Monthly Archives: February 2009

Friday Podcast: Sports Affiliate Marketing With Jason Rubacky

jason rubackyHave you looked at the lucractive world of affiliate marketing for sport franchises and sport-related marketing? Football Fanatics affiliate manager Jason Rubacky came on the Friday Podcast to talk about the wide range of products available under his company’s banner and tips and techniques to successfully promote these items.

During the Friday Podcast, we touched on:

  • Jason’s experience as an affiliate and affiliate manager
  • How Football Fanatics got started and it’s position as a leader in the sport affiliate marketing field
  • Information on the Football Fanatics affiliate program and it’s listing on Commission Junction, ShareASale and it’s in-house program
  • Upcoming enhancements to it’s partner manager (affiliate) interface
  • In addition to football, you can also promote hockey, surfing, NASCAR and MMA (mixed martial arts) products
  • How to effectively generate traffic for your sports affiliate site
  • Pro teams vs College teams: which drive more traffic, and importantly, have greater profit potential

We covered quite a bit of ground during the interview, check out the podcast below:

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Links:

Jason Rubacky on twitter

Football Fanatics

Surf Fanatics

Jason’s blog

Affiliate Summit West 2009 In Pics and Words (Part 3)

If you missed it, here are “Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Pics and Words” – Part 1 and Part 2.

Meeting people in person at tradeshows and seminars and more importantly, talking to them face-to-face has yielded some of the greatest dividends in getting ideas to grow my business, find partners to work on projects and connect with others.

Here’re more folks:

billy kay knoblach

Yes his name really is B Knoblach AKA BillyKay.

Besides his successful Mail Order Shoppe, BK is friendly and always has a smile on his face.

BK’s twitter account.

deb carney loxly

Deb Carney AKA Loxly always gives highly welcome Loxly hugs.

Besides being the boss at outsourced program manager TeamLoxly, actively running Loxly Gallery and producing a number of new podcast at Continue reading

Is PPC Classroom 2.0 Really Free? What’s The Catch?

PPC Classroom 2.0, a program which incorporates pay-per-click training and affiliate marketing training, launched a couple of hours ago with a reported 13.6% conversion rate for the first 2,500 orders being processed. Over a period of 3 hours, 3,000 orders have been processed.

Not surprising given that the course’ creator’s Amit Mehta and Anik Singal have used the business model similar to “free trial” offers you see listed in the CPA networks.

If you’re ordering from the US, you get the course free and pay a $6.97 shipping and handling charge. If you’re overseas/international, you pay $9.97 for the s/h charges.

Is it’s really free?

Besides the 9 module PPC affiliate training course, a DVD training disc and other materials, you’ll also have access to website templates and a free ticket to the PPC Classroom Live workshop (I was there for the first one in Las Vegas and the speakers and material was excellent).

So yes, you will be getting all this stuff for essentially free (the shipping and handling charge pre-qualifies the lead quality).

But What’s The Catch?

If you look at the fine print, you’ll see that you get access to the “PPC Inner Circle” where you’ll get additional access to training at $97/month. You get the first month free with your PPC Classroom purchase.

So what I believe is that Amit and Anik will do their best to overdeliver on the content and help you get results to motivate you to stay in the program.

If you consciously apply the techniques from the course, I’m sure your profits will exceed the $1,200 per year you’ll be paying for the PPC Inner Circle access.

Will I make $10,000 a month after going through the training?

There’re a number of income claims on the sales page about folks making $5,000 a month, $20,000 a month (even $1,000 a day from my friend Josh Wexelbaum, owner of the Scrappy Business blog).

While you can achieve that, given that PPC essentially allows you to buy unlimited web traffic, you will need to work at it, likely putting in quite a bit of time to test, analyze and optimize your campaigns.

What you’re seeing on the sales page is what the top 1% of students are doing in the course. Use that as motivation to spur yourself to take results.

What will help is that Amit is very open in sharing the techniques, tools and strategies he uses in his own business, and being able to replicate a fraction of what he’s achieved will move most affiliates to the next level in their income level.

The major takeaway is to take massive action, in order to get massive results.

