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!

As many of you know, there are many unexplained aspects within Google Adwords. Google, makes it a point, to leave specific aspects of the system mysterious, leaving their advertisers to figure things out on their own. This is especially the case for affiliates. I have been using Google Adwords since 2001, and throughout my years, I have seen the Adwords program evolve drastically. Specifically, within the past 3 years, since the emergence of the almighty Quality Score, there are some specific aspects of Adwords that are still unexplainable. I have formed strong assumptions based on “What I think”, or “How exactly it works”. These assumptions were based off of my experience and countless hours of trial and error to form my conclusions. Still, there was always that random slap, quality score decrease, or ad variation denial that never made sense to me…. Until now….

I recently had a extremely indepth conversation with an Adwords representative about the Adwords program, and exactly how it works. This was a face to face conversation, during non work hours. I can confirm that many of my assumptions were dead on the money, while others were surprisingly off. The conversation lasted for well over an hour, and I can truly say, that I feel I learned more from that single conversation, then anyone in the industry could from years of trial and error. Below is some information provided to me directly from the rep. These are answers that many affiliates have been seeking for years, and can make all the difference for those of you who are not already banned or given up on Adwords.

1.) Google slaps are entirely automatic. I always assumed that there was automatic slaps and manual slaps. A manual slap is EXTREMELY rare. There are tens of thousands of publishers using Adwords daily, and hundreds of thousands ad variations. This makes it extremely hard for manual monitoring of campaigns, which is why it’s an automated process.

2.) So what are the main reasons a site gets slapped if it’s done automatically? A slap, is a complex equation that takes a variety of campaign and account variables into consideration. Some of the main variables are:
a.) Duplicate content – This is the reason most affiliates get slapped. This is because there are so many other affiliates copying landing pages from each other. Duplicate content is not just limited to sites using Adwords, rather, it includes ALL websites indexed in Google search. Even when someone copies your own landing page, both parties are penalized. Content exceeding over a certain percentage of duplicate material is almost always an instant slap.
b.) Account History – This includes account age, and account spend. $50,000+ spend has extra weight.
c.) Rebill offers – Slaps weight more heavily on specific niches notorious for consumer complaints. Specifically weight loss and teeth whitening. Google will monitor for keywords and weigh against your campaign for rebill type words, such as “Free Trial” and “Acai berry”
d.) Severity of previous slaps – Google does not only take into account how many times your account has been slapped before, but also the severity of each slap. For instance, a slap from duplicate content does not weigh as heavily as a slap from a rebill teeth whitening campaign that has been reposted and slapped 5 times already.
e.) Content is king! The more content you have, the more it waters down the algorithm. Meaning, if they are looking for specific faulty words, and then placing a value to that word based on the comparison of total words on the site, the more words the better! This is why I always recommend to the people I mentor to get 20-30 unique articles minimum for your landing pages.

3.) How often does Google do these automatic checks? Every single time Google updates their algorithm, it automatically recrawls ALL of the sites on the Adwords system, whether they are paused or active. So this means that between the time of the last algorithm crawl, if there was another affiliate who copied your landing page, you will get slapped. Additionally, their updated variable could spin your site’s slap score in an entirely different direction, for better or worse.

4.) So how often does Google update their algorithm? Basically, it is unpredictable. It could be 2 months, it could be 2 days. It’s sporadic based on when the guys in charge change the algorithm. I will say from experience, it seems to be around every 2 weeks.

5.) Having the keyword in your domain name is huge! This is especially the case for assigning a high quality score. It’s good practice to have your targeted niche keyword once in the ad variation title, once in the ad variation body, and once in the ad variation display URL.

6.) Always keep your ad groups under 25 keywords. Over 25 keywords in an ad group can KILL your quality score. The quality score is as much about how you group your keywords as it is with the content of your page.

7.) And Finally…. what’s the deal on all the random bans? The mass amounts of Google Bans that occurred during November and December were automated. These bans looked at severity of prior slaps, duplicate content frequency, and if your promoted a questionable offer. Being said, the automated banning method completely screwed some undeserving advertisers over. Google will not give out much info as to why a specific account has been banned, and if you are one of the unfortunate ones, there is nothing you can really do. Moral of the story – don’t promote rebills on Google!

I have much more info that I plan to write in the Bevo Classroom, however that’s all I’ll blog about for now. I hope this cleared up some confusion from the affiliate side of things. If you guys need any further explaining about what was wrote, let me know and I’ll try to explain the best I can!

-RB

So why did I chose La Jolla? La Jolla is one of the most beautiful, wealthiest areas in the world, on the Beach, perfect weather year round, in sunny Southern California. I am a firm believer that if you truly want to achieve your goals in life, everything you do needs to revolve around them. My goal is to build a top quality, head over heals, internet marketing powerhouse. In everything I do in my life, I strive to be the best, and do so by challenging the best, building the best interface, having the best design, associating myself with the best personnel, and hiring the best team humanly possible. I am a positive thinker to the max, who is satisfied with nothing else but the highest of quality, and I feel that La Jolla represents my mindset perfectly. The best part of it all is, that my teams vision is just as strong, each and every person…

I will leave you with the most beautiful sunset I can possibly find, from this new place I can now call home, La Jolla, CA:

As many of you know, Bevo Media has taken me 2 entire years to develop, without a cent of outside funding to finance the project (also referred to as “bootstrapped”). As you could imagine, with 4 full time, inhouse American programmers, the cost of this is substantial. A ton of people have asked me why I have done such a thing. Well I am here today to fully explain my logic and reasoning behind this, and although some people think it is crazy that a person would take on this type of investment at my age, I think bootstrapping can be the key factor of achieving my ultimate vision of Bevo Media. My goal to this project was to create an extremely efficient and time saving tool that would be widely used by the industry, for free, and become established in the market.

To date, Bevo Media has cost me a substantial amount of money to build. The entire project has been funded entirely from my affiliate marketing earnings. I had several opportunities to accept venture capitalist funding even before development has started, but after much advice from several successful entrepreneurs, I would never have been able to provide a high quality product for free with someone else in charge. I know the industry inside and out, I am fully aware of the concerns and desires of affiliate marketers, as well as the potential competitors to our idea. I do not want someone forcing me to do something that inhibits the chances of the Bevo interface from being the most popular tool in the industry.

However, my main reason for bootstrapping is not for control of the product. Simply put – you cannot hit it big if you take major funding. Mark Cuban says it perfectly, when he said the best thing that happened to him was the sale of his first company that allowed him to self-fund Broadcast.com, which he then sold for $5.2billion. I have adapted a similar mindset for this project. After Affiliate Summit West, I have been getting phone calls from investors almost every day, and although these offers do sound enticing at times, I know that these 18 hour days can make all the difference in the long run.

With this project, I am going for the absolute homerun. This project is just the first of several major projects that are going to stem from the initial success of Bevo Media. Bevo Media, is in a sense, a mere way of getting into the market. I could care less about the actual revenue earned from Bevo. I am pleased to say that we have a much, much, much bigger project in the making that will benefit from the success of Bevo Media. Although the size of the market may only allow Bevo Media’s max potential to cap out at a few million valuation, these other projects apply to a much broader range of publishers, and all of the Bevo projects together can be that 8,9, or even 10 figure company that I envision. If I achieve my goal of bootstrapping this entire project, then the reward would be substantial.

With all being said, I have nothing holding me back. I am going to be extremely aggressive to achieve my goals. With 6 figures allocated to marketing , and really no reason to charge users for the service, I am determined to make the most beneficial advertising platform in the industry.

What’s your attitude towards scaling? So you have a landing page which converts, you have a great relationship with the network/merchant and a traffic source. Great! There’s just one problem: most people limit themselves to milking that one traffic source for all it’s worth and then that’s it, end of story.

Why would you do something like that? Don’t you like money? Would you have liked money more if the bills were blue instead of green? Why just that one traffic source? There’s a lot of money on the table, why are you limiting yourself to just that one piece of the pie?

What Scaling REALLY Means

Ok, so you’ve milked traffic source A for all it’s worth? Alright, then move on to traffic source B and then to traffic source C. That’s scaling. Keep the engines running and don’t take your foot off the pedal when it comes to the traffic sources you’re already on top of but on the other hand, always be on the lookout for more traffic.

It’s a never-ending process, expression such as “ok, I’ve scaled, now what?” don’t exist unless you trick yourself into thinking that they do. New traffic sources emerge on a daily basis, why not be there with your wallet open?

Polish Your Negotiation Skills

One word: Facebook! If that’s not a love-hate relationship, nothing is. This is what happens when people depend on just one traffic source: you’re in no position to negotiate. Lots of people were/are earning a living exclusively on Facebook and given their track record, those folks are definitely skating on thin ice.

Once you realize that there’s not just one website which controls everything in terms of traffic, you’ll start being in a far better position to negotiate. This is extremely important when it comes to media buys. Get ready to negotiate everything, absolutely everything. Think everything through carefully before spending your first buck: if they want your money, they need to make the deal worthwhile for you as well. If not, you’ll simply move on and never look back. End of story.

This much is certain: we’re marketers and as a result, hunting down traffic sources is what we do. Depending on just one traffic source is a sign of weakness, plain and simple. If you don’t up your game and start demanding the most bang for your buck as an advertiser, traffic networks can and will take advantage of you.

A lot of people think that pushing your own product is the best way to make serious cash. In theory, it all sounds great: you won’t have to worry about networks running away with the cash or otherwise acting shady, you won’t have to worry about merchants pulling a fast one and the list could go on and on.

But there’s more to being the merchant than meets the eye and, while it’s true that you’re eliminating a lot of problems, it’s just as true that those will quickly be replaced by others. Don’t just think that pushing your own product is a piece of cake because it isn’t. In fact, get ready to work harder than you’ve ever worked before.

Work Harder? Seriously?

As an affiliate marketer, you’ve probably built an image of the “average” merchant in your head: those cheap bastards who always want to screw you over. In some cases it’s true but that doesn’t mean that you should forget about the fact that it’s not all fun and games for them either.

Think about it: all you have to do is push traffic to and offer and get paid. In their case, things are a bit more complicated. They have to deal with customers, they have to answer calls and reply to emails, they have to ship the product, they have to manage their relationship with the networks and so on. Again: there’s more to being the merchant than meets the eye.

Is It Worth It?

Only the merchant has enough data to tell for sure. It all depends on your way of doing business. In most cases, the margins merchants have to work with are not as great as you think. Oh and one more thing: sure, you have to deal with a lot of shady networks and merchants but the merchants themselves have a lot of “obstacles” to overcome: leads which aren’t backing out, fraudulent traffic, networks which have never heard about the term “win-win” and so on.

Is being a merchant worth it? For most people, probably not! There’s a lot of work involved and since most affiliate marketers enjoy their lifestyle and wouldn’t be willing to say no to some/most of the things they currently have time for, they’re better off sticking with what they do best. Lots and lots of freedom: doesn’t sound all that bad, does it? Didn’t think so!

If you’re a person with an above average IQ, you probably have several amazing ideas each day. On the one hand, it’s a huge advantage but on the other hand, it’s also something that can work against you if you’re not careful.

No matter how successful or well organized you are, a day still won’t have more than 24 hours and your budget will probably never be limitless either. Yes, it’s true that you need to diversify but that doesn’t mean that you should go overboard. Spreading yourself too thin is just as bad as keeping all of your eggs in one basket.

In Case You Forgot: Focus, Focus, Focus

Most people get really excited about a project at the beginning but end up being distracted at one point or another. The brainstorming process is almost always a lot of fun but when you start implementing everything, things tend to get a bit boring. It’s like that for everyone and it’s perfectly understandable.

While it is understandable, that doesn’t mean that you have to start finding excuses. So you have great ideas? Well, what good will it do if they don’t materialize? Writing stuff on a board or on a piece of paper is great and everything but making money would be kinda-sorta nice too, wouldn’t it? If you always jump from one idea to another, you’ll end up with a lot of “concepts” but no money in the bank. So, what’s the solution?

You’ve Guessed It: Focus, Focus, Focus

Keep your eyes on the prize and be sure to set goals. Reaching a goal always gives you a nice little boost, probably more than enough in order to make it to the next one and so on. Don’t forget to reward yourself, keep it fun!

Ok, so focusing is important. But does this mean that you should let ideas with a lot of potential go to waste? Of course not, be ready to always write a great idea down. Be organized, you’ll thank yourself later on. Notepad is your friend, seriously! Why complicate things? Create a folder, call it “ideas” or something and whenever you think that you’ve discovered the best thing since sliced bread, open notepad or an editor of choice for a moment and let your imagination run wild. Then get back to work, rinse and repeat. That’s really all there is to it.

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a rocket scientist in order to make $200 – $300 per day online. Anyone with half a brain can pull it off and even if you’re a complete beginner, you’ll probably be able to start making $6k – $9k monthly without working all that hard fairly soon.

Starting out is always hard but once things are on the right track, you’ll have your first “hey, I’m making some decent cash by only working a couple of hours/day” moment. You’ll be able to start taking advantage of all the free time you have at your disposal and that can be extremely dangerous.

Oh Really? Why?

Three words: the comfort zone, the place which keeps most people from tapping their true potential. Human nature at its best! After all, why hustle and hustle and hustle when you can make enough money to live a comfortable life without working all that hard? Time to take your foot off the pedal, right? Wrong!

While it may be true that you’ll feel “content” at the beginning, it’s only a matter of time until regret starts kicking in. Sure, your life is fairly comfortable but what will happen when you find out that the guy you’ve been talking to on AIM back when both of you were beginners is now banking $3,000 per day while you’re still stuck at the $250 level?

Why Sacrifice the Future for a Comfortable Present?

The opportunities you have now will not stay around forever. Maybe you’ll come across better ones but you probably won’t. That’s why the ability to make the most of what you have is ultimately what separates winners from losers. If you can make $500 per day, make $500 per day. Even if it means not hanging out with friends as often watching less TV! Guess what: your friends will never pay your bills and neither will your favorite TV host.

Never make the mistake of letting the comfort zone hold you back. It’s easy to let the thought of making money without working all that much seduce you, especially after you’ve invested a lot of time in a certain project and think that you’ve had enough. Once you make one compromise, others will follow and it’s only a matter of time until things get out of hand. Is being content really enough for you? It definitely shouldn’t be!

Offical Network List for Launch Date:

Ads4Dough
Affiliate.com
AzoogleAds
ClickBank
ClickBooth
Comission Junction
Convert2Media
Copeac
CPAStorm
EliteComission
FluxAds
MarketLeverage
Maxbounty
Adfinity
AdDrive
AdEx
AdFish
AffiliateWise
Amped Media
Aqasis Media
BlinkAds
Commission Empire
CPA Fuel
CPA Jolt
CPA Valley
CPARev
CXdigital
Eagle Web Assets
eComLeads
EliteProfits
EpicCenter Network
Express Revenue
FireLead
Glipsa
Hydra Network
Jar Media
Karaktr
MarketHealth
MediaTrust (Advaliant)
Millnic Media
Motive
OfferWeb
PepperJam
PrimaryAds
RevenueLoop
Rextopia
ShareASale
Tatto Media
Unique Leads
Wotogepa
YEP!

Cash flow problems have the bad habit of turning something good into a very stressful experience. Instead of enjoying the ride once you’ve finally found a campaign you can scale, you have to try your best to find enough cash to keep that campaign alive.

You can either pause the campaign and wait for some money from the network(s) you’re working with once you run out of funds or you can be smart about it and try your best to get your hands on some money fast. What will it be?

Ok, I Need Some Cash: Where to Start?

Well, why not start by asking the other party who has a lot to gain if you keep the campaign alive for assistance? Networks are basically middle men, it’s in their