It began a couple days ago, Facebook users could check out the new layout with all its aesthetically pleasing appeal simply by visiting http://www.new.facebook.com. Now starting this morning users have been given the prompts enticing them to switch over and try it out.

So what is new?

• New Menu Bar
• Mini-Feed and Wall are now under the wall tab
• A new “Bio” box
• Complete rearrangement of tabs for your wall, info, photos, and apps
• Facebook Apps are now found in the “Boxes” tab
• Users can add extra tabs
• Use your webcam to take a photo or record a video to add to your collection or post on the Wall of your friends

So what does this mean to advertisers and affiliate marketers using Facebook Ads? Well the first thing I noticed was that there is an additional ad unit on the right side of the page. The old layout had simply one ad unit on the left hand side of the page, and now there seems to be more white space as well as not one but two ad units on the right. (Note: after surfing for awhile the two ad units switched back to 1, so this may be facebook’s way of controlling click fraud.) This only applies to profiles however. The “home” page no longer has ANY ad units on it whatsoever, and affiliates are going to see a drop in traffic from this undoubtedly.

New Facebook:

Old Facebook:

Facebook may simply be doubling its rev share with this move but more importantly this will mean more competition for affiliate marketers. Instead of having prime placement for your campaigns, you will now have to compete with a secondary offer either above or below your ad, and while I am not certain whether or not the ad’s being displayed are by the same advertisers, my best guess would be that you are competing directly now for the traffic.

Another big change that advertisers are going to notice is that the applications have been moved into their own panel. This is a grey area since I haven’t really done any work with Facebook app’s as of yet, but any advertisers out there that use Facebook applications for promotions and campaigns, it would be interesting to see what kind of changes you see because of this.

Overall I don’t really mind the new redesign, although I feel that a lot of the less internet savvy users are going to have issues adapting to the changes. The wall and mini-feed conjoined isn’t really a bad move, and the custom tabs leaves room for a lot of customization so I think Facebook might be on to something with that. Let’s just hope they don’t take the customization too far and turn into Myspace 2.0.

So I recieved an email from a friend the other day recommending I should start blogging about something relevant and useful, and I came up with nothing. Then he suggested paying me to write something useful, at which point I also refused… Finally he said that I should check out blog marketing because they will pay me to actually write content that doesnt even have to be useful, to which i scoffed. Could it be true? Was there actually a system in which I could be paid to write something people will find no use in whatsoever? SIGN ME UP BILLY!

Anyway to make a long gregarious story short, I signed up and this was my first assigned task once my blog was approved. (Yes they actually screen your blog for PR and Alexa rank) So now that I am a new “postie” as they call me, I get to talk about what i love best about PPP (PayPerPost), or triple P’s as I like to call it.

Well lets start off with the positives, I like triple P’s opportunity to make money. Did I mention that getting paid is nice? There are actually some crazies that blog so much they have earned over $20,000 with triple P… impressive. The system is easy enough, you just pick whatever niche you wanna talk about and you get anywhere from $5 to $50 per post, which may or may not be worth your time, but hey does it look like I care?

Either way, if you want to squeeze some juice out of your blog and write about stuff that may or may not be relevant to your readers, check out PPP, you may or may not be disappointed. I guess that really depends on how you look at it.

Heres the neat little disclosure button they get you to include in your posts, isn’t it cute?

For most webmasters and affiliate marketers, Google AdWords is their bread and butter, and rightfully so.  AdWords is a beast of an advertising system, and if targeted properly its earning potential can be great. If you follow some of these strategies then maybe even you can make money off Google AdWords.

1. The merchant or vendor site should have a professional look to it, in order to ensure the surfer that it is a credible product/service that they will be buying into.

2. Make sure to be able to maintain a level of communication between you and your affiliate preferably through an AM.  This will help you realize which ads convert better as well as keep you updated with new offers.

3. When you are paying for clicks, you need to realize the ratio between what will be a positive return and what wont be.  Try and promote affiliate products that will pay more than $15 in commission to get your ROI up. Clickbank is good for this.

4. The landing pages and sales sites need to be top of the line. If the customer is unhappy with the appearance of the page, it is more than unlikely they are going to invest their money into what your selling.

5. Same goes for the sales copy and actual marketing that is done ON the landing page.  It should include testimonials , and other key selling features in order to ease any hesitations the buyer may have.

6. Would you buy it? Ask yourself this when choosing a campaign for your affiliate program.  Chances are if you wouldn’t buy it, then most people wouldn’t be comfortable buying it either.

7.  Affiliate links are fine with your vendor as long as they are low key.  It can kill a sale if the user feels like he is getting scammed or bought into something.

8. The referring page for the vendor website should only have one product/service on it.  If there are multiple products the user can get confused by the sales messages and become hesitant to buy.

9. Tracking!  Keep a keen eye on your keywords and phrases. If any of them are getting higher than a 1:200 buy:click ratio, they need to be cut off.  A decent ratio to look for is around 1 in 50 creating a sell.  The higher the click-through rate, the better rankings you get on your niche.

10. Most affiliates will keep a record of email addresses for all your referrals.  This makes sure that you get credit for a sale even if the customer took 4-5 visits before buying… which is the case a lot of the time.

So you want to be the next super affiliate and make uber amounts of cash online… great… grand.. fantastic. There’s no magic formula that is going to get you rich quick, so if thats what your looking you need to go beg your boss to give you your job back. What you need to do is understand exactly what your getting into, and what affiliate marketing really is. I get asked on a daily basis what it is I do, and how I can help other people make money online, so I figured I would help you all out a little bit.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

First of all to get into affiliate marketing you need to break down exactly what it is. The first thing is obviously the affiliate, a company in which you will promote their offers for cold hard cash. Depending on the offer you will either get paid per click, per lead (signup), or per impression. There is undoubtedly greater detail for each but we will keep it simple here. Next there is the marketing aspect in which you will need to market those affiliates’ offers and try to get other people to do one of those aforementioned things. (click/lead/impression)

Which Affiliate Companies are Best?

Now you are probably wondering what to look for when you go to signup for an affiliate company. One of the most important things to look for is the quality of the customer service and of course the reputation of the company. I would suggest reading around some affiliate related forums to give you some insight. There are literally tons of affiliates out there depending on what you are trying to sell. If it takes longer than a week to approve you for their program or there has been no contact from an AM (affiliate manager) then its more than likely not the best bet. If however when you signup you are greeted by a friendly email and are given numerous methods of contact, then you may be on the right track.

The Marketing Aspect

So great you’ve decided upon one of the numerous affiliate companies out there, now what? Well you need to start pushing those offers and try to get some leads. What is the best way to do this you may ask? SPAM! No just kidding, the truth is the vast majority of affiliate marketers don’t really make that much money. Around 10% make 90% of the money, and thats just the way it is. They’ve built monopolies on certain market segments and it is extremely hard to topple some of those strangleholds. However don’t give up all hope yet!

The secret to affiliate marketing lies within the niche you choose to market. If you look through your affiliate companies campaign listing, you will see there is pretty much an offer for any type of product you can think of. And if its not there, then you can bet there is another affiliate company or program somewhere out there to cater to your specific needs. An example of this is a hip hop forum that I was running and wasn’t getting that many leads for the offers my affiliate company was offering. I switched over to an affiliate program for the clothing supplier DrJays.com and started to make some nice dough off of actual sales. Affiliate marketing is all about tweaking and testing your offers until you hit a home run, and then once you find that golden gem, you need to drive it into the ground until the wheels fall off.

Putting it all together

There are other ways to earn money through affiliate marketing without the need for a website, although you will need a landing page. But Lorne I am slow, what the hell is a landing page?! A landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link, taking them to your offer and hopefully getting them to signup, and getting you a conversion. An example of this would be facebook ads, where you can simply setup an offer through their developer network and pay per click. The premise here being that if you pay for example .20 cents a click, and your offer pays out $1 per lead then you would need 1 signup for every 5 clicks to break even. Obviously no one wants to break even, you want a positive return on your investment (ROI).

So on a very basic level I hope I have given you some insight as to exactly what affiliate marketing is, so that next time when one of you donkeys goes to ask me exactly what it is, I can simply direct you to this article

Earlier today a friend recommended I check out SEO Digger which is a totally free to use competitive analysis tool, which displays keywords your website ranks for. With a massive database of 44 million unique keywords and keyphrases you can see where you rank for your most popular keyphrases in an instant.

I had been using SEO Elite for all my keyword analysis but I feel that SEO Digger deserves a chance, seeing as their interface allows you to conduct analysis from any internet browser, without the need for an external program.

In terms of tracking SEODigger uses Overture and Wordtracker to show keyword popularity, alongside with google to show your current ranking. Other similar sites that achieve this are SpyFu (AdWords & Organic), KeyCompete (AdWords), and URL Trends (Organic).

Well its a new year, and that means that I should probably get off my ass and get down to business as usual. So for 2008 I figured I would give some insight as to the best ways in which to garner traffic to your website for the new year.

