WOW!

That’s all I can say really, wow. This past week was the highest volume week in ACP since I’ve taking over the reins of management. For that, I thank you all who were a part of my record volume. Monday was another great day so let’s keep this momentum going into Spring and grow our private, close-knit community. ACP isn’t trying to be the biggest affiliate network, we’re trying to be the best. I don’t want a million affiliates because the level of service we can provide won’t be the same as it is now. But, we do have room to grow. If you know of any good & active affiliates wanting to join an affiliate community, not just a network, please get them to email me.

I’ll be doing my best to add some new offers for us this week as I know we lost a couple of past best performers due to normal business cycles with advertisers. If you discover any broken links on offers that my tech team may have missed please let me know and I’ll have it taken care of immediately.

If you ever want to go back and read through past Cash Pile Makers you can check them out on our blog:

affiliatecashpile.com/blog

Now, on to the guide:

GUIDE:

We continue our journey in becoming master manipulators. Sounds sinister doesn’t it? In reality all marketers are trying to manipulate people into doing what we want them to, some just do it more aggressively than others. The really good ones do it effortlessly.

Chapter 3 of Influence talks about Consistency and Commitment. Getting people to consistently commit to something simple first will make it much more likely they will comply with a more complex request. Don’t get too bent out of shape on the levels of complexity here. A simple request could be clicking a link and a complex request can be filling out your email address, doesn’t have to be super complicated.

According to Cialdini: “Once we have made a choice or take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.”

Once we have committed to something our personal feelings about that subject will be influenced. Sign a petition to stop global warming and you may find yourself recycling more, taking more fuel efficient trips, or even becoming a weather activist. Small commitments can lead to much larger ones over very little time. We, as marketers, can use this to our advantage.

Let’s say we want to design an optin list around single people looking to date more. We can create a PPV campaign to get initial signups. Design your custom lander with a simple question (make it highly visual though) Do you want a date this Friday? Then have a simple Yes No buttons below. In either instance you can choose to have them go to either the same place or different based off of your answer. If it were my campaign I would send those that click No directly to a dating offer like Find Me Love. Conversions won’t be high since they said no, but you may get a few here and there.

Those who click Yes will get forwarded to my email optin page to put them on my list where I can email them various dating sites, workout /weight loss offers, etc.

Now, you may be wondering why I have them clicking the yes / no button first? That’s a small commitment they are making to my funnel. That simple gesture will yield a higher conversion percentage than if I just instantly sent them to my optin page.

Ever wonder why more and more optin offers have a few questions for them to answer prior to signing up? The advertisers have figured out that people will become more committed to the process if they get them to commit to small things first like clicking an answer button to some benign questions.

Now, I know you’re tendency is to copy and paste my example here directly with no twist on it. Don’t do it for two reasons. 1. If everyone did this same campaign on PPV networks its effectiveness would go down quickly and, more importantly, 2. You would rob yourself of the much needed practice of creatively thinking. You’ll learn so much more and become successful so much faster if you actively think, test, think, test along the way rather than copy, test.

I hope you enjoyed this and make sure to read up on Chapter 4 of Influence for next week. I invite you to respond to this email if we haven’t spoken much or if you have a comment on this newsletter.

To your Piles O Cash Growing!

Jim

If you’re new to ACP WELCOME! We brought you on board because we believe you can add to the great matrix of publishers we have on ACP. You will get more useful information from me on how to make it in any business as well as CPA than any other network. Not to mention THE best communication of any affiliate network on the planet. Don’t believe me? Ask, any of the affiliates who have contacted me and received a response in minutes NOT days.

If you helped contribute to last week’s fantastic volume, YOU DA BOMB! Keep up the good work. Stay in contact with me, let me know what’s working, what’s not, any things iffy with your campaigns and let me see if I can make your campaigns more profitable.

If you’re the kind of affiliate that just likes to sit on the sidelines and don’t run traffic with us, why are you here? I assume you want to make money, right? CPA is a not a spectator sport. You have to play to win. When I was a newbie affiliate I would bug the crap out of my AM until I finally decided to get off my ass and try the concepts. Don’t want to screw up? Then contact me, that’s why I’m here for. Don’t just sit there waiting for the next never-gonna-happen event to get started. Got $50 I can help you. Got $0 I can help you. Got $1 million, can I borrow some? LOL Bottom line, stop giving yourself excuses. There are a bunch of ways to skin this CPA cat and you need to pick one and get going.

Alright, I’ll get off my soapbox now and get onto this whole giver and taker motif I’ve got going on today:

GUIDE:

Continuing on from our lesson from last week, which was Chapter 1 of Influence. We will be diving into Chapter 2: Reciprocation (Hence the giver or taker).

Chapter 2 of Influence is all about the old give and take of reciprocation. We, as humans, have been hard wired with a sense of obligation to reciprocate a favor if given one first. These favors can take multiple forms. From something physical, like a free ebook, printed address labels or something temporary like a free trial, or something intangible like coming down off your first price we humans are obliged to comply out of the law of reciprocation. You see examples of these all throughout the internet. Ever try to click off an offer and get javascript popup that says Wait if you stay on here I’ll give you a discount? Ever seen an email submit offer?

These obligations are quite time sensitive so you need to take advantage of the opportunities you create straight away or they feeling of obligation will be gone.

Why do you think there are so many free trial offers out there? They are willing to lose a little on the front end so people feel obligated to purchase the trial and what is often the case with internet trials the consumer forgets about it being a trial and just lets the charge hit their credit card for a few months before figuring out they no longer want whatever it is they signed up for and cancel any future rebills.

How do we incorporate this into our CPA business? If you’re just looking for the quick buck then a lot of this reciprocation obligation stuff is already built into your offers. Look at any submit offer, “Fill out your email address and I’ll enter you in this fantastic gift card drawing.” They are offering a bribe for compliance.

Now, if you want a longer term business here’s what I suggest you do. It’s a little more money up front but well worth it in the end. Build your own optin list. Create your own Email submit offer, build up your email submits using either Twitter, Facebook, PPV. Do a double optin list. Why? Because there will be less reports of spam and people that are left will stay on your list longer. To design your campaign pick a niche first. Could be your niche is age based, or interest based, or vertical based. Some examples, age could be teenagers, retirees, soccer moms, etc. Interest based could be reading books, watching movies, whatever. Get them to optin to your list and then mail them a mixture of relevant offers and content they really want to read so they stay interested in your emails.

Alright, hopefully I’ve got your creative juices flowing. Go out there and ACT on what you’ve learned. Otherwise your pile O cash will be the same size next week as it is this week.

To your Piles O Cash Growing!

Jim

It’s that time of the week again. Before we get into the smack down of education this week I wanted to touch base on a few notes for ACP. Things have been going extremely well this New Year and wanted to thank each and every one of you who are actively driving traffic with us and communicating with me to make ACP the premier affiliate network available. I’ve spoken personally to quite a few of you now and can honestly say I’m honored to be the network manager of such a great group of publishers! For those of you who I haven’t spoken to yet personally don’t be shy. If you need help getting going hit me up and I’ll do my best. I can’t spoon feed you campaigns but I can guide in the right direction.

To keep the momentum going into 2012 I’m asking all of you who are active on ACP to NOT keep us a secret. Talk us up in your normal affiliate groups, forums, or wherever you hang out with likeminded individuals. I’m asking this because I need your help in keeping our community strong with the best affiliates available. If you refer someone over tell them to respond to their thank you for signing up email and have them let me know they’ve applied so I can expedite their application and give you proper credit (pay bumps) to you.

Alright, enough of the selfless promotion, on to the goods:

As promised from last week’s C.P.M. we are going to be diving into Robert Cialdini’s Influence 5th Edition. This week we’ll cover Chapter 1: Weapons of Influence. I sincerely hope you have purchased or downloaded your copy and are following along. There’s no possible way for me to cover every bit of the book in these newsletters and you owe it to yourself to pick this book up, make time to read it, so you can digest what I’m putting here.

1. Weapons of Influence

We as humans all of have blind mechanical actions ingrained into our psyches just like our animal counterparts. The difference lies in the fact that most animal “Click, Whirr” (you know what I’m talking about if you read the book) responses are ingrained in their instinctual DNA whereas human’s “Click, Whirr” actions are learned from our upbringing. These fixed-action patterns can be trigged often by a single feature. For birds, a certain color of feather can cause them to go territory protecting crazy. With humans we can get a much higher rate of compliance for a favor just by giving a reason why we need them to do it. For instance, people are more likely to comply with a line cutter simply if the line cutter provides a reason for cutting in line. Doesn’t even have to be a good reason, just add the word Because and compliance % skyrockets. Notice in the previous section where I asked you guys to send me referrals? Did you feel more compelled because I gave you a reason for giving me the referrals? That’s a natural response for the human race, if we are given a reason to do something we are often times more likely to comply then if we were simply asked to do something.

How does this relate to your ad copy? Think about it. Brainstorm how to add a reason behind your calls to action. You’ll see conversions increase. If at all possible use the word Because, since it has shown to be the most effective verbiage.

Some other automatic triggers for us is the stereotype expensive=good. If we don’t have a ton of background knowledge on a product or service then we default to the if it’s expensive it must be good mantra. Split test higher prices if you’re promoting a physical product to sell.

For you dating publishers, women always describe their physical attractiveness and men always describe their material wealth in personal ads. Ad copies designed to promote to men perform better with a hot girl and the copy talking about how many attractive women there are on the site and if you’re promoting to women describe how wealthy or financially secure the guys are on the dating site your promoting.

Why do humans need to use so many short cuts to make decisions for us on a daily basis? Because, we are exposed to entirely too much information in a given day and if we had to think, in detail, about every decision we’d never make it through a 24hr period.

One of these shortcuts is the “If an expert says it, then it must be true” mentalities. We put way too much faith in experts. But, if you can position yourself as an expert in your niche it will be an easy sell. Yes, there are ways to do this even if you’re just pushing CPA offers. Just sit down and have a good think on all the ways to play this strategy.

Another shortcut. The discount coupon. People LOVE coupons. Even if there is no real discount, volume will increase because of the “discounted” coupon.

The contrast principle: If a second item is fairly different from the first we will tend to see it as more different than it really is. Use this tactic for your review style landers. Brainstorm and share your own ideas to use this on the Facebook page.

That sums up Chapter 1. Again, this is not meant to flush out every single angle you can use these strategies on. It is intended to get you thinking of your own ideas and how to twist them for your own use. Next week we’ll cover Chapter 2, Reciprocation.

Feel free to hit me up and let me know what you think of the newsletter and input any advice or additions you’d like to see in future issues.

To your Piles O Cash!

Jim

In this edition of the Cash Pile Maker we are going to prime the pump as it were to get as many of you excited and prepared to follow along to learn the MOST important IM skill there is….Persuasion. Now, the next few weeks could literally give you the skills you need to succeed in CPA marketing regardless of the traffic source or vertical. However, this will only work if you apply what you read! Taking action is a limited commodity in our profession. Those that act will win. Those that sit on the sidelines and do nothing will lose.

IMPORTANT NEWS:
I’ve decided to scale down the newsletters I send out to once per week on Tuesdays. I’m forgoing the Saturday email and will put any important news or network updates in this section of the weekly newsletter. You know what they say, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Now, on to the show:

Guide:

The book you should all go out and buy/download/borrow/whatever and read along with me over the next few weeks is:

Influence: Science and Practice 5th Edition by Robert Cialdini

Starting with next week’s Cash Pile Maker we will be reviewing 1 chapter from this book.

A quick rundown of the topics we will cover from the book:

1. Weapons of Influence
2. Reciprocation
3. Commitment and Consistency
4. Social Proof
5. Liking
6. Authority
7. Scarcity
8. Instant Influence

Now, you’re probably wondering why we’re spending so much time on these topics. Techniques on the internet change all the time. What works today may be gone tomorrow. Especially with the crazy regulations that are trying to be passed by the US Government and what has already been passed internationally. The internet changes, people do not. Figure out what makes human beings do the things they do, like click on one ad over another, fill out one offer over another, and you’ll be able to adapt to any new “method” that comes along in the internet marketing business.

Though the book gives a ton of examples the author does not go into detail on how each chapter relates to the IM business. That’s my job. After our brief discussion on each chapter I will go into how each applies to internet marketing and what you can with this info to really make an impact on your campaigns.

So, your homework is twofold:
1. Get the book and read the first chapter by next Tuesday
2. Create some new campaigns and push traffic! You can’t make any money if you’re not in the game. Hit me up if you need help. I’m not going to teach you the whole process but I can give specific advice on specific questions, so don’t just hit me up asking “what’s the best method?” and “what’s your best offer?” You’ve got to give me more info than that.

To your Piles O Cash!

Jim

In this edition of the Cash Pile Maker we are going to cover what you need to know about demographic research and a potential new direction for the upcoming CPMs over the next few weeks.

If you’re not following us on Twitter or a Fan of our Facebook page, do so now or be left in the dust…

Twitter: http://twitter.com/acashpile
Facebook: http://facebook.com/affiliatecashpile

IMPORTANT NEWS:
When clicking on the magnifying glass to the left of the offer name you’re interested in running. If the preview webpage does NOT load correctly, please let me know about it so I can get that fixed. ALL offers should have a preview landing page for you to view.

If you have an offer request or want to split test on offer we have vs a competitor’s offer just hit me up and we’ll make you happy, promise!

PAYOUT Bump Opportunity:
Open to all ACP affiliates. If you push more volume for Wed and Thursday of this week then you did last Wed and Thursday I will bump the payout of every offer you’re actively pushing as my way of saying thank you for being committed to ACP’s growth.

Guide:

Demographics is an essential part of offer research prior to running campaign. To get a general idea of what demographics you should be targeting you need to hit up quantcast.com. For our example, let’s choose the offer True.com, which by the way is doing great for our general-dating publishers with this week’s EPC at $0.34 so far.

Now by looking at this picture of the demographics we can’t tell too much. Why is this? Well, alot of the percentages are evened out in some of the categories. It’s almost a 50/50 between males and females. They have a wide age range. We can tell that Caucasians frequent the site a lot more than any other ethnic group, but beyond that we’re kind of shooting blind. What that means is, you are going to have to pick a niche and go after it since so many different groups of people go on true.com. My next step for promoting this particular offer would be to look at some competitors ads to see what’s working in general. I WOULD NEVER STEAL someone else’s work, but it is nice to get some ideas. Don’t just copy the format either. Make the creative your own, but use your competitor’s ads as a roadmap.

Some offer demographics will be more precise then True.com. Some site’s won’t have demographics available for their specific site, but Quantcast will recommend a similar site that has the same demographics.

If you have questions regarding demographics or what to do with them post your questions on the Facebook page so all affiliates get the benefit of your question.

CHANGE:
Now, moving forward with CPMs (Cash Pile Makers) I’ve been thinking a lot about different types of content and wanted your opinion. The biggest skill we can have in this business is getting people to do what we want them to do. Tactics and strategies and traffic sources change all the time, but if we know how to get people to do what we want them to then no matter what the flavor of the day is we’ll be profitable.

I know I posted a couple of books in one of the past CPMs for you guys to read, but doubt many of you did. I like reading about manipulating people and convincing them to do what I want them to do, so I thought as I read a book I could summarize a section in the coming CPMs so we can start a discussion about them in the Facebook Page. What do you think?

Worth doing?

Let me know ASAP so I can prepare accordingly.

Till Saturday, may your piles O cash always be growing!

Jim

If you are searching for offers and there is not a preview site available when clicking on the magnifying glass to the left of the offer name, please let me know about it. If there’s an offer with a dead link, please let me know about it. I’m having our tech team do continuous audits on our offers but I want to fix any and all issues ASAP, so if you find one before we do please let me know.

Going forward we are going to push extremely hard in the dating, submit, and biz op verticals. Does that mean that’s all we’ll have? No. But that’s where we are going to be the dominant player going through 2012. Do I know this is a tall task? Yepper, but together we can do it.

If you’re new to ACP, welcome. We approved you because we know you can be a success on ACP. If you don’t plan on running traffic with us, please let me know and we can part ways. I’ll bend over backwards to get you set up and profitable, but I only want to work with those willing to work with us. We have seen near record numbers at times since I’ve taken over, but it’s far too inconsistent for my liking.

If you have traffic somewhere else, please contact me and I’ll do whatever it takes to earn your traffic. I’m on a mission to make ACP the dominant player in dating, submits, and biz ops this year and can use ALL of your help to get us there. ACP has made mistakes in the past, I believe we have them all rectified. We are improving every day and we need the support of all of our affiliates to get where I want to go with the company.

Check out the new submit offers we’ve just set up for you guys. All are paying a whopping $1.60 for just an email submit. If there’s a style of lander you want but we don’t have I will have the advertiser make it. Want to take advantage of the political races in the US this year? Working on getting that for you. Want to take advantage of the most anticipated movies coming out, like The Hunger Games? Coming to an ACP near you soon.

Okay, now on to the part you’ve been waiting for…

Last week we talked about how there are 5 components to a profitable campaign:

1. The Offer
2. The ad creative or copy
3. The traffic source
4. Bidding strategy
5. Tracking

We covered numbers 1-3 last week and now we will cover 4 & 5.

If you have any questions regarding anything you read on these newsletters just let me know and I’ll answer everything I can.
Bidding Strategy: This is one of the most important features to being profitable regardless of what traffic source you use. Mastering a traffic source will often times means the difference between long term profits over short term success and long term headaches. Everyone can get lucky with a campaign, but to truly be successful you need to master the art of bidding. There are too many traffic sources to go through each in this one newsletter and we’ll be exploring these in depth in future ones. For now, know that you need to test your bidding strategies just like you test your ad creatives. Too low and you won’t get enough traffic for an accurate test, too high and you won’t be able to get profitable. It’s not a good idea during an initial test to bid really high and dump your testing budget in an hour or whatever. Your bids need to be able to spread your budget throughout the day or as long as possible to get an accurate test.

Tracking & Metrics:
This is really the crux of your business. Without tracking you’re throwing darts at a wall. You can use a tracking software like Prosper202, but just appending offer links with subids should suffice for most of you. What metrics are most important to you? Well, depends on how you get your traffic. In CPC, your CTR (Click Through Rate) is important because often times that will determine the cost of your CPC. Ad platforms like Facebook ads are big on this. The biggest indicator for you CPC buyers is obviously the EPC or earnings per click. If your EPC is higher than your CPC than you made money, yay! If you’re buying traffic via CPM than CTR is still important, but not as important as eCPM the equivalent to EPC for CPC buyers. Now, our network will give you the EPC, and you’re ad platform will give you CTR, but most will NOT give you eCPM. So, here’s how you figure it:

Total Revenue for 1 ad creative / Total impressions that ad received * 1,000 = eCPM

You can also find a eCPM calculator by googling “eCPM calculator” genius right?

Alright kiddos is getting late and I’ve got 23 more things on my to do list so I’m out for now. Hit me up with any questions.

To your Piles O Cash!

Jim

I have been getting the same question for years now from affiliates trying to launch new campaigns, and though it does have some merit, its answer will not completely make or break a campaign.

What’s the question you ask?

What are your best converting (fill in the blank vertical) offers you have right now?

I must hear this question at least a dozen times a day, and I don’t mind it at all, but wanted to share some nuggets of real wisdom on why it doesn’t necessarily matter what the “best” offers are and what you really should be focusing your time on. This will be longer than this one Cash Pile Maker will allow so we’ll just call this part 1.

Why do I call this the Holy Grail? Because, until I learned these little skills I wasn’t making money I was just following the herd and focusing on the wrong things. When I started to pay attention to what I’m going to share with you all, I started making money. My hope is you’ll do the same.

There are 5 components to a profitable campaign:

1. The Offer
2. The ad creative or copy
3. The traffic source
4. Bidding strategy
5. Tracking

In reality, we don’t push many offers that suck, plain and simple. Why would I keep an offer around if it’s not going to make us money? So, when I get the question what’s the “best” offer it’s kind of hard to answer as all of our offers CAN be profitable. The one’s with the highest EPC are a reflection on the publishers running that particular offer more so then the offer itself. Yes, some offers will convert better but I have seen tweaks on the publishers side yield so much more profit then tweaking different offers. I know some of you will disagree and that’s cool, you have every right to, it’s just what I’ve seen.

The ads you put out are of vital importance. Without clicks you have no shot of getting a conversion. I lump landing pages, email copy, banners all into ads. Whatever you use to get people to act on your marketing piece to get them to the offer I consider an ad, k? If you suck at copy and ad making you need to improve your skills. Like I said last time read Cashvertising, it will help you. Look at (DON’T STEAL) other people’s ads to gain inspiration. Come up with your own unique twist on the message. Always remember you’re trying to get the person looking at your ad to click it, that’s it. What would make you click on the ad? I shouldn’t have to tell you that what makes 50 year old moms click on an ad is going to be different then what makes an 18 year old boy. DON’T overcomplicate this. Make your ads crisp, ridiculously easy. NO BIG WORDS! You will want to make several variations on your ads. Test only 1 variable at a time (Yes just like in High School Biology class). We’ve covered this stuff a little more in depth in previous Cash Pile Makers so I’ll leave it here.
Traffic sources: If you’re still trying to figure out how to manipulate Google, STOP IT! Google hates you because you’re an affiliate. There are trillions of ad impressions across the net every day outside of Google use them. Whether that’s Facebook Ads (getting close to as annoying as Google), POF, Media Buys, PPV, email marketing, Twitter, YouTube, whatever a traffic source is needed. No traffic, no clicks, no conversions, sad affiliates. Each traffic source is different. I recommend that you settle on an offer or at least a vertical and then pick 1 traffic source. Yep, just one and focus on making that offer profitable on that one traffic source. Why? Because too many affiliates bounce from traffic source to traffic source wasting money. All of these sources can make you rich. All of them will make you broke if you don’t learn how to master them. How exactly do you master a traffic source? Well, you need to get a lot of data from it testing different features. Whether that’s ad placements, ad sizes, static or moving ads, etc. There’s a lot to test all on one source. Any of the above can you make a campaign profitable as long as all parts of the campaign work together. Yes, some traffic sources yield crappy traffic over others. So how do you know if a source is good quality or not? ASK! I know most of what’s out there and if I don’t I know who to ask that has the answer.

If you have questions on the stuff I’ve talked about so far ask me and I’ll include the answers in next week’s Cash Pile Maker where I’ll cover the remaining elements of a profitable campaign. These basic strategies can all be adapted to any offer, any traffic source. Use your brain. If you’re not creative read a book on becoming more creative.

Until next time…

To Your Piles O Cash!

Jim

When I took over ACP a little over a month ago I had 2 main objectives. Establish ACP as a real community where affiliates felt like they were a part of something bigger, that they were well taken care of, and establish ACP as THE place where affiliates had the best shot on the net to create their ideal amount of wealth. I hope I’m beginning to fulfill those 2 objectives for you and your business.

If I am, I would greatly appreciate you tell all of your friends about us and get them to sign up with us. The old adage still holds quite true, There is NO greater compliment than a referral.

If I’m not, and somehow ACP is not living up to your expectations in any way I beg you to email me explaining your issue and I will do everything within my power to rectify the situation and make it right.

And now, on to your regularly schedule Cash Pile Maker!

This week’s main topic is going to be on market research, but first I had a separate request regarding what types of traffic sources we DON’T accept, so here goes:

ACP is a very lenient network. We work hard with our advertisers to give you any edge possible. For example, I’ve just finished doing a blanket negotiation with our advertisers to allow YouTube traffic for ALL offers. However, getting into the specifics of every single traffic source would make this C.P.M. quite lengthy, so if you have a specific question on an individual traffic source please hit me up on

AIM: acpJimC or Skype: acpJimC

Market Research:

To be a success in any business you need to conduct thorough research on your market prior to making any creatives live.

Step 1: Demographic research. Go to quantcast.com and plug in your offer’s main URL. Copy down the demographics you see there. Some offers, like credit, for example will have a very wide demographic and that’s okay, but if you’re brand new to a vertical its worth taking this step.

Step 2: Figure out where you want to post your creatives. Some platforms, like POF, will allow you to drill down on demographic data like crazy so use the info you found out from your offer research. If you’re looking to place your creatives on a media buy site match the offer’s demographics with a site that has very similar demographics.

Step 3: Look at ads marketing the same or similar offer. Once you have your ad placement site figured out go to that site and look at your competitor’s ads. DO NOT copy them outright, but if the same ad keeps showing up again and again chances are it’s making money so use it as a guidepost to build your own creatives.

Step 4: Create multiple variations of your ads to split test during your initial test phase. The image you use is vital and should definitely be split tested. Sometimes all text ads work better if it’s an image dominated site. Only test ONE variable at a time with your creatives. Meaning, don’t test different images, headlines, and ad bodies all at once. Test them one at a time.

Required Reading:

I get asked all of the time about what goes into a great creative and/or landing page. My answer is usually, psychology and good images. You have to understand your target market, what makes them tick, and what types of ads they’ll respond to. So, to help you all have a better understanding of how your market thinks and what to say to them to get them to click on your creatives I will from time to time post a few books that you need to read more than once. Here’s two to get you started:

Cashvertising, By: Drew Eric Whitman

Influence, By: Robert Cialdini

If you are serious in making a full time living from affiliate marketing you need to understand the psychology behind what makes people click on your ads. Don’t thank me now, thank me when you’re making thousands off of the content contained in those books.

Don’t be shy, hit me up on AIM, Skype or Email with thoughts, suggestions, ideas, and of course questions. We are after all a community and communities help each other.

To your Piles O Cash!

Jim

I don’t know about you guys but my personal campaigns are seeing crazy numbers right now over this holiday break! Why, you ask? Think about it, people are home they’re bored of turkey dinners and family members so they surf the web. There’s going to be a LOT more traffic in the coming week so if you’ve been waiting on the sidelines or just “testing” a couple of campaigns get in the game already! Test small and scale. For those of you pushing great hard work through this last week and into the New Year my personal thanks! Our numbers are up across the board and it’s 100% thanks to you all! Makes me very proud to be your humble network manager and itching to give out more, so stay tuned into the New Year where if you’re willing to push traffic I’m willing to cut our margins and give crazy payout bumps never before seen. I’m a volume guy, so if you can push volume I want to steal all of your traffic away from my competitors.

If you haven’t connected with me via AIM or Skype yet please do so:

AIM: acpJimC
Skype: acpJimC

1 note: I’m a big family guy, my wife and son are everything to me so if over the holidays or really any time I’m not on IM feel free to email me at jim@affiliatecashpile.com and I’ll respond ASAP. My iphone never leaves my side and can always fire off a quick email.

On to the guide for this week:

I was asked a little while ago about building lists via PPV so thought I’d use that as our main content piece for this week’s newsletter. I’m not a PPV expert as some of you are, these are tips and ideas I’ve used successfully but most of my personal affiliate income comes from media buys. Since we are a community if any of you out there would like to add / edit / take away / whatever please feel free to respond to this email and I’ll get it out to everyone.

Dating Lists:
Building a dating list can be great because you can cross promotion a lot of different offers beyond your typical dating sites, IE Weight loss and Healthcare. If this were my campaign I would probably design a blog style lander stating put your email here for the skinny on the various dating sites or something like put your email here to find out what this (replace with whatever target you’re popping over) site doesn’t want you to know about their members.

When designing an optin lander you have to give a reason for the person to opt in. Whether it be a free report or list of secrets to getting any girl / guy to say yes, whatever be creative. If you’re not creative go Googling for ideas. I do this all the time. If I’m hitting a road block I Google it, and then come up with my own ideas to move forward with. As far as styling the lander goes, I would split test two different styles, one closely matching the target’s page the other going completely opposite the color scheme. Remember, simple is always better. Amateurish ugly landing pages always seem to test out better than the flashy pretty ones.

Remember with PPV your interrupting the user’s normal surfing with a silly popup. You have to grab them by their shirt collar and force them to click your CTA because of your mind controlling copy.

Biz Op Lists:
Depending on your niche of biz op will determine where I would focus my attention. For example, Internet Payday is a really good performing offer for us right now so if you wanted that as your back end pitch then I would design a lander similar to the dating niche, but obviously focusing on internet marketing as my giveaway. One example campaign could look like lander saying enter your email here and find out how “Insert guru Name here” REALLY made his money and why he doesn’t want you to find out….Then in the email you send them come up with something that says that particular guru is bad and you’re looking out for them and oh by the way check out a REAL course that has actually made you money online. Something like that. Obviously you’d want to pop over the guru landing pages. Get on their lists and find out the URLs of their next big launch and then pop over their pages.

This is some of the stuff I did in the past and saw good success with. Like I said in the beginning of this newsletter, I’m by no means an expert in PPV and this is by no means a complete guide. These are meant to get the creative juices going for you guys so you can create some awesome UNIQUE campaigns. UNIQUE wins in this game long term, so take these basic ideas and make them your own.

Don’t forget to push traffic over this coming week. MANY people have extra time off and will be surfing the web right to your offers if they’re there so go get you some Piles O Cash!