If you’re looking for strategies to scale your affiliate business and bring your business to the next level, be sure to check out PPC Classroom 2.0.

TweetDeck Users Read This…

I’ve discovered a major problem that plagues Tweetdeck users who use the free Twitter client to access and post microblogging updates. TweetDeck is bugged by a fairly major issue which will require a solution pretty soon.

Background: I’m an active Twitter user and have been using what I would consider the best Twitter client, TweetDeck, for a couple of months.

Sure it’s had some weird idiosyncrasies like having to shut it down so I could run more bandwidth-intensive applications or MMPOGs on my system, but on the whole, it’s been a pleasant experience (read my earlier review)

I may or may not be the typical Tweetdeck user – here’re my usage habits:

  • My computers are on 24-7. I run mainly Windows XP operating systems (a combination of Professional and Home editions). I reboot when virtual memory drops “dangerously low” or I get a BSOD (blue screen of death).
  • I follow about 200+ Twitter users, some of whom tweet as many as 50 times a day or more.
  • I live in a GMT+8 timezone (which is 13 hours ahead of EST now. My night is your day. I’m snoozing while you’re working)

As a result, it’s not uncommon to wake up to 500+ tweets during the 6 hours I’m sleeping.

Particularly today, my machine crawled to a grinding crawl, and pulling up the Windows Task Manager (hit alt-ctrl-delete to see this):

tweetdeck memory leak

Coming in at #1, TweetDeck with a pretty monstrous 334 MB of memory usage (followed by Firefox where I had about 30 tabs open).

And a screenshot a few Continue reading

My WordPress 2.x Wishlist

Since it’s been almost a year since I set up my last blog, it’s been a somewhat nostalgic experience looking at how the platform has changed since I started using it in 2006 with it’s 1.x incarnation.

Having played with a WP 2.7.1 install, it seems to chug along slower compared to it’s 2.5.1 predecessor, and hopefully this doesn’t signal a path down the bloatware route, even if it comes with lots of shiny bells and whistles, compared to before.

WordPress has become much easier to use now for the most part, with several functions accessible behind the browse-based point-and-click interface. In the past you had to FTP files down, edit them with a text editor and upload them, or use the clunky “theme editor” function and edit the text from there.

I started out in 1997 writing HTML on a text editor and created tables writing raw table, tr,td,/td,/tr, /table tags. I later progressed on to using WYSIWYG text editors and software like XSite Pro. These days I do almost everything exclusively with WordPress only or in tandem with other software like vBulletin forum software, Aweber email autoresponder software, Joomla or some of the new CMSes I’ve been working with recently.

HTML editors have gone to the scrapheap for me. That’s not to say that WordPress is the final word in creating new niche affiliate sites though.

Here is my wishlist:

wishlist

Here are a couple of things that WordPress has done well:

  • Spam control: Akismet works hard to keep trackback spam, comment spam out of the woodwork. I use a couple more for good measure so very little spam is sitting in the moderation basket each day.
  • Tagging: Keywords and tags help readers find relevant content, especially with the millions of blogs floating in the blogosphere. They’re one step further towards relevant and have made older plugins like Tag Warrior float into lesser prominence.
  • Native embedding of video and other embed code: While you had to jump through hoops to place a YouTube video in a blog post, the process is a pretty seamless copy-and-paste job now.

Here are a couple of things that would help WordPress become Continue reading

Friday Podcast: Strategies For Scaling Your Affiliate Business With Miles Baker

miles bakerVeteran marketer Miles Baker gave an insider look at how he’s grown his affiliate business through the process of automation and outsourcing elements of his affiliate marketing business.

Having been on the Friday Podcast series before, you can check out his first podcast interview.

With his experience as an affiliate and affiliate manager, Miles has insights into the affiliate industry which has helped him develop a set of strategies to “work less and earn more”.

In this Friday Podcast, Miles spoke about:

  • How to grow your business
  • How to focus on what’s important and high value within your organization
  • Budgeting how much to spend on scaling your business
  • How to train your employees and outsourcers efficiently
  • What criteria and considerations to factor in as you’re scaling your business

Check out the podcast below:

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Links: