The key to starting a campaign
The biggest problem newbies experience, is that after spending hours developing a solid landing page, getting a keyword list, finding the best offers, and coming up with a solid ad variation – they run their campaign, blow through their money without a single lead to show for it. They then quit on their campaign as they haven’t even sniffed a positive result from hours of effort. This happens to almost everyone – so don’t worry! The following is a list of key points that all newbies should strive to attain, and to know when their campaign really wasn’t a waste of time:
1.) Make sure you have a good niche! How can you expect to get hundreds of leads a day when you don’t even know if there is that many people looking to buy your product? Sure you can be the first to exploit a niche, but leave that to the big guys. If you are just starting out, you don’t need to make things any harder than they have to be.
2.) Find the leads! Regardless if you spent $100 or $1000 on your campaign, if you haven’t generated any leads – then all you know is that atleast ONE variable within your keywords, landing page, offers, ad variations, bid price, and ad position combination does NOT work. You need to distinguish what variables need adjustments and which doesn’t, and the only way to do this is to compare results between what is working. The problem is that if you don’t have any leads to use with your data – it’ll be very hard to make adjustments because in essence – you have no idea what is working. The first step in the right direction is to FIND as many leads as you can, and try to optimize your efforts to more leads in that realm. This is why it’s important to make sure you are promoting a hot niche. You KNOW the leads are out there… Go find them!
3.) Don’t give up – I can’t stress this enough. The only real money you lose is when you don’t learn from your mistakes. Keep grinding until you’ve tried every combination of keywords, ad variations, landing page, offers, position and bid price as you can.
The big thing ALL newbies should know, is that if you just keep at it, you will hit your campaign! Even if it takes 20 swings until you hit, that hit will be ever so sweet. Once you hit your first campaign, everything starts to make alot more sense in your mind, and your experience starts to kick in. Affiliate marketing is like developing an extra muscle in your brain. It’s tough at first, but once you get the hang of it – it becomes much easier to hit more campaigns. Enjoy the ride!
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Media Buys
Everyone is selling traffic these days and no, not all websites are monetized via Google AdSense. More and more people are starting to try media buys on for size.
Here’s how things work:
1) You contact a company which is able to put a lot of traffic on the table (sometimes an extremely large website, sometimes an advertising network)
2) You start negotiating (having a great account manager is extremely important because if the two of you don’t work well together, you might as well just take your money somewhere else)
3) You start testing (be prepared to lose money initially because it takes a lot of testing and tweaking until you find placements which convert: on the other hand, don’t forget to negotiate a good out clause and if you see no potential whatsoever after 24 hours, you’re probably better off moving on)
If you’re a complete beginner, media buys do not represent a good starting point. Even if you have an impressive budget, it’s recommended that you get your feet wet with PPC first because otherwise, you’ll probably burn through your entire budget without even making 10% back.
Never spend a huge percentage of your capital on something like media buys. If you have $100,000 in the bank, it’s smart not to spend $75,000 on media buys. A lot of people have made some good money via PPC and wanted to take things to the next level, only to lose their hat as a result of the fact that they jumped in too soon and invested an amount they were not ready to lose.
If you’re in a good position to test then yes, there’s a lot of money on the table but don’t get carried away. If you act on impulse and don’t calculate each and every decision, you will end up losing a lot of money. Be sure to keep that in mind.
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I figured I’d let you guys know the scoop on my history with affiliate marketing, and how I got to where I am today. So here is how I can best explain it:
The Beginning
As a kid, I always had a passion for sports and computers. Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, a wildly passionate sports town definitely contributed to my love for sports, but my passion for computers had a quite twist to it. From the age of 4, my parents forced me to use the computer for an hour a day, learning the basics of then popular DOS. Ever since then, computers have been a huge part of my life (I even remember learning to read from basic DOS video games).
The evolution of the internet in 1995 soon led to further my obsession of technology to the next level. I learned Visual Basic and C++ in 6th grade. It was around that time that I developed my first application, a program to help consolidate the functions of AOL users (the tool went on to have over 50,000 downloads on then popular Download.com). By 2001, my business partner, Mike Vellucci, and I started our first website. We were in 9th grade at the time, and was exactly when we learned the power of internet advertising.
Our first site started with a week long intense “learn how to build a website” sabbatical. From there, Mike and I created a site that helped high school with vocabulary memorization. The site, made by Mike, was complimented by an application that I made in Visual Basic 6.0. Instead of charging a fee for this application, we gave the user the option to fill out a CPA Offer. The miraculous part of this story is that we somehow were featured on a popular vocabulary site that bolstered over 20,000 hits to our newly developed site. A week later, we had over $3,000 in our affiliate account just after a week of going live. From there we realized the endless potential that the internet brought to us.
Our profits made from the vocabulary site led us to our next major venture, a full scale wholesale business. We sold everything from computers to shoes. The majority of our sales came from eBay and then led into a website warehouse. We stuck with our wholesale company our entire high school years.
My Other Passion
During this time, I also became heavily involved with sports. During high school I earned 10 Varsity letters, 7 in track and 3 in football. Although I was heavily involved with our wholesale business, the majority of my goals were directed towards playing at a competitive Division 1 school. My senior year was entirely tied up into being a state champion in track and proving I was good enough to make it big time athletically. I was a sprinter on the track and a utility player (mainly WR/CB) for the football team. I worked my butt off week by week to be the best I could be, and ranked amongst the fastest sprinters in the state of Pennsylvania my senior year. This led me to accept a spot on the Track team at Syracuse University.
Athletic Career Ran Short
On February 1st, 2005, a week before the state indoor championship for track, I tore my hamstring entirely, bringing my senior year state championship aspirations to an end. I was in crutches for about a month and the next race I would run would not be until my freshman year at Syracuse. As tragic as this was at the time, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
College Track
After over a year of rehabilitation on my hamstring, my attempt at running college track never panned out. With my hamstring still nagging, I was only able to compete in 3 meets total my entire college career, all of which did not work out too well. My legs lost the long term endurance that made me successful during high school. At this time I started dabbling around more with internet marketing for some side cash, however, my athletic career was not over.
Division 1 Football
With my track aspirations being hampered by a nagging injury, I sent my high school football tapes over to the football coaches at Syracuse. After explaining my situation to the coaches, I was offered a spot on the football team. I went on to play for a year and a half. This was a major event in my life as I learned several unexplainable life lessons that helped develop the core framework of my ambitions and personality. The ability to relate current life issues to comparable situations that I encountered during my athletic years are irreplaceable, and I credit my success thus far to this realization.
From Spare Time to Full Time
During my football days at Syracuse, Mike and I would pick up some spare cash during various internet marketing ventures. Of which was a site dedicated to Breast Cancer where we would promote various breast cancer products and give a portion of our earnings to The National Breast Cancer Foundation. During the development of the site, I learned the “in’s and out’s” of internet marketing from all aspects. I also found a major need in the industry for consolidation and management assistance. This ultimately led to the idea of Bevo Media. I also started dabbling in search marketing during this time as well.
Our breast cancer site was rocking, there was a point where we were averaging 10,000 unique visitors a day, with over 8,000 members joining every month. When we saw how well our Breast Cancer site was doing, we decided to start a number of additional sites with the same idea, just different themes. We ended up managing 6 different sites and developed them all to reach over 50,000 unique hits a day combined. In May of 2007, Mike and I sold off all of our sites for an extremely large sum of money. We planned on using this money to start our main idea of Bevo Media. However during the website process, our search marketing started taking off big time that would make our site acquisitions seem marginal.
Search Marketing Prodigy
Unlike most people starting off with search marketing, my very first search marketing attempt was a gem. I threw up a basic email submit campaign using the Poll Method and made $500 my very first day from only $50 in clicks. Since then, I became complete and utterly obsessed with search marketing. Once email submits started to scrub, I moved onto the more competitive niches. Since the competitive niches have a substantial amount of traffic and much higher payouts, I began to blow up.
The skills I have developed during my search marketing efforts have benefited me greatly in the development of Bevo Media, and has also given Mike and I the opportunity to bootstrap a project that would normally cost millions of dollars to develop.
Bevo Media
I won’t get into too much detail about what exactly Bevo Media is until we have officially launched for open beta. But I will say that Bevo Media is a major project that I believe can impact the industry substantially. We have been developing the platform for close to two years and have a full team of programmers working hard at work 6 days a week. If you want more info… you can ask to be a beta tester! 
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