Till next time,

Jim

Welcome to our first edition of the Cash Pile Maker!

I wanted his first start off with a huge thank you to all of you affiliates who are actively pushing traffic with ACP! Your loyalty will be incredibly rewarded as we grow this fantastic company.  If you’re sitting on the sidelines of ACP right now, GET IN THE GAME!  I can help you make money unless we have a starting point to build off of. Throw some campaigns up there and let’s get to work!

I decided to put this first newsletter together as a high-level overview of some campaign ideas and traffic sources that you guys have been asking for. So without further ado let’s get this party started!

We will start with a variety of traffic sources: PPV, social traffic, adult offers

PPV

PPV can be a great source of traffic for a lot of different offers. If done correctly it is one of the easiest ways to get profitable. The big traffic sources out there are Traffic Vance, and Lead Impact. You will need $1000 start up to get on Traffic Vance. You will also need a referral to get on Traffic Vance. If you’re having trouble getting a referral to Traffic Vance please let me know and I’ll help you out. Lead Impact only requires a $200 starting balance so this may be a good offer for those of you just getting started. Lead Impact has really good quality of traffic just not as good as Traffic Vance.

Types of offers: being that this is the holiday season your e-mail and zip submits for gift cards or technology-based niches will work very well. You should also have good success running penny auction offers like DealFun. I would have your targets set for the big sites like eBay, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Apple Store. You do not have to stick with just the main URL you could also go into a product specific page. So instead of Apple.com you may have better success with store.apple.com or iTunes.apple.com. If you are pushing deal fun you may even want to focus your lander on a MacBook Pro or iMac and then pop over the specific Apple Store page for MacBook Pro or iMac. The main URLs like Walmart.com will have a lot more competition with them, so be prepared to bid higher for the main URLs.

Social traffic

Since ACP has a lot of very good converting dating offers you may also want to look at using Facebook ads or plenty of fish ads ads.POF.com to run some very niche-based advertising. For example, True has many offers with specific niches in mind geared towards their landing pages. The more focused you get the higher the ROI, the more general you are the more competition. The key ingredient to a successful 110 x 80 ad is the image. Do your own research. Go into some forums, find some attractive looking people (depending on the niche you’re going after) and get unique images. You also want to make sure that you’re only targeting people with less than 50 to 100 logins (on POF).

Adult offers 

Adult traffic serves literally billions of impressions daily! And what’s better is that the clicks and impressions are CHEAP! That’s an easy money making equation. If you are on a budget or looking the scale try adult offers!

Traffic Sources: the two most known and traffic sources for adult traffic are trafficjunky.com and exoclick.com. TJ is still giving the best quality of traffic that exit click is cheaper. TJ is purely a CPM-based platform, while exit click does give you a CPC option. What’s the difference? CPM you want as many clicks as humanly possible! CPC you want quality clicks so your creative’s have to really presell the offer.

TIP: be careful with TJ’s bidding strategy. If you been up to the majority of traffic share your daily limit will be spent in our and TJ server or be able to shut your ads often time soon expect a heavy overbuilt. For instance: I had daily spend limit of $50 during my testing phase and did hide to get a good percentage of traffic and poof my actual spend was closer to $80. Moral? Keep your bids low to only get a few percent of traffic during testing. That way your spend will go evenly through the day and your spend will be minimal.

Offers to run: we have a ton of adult dating offers and just added a good bit more over the weekend. Try running Just Hook Up or Get Flirting or Untrue they seem to be performing best on internal testing. Also, we just added Sex in the UK and a bunch of different landing pages for Be Naughty 2 very good offers. DIRECT link these!

If you have a bigger budget or once you’re walking on adult dating switch to some free trial offers like NO3 chrome Cellucor and ViMax.  Use a traditional blog style lander to presell these. These types of offers are where the big boys play an adult. Don’t believe me? Check out pornhub.com and hit refresh a couple dozen times. 80 to 90% of ads are penis enlargement ads.

Bottom line, do your research, make UNIQUE create its(get pics from some amateur forms), and test, test, test. HINT: regular to ugly girls pull better CTRs than hot girls.

How’s that for an opening newsletter?

I thrive on feedback, so make sure to respond to this e-mail by posting on our Facebook page. I’ll be posting a copy of this newsletter there soon.

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To your pile O cash!