After the STM BKK meetup, I know a lot of affiliates showed interest in moving and working out to Thailand. There was one short presentation that covered most of the basics, presented by Nick K, but due to the odd time constraints and formatting, left out some information I felt that most of you should know.

Number 1 is, that unless you own a legal entity business in Thailand or have a work permit and work visa through being employed by another business in Thailand, there is no legal way for you to legally do your work as an affiliate marketer in this country. The limits on this go so far as to say you can’t even volunteer without a work permit, I believe. There are several ways you can allow yourself to stay legally in Thailand, such as education visas, however these do not permit you to work (including affiliate marketing on your own). Starting your own Thai business is expensive, requires a massive investment as well as too much damn time, as well as a Thai partner who can pretty much boot you out of the company as soon as the doors are open, so you better make sure it is someone you trust.

Also, if you do decide to go that route and go to a Thai language EDU visa churning school and you can’t already speak a word of Thai, you should under no circumstances “skip class”. You will be tested once a year at the Ministry of Education and can be randomly tested by immigration when  you go in to extend it. If the immigration officer points to an image of a small fish, says “big dog” and you nod your head, you can kiss your chances of ever getting an extension on your stay goodbye. Most courses only require you to be there 4 hours per week, and it will make your life here so much easier. On top of that, its a very simple language to learn, especially once you can pick up basic reading. You’ll be able to start marketing in Thai language, which has a ridiculously high converting mobile market, too!

2. Living costs can vary extensively. I used to live like a normal broke ass student with a $200 rent, $200 monthly budget for food, and $100 left over for entertainment and other living expenses. I’ve lived in $2000 houses and condominiums, spent $100 a day on food and another couple hundred a day on partying. I’ve burned myself out of most of that and find a decent middle ground with about $1500 a month on food and dates, $1000 on housing, plus another $1-2k or so for everything else. You won’t be living like a king on $1k a month, but if that is all you can afford, you’ll be able to go much further with that in Bangkok or Chiang Mai than you would in any other major city around the world, I think.

3. It is hard to find good Thai workers. They are (and I know I’m generalizing here – I’ve had some great Thai employees before, just far and few between) unreliable and if you aren’t constantly barking orders at them, they get lazy and nothing gets done. Where I have long lists of default tasks setup for my Malaysian and Filipino outsourcers that they’ve sat and done for weeks without instruction, my Thai’s wouldn’t do any of it unless I reminded them daily. Get an in office assistant with no tasks to do other than reminders, setting up meetings and filtering email and make them yell at you if you get distracted, because…

Number 4 is that you will get distracted. That lazy attitude towards working, and that “mai pen rai” perception of the world will eventually get passed along to you if you hang out around too many Thai people. They are lovely people, but they won’t give a shit if they show up 2 hours late or don’t show up at all, won’t feel bad about calling you fat, and will almost always not get things done on time. It is just the typical working and social culture of the country. If you can’t teach yourself to discipline yourself from this, you will need to hire an assistant that can help keep you on track.

If you come here, you’ll most likely pick up a long(er) term partner, which is point number 5. Dating culture is very classical here. You’re the man, so you pay for everything. You are rewarded with her company and maybe (MAYBE) a little fun time later. If you’ve ever wanted to take a step back 30 years and know how your parents dated, this is the place to find out. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t smart, successful, independent women here, but many are treated as princesses and spoiled from the day they were born and will expect this treatment from their man. Where most of the foreign women I’ve dated and met will try to reach for the bill first, most Thai girls won’t even bat an eye. If they don’t ask to help pay, unless you want to release the wrath of a demon at the restaurant, don’t insist on it.

There are places you can go where you can meet the general party girl who’s DTF, but outside of hooker bars, its not nearly as common as it is in the west. Most Thais live very sheltered lives, and many at the age of 30+ still live with their parents, so be considerate if you are thinking about proposing sex on a first date with someone you didn’t just pick up down Soi Nana or Soi Cowboy.

It’s really all down to the people you meet, and the saying “Surround yourself with people you want to be like and enjoy” stands true here as it would anywhere else.

Generally, you just want to be prepared for anything. Don’t do this on a whim. It’s similar to affiliate marketing. If you create thousands of campaigns with no direction or research, all of them could fail miserably, or it could be the best thing that ever happened. If you do research, know whats up with others that have done similar things, have some knowledge and understand some of the lingo of your choice, you’ll be much more likely to build a successful campaign, or in this example, enjoy your stay in the Kingdom. I’ve known people, like myself, that don’t want to be anywhere else in the world, and I’ve known people that just didn’t have any fun at all (and most of that was because they weren’t prepared for the culture shock, didn’t study the language, and didn’t make any friends).

Today, I want to cover the simple topic of just that – staying on topic and being at the top of your game when it comes to productivity. There are a lot of distractions out there, and I’ve found these extensions allivieate a major part of that. As Chrome is my main browser, and I suggest you use it too, I’ll be showing you some of the best ways to keep you on track with it.

StayFocused – Essential for anyone that plans to work online a lot, this little extension keeps you off the stupid cat videos of Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you might find most of your time wasted online. With its irreversible Nuke feature, you can block yourself out of sites until the timer you set ticks down. Need to spend the next 8 hours doing nothing but grinding and can’t help yourself from distractions? The Nuke option will save your life! This app is the reason you won’t see me on Facebook much anymore. I only leave a couple hours open for it a day, like during my lunch hour or right before “bedtime” after which it is quickly blocked again just in case I try to spend a late night on it. I do the same for email and only leave a few hours a day open to my Gmail.

TimeStats – Combine this with StayFocused to give you a better idea of what to block. This will show you how much time you spend on x or y website. You’ll be surprised by just how much time you waste with Youtube or 9Gag.

Awesome Screenshot – Allows you to take cropped images from whatever you are browsing, annotate and edit them, save them locally, share them online, or upload to  your Google Drive. This is perfect if you like to grab screenshots of ads or other information and write notes next to them like how you can implement them into your own affiliate marketing campaigns.

OneTab – I always have around 20+ tabs open in my browser. This little plugin allows me to basically save them for later in a tab of its own if things are getting to cluttered and I need to view something else. If your PC is a little weaker, it should help save CPU and RAM resources if things start to slow down. You can come back and open any of the previously viewed tabs later.

Instapaper – I don’t think any productivity list would be complete without this. Find a helpful affiliate marketing post online, but don’t want to read it just now or want to save it for later. Use this. It allows you to easily go back, or read on the go through the cloud and multiple device support. I use this a lot for research and reading longer, in depth reports in certain niches and demographics.

LastPass – LastPass can save all your current passwords, generate random new ones and save those, or allow you to easily fill in applications to new offers and affiliate networks with a touch of a button. I remember using it to sign up to about 1 new network every 1-2 minutes back when I first started using it. It’s a real time saver and its one of the only security based software I’ve never seen have a huge security leak.

Wunderlist – A list of productivity solutions wouldn’t be complete without a to-do list app. Wunderlist does its job perfectly. It’s cloud based, so not only can you access it from Chrome, but also your iPhone or Android device. Get it, use it, list long term and short term and daily productivity goals and get them done!

That’s my big list of must use Chrome apps to get more shit done with less distractions. What do you guys use?

Before PoFPro, I never worked too hard with PoF. There was a time when it was easy to make a quick buck there, but to be competitive there today you either need 100s of campaigns and thousands of ads, or lots of time to optimize many different campaigns and niches. It’s a great traffic source to build your first $100 a day on, but its a large mountain climb to 10-fold that. Without PoFPro, I’d say you’d need at least a couple people working on campaigns at Plenty of Fish to keep them active and alive as it requires a lot of creative testing and rotation as well as optimizing out non-converting targets. PoFPro fixes this by automating a large part of everything you need done.

Setup

Setting up PoFPro was probably the hardest part of using PoFPro, and with the support and videos, that isn’t very tough at all. So long as you know how to create a database or can learn, you shouldn’t have an issue with PoFPro. In case you do, Tom is ready to help you out on their support page. Minimum requirements for your server or VPS are PHP 5.3 or better and MySQL 5.0 or better. You will also need to setup cronjobs which can be automated through PoFPro or done manually if that doesn’t work. I had to fill mine in manually, but overall setup takes less than 5 minutes once all minimum requirements are met.

I keep my tracking on a beefy server, but you should be able to do well with a smaller VPS with 512 – 1024 MB of RAM. I’m not completely sure on minimum stats here as they were not provided. Just make sure you aren’t tracking on a shared host and you should be fine.

PoFPro hooks into your current ads account via username and password, so you don’t need to do anything special with your PoF ad’s account to make PoFPro work.

Setting Up Campaigns

If you already have campaigns setup in PoF, you will be able to recreate those campaigns in PoF. Depending on how many campaigns you have going and want to import, this could be a rough patch. While you won’t need any of your ads up and running, you will need to grab all the affiliate links you were using and rotating through. If you have 100s of different offers you are using, it could take time to grab them all, however, after this all you need to do is assign which offers were running on which campaigns. At that point, you simply assign whatever offers were running on whichever campaigns. It’s a simple, elegant solution.

Creating a completely new campaign couldn’t be easier. All ad options are available from small ads, profile targetted ads and IAB banners. Write and upload all your images in one go. Ad affiliate offers to groups and you’ll never have to add that affiliate link ever again – simply just select it to rotate through in any future campaign. Add all your targeting (all options are available) and click Execute to create the ads. When the next cron job is scheduled, your new ads should be uploaded and ready to go. You can upload any number of ads to the campaign, split test any number of ad copies, and rotate through all of them to find winners.

Managing and Optimizing Campaigns

This is where PoFPro shines. PoFPro can track campaigns using a global postback or simple tracking pixel or via uploaded subid reports for affiliate networks and programs still living in the stone age. This allows you to do some amazing things with PoFPro.

Hurdles are where you should spend some time. This allows you to setup rules by which your campaigns should follow. So for me, I don’t like to run ads that have zero clicks after 1000 impressions. Using an Ad Click hurdle, I am able to set it so all ads that reach 1000 impressions without a click will be paused by PoFPro. I can also use a rule that makes it so if I spend 1 – 2x the payout of an offer without a conversion on that ad, it gets paused. This is simple, yet oh so effective automation. With these two simple rules I’m 95% able to automate all facets of my Plenty of Fish campaigns. It’s stupid how overpowered and awesome this is. It cuts my management time down by 80% and actually makes PoF a viable traffic source for me again.

Hurdles can be applied to any campaigns individually, and you can create an infinite amount of hurdles which can be mixed and matched to the specific ad campaign you are making.

Other tracking information automatically appended to all your campaigns is age, state, and sex. You’ll never be adding variables to the end of your links again! You can view these stats in your analytics.

On top of that, you can see cross-tab reports across all your campaigns as a whole or individually right in the tracker. This is powerful stuff which can skyrocket your ROIs when you go deeper into targeting and get more creative with your ads. Use them!

Each campaign you make can be tracked hour by hour. This allows you to be able to shut down and start up a campaign at any hour of the day, automatically. PoFPro prints out ROI reports so you can see exactly which hours of what day you are most profitable and which hours are your common losers. I’d suggest collecting 2 weeks of data in any new niches and countries before you optimize any campaign hard here, but I know for a fact many of my campaigns will flop overnight, so this allows me to immediately set it up so I won’t be spending money while my campaigns fail to generate revenue during poor hours.

You can also group your campaigns. This allows you to manage as many campaigns as you’d like all on one screen. Massively upload new ads and images to all those grouped campaigns, split-test a new offer or landing page, day part them all at once, apply hurdles, etc.  This all just helps cut down on time you spend managing campaigns versus making new ones.

The tracking and analytics are robust and will give you all information from CTR, CVRs, impressions, landing page clickthroughs, and more. It’s all the information you will really need to make a campaign work.

Another big time saver, the ability to re-submit disapproved ads. If you have ads you know don’t break any rules, you can even have Ben, a PoF Ad Manger, look at your ads before they are submitted right in the system. This isn’t something you’ll want to abuse when you know you have ads that are against PoF’s rules, but it speeds things up immensely when you want to see what a second ad approval team member looks at it. I’d suggest only using this when you really need it.

What It’s Missing

More robust ad rotation settings are needed. Right now I can kind of rotate by creating two-three different campaigns running their ads on different days, but this isn’t good enough. I want to be able to set up ad groups, too, that stay in one campaign that work with the hurdle system. Say something like, run ad group 1 until ROI drops below xyz percent, then run ad group 2, 3, 4, etc. Or something like an ad drip system where I upload 500 ads at a time, but it will only test 10 at a time and keep only the positive ROI ads. These are much more detailed requests though, so I can’t blame them for missing something like this.

Also, landing pages. I didn’t test it, but I’m not sure if multiple-choice LPs and multiple-path with multiple-page LPs are supported. Right now it looks just like simple 1 page landers are supported. This could need an upgrade. Edit: Tom has corrected me in the comments section below. Multiple LP paths, multiple-page paths and more work!

These aren’t complaints, just things that I think should be addressed in the near future.

Overall

If you plan on advertising on PoF, get PoFPro. Simple as that. It’s about $4 per day to go for the Pro plan, and it comes with a 1-month free trial. If you are making $100 a day or losing $100 a day, this is a safe investment and will allow you to spend less time looking at and managing your campaigns, and more time making new campaigns and creating branches off your current campaigns with more detailed and accessible reports. If I wasn’t still on my free month, I’d have made my money back strictly using this tool to manage new campaigns in my 2nd day of use. That’s how powerful it is.

On top of tracking, you’ll also get access to reports and guides to get started with affiliate marketing and PoF. I had a quick browse and they’ll definitely help you hit the ground running.

Just get it.

List building is the act of getting someones email address from your squeeze page, usually in exchange for something. Whether you are just sending them off to the offer afterwards, or giving them a free info product in a download is up to you. This post won’t be to cover the hows of list building, but the whys.

Why should you build a list? It’s hard, costs a lot of money to test properly, and most likely, you’ll see a loss on any new lists you create. List building is not very noob friendly because the amount of work and effort to put into them is high, and initial returns can seem low rather than just simply direct linking or a quick jump through a landing page. Let’s look at everything you’ll need to test when building a new campaign, and then what you need to test to build a list:

• Traffic source
• targeting
• ad headlines and bodies
• images
• Landing Page if you are using one
• offers

And with a squeeze page to build a list:

• landing page design
• landing page copy
• follow up email copy
• headline copy
• calls to action on all emails and landing page
• offers/whatever you are giving away

So you can see an email list ads a ton of extra steps to any campaign you are building. That couples with the fact that you might not see an instant positive return means you’ll be spending money and not making it back instantly. This can be hard for anyone new to affiliate marketing to accept.

The problem for many is that they see affiliate marketing as a get rich quick scheme, which is wrong to assume. Like any business, you must treat anything you do as such. How do you establish a long-term physical business? Repeat and long-term customers that come back to you time and time again. With standard affiliate practices, you get them to click your link and that may be the last you see of any such target. They may never click one of your links again. I hope you can already see where I am going with this.

When you get someones email, that automatically gets you a line with that customer over and over again. So long as you can keep shooting them products and offers that they will enjoy and can benefit from, you’ll be able to find use in the list time and time again. And this means long term business, conversions and money over a long period of time. Just what any physical business wants. Rather than just having that $3.50 conversion, you might find the lifetime value of any new subscriber to your list is in the 10s or 100s or even thousands (I have lists in the later stages, already, and it was fully worth it to test, test, test again to get there!)

So, for anyone considering affiliate marketing, I can full-heartedly recommend getting into building lists for any major campaigns you launch. Test it. If you are profitable on a linked campaign, send 20% of the traffic to a list LP and start sending off emails to test the waters and get your feet wet.

When my buddy, Charles, brought up Bitcoin at a Meetup around 2 years ago, I thought not too much of it. I spent a little time mining it and reading into it, but figured it wasn’t really going anywhere. Back then prices were at around $10 for one coin. Today that cost is at $100 per coin, fluctuating daily. Let’s say I regret ignoring Charles a little bit.

But the real idea behind Bitcoins isn’t to create a, what I would call, a true push-button profit system, but to create a form of real world monetary value decentralized from any one government agency that is plagued with problems. Now I’m not too in-touch with FIAT economics and how it all works, but anyone with half a brain can see that the government control of currency and the current bank schemes aren’t what they should be. Bitcoins allow for near instant transactions, worldwide, with lower to zero fees, a level on anonymity, and a market based around what you and I see the worth at with no one group of people or banks with complete control over it. It is also a global currency, which means no fussing around with silly exchange fees (I have to pay around $20 in exchange fees for every $500 I spend here in Thailand.. yeah I really need to find a better bank!)

But here is the major dilemma. I don’t think many people are really valuing Bitcoins and other alternatives for what they should be, which is a pure, global form of currency to be taken for the exchange of goods and services. A lot still see it as,  again, a push button form of generating FIAT currency. If we want to see any major FIAT banking changes, we need to purge ourselves off of FIAT as much as possible and use Bitcoins as a replacement currency. We need to stop changing it to USD or whatever local currency and keep it as a Bitcoin, exchanging it from one hand to another. Until a more services and people start realizing that this is the future of currency (And I believe that it is, and we just aren’t ready for it at this moment), Bitcoins and other cryptos are just kind of stuck in Limbo.

I know I might not be making very much sense; I blame that on my lack of knowledge on how government and banks work. What I do know is that with FIAT, our money isn’t truly in our control. We’re left to the whims and wants of our banks and government. Bitcoins are untaxable, are finite (only 21 million will ever be produced and it will take over 100 more years for them to be minted through mining), and require work to be minted. There are no government bailouts and they will be produced at a predictable rate, which should help with volatility when more people can embrace the use of cryptocoins on a daily basis.

With that said, I’ve decided to accept Bitcoins, Litecoins and other minor alternative coins in exchange for goods and services I produce at a 10% discount over regular fees. The future of this currency relies on it being exchanged between us all, so I feel this is a step in the right direction to get it there.

I’ll have more affiliate marketing related posts for you this week! Hope my rant didn’t bore you too much!

1. Assuming you already have some high CTR images, choose 3 with the highest CTRs and split test them with up to 20 different ad copies. This is a quick and fast way to get an idea of what types of ad copies convert the best for your offers.

2. Take your best converting/highest CTR images and use them on a landing page. I like to use a 3 x 3 grid style image made up of my best images with a dating landing page that can say “These are just some of the girls you can meet blah blah”.

3. Use borders around images. I find a green/bright green color increases CTRs off the bat. Pink can work well, even when targeting guys. Borders should be between 3-10 pixels thick.

4. Questions tend to get higher CTRs for my ads. Having trouble thinking of questions? Write your ads as you normally would, then ask yourself how you could turn that into a question.

5. Don’t use the word free in your advertisements. Offer owners (advertisers) don’t like it, and it generates poor quality leads. You don’t have to say they have to pay for a full dating profile, but just avoid using the word free, especially for dating offers.

If you are unfamiliar with what you’re seeing in this image, you’re looking at the web form stats page on my Aweber account for a new campaign I just put up less than 24 hours ago! With $25 thrown at the campaign, 59 people have subscribed after 140 unique displays for a real opt-in rate of 42.1%. This is what I call a killer opt-in rate that you would have to be blind, stupid, and a dog to not be able to make money off of.

So, how did I set up a brand new campaign that was set off for success from the get go? Let’s talk about that!

Know Your Targets

This is probably the most important part of the campaign. If you’re not studying demographics and psychographics on a daily basis, you aren’t performing to your max capabilities as an affiliate marketer. In fact, you’re as dumb and blind as the dog from the first paragraph. Before I go into any new campaign, I study exactly whoever is buying what I plan to promote. What are they saying about the current market? What are they buying and why are they buying it? Why do they like it and why do they hate it? Most importantly, what made them buy it? You can build any campaign in the world around these questions and it will almost always be profitable within a week of tweaking in and testing it.

Too many times, I hear about people quitting affiliate marketing because they threw up 3 offers and got zero conversions. The above campaign is stupid simple. I listened to the market, applied tactics my competitors used and have started tweaking it to improve my opt-in rates. It took all of $25 because I took the time to research who I wanted to target rather than blindly throwing shit at the wall.

Borrow From Your Competitors

Big brands and big spenders know what they’re doing. If you’re not implementing their knowledge, you’re a bozo. Now, I’m not telling you to blatantly copy ad, offer and landing page, but I am telling you to take some inspiration. My ad copy on this campaign was 100% my own, but it used many of the same ‘salesy’ words seen on other ads that were hitting some of my targets. Many of these have been online for months, it is obviously working for them.

Study those ads and offers and landing pages, and ask yourself why those might work. Go back to the first section and analyze the market to find your answers. I was able to apply this knowledge to my ad for a crazy CTR, and then to my opt-in page for this insane 42% opt-in rate. When I have numbers like this, before I even shoot out emails to them, I know I have the right targets and I know this is going to convert very well.

Give Some Bait, Set The Hook

The best way to get someone to convert is to offer some sort of incentive after you initiate some sort of emotional response from your targets. Joy, fear, and curiosity are some of the best emotional responses for obtaining conversions and making money. My ad provided an incentive download that would solve a huge problem specifically for the people I was sending the ad to. But that is where I cut it off. This provides a sense of curiosity. “What could it be!? How could it solve my problems!?”

That is exactly what you want people to think when they see your ads. This provides a high CTR.

The landing page further reinforced this with a countdown timer. So now I have people not only curious for what they could be downloading (a specific document that will help them solve a specific problem), but now they are heightened with a sense of urgency to grab this download before the timer ticks down and the offer is gone forever (not really, but most people on the internet have the intelligence of an 8 year old and are just that gullible). Here, the hook is set and I now have a new subscriber.

What you do with these new found leads is up to you, but keep applying what you’ve learned here and you’ll find you’re making more and more monies for the bank!

Samsung Galaxy S4

This phone makes me want to drop my old iPhone 4S off my condo balcony. It blows it out of the water. Hell, it blows the iPhone 5 out of the water and unless Apple stop playing it safe, it will probably blow their 5S out, too. Perfect size, light, and extremely quick, it makes the perfect partner for any internet marketer on the go. I can now write emails without fumbling all over the wrong keys, constant crashes and lets not even get started on the iPhone’s miserable battery life (That quickly gets even worse after only a few months of use). While it doesn’t have the best selection of apps, I don’t use my phone for much more than emails or expense keeping which is easy enough with online mobile apps like Mint. I highly recommend this handset!

Ugly Banners Work Better

Sometimes I just need to test some banners quick. When I’m too impatient to wait for my designer, and too lazy to create my own banners, this is the tool I’m turning to. Ugly Banners Work Better is not the best banner generator, but it does a quick crude job. It’s from Adam Tal, the same guy that brought us FBAdsToolbox.com, which I use, as well. I think there are still some kinks to work out here, like font overlapping buttons and additional ad backgrounds and fonts auto-generated would be nice, but I like it.

If there are any other similar tools out there like this, let me know. I would like to review a few more.

Keyword Researcher

This neat tool does a few good things for those into search and PPV marketing. Wildcard searches, seed keyword searches, and related keyword searches. Think of Keyword Researcher as an extreme Google Keyword tool on crack, with the ability to scrape autocomplete search terms from Google, Bing, Youtube and Amazon. This thing has simply blown up my keyword lists for my TrafficVance and various search campaigns. While I’m sure there are other, better tools out there for this, it’s simple and that is all I needed. You can get it here. (Yes, that is an affiliate link)

If you have any tools like these that you would like to see reviewed on the blog, shoot me a message!

Here’s a preview of what you’ll get by downloading this LP. It’ll be awesome in any dating affiliate campaign you are running. You can use it to run traffic direct to the offer or squeeze some emails out of it, too.

Click the image or here to download it!