For those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on Twitter or just regularly check my blog (thank you), you will have noticed my blog has been quite absent lately of content. The reason is, I’m not doing much affiliate marketing at the moment.

Affiliate marketing is a venture that requires money to start (unless you take the SEO route) which I quite simply don’t have. I’ve been spending my time lately reading and writing articles whilst taking classes in iPhone development.

The reason I’m making this post is I’m unsure of what to do with this blog. My original plan was to turn it in to a microblog/tumblr style blog – so I can post small snippets of information and post links to articles I write elsewhere (rather than lengthy articles on my blog).

Failing that, I could just leave the blog as it is but not solely focus on marketing and the odd design post. I’m unsure and if anyone has any suggestions or advice, drop me a comment, email or tweet.

Cheers!

This is a quick post to say that I’m considering writing a book after a few people mentioned I should look in to it.

If anyone has any experience in the publishing industry or has a book published – please drop a comment below or hit me up on the contact form!

Cheers

Hey that rhymes. Anyway, I’ve recently bought a small car to carry me around and I’m hopefully not far off of passing my motorcycle test and getting that roadworthy. What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? It’s made me skint.

So, with no money left to attempt any form of PPC or social media marketing, my attention turns to SEO. It’s a beast that many affiliates don’t have the patience to tame, but I’ve been hearing good things about lately. A friend of mine called Becky Marie seems to be doing ok with it and has given me a few pointers!

My current plan is to get a single site up in the health niche, write some articles and build some backlinks. Once it hits a few sales I’ll work on the next one. I’ll be blogging here of course with how it’s going and if it does turn out to be a hidden cash cow, expect a case study!

I recently ran in to a problem with Facebook advertising. I was happily having ads reviewed and accepted for direct-to-offer campaigns. Soon after though, I submitted more and they were declined because of the URL. There were no popups, forced downloads or anything – and I hadn’t changed the URL? Odd. I submitted again and got the same error, 3-4 times in the end. This was because, I assume, the reviewer was not in the right location for my offers – so they were being redirected elsewhere by the network or just hitting an “Unavailable” page. So how do we get round this?

Well Jonathan Volk recommended I try LinkShiftr with the idea that I set my URL’s to a generic website without geo targeting (such as the sites home page) then when the ads are approved simply swap out the URL’s for my offer URL’s. Simple, or so you’d think. Pretty soon I’d changed all my links round and got the same message back. Slowly it seemed, other people using LinkShiftr URLs were given the boot.

It seems Facebook is slowly blocking out URL shortening services that let you modify the links after creation, to prevent you from doing this kind of thing. Luckily however, there is a way round this and it’s essentially like creating your own URL shortener.

The trick is to create a URL for your tracking/forwarding needs, something random like asdoiahsdasdaoisd.com – something that only you will know. Next, chuck a PHP script up there that will take care of your forwarding. Here’s how I do it.

First of all, for each campaign I create a file. Let’s say my campaign is about weight loss, so what I’ll do is create weightloss.php on my server. So let’s also say that the URL to the actual offer is http://example.com/offer/pub123 (that’ll do for now), but this URL keeps on getting declined. However, if you forward the ad to http://example.com it won’t get declined because there’s no geo-targeting and redirection, right?

So in my weightloss.php file I’d put the following script;


<?php

?>


This script currently forwards to the safe page, the one that Facebook will approve. So, as soon as Facebook approve the ad, all you have to do is comment out the top line (using //) and uncomment the bottom line. Now our users are being forwarded to the offer and our ad is approved. As an added bonus you can append ?subid=ad1 for example and it will be pegged on to your offer URL so you can track your ads individually.

This is just a little tip but it can really help the painful Facebook approval process go a little smoother. You could expand on this to include split testing or anything else – really what we need is a self hosted URL forwarder that’s pretty fancy, I’d code one – would you buy it?

Tips like these are always being shared at Jonathan’s forum (it’s helped me no end with my Facebook advertising). I highly suggest you join, it’s not even five bucks to give it a go – if you can’t afford to spend five bucks on testing something then you shouldn’t be in Facebook advertising!

Since I don’t want my blog to 100% be about Facebook I’ll be sharing more code/tips/tricks in Jony’s forum – so check it out before he ups the price!

Just a quick post to say it’s my birthday, was not expecting twenty! I’ll be making a post of goals I’m hoping to hit by 21 soon! Also, thanks to Becky for her wonderful chocolate fudge birthday cake

Woah. I’m turning 20 tomorrow. It’s hard to believe I’m not a teenager anymore, it’s going to be even harder finding an excuse for being immature and lazy too now. At least I’m still a student, so there’s always that one to fall back on!

