed to be landing pages. The one he did for me was excellent though.

So if you have not already signed up for neverblue I recomend checking them out!

First of all the adboard does not necessarily mean the ad has an amazing CTR. It just means it has been showing for a while. And guess what… ads that have been showing for a while usually don’t have great CTR anymore. The person who first made the ad can still bank off the good CTR it built up in the past but it will do nothing for the guy who copies it.

Secondly use your brain! God gave us one for a reason… Think of original ways to get your audiences attention. Usually the easiest way to do this is by some how relating an image that has nothing to do with the offer to the offer. For example if I’m promoting Credit Reports, my image will be a man in Jail. The ad can read something like “Are your protected from internet fraud? Help put these thief’s behind bars. Catch them early with our free credit report. ” I guarantee you that will get a better CTR then a pic of some money or credit cards and an ad that reads “Free Credit Report” “Find out your free credit score now. Average in your area is 645, are you better?”. You see what I mean now on making irrelevant pictures relate to the offer? Now go on… try it!

What do people love on the internet? They love to watch movies!!! Ever since YouTube went main stream that little “play” button has just been to hard for the average internet surfer to resits pressing. So what does this mean? We are going to use it in our ads. For example check out this FB ad I just made (demonstration only… never actually used):

I have been using this technique for a while and it kicks ass! CTR is usually a few points better then the same image without a play button. The only thing you should watch out for is that it does not effect conversions to much. If people click on it expecting a movie that is not there then you may loose a few more visitors then usual.

When I was at affiliate summit east one of the most inspirational and knowledgeable people I met was Wes Mahler. If you don’t know who Wes is you most likely are familiar with his popular 202 brand (prosper202, tracking202, Export202, WorldProxy202, and MeetUp202).  Well I’m pleased to say that thanks to my friend Sam who I roomed with at ASW, Montreal is now officially part of MeetUp202!

Our first meet up is going to be on november 1st, which is this Saturday. I wont be able to attend because I’m going up north for the weekend but I will be sure to go to the next one! If you live in or around the montreal area be sure to join our MeetUp202 group so you can actully get a chance to talk to some affiliates in person instead of hiding behind the computer.

Well I’m back from Florida and boy was it a good time! Nothing beats beaches, Disney world, cruises, margaritas and sun! Unfortunately not everything went according to plan. My departure date was Thursday and 3hrs before it was time to leave I messed up my laptop so I had to leave it behind which meant limited internet access on vacation. Before I left I checked up on my campaigns and everything was running fine. I let my AM at Neverblue know I was going away and left for my vacation.

We got into Florida Friday and it was beautiful! Sunny, warm, and Disney World was waiting for me! I checked up on my campaigns at the hotel computer before getting my room and everything was still running smoothly. Knowing my campaigns were running good allowed me to rest easy that night and enjoy Disney World to it’s fullest on Saturday.

We all woke up bright and early Saturday for our first day and Disney World. We went to the Magic Kingdome and then to a very cool restaurant for dinner. We only got back to the hotel at 11:00pm so I didn’t get a chance to check up on my campaigns that day. Sunday evening came along and I finally had some free time. I walked to the hotel lobby to use there computer. I logged into my Neverblue account only to see a big fat $0 for my daily earnings!! I click to view Saturdays earnings and I see another $0!!! I quickly navigate over to Facebook and Adwords admin areas to see what was going on and guess what? I had spent a total of just under $2000! I quickly paused all my campaigns while I diagnose the problem which was incredibly stupid. I was using a shared hosting company which went down as I sent to much traffic. Perfect, I just sent $2000 of traffic to 404 page.

I still had 9 days left in my vacation and I didn’t want to ruin it with this problem so I left my campaigns paused turned off the computer and didn’t touch the internet for 9 days straight. When it was all said and done I flat out lost $2000 to a 404 page and then I lost about another $8000 in opportunity costs since I was not earning any money over the next 10days.

Guess what the first thing I did when I got home? I bought a VPS. I was being cheap and only paying $30.00 a month between 3 shared hosting companies. I guess you can say I learned that paying a bit extra for hosting big campaigns is well worth it!

Anyway here are some pictures from the vacation:

Before dinner on the cruise:

At the beach with our cruise ship in the background:

At the Magic Kingdom: