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!

Keep your office clean. I tend to linger around my office for longer hours when I’m not surrounded by dirty plates and trash thrown around. I used to be one of those lazy guys, but a) it just isn’t healthy, and b) it made me move around and lose things more often.

Don’t forget a nice desk to pair with that ergonomic chair. Keep your feet squarely on the floor and make sure your thighs are angled ever so slightly up as to not put your full weight on the lip of the chair. This keeps blood flow from your legs a little more clear. Make sure you get up and move around a few minutes every hour or so. Failure to do so can cause serious health risks and even cause death to people who would normally otherwise look relatively healthy. Look up deep vein thrombosis for more info on that!

Also, make sure you are looking up at a very slight angle at your monitor. I’ve seen far too many examples where people are hunched over looking down at their monitor. All those hipsters with their Mac Books at Starbucks aren’t doing their heart or back and neck a favor by using their notebook rather than a proper desktop and monitor solution.

Keeping comfortable keeps me at my PC and leaves me with less stress, able to tackle more problems and build more campaigns than my competitors.

Many people approach me for coaching with questions like “How long will it take you to teach me how to make $100 per day?” or “What is the easiest way to make $100 a day?”. Half the time I never reply because I know these are the kinds of people that have been too blinded by Warrior Special Offers and guru blasts to realize that I don’t run a business that relies on me easily getting what I want. They’d be poor students and would most likely drop out after an hour or two of talking with me and seeing that I put in more hours per day than the average nine-to-fiver.

Honestly, if you want to know where the easiest place to make $100 bucks is with the least amount of pain and zero skills, McDonalds is always hiring. You could be a brain-dead monkey and make $100 in a couple days. I put in an average of 40+ working hours to get a new campaign to a stable $100 a day, and that’s only after I’ve gone through several campaigns that go bust, all with that amount of time sunk into them. And that is with 5+ years of experience.

Call me a negative Nancy, or whatever you will, but I can’t stand hearing people say I’ve got it easy. Every true internet marketer I know that makes a good buck online works their asses off. If they are out of the office, they’ve got someone else grinding some part of their business away in their place, and when they get back in, they’re right back into it. I’ve got a team, working around the clock for me, yet you can still find me in front of my PC looking for new and exciting ways to scale my campaigns an average of 10+ hours per day.

So, want to be a real Internet marketer? Get to grips with how much you will truly have to sacrifice- that can include time, money, and even relationships. It’s as tough as starting your own restaurant or avenue store. Then when it’s time to scale, it’s like trying to build a big box store. Make realistic goals, put in some real research outside of all that guru BS, and prepare yourself for a rough first few months. Being an Internet/Affiliate marketer is not easy.

I’ve talked about doing research before. Part of doing research is finding out what a specific demographics problems might be. When I want to go super niche, you can get very defined into what the specific problem is (say for one off health issues or, in my example, PC software/hardware issues).

I was search Clickbank for new offers when I stumbled upon a flight simulation program. As I am a flight simmer myself, it was perfect. I’m sure many of you are aware of Microsoft Flight Simulator. However, you may not be aware that the software is highly unoptomized for today’s PC hardware, despite being released many years ago. It’s slow and clunky once you get to dense scenery areas.

Knowing the main problem with this software that 90% of flight simmers used, I was able to create a solution styled ad that offered this “new software” that ran fast, had amazing graphics, and didn’t require a super computer to run. This campaign had a huge clickthrough rate across display, PPV, and Facebook and ran me an ROI of about 500 – 600%. At the peak of the campaign, I was spending $100 a day and making $500. Eventually, flight simmers wised up (I started seeing forum threads on popular flight sim forums start talking about my ads, my landing pages, and the offer), and I started getting so many refunds that I was losing money, but I learned a great lesson running that campaign.

Find a specific problem, target people that have that problem, and feed them an exact solution. While I question my ethics back in the day, there are plenty of cleaner paths you can take which I now tread, as well.