In all seriousness though, where have the last 10 years of my life just gone. It’s a kick up the ass that reminds me I really need to get in to gear online!

After my last post about networking, I received a handful of emails from all over the world. Most of them had questions ranging from “how do I tweak this campaign or website” all the way to “how do I get started?”. I’ve replied to each one with as detailed an email I can get to push people in the right direction, but it seems a lot of questions I get are repeated.

With this in mind, if you have any questions about affiliate marketing in general or anything related, drop me a message via my contact page and I’ll publicly answer all the questions I receive soon in a blog post. No question is too big and no question is stupid and too small.

If you drop your name and URL in to the email too I’ll link your question to your blog, so you get an answer and hopefully a bit of exposure that my blog can offer

Get asking!

After reading John Chow’s book on blogging, I made a lot of little changes around here, one of them being adding a contact form. I didn’t anticipate the contact form being used much and thought of it more as a cosmetic improvement to give the blog more of a personal feel. Wrong.

Within the space of almost a week, I’ve already had a handful of small affiliate marketers contact me explaining how they love reading my blog and asking a question, or offering to exchange links. This is exactly why I started this blog, to share information on how to make money online and meet others in the same boat.

After exchanging a few emails with a certain reader (you know who you are), they were kind enough not only to give me some tips but even recommend me a niche to attack and what traffic source to use as it’s relatively untapped (which I’ll be trying next week!).

I’ve met a lot of affiliates by leaving blog comments, sending emails, receiving contact form submits, tweeting and a few other ways. The thing to take home from this post is that we’re all in this together and although we don’t have to share exact methods to make a profit, it’s nice to give and receive a little help.

If you’re a small affiliate marketer and want to get in touch for any reason, feel free to drop me a line on my new sparkly contact form.

I was lucky enough to get a free copy of John Chow’s latest book ‘Make Money Online: Roadmap of a dot com mogul‘. Since it arrived yesterday morning, I’ve already read it cover to cover and left a few sticky notes highlighting useful pages, so what did I think of it?

What is it?

If you’re reading my blog then chances are you’re in to affiliate marketing, if you’re in to that, then chances are you know who John Chow is. He’s the top make money blogging guy, he makes money blogging about how to make money blogging. John has made some great resources in recent years, from videos to eBooks to keynotes and now to this 149 page paperback book on how you can be as successful as him.

When I first heard about John’s book, I was excited to get my hands on a copy but at the same time weary of hearing the same old drivel about what makes a good article or how many ads to have on your blog at any one time. When you’ve read a few different affiliate marketers eBooks and resources, things can start to blend and become just reworded versions of each other.

John’s book is a different though, you see most affiliate marketers refrain from giving you the exact details. You’re more likely to hear “Make sure to setup your spam filter correctly” from a generic affiliate, John walks you through the steps hand-by-hand in what is a much needed breath of fresh air.

Did I learn anything?

Although I’m no pro at affiliate marketing, I pretty much know my way around the theory and know what each book or eBook is probably going to throw at me, it’s not very often I learn a new technique that I haven’t heard of before, which is why this book came as a bit of a surprise to me. John doesn’t just give you a vague idea of what to do to your blog, he lists plugins he’s had success with and details the most effective way to get your use out of them. Some of these plugins I was already using, some I’d never heard of (needless to say they’re installed now!)

You might of noticed a few subtle changes around my blog the last few days, all of which I picked up from this very book (maybe another post soon on how much they changed?). I can honestly say I didn’t put this book down much in my time reading it, in fact the only time I briefly set it on the desk was to implement something John mentioned.

Personally, I loved how John broke down his income sources from his own blog, telling you what percentage of his blogs income was generated from which source – it really helps give you an idea of where you should be aiming with your blog.

Quality of the book itself?

The book is thing and light – a perfect travel companion and it can be used as a cover-to-cover book or simply for referencing (mine is filled with sticky notes!). It’s a good quality book and it’s a nice change to have a physical product to read wherever rather than staring at an eBook hour on end. Best of all, thanks to Jonathan Volk my copy was signed

Really I just wanted to boast that my copy was signed in this section.

Did it miss anything?

Quite frankly, I was expecting a chapter on building an email list – maybe a small section on using aweber to manage loyal email readers, but there wasn’t a mention. I’m sure John left this out for a good reason, probably because he goes in to good detail about email lists in his Ultimate Blog Profit Model eBook he recently released.

Despite skipping out email, which I suppose you could argue isn’t directly related to blogging, everything else was there and more. Some section I just wasn’t expecting to see at all, but were a great help in tweaking my own blog and will hopefully help out in the long run.

Worth buying?

Yes. It doesn’t matter if your blog is already making money or has yet to see it’s first penny, this book by John Chow and Michael Kwan is a great resource and full of lots of powerful tips and techniques – I guarantee you haven’t heard of all of them!

Read some of the reviews on Amazon to see what other people thought, but I can’t see there being many negative things to say about this book!

One thing I’ve learned over and over from every affiliate marketer is that you’ll get better results if you know your target demographic. It’s common sense. Advertising your latest product to build biceps on a site about knitting probably won’t get you many conversions, even if thousands of people see your ad daily. Stick that ad on a forum about fitness or similar and chances are it’ll perform a lot better.

The beauty of Facebook advertising is how much it will let you target a given demographic. If you want to sell your product to homosexual, african american males in the USA who like skateboarding (just an example) – you can. I’m no expert (yet), but friends starting up do ask me to look at their campaigns and help, usually it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing wrong…

New affiliate marketers tend to think that more impressions is more sales – not strictly true. Whilst you can’t have sales without ad impressions, those impressions count for nothing if you’re not targeting the right demographic. One example of a friend (who will not be named) failing to target properly is a guy I know over the net who’s trying to get started but not seeing much joy. My friend sent me a few screens of his FB campaign and it was standing out in blazing letters what was wrong.

You see my friend being new, was under the impression that if you’re selling a muscle gaining product (he wasn’t, example) then it’s probably going to appeal more to men. These men are also more likely to be heterosexual and between the ages of 18 – 35. You could argue that it could go much higher than 35, but then you could create a new campaign for the older ages.

Now what we’ve done here is got a campaign aimed at 18-35 year old, heterosexual males – to a new affiliate marketer this campaign is ready to go. Wrong. Facebook REALLY let’s you drill down in to your demographics, a better idea would be to show it to people who have their interests set to or have joined groups involved with muscle building, weight lifting etc. The impressions fall down drastically, but by targeting your audience like this hopefully your CTR will be much higher.

People like to see other people like them in adverts, so even better would be to break this campaign in to multiple ad groups, showing pictures of 18-25 year olds to that age group, and 25 – 35 year olds pictures of muscle clad men from that age group. Of course what pictures etc you use is up to you, but this is just a way of going about it.

We could drill down further, but the point of this post is to make you realize that Facebook is extremely powerful for targeting, be sure to really penetrate the demographic and find out who you’re marketing too.

Today my copy of John Chow’s latest book arrived, a gift from a friend of mine, Jonathan Volk (review to come soon!). As per usual when I get a new book, I blasted through the first few chapters straightaway to get a feel for the content.

After chapter one I had one of those “Oh crap” moments, where suddenly everything you’ve been doing wrong appears in front of your eyes in plain english and slaps you across the face.

John focuses a lot on the difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person, something that can help classify yourself. Right now I would classify myself as the latter, but that’s entirely my own fault. Lately I’ve been treating making money online as a hobby, a gimmick, something unimportant that’s just money on the side. This is where I’ve been going wrong, I have 18 months away from University in order to make it online, making a living online should be my number one priority.

There’s quite a lot of I’ve realized today after some soul searching and figuring out what I want out of life (both online and offline).

My Problems

After sitting and thinking about it, my two main problems are focus and priorities. Let’s start with focus. This blog is a prime example of where my lack of focus comes in to play. I love web design/coding, photography, marketing, fast bikes/cars and a lot of other stuff – but squeezing all of them on to one blog is tough. It seems I’m trying to please different readers, some of which I don’t even have, and keep myself busy.

Because of this, I’ve decided this blog should have a clearer more defined focus – which I feel should be about making money online. If I want to write about other subjects, I should contribute my content to other blogs or maybe even start another blog about that subject.

My second problem, prioritization, is a biggy – I think it’s where I’ve been going wrong a lot lately. I’ve been doing guest posting for other blogs lately because I enjoy it and it pays. The pay isn’t enough to live off by all means, but it’s a nice bit of pocket money for doing something I enjoy. The problem is writing can take a lot of time up, and when you divide how much you’re getting paid by how much time you’re spending on it, you start to realize it’s not making you as much as you think.

For example one site I’ve been writing for pays $50/article, which sounds great until you have to do 2-3 hours of research and image gathering (or image creation) before writing the article and proof reading, which can take 4-5 hours again. Before you know it you’ve spent 6-8 hours on an article for 50 bucks, or $6 – $8 an hour.

Since I’ve been writing, I haven’t had a single chance to concentrate on any marketing, PPC or SEO, or even write content for my own blog. Although I’ve managed to pay off any debts I had and get back in to the clear, I now need to re-prioritize my workload.

My Solutions

I’m going sort this out by cutting down on my freelance writing. As much as I enjoy it, the amount of money you get in is directly linked to the amount of time you put in. That’s not where I want to be, I want to be where everyone else wants to be – earning passive income. Sure to make any money you have to put time in, but if you put 2 hours in to an article or 20, you’re still capped at $50. With affiliate marketing if you put 20 hours in to an SEO campaign, you could be making anything from $50 to $5,000 in a few months.

So from today, I’ve quite a few writing jobs and made a small list of well-paying blogs that allow me to create interesting content I enjoy writing. This will give me more time to concentrate on my ultimate goal of living off money made online and still allow me to enjoy creating articles on cool subjects.

Expect some blog changes around here too, I’m looking in to getting nested comments enabled, a newsletter and maybe re-enabling the top commentators plugin.

These are exciting times. For me anyhow.

The blog hasn’t been as active as I’d like it to of been this past week or two, I’ve been working hard now I’m back at home trying to get setup for this next year of strictly online money making. I’ll be making a blog post about my plans for the next 18 months, goals and a few things I want to roll out on my blog pretty soon!

Sorry for the delay, stay tuned!

If I trust anyone when it comes to Facebook advertising, it’s this guy. He’s made over $1,000,000 in revenue from Facebook and he earns a day what I earn in about 2-3 months, just from Facebook advertising alone.

When I heard Volk was releasing a guide for Facebook advertising, I had to jump at the chance to see how it’s possible to earn so much cash from a single source. So here’s my review of Volk’s new guide!

What is it?

Facebook Ad’s Guide is from start-to-finish guide about how to;

• Get setup with FB ads
• Find demographic’s for your offers
• Target your audience properly
• Split test ads
• Increase CTR
• Bid strategically

That’s just a few of the things Jonathan covers in his guide, it really is an A to Z from joining an affiliate network to split testing your ad copy with image variations and subid tracking links.

Who is it for?

Now before I even opened my copy, I thought I already had this bit sussed out. I was pretty sure this was going to be a basic guide for the people new to Facebook advertising, but this is where I missed the mark by a fair way. Because I’ve used Facebook advertising a couple of times before and I’ve tried affiliate marketing many, I thought I pretty much had it figured out, not to an expert level but more than enough to get by and teach others.

I can honestly say that after reading this guide (and even though I was using FB ads before this guide) I learnt a lot. I mean there’s no escaping that if you’re already an affiliate marketer, or even already on FB ads, there’s stuff in this you’ll already know. But even with that said, there’s some great tips and techniques that you can apply from day one to your existing campaigns.

What I Learnt

I expected to learn nothing, I already knew a lot of the material but I still learnt quite a lot to say I’ve been around a while. I think one section where Jonathan really shines and where I learnt the most is properly targeting your demographic and increasing CTR quickly and easily. Combine this with his excellent part on bid strategy and it’s gold.

One thing I thought was really great, was the bonuses included. Jonathan’s guide includes a HUGE list of keywords that specific niches will be using or searching for, along with lists of fan pages and similar, to target for specific offers. I thought this bit was worth a lot more than Jonathan is asking for and this is definitely a big tool in my Facebook arsenal.

Guide Quality

The overall quality of the guide itself is fantastic. One thing I hate about guides to subjects such as affiliate marketing is the lack of pictures and lack of examples. One thing that’s crucial, especially when teaching new users, is examples and demonstrations. Jonathan’s guide is packed full of both, as well as a great section on how to find, analyse and use competitors advertisements to help you increase your CTR and overall profits.

Why Should I Get It?

Admittedly this hasn’t been the longest review I’ve done, partially because I believe the guide sells itself. If the guide doesn’t wow you, maybe the bonus list of keywords, fan groups, the secret bonus (that gets emailed to you) or the mastermind video will swing it.

Jonathan has put a lot of effort in to this guide and it really shows, he really has revealed everything he knows about FB advertising, so really after reading this guide you know the exact method he’s used to make a million and earn over 3k a day, that means there’s nothing but laziness stopping you achieving at least a small profit.

Jonathan has told me that the guide is going up in price sometime soon by $20, so get it now – it’s well worth it

Click here to see it!

Just a quick one to say phew, exams are almost over! I sit my final exam tomorrow then I’m free for 18 months for my gap year! Make sure you’re subscribed to my feed as I’ll shortly be updating about my plans for my year out!

If you’re a designer or web developer and haven’t heard of The Smashing Book, you should probably come out from behind that rock and get updated!

The Smashing Book is a paperback bursting with creativity from the guys over at Smashing Magazine, I received an early review copy before it’s official release but I never published my review as my blog went down for a while, so hear it is! A complete review of the book from start to finish!

I was a bit shocked when the book arrived at my door, I forgot I’d applied for a review copy months and months ago and was a bit confused as to why it was here, nevertheless I was excited as it was a freebie and I love Smashing Mag.

So after frantically tearing off the packaging and getting a sniff of that glorious new-book smell, I dived straight in and read it from cover to cover in the space of a few days. I’ve since read it three times in total, so here’s my honest review of what’s in it and what to expect.

The Chapters

I love the way this book has been structured, there are several chapters or sections throughout the book that deal with distinctive areas of design. For example, there is a chapter devoted to one of my favourite arts; Typography. It goes in to great detail about everything from old style calligraphy to how to use whitespace effectively in web type. There’s another chapter devoted entirely to colour, and not just a few pages of palettes, an in depth explanation of how to come up with palettes from the colour wheel.

What inspires confidence in me is that each chapter is written by different contributors (from one to a handful), so it’s not one or two people who are your typical jack of all trades and master of none, these people really know what they’re conveying and put it across in their own distinct style.

The Content

Content wise, the book is a fantastically easy read. There’s no page upon page of paragraph upon paragraph of boring text, the book really is a visual treat and illustrations, pictures and diagrams are aplenty and of stunning quality. The colour chapter is exemplary in this area, as rather than simply teach you the different angles of which to pick colours from the almighty colour wheel, it features designs that use the palette or a technique described with a screenshot to demonstrate.

It seems everything that the authors impart to the reader, they demonstrate it in some way or another so that nothing is left to guesswork. Even the section on optimising designs for sales which has to cover a lot of ground on the psychology and actions of users features vast examples with annotations and notes to point out how to improve your existing layouts.

The language the authors have used is excellent, every point is met with great clarification and a genuine feel of passion for the subject. You can tell the author of the section isn’t simply filling in where someone else should probably have contributed, they’re passionate about their subject and enjoy sharing with others the ins and outs of their field.

As well as clear cut precision in the content of the book, you also get a sense of personality from each subject. Their are quite a few known names in the book, one of which is Jacob Gube of Six Revisions, a writer I both admire and follow online for his great articles and community input. You can tell each section is independently authored, and despite what some might think, it’s a good thing. It makes a nice change in language which means you can keep reading the book, rather than feel like you’re in a phone call that’s gone on way too long with the same person.

The Book Itself

Now this is something that really impressed me. The book isn’t expensive at around £23, but it’s not super cheap either. However, the quality of the actual book is fantastic. It’s a great size to take anywhere, I generally keep my copy of mine with me if I’m doing design work away from home as it’s great as a reference book as you can really jump in to any section and start reading.

The interior is where it shines though, all 311 pages from cover to cover are high quality, full colour and glossy. Images and diagrams are of superb quality and it really helps in a book that’s all about design. The font used is very easy on the eyes and it’s easy to tell the book was designed by a bunch of guys who love typography.

Another sense of personality is even found towards the index page, where a list of authors can be found along with how many pets they own, their shoe size and even how many countries they’ve visited.

Overall

I wrote this article and got to this point and skimmed from start to finish about six times just trying to find something wrong with it. I came up completely blank. I can’t say a negative thing about this book and it really does get a 5/5 from me. Whether it’s a bed time read or a handy desk reference book, it fits a whole host of needs and does the job with superb finesse.

I highly recommend picking up a copy, whether you’re a designer, developer, marketer or just a hobbyist in any of the areas covered.

It’s probably worth noticing this isn’t a sponsored review, nor do I receive any money for each sale of the book, I’m simply overly happy with the quality of the book, there was a small worry it’d let the brand of Smashing Magazine down if it wasn’t executed with heart and soul – but they hit the nail on the head superbly.

You can find out more about The Smashing Book by clicking here for an insight in to the chapters and a preview of the book.