Social Networks

With the booming explosion of facebook and myspace, marketers should once again look to utilize these resources in order to drive substantial traffic to their websites. Numerous web developers have seen great success using facebook ads to publicize their sites or push conversions on their affiliate offers, and either way you will see improvements.

Blogs

Blogs are going to continue to be utilized in 2008, with networks like blogrush and mybloglog you can expect to drive traffic to your sites using the traffic and social systems of these sites. The best thing about blogrush is that it is totally free and the traffic you drive can be targetted for your specific niche. The best thing about blogs is the fact that if your writing unique content you can get other webmasters to help build your traffic flow simply by linking to your articles. Content will always be king.

Social Networking & Bookmarks

We will continue to use social networks such as Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Stumbleupon, reddit and the long list of up and comers to drive traffic and build backlinks to our sites. While getting your stories dugg or stumbled isnt the easiest thing to do, as long as you keep submitting viral stories sooner or later you will start to see traffic flowing. While the majority of the users are going to be ad blind, it will still be one of the best ways to drive traffic and backlinks for your sites.

Google

Still the powerhouse of the internet, valued at $66.5 Billion US Dollars, and not something that looks to change anytime soon. Getting your websites and articles ranked high in the SERPS will ALWAYS drive you targetted traffic and tons of it depending on the relevance and search popularity of your terms. While backlinks and SEO are the most important things to consider when trying to rank for google, once you struggle with rankings for awhile and work on building high quality niche relevant links to your pages, you will start to see significant traffic from the search engine leader.

Article Writing

Well content is still king in 2008… Not much has changed there. The only thing that has changed is who is writing your content. With guest blog writers and some very inexpensive article writing services available on the various webmaster forums around the net, you can keep a steady stream of articles flowing for less than $50 a month if you know where to look. However if you have garnered a reputable name for yourself in the industry you can even find yourself writing articles for others and making a pretty penny.

Overall in 2008 you should look to continue to utilize the booming social media networks and social platforms to drive traffic that is targeted for your niches, these are the top performers right now in terms of my traffic generation and I suspect that these methods shall remain prevalent for the rest of the year.

The best parties? Internet ballers? Champagne?

Since these are all terms synonymous with the lifestyle im accustomed to living then I am definitely off to a good start! So who am I you may be asking? In case you cant read, or are mildly dyslexic, my name is Lorne Fade, and I’m just your regular run of the mill 23 year old college student with aspirations of the highest degree. In terms of affiliate marketing, I have been in the industry for awhile now, whipping up ingenious ways to earn a buck online, and doing pretty well considering I haven’t worked a real 9-5 job in 6+ years.

I might not always use the most “white-hat” methodologies to get my traffic and rankings, however I try to stay within the realm of “staying out of jail”, so lets call it greyhat. I have dabbled in the poker industry with a few sites, buying and flipping pokeraffiliated.com last year for a very modest ROI.

Currently I am looking into promoting an up and coming poker site pokerspace.com. While the poker affiliate industry is as lucrative as ever, I decided to part ways with it back when there was the gambling ban online in the US.

I think I would be the perfect choice for this trip for a multitude of reasons. First off I have extensive experience in the industry, and maybe you guys can convince me to come back to casino/poker affiliation. Secondly, I not only know my way around a party, but I AM the party. If you need the life of the party look no further, put some liquor in me and I’m good to go…

So strap on your boots Jeremy and Greg, and get ready to party like a rockstar! And on a totally unrelated note, I’ve never been overseas in my 23 young years and would really love the opportunity to not only see the sights, but to hang with some of the top dogs in the industry, it would be the chance of a lifetime. I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen… Thanks for considering my entry guys, and best of luck to everyone else.

But hey aren’t bots against facebook TOS?!
Simple answer. Who cares?

So the other day I felt like spending some money on some *nearly* useless products, and after having no luck with the free “facebook bot” I opted for the more user friendly version of the same thing, and after some digging, I found a nice little bot called Facebook Tools. After $70 deduction to my paypal account and about 4 emails to the supposed owner of the bot, I finally was given a download link that worked, and was able to activate the bot. (online activation, so cracking is gonna be tough, but not impossible :P)

So I went to work, made a bunch of accounts the old fashioned way (hot girl, a few scandalous pics, and a whole lot of way too friendly “about me” information) After pumping out a few accounts I thought I’d give facebook tools a run for its money.

