Internet Business Daily

Intro
T3Leads, located in Los Angeles, Ca has just launched the revamped version of their affiliate website. A while back I wrote a review of them and it was pretty positive. The revamped website seems to have improved upon the original version. I would categorize T3Leads as a niche affiliate network, which I will explain more about in this post.

Offers
The first thing I will talk about are their offers. The reason I consider them a niche affiliate network is because they seem to specialize in insurance and loan offers. They have mostly insurance offers that range from auto insurance to burial insurance. I have done a good amount of auto insurance offers in the past and T3Leads payouts are very good. Knowing what the actual conversion process is, is sometimes difficult with affiliate networks but T3Leads makes it clear as day. They also point out average conversion rates for different types of traffic right in their offer description. If you are big into insurance offers, I would definitely suggest trying them out.

Backend
Having a great, easy to read backend is difficult to accomplish. T3Leads for the most part gets it right. There are a few complains I have though. Initially, it was a little difficult for me to find the offers. I would have liked to seen a big “offers” button right on the homepage. The reporting system however is great. It is easy to use and very quick. There are definitely some things they need to iron out in their backend but for the most part it is very well implemented. Here is a screenshot.

Payout
Generally, when you have a niche affiliate network, they are able to pay higher than normal rates because they kill one section of the industry. This is the case with T3Leads. From what I’ve seen, they pay very well for insurance offers. Just like any network, if you are pushing a large volume of leads, you have the option to negotiate a higher payout. I always suggest affiliates do this. T3Leads pays every other week by default. As with any other network if you are driving lots of dollars to them, you can request speedier payments.

Landing Pages
One of the most unique features of T3Leads is their private landing pages. These are pages you download and self-host on your own server. They come with a built in CMS and can be edited to fit your needs. This is unlike any other network I’ve seen and is very surprising. I always want to change the default landing pages offers usually have to optimize them but am never able to. Now, I can pretty much do anything I want with these landing pages. They also offer automated form creators, which is another great feature to make landing page creation easier.

Overall
Just like any other network the best way to determine if this network is for you is to give them a try. T3Leads is a niche network focusing on insurance and loan offers so if that is your bread and butter, definitely give them a try. Their updated site is definitely an upgrade from the previous version and with some minor tweaks here and there, they can become even better.

Jon Volk has recently released his long awaited Facebook Ads Guide product. Basically, it’s an ebook + bonus materials going over everything a beginner/intermediate needs to know to run successful affiliate marketing campaigns on Facebook. Jon is not some random guy writing an ebook, he is a successful affiliate marketer and has been killing Facebook ads for a while, making almost $3,700/day using the same methods he teaches in this ebook. Facebook has become the highest trafficked website on the internet and because of this, it is a great place to start affiliate marketing. It is much more simple and now has more volume that Google Adwords.

I’ve purchased a few ebooks in my time, but Jon was kind enough to give me a review copy for free. After reading the entire thing, reviewing the methods he describes, and studying the bonus materials, I can easily say that I would pay for this ebook. I would say that the book is geared more towards beginners however it contains a lot of useful information for more advanced affiliate marketers as well. I have been using Facebook ads for quite some time now and I still found some new information from this book.

What else do you get?

• Facebook Affiliate Offers Guide – This is a guide written by Ryan Eagle, the owner of EWA, a great affiliate network. This hasn’t been released yet, but looks like it can be very powerful.
• Facebook Ads Guide Newsletter – Occationally you will receive a newsletter with all the top offers that you can run on Facebook with tips and tricks on how you can run the offers.
• Top Fan Page List / Guide – Learn how to utilize fan pages to better target your advertising! Includes a list of the top fan pages in numerous categories.
• Keyword Targeting List – Special facebook keyword list formulated to help you target specific people groups that you normally cannot target. This was one of my favorite things that came with the ebook.

There were a few things missing from the facebook ads guide though. Recently, facebook made some changes to its bidding systems. They sent out an email saying that CPM bidding was going to start getting less clicks because it should be used for “brands that need views rather than clicks.” CPC bidding prices went way up because of this because a lot of people switched to CPC bidding. I tried CPM bidding on ads that I know had good CTRs, and got literally zero clicks. This is because with CPM bidding, they mostly show your ads to people who are known to not click on advertisements. I would have liked to see Jon’s guide address this new issue.

I would have also liked to see Jon go into bidding strategy a little more. One last thing I think could have been covered better is exactly how to start testing a big campaign. Knowing how to go about testing a large demo and gradually splitting the successful demo’s out and pausing the unsuccessful ones is a big part of facebook ads strategy.

