I receive emails daily from people that have struck gold so to say.  They found them self an offer that is converting well, they’re making money, and they couldn’t be happier… Until…

A couple months later I receive another email stating that the niche has completely dried up on them and they can’t seem to get any of their traffic to convert anymore.  They are trying new landing pages, bidding higher…or lower, new ads, etc…

So what happened?  What made this niche dry up?  Did people just stop needing the product or service?  Occasionally offers do dry up, demand lowers, etc…  However, 9/10 times I find out the person made one huge mistake!

They became a complacent affiliate marketer!  What exactly do I mean by this?  Well, let me break it down for you as I feel you’ll get a better understanding of what I mean if I do.

Imagine you work hard on setting up a niche, let’s say you’re in the dating niche, and after weeks of creating your site, gathering keywords, grouping keywords, and writing ads you finally launch your campaign.  Immediately you see a little success, so you start tuning everything, deleting under-performing keywords, raising bids on converting keywords, split testing ads and ad copy, you test multiple landing pages…  Basically the whole sha-bang…

You take your campaign that was making let’s say 10 dollars a day and now its making you 200 dollars a day.  Your excited, this is your first profitable campaign.  Things are going good, in fact, great!  You can’t believe your making this much money working from home.  Then the problem hits…

Before too long, you start split testing less and less, you quit looking at your keyword data daily and finding new keywords or seasonal keywords.  You’re no longer testing new landing pages or testing different offers within your niche and then suddenly it happens…

You wake up one day and realize your campaign has gone to crap!  You’re no longer making 200 dollars a day but instead you’re making 100 dollars a day.  You think to yourself that it’s just a slow week…then month…then before you have even started to try to fix anything your down to 50 bucks a day!

Suddenly you become frantic, trying desperately to fix your sinking campaign!  You start split testing your ads, landing pages, trying new offers, etc only to realize that it has become inevitable… The campaign that you spent so much time on is no longer working for you because you have become complacent aka LAZY!

Needless to say, you now start working on redoing your entire campaign from scratch…

So before you become the person in the scenario above stop and think about what happens when you become complacent aka lazy!

On a side note, don’t you just love my lazy prairie dog?  He’s knows how to relax aye?

Popularity: 13% [?]

In the last post, I talked about using .htaccess to hide and redirect your affiliate links.  In this post I want to give you another example of a free way that you can do this only this time using php instead of .htaccess.

I’m sure you’ve seen this method used over and over on make money online blogs and probably never noticed it, or if you have, you haven’t implemented it on your site or blog even though it’s extremely easy to do!  This post will show you exactly how to go about redirecting affiliate links or any other type of link using php.  This allows you to link to an affiliate offer multiple times yet if you ever need to change the offer, you’d only have to open up one file and change the url in that file.

If you hovered over a link using this method, you’d most likely see a URL that looks like this…

http://www.clickconsultants.com/goto/wordze.php
or
http://www.clickconsultants.com/recommend/wordze.php

So let’s explain how this works.  The first thing you need to do is log into the FTP of your site and create a folder.  You can give this folder the name goto, recommend, or whatever else you may feel works well for your site.

The next step is to open up notepad or any other simple text editor and add the following code to it.

<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.youraffiliateurl.com/' ) ;
?>

You would of course replace www.youraffiliateurl.com with the actual site or affiliate offer that you want.  Next, you simply save this file using whatever name you want that would describe it.  For example, I could link to Wordze and save the file as wordze.php

Next, upload the file into the folder your created above.  You know have a link which would look something like this.

http://www.clickconsultants.com/goto/wordze.php

You can then use this link in all your articles, landing pages, etc and if you ever need to change the affiliate url, you would simply open up the wordze.php file and change the link, thus, allowing you to change the link across your entire site instantly.

Popularity: 25% [?]

One of the best free ways to redirect your affiliate links is by adding a simple code into your .htaccess file.  This code allows you to link to a page on your website that doesn’t actually exsist and then redirect the user to your affiliate link or another site.

For example, let’s say you’re running an affiliate offer for online dating and you have built your landing page and on your site you’ve included links to several different sub-niches like asian dating, hispanic dating, etc.  So instead of linking to the affiliate offer directly so that others can see that they are being sent to an affiliate offer, you can instead send them to a url like http://www.yoursite.com/asian-dating and when they click on the link it will then redirect them through the affiliate url, thus increasing your CTR% (Click Thru Rate).

Adding this code is extremely easy and setting it up only takes a minute.  Simply open up your .htaccess file and add the following line to it.

redirect 301 /asian-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl

This code will then allow you to link from your landing page to http://www.yoursite.com/asian-dating and then redirect the user to the affiliate offer without them being aware of the affiliate link if they were to hover over one of your links.

You can add this line multiple times using each sub-niche by simply adding each one like this…

redirect 301 /asian-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl
redirect 301 /hispanic-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl
redirect 301 /black-dating http://YourAffiliateUrl

Another great benefit to using .htaccess to redirect your links is that you’re able to add those URL’s anytime in your articles and site and if you ever need to change the affiliate offer you’re using you can simply open up your .htaccess and replace one URL and it will reflect across your entire site!

So, quit changing all your links by hand and increase your CTR% by adding a quick and simple code to your .htaccess file!

In the next post, I will discuss using php to redirect and hide affiliate links which is another great, free method you can use that is very easy to setup as well!  Even if you have never used php or done any php programming.

Popularity: 27% [?]

I did a podcast with Max from Moneybites he asked me a couple questions.  I think it turned out pretty well, we kept it short so you wouldn’t have to site though a bunch of boring stuff and got straight to the point!

Enjoy and make sure to check out Max’s Blog and learn how to earn online.

Popularity: 15% [?]

So, you’ve heard over and over that you should be split testing your ads.  That if you’re not you could be losing out on a lot of money!  However, the question most affiliate have after they figure out what exactly split testing ads means, is what do I split test in my ads?

Below you’ll find 5 different things that you should be testing when you start to split test your ads!

• Capitalization - What is the best way to capitalize your words in your ads?  Should You Capitalize The First Letter of Each Word?  Should you only capitalize the first word of each sentance?  The first letter of Important Words?  How about your display URL?  Should any part of that be capitalized?  This is something that is very important and by simply capitalizing your words a certain way could change your CTR% by crazy amounts!  Unfourtenly, you must test each of these things as it changes depending on the niche!

• Use of Numbers - Should you use an average number when you’re mention numbers or statistics?  For example if the cost is $49.99 for your service or product should you put $50 instead?  Studies have shown that using exact numbers is typically the best approach as it helps to make your ad stand out from all the other competition thats out there!  However, again this isn’t alwasy the case!  You’ll need to test this yourself for each niche you enter!

• Display URLS - Display URLS can be very important and are often ignored as part of your ad writing process!  Most affiliates feel they have 3 lines to work with when it comes to creating ads, however, if you count your display URL, you actually have 4 lines!  Should you capitalize certain letters?  Should you only use the base URL or add a /keyword to it? Should you include the “www” or not?  Again, the key to figuring this out is to test each way until you find the display URL that gives you the greatest conversions and CTR%.

• Ask a Question - A simple way to increase your CTR% normally is to simply ask an inticing question in your ad.  This will cause searchers to think and if they feel their answer will be met on your site, they’ll typically click through.  So make sure you test several different types of questions and also try not having a question.  You’ll never know which way will work best for any given niche unless you test it!

• Write Specific Ads for Each Keyword Group - As most of you have probably heard your adgroups should be tightly grouped by using base keywords.  Naturally and Simple Enough, your ads should be different for each of these adgroups and include teh keywords for each adgroup in the ad!  You should never ever write generic ads and just throw the same ads into each adgroup and expect the results to be good.

There you have it!  5 things to test when you’re split testing your ads.  By testing these 5 different things you can easily take an ad that is getting a CTR% of 2% and increase it to 8%, 12%, or even 20% depending on the niche and amount of competition you have!

So quit your crying and get to work before I pass you up in the niche you’re working on!

Popularity: 16% [?]