Sort of a continuation of my previous post, Firefox has decided to take it one step further and attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours, and if anyone can do it, Firefox 3 can.

They have setup an affiliate page in pretty much every language you can think of with banners like the one below, so if you haven’t already, click below and pledge your allegiance to Firefox 3, and help set a world record. And if you decide to sign up to their affiliate program over at spreadfirefox.com you can earn points for your efforts which can win you t-shirts, if thats your thing.

At the time of writing this they are at roughly 175,000 users who pledged to download on the release day, and firefox itself had been downloaded 562992952 times, finally people are pushing IE under the carpet.

So go ahead and pledge to download Firefox 3 and set a Guinness World Record. I voted but im pretty sure it will come down to what the superdelegates want.

Update:

Download day is today!

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

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.

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?)

We knew it was going to happen. Digg users try to game the site by copying articles and then passing those said articles off as their own work. Also users engineer written works in the Digg user base to increase popularity and thus forth increasing traffic to their site.

While other Digg users have gone off to forums such as DP and sitepoint in “Digg-trades” whereas they can gain a vast amount of diggs for relatively cheap or for returning other users’ diggs. (.30 each for 50 diggs in the current example)

However unethical it may be, it is being done and these “Digg Gamers” are taking advantage of the tremendous amounts of traffic sent from digg. Even with the traffic not being the best in terms of monetization (Digg users tend to know not to click ads, and will only do so by accident most times), it is still traffic, and that means return visitors and maybe future sell’s for you and your affiliates.

An article I read over at SEOmoz, titled “The anatomy of a Super Digg” explains exactly how he gamed Digg users with viral articles written simply for the basis of gaining quick readability and interest.

Over the coming weeks I am going to attempt to “game” Digg with some viral marketing and some catchphrase titles, I may use the Digg systems used on the forums however I am afraid I may be penalized by Digg for using these unethical methodologies… only time will tell.  If anyone has any experience with using Digg-trades please let me know how it went for you.

Print media is very expensive these days. All small magazine ad in a well published magazing could easily cost you upwards of $500 a month. That could be for an add the size of 2″ x 1″. A full page ad can cost thousands monthly. So, should we disregard major print media as a possible source of advertising? Try this alternative instead.

If you have a forum providing excellend discussions and information that people are in need of, spend some time accumulating a list of print media contacts in your field. So if you have a computer related forum, build a list of contacts from computer related publications. Try to find the email addresses of writers, which is normally quite simple to do. After you compile a decent list of maybe 20-50 email addresses, write a BRIEF yet compelling email that you can send out to these writers. Obviously most attempts will be ignored, but it may only take one for you to get some free advertising. Maybe you can build a relationship with a writers and be used as a future source of information.

I mention this only because I have seen it happen first hand and with several that I work with. I wish you all the best!