Other than those few additions I would like to see, the facebook ads guide product is excellent. I am sure Jon will be updating his ad guide with more information regularly, so the facebook ads guide is a great investment for affiliates. I suggest if you are new or even decently familiar with facebook ads that you purchase this ebook.

2nd UPDATE: The page has been removed and the writer has been deleted.
UPDATE: I looked through all of this writer’s articles and they all contain shady affiliate links. Yahoo, you are stupid.

This must be the most ridiculous thing I have seen in a while. Either a writer at Yahoo! Shine’s account got hacked by an affiliate or someone at Yahoo got tricked into posting this article with affiliate links.

Using 50′s images (shown here) and a story about how 50 cent lost a bunch of weight for a movie, an affiliate marketer was able to get 2 of his affiliate links to weight loss products to the Yahoo homepage. Someone is definitely making a lot of money on this. Someone at Yahoo really messed up on this one. This is one of the shadiest (and funniest) affiliate marketing plays I’ve seen in my time.

John Chow wrote a post recently about how he made $1,399.90 just by using the cash back program with his credit card. Well, I just did the same thing.

All of my affiliate marketing spending gets charged to my business credit card I have through WellsFargo. One of the benefits of this card is that I earn rewards points for every dollar I spend on the card. Over the past year, I have spent a ton of money on this card buying traffic. I recently decided to check how many rewards points I have and found that I have well over 100,000. WellsFargo provides an entire store of things I can buy with these points, but in the end all I wanted was cash in my pocket. For every 50,000 points I have I get $500 cash. So having over 100,000 points means I just ordered 2 checks from WellsFargo totaling $1,000. This is basically free money for me, which I will then reinvest into affiliate marketing to make more money from it!

WellsFargo is not the only bank that has programs like this. Almost every bank has some type of rewards program or cash back program when you spend money on a credit card. I suggest anyone in the affiliate marketing game (or anyone with a business) sign up with their bank’s program.

One very important thing to note is that I always paid off my credit card in full every month. If you spend a lot of money on your credit card and don’t pay it off you will be paying ridiculous interest rates, which will make your cash back rewards moot. Be responsible with your credit and pay it off in full every month and you will reap the benefits of rewards points or cash back.

UPDATE: Check out my Facebook Ads Guide review. Facebook Ads Guide is an all-in-one guide to making money using facebook ads for affiliate marketing.

Here we go again. An internetbusinessdaily.net reader was kind enough to show me this Facebook ads coupon for $71.88. I know it is a weird amount, but that’s because it is converted from another currency. Here are the steps to receive this coupon:

• 1. Go to qapacity.com/promote/facebook and sign up for an account.
• 2. Wait for the confirmation email and confirm your account.
• 3. Log in and goto the promote tab.
• 4. Click the “read more” button in the middle of the page.
• 5. Redeem your code.

That’s it! Have fun.

It’s a new year and it’s time to get to business. I am continuing to consult for some clients for SEO and PPC marketing but have started researching new affiliate marketing products to promote as well. My goal for the first few months of 2010 is to build up a nice amount of passive income through a few steady affiliate marketing campaigns.

Last year, all of my affiliate marketing campaigns were very volatile. One month I would make 5 figures and another month I would make nothing. Although this is exciting and has the potential to make more overall money, having consistent income is more important to me right now. I will update IBD with my progress when I start.

I couldn’t think of an image to add to this post, so here is a picture of my new puppy.

I have been doing a lot of affiliate marketing lately and one of my biggest concerns is always protecting my landing page from competitors. Since I’m tracking every visitor that comes to my landing page, I can get a good idea of how many of those visits are competitors looking for ideas for their sites. I can’t really blame them, I check up on my competitors as well. This doesn’t mean I don’t attempt to protect myself.

With the help of Ben from WickedFire.com I put together a short script that will cloak your site from anyone not coming from the exact sources you specify. You can even white list IP addresses to make sure no direct traffic comes to the site that doesn’t belong there. Be careful with that one since you might be sending away actual customers. I always redirect to the offer page just to be certain.

So, here is the script:

<?php

if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
 $referer = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

 preg_match(‘/[^.]+\.[^.]+$/’, $referer['host'], $match);

  if ($match[0] != ‘trafficsource.com’) {
   header(“Location: http://www.offerpage.com”); //redirect all traffic that comes from any source except the one listed above
   exit;
  }
}

if(empty($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
 $visitor = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

 if (!(preg_match(“/xx.xxx.xxx.xx/”,$visitor)) && !(preg_match(“/yy.yyy.yyy.yy/”,$visitor))) {
 header(‘Location: http://www.offerpage.com?subid=directTraffic’); //redirect all IP addresses to this that are not the IP addresses listed above
  exit;
 }
}

?>

This should do the trick. Remember to fill out the correct information in the script, it won’t “just work.” One last thing to remember is that when you enter a traffic source, it should be the root domain (myspace.com, google.com, facebook.com) and nothing else. The script will parse the referring source down to just the root domain. You can add as many IP addresses as you want just by adding another AND (&&) operator. You can also tweak this code to cloak your site anyway you want. Hope you enjoy!

Well, it’s not really a guest post but a list of beginner’s tips I wrote in a post on WickedFire that Jon enjoyed and decided to post on his blog. Here’s the link to the beginner’s Facebook tips.

The very next day after I wrote that a lot of things changed on Facebook. They started accepting pretty much any type of advertising, as opposed to before when they were very restrictive. One thing I would like to append to that article is that Facebook is now approving ads at all hours it seems. I had a group of ads approved at 2pm PST. The prime time to get ads approved is still middle day though.

I’ll be posting an article to this blog soon, so come back soon!

I was talking with Neil from NeilsWeb.com a couple days ago and he gave me a really cool script to deal with clicks from Facebook’s adboard. For those of you not familiar, adboard is a listing of most of the ads that are relevant to you on Facebook. There is a little link under the ads on the right side (shown below) that you can click to get there.

Problem:
Adboard is a great place to get competitive information. You can see all the ads targeting your demographic on a single page. Because of this, I assume 95% of the clicks you get from the adboard are from your competitors. This is especially true in the affiliate marketing world. So when my competitor sees my ad and then clicks it, they also can see my landing page. This is 75% of a profitable formula. So Neil gave me a great idea (and script) to prevent my competitors from seeing my landing page coming from the adboard, which is a huge help.

Solution:
The solution to this is to send all clicks coming from the adboard to a different landing page. You can send them directly to the offer, or a different page all together. I am not certain this exact practice is allowed by FB, so I have asked my account manager and am awaiting my response.

So, how do we redirect all clicks from the adboard? A simple php script below (this is a modified script from the one that Neil gave me):

<?php
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if ($ref == ‘http://www.facebook.com/ads/adboard/’) {
header(“Location:http://www.adifferentwebsite.com”);
exit;
}
?>

That’s it. This code basically detects the referring URL and redirects the click if it comes from the adboard. A few things to remember: 1. this does not catch clicks if the user copies/pastes the URL from the adboard, without actually clicking. 2. you are still paying for the clicks that you redirect. 3. this may be against FB’s TOS, so use at your own risk.

Problem:

I recently ran into a problem while running an affiliate marketing campaign. The problem was that since I was changing my ad copy so often, the same people would click my ads multiple times and land on the same landing page and would leave (because they had already been to it and left). This caused the amount of clicks from my landing page to the offer page to decline gradually because return visitors thought they were going to a new site when they actually weren’t (since my ad they clicked on was different).

A similar problem was people who did click through to the offer page and were back a second time. In this case they converted and won’t convert again, or did not convert because they didn’t like the offer. Either way I had to think of something else to do with these repeat visits.

Solution:

I thought about it and came up with a solution. I created a little cookie dropping script that tested two things: 1. did they already come to my landing page? 2. did they click through to the offer page? Here is the code:

<?php
if ( isset($_COOKIE['clicked'])) {

header(“Location: http://www.anothersimilaroffer.com”);
exit;
}

if ( isset($_COOKIE['landed']) && ($_COOKIE['landed'] <= time()-60*5) ) {
header("Location: http://www.adifferentlandingpage.com/");
exit;
}

$month = time()+60*60*24*30;
$value = time();
setcookie("landed",$value, $month);
?>

Put this code at the top of your landing page.

In addition, you will also have to set another cookie (shown below) called “clicked” when they click your outbound link to the offer page:

<?php
$month = time()+60*60*24*30;
$value = time();
setcookie(“clicked”,$value, $month);
?>

Basically, how it works is when a new user visits, it will set the “landed” cookie. If they leave after that nothing else happens. If they click the outbound link to the offer page, a cookie called “clicked” will be set.

When a repeat visitor comes back it will check to see if they went to the offer page first. If they did you can redirect them to another similar offer instead. If the repeat visitor landed but did not click through (left your site), you can redirect them to another landing page for the same offer, which may give a conversion. NOTE: it gives a user 5 minutes after leaving your site before the redirect will occur.

This will at least give you some control over people who click your ads multiple times and either don’t like your landing page or don’t like the offer you are selling.