I ran the friend adder successfully for about an hour on my verified account.. but wait m getting ahead of myself here. I had to “borrow” a cell phone just to get that account verified, so I could bypass the annoying captcha process facebook has instilled upon us. Which presents a totally different challenge in that I will need to find a method for bypassing the captcha OR a way in which to verify the accounts without dropping more money on unneeded cellular numbers.

A friend suggested that skype has a service where I can get numbers for $20, so we will have to do some research and see if that would be a worthwhile investment. Anyway back to the bot, I setup a neat little app on my (hot chick) facebook account entitled My Web Embed, which worked wonderfully in the implementation of my affiliate links, and I was up and running.

I put together a nice list of offers with the infamous “more profile pictures” and started up the bot. I ran the friend adder after scraping some FB id’s from a group dedicated to hot women (and shallow men, just the kind im going after :P) I’m going to leave it adding overnight and hopefully in the morning we will see some progress in the dollars department. (I didn’t want to run the adder without a 10 second delay between add’s to minimize bot-like suspicion…even though this probably doesn’t even matter)

After about half an hour of running the bot, I had sent out around 500 friend requests, and was already starting to see some clicks on my affiliate links, and actually made $18, which is a pretty good start.

The thing about facebook is that a lot of the users actually screen their friends, so its hard to filter out the more intelligible users. Your inbox may start to look this way:

This is probably not a problem, as long as these users don’t start to flag your accounts, and as long as you keep your friend requests to a decent number (probably 70 a day), you should be able to minimize suspicion and therefore increase your earnings. After some deeper digging I found that I only actually sent out about 80 of those requests successfully after which this message began to appear:

Okay, well folks, the cat is out of the bag, and if you haven’t already heard, the new Google Adwords is facebook ads. So how the hell are you supposed to use facebook to make money you ask? The answer is simple.

First and foremost you need to decide on something you wish to advertise. Think about the facebook demographics, who uses it the most.. and you should come up with both males and females ages 19-25, with the dominant group being the females. Now in order to cash in off of these pretty women, you need to think OUTSIDE THE BOX!

Ive been testing ad campaigns for several weeks, tweaking and testing and getting my cpr % up slowly and diligently, and with limited success I realized what was wrong… I was using the wrong image. I’ve come to find that the text you use has little to no effect whatsoever on whether or not the ad gets clicked, it simply comes down to the image, and the title to some degree, but not nearly as much as the image.

Heres an image I’ve been playing with and seeing some pretty decent results:

Now as you can see, there is pretty much NO text below the image, and I feel that makes it stand out more so than other ads. I’ve decided not to discuss numbers simply because I haven’t really invested big yet, but my ROI is well above 200% which is more than lucrative.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I was promoting a dating ad, but that is bottom of the barrel in terms of advertising… dating is becoming more and more saturated and im actually noticing my clicks dropping daily, despite the constant tweaking and testing I’ve been doing. So what ever will I do?!

Remember how I was talking about how the majority of users are women ages 19-25… What do women in that demographic want? I know your not Mel Gibson and you can’t read their mind, but if you can think logically and come up with some ideas (make-up, designer purses…?) as to what they MIGHT want, you will be well on your way to baking that cake as fast as you can!

And remember above all, hard work pays off… I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen!! Now get out there and make some dough!

Well it has been a long time coming, and most of the people I know got out of the game ages ago when the “Myspace Marketing” fad was growing near its saturation point. Today I received an email from Millnic Media which is basically putting the nail in the proverbial Myspace spam coffin. (Although I’m sure there are still other viable affiliate networks for Myspace Marketing)

Hello Lorne,

This is the second very serious email I have written in two weeks. It’s so not like us, but into every CPA Network a little hammer must fall.

All drollery aside, MillNic Media does not tolerate or condone Myspace traffic. Some of our affiliates have been running offers there, so we wanted to remind everyone of the Terms of Service. The Terms of Service is the list of rules and conditions you agree to when you sign up with the network. If you break these conditions, “you will forfeit your entire commission for all programs and your account will be terminated”. Although this warning is redundant, it’s still what happens when you run MillNic Offers on Myspace (for posterity: you don’t get paid, and your account gets shut down now and forever)Great. It’s all very clear now so there wont be any confusion. If you have questions as to the rules and regulations that govern the network please have a chat with your affiliate manager.

Sincerely,

MillNic Media
www.millnicmedia.com www.bestcpanetwork.com

http://millnicmedia.com

So if that doesn’t speak loud and clear, then maybe you deserve to get your affiliate account shut down and never receive any of your “free iphone” or “ringtone” money. Either way if you are still in the Myspace game for whatever reason, it may be time to start looking into new social networks for your marketing purposes. (Facebook Marketing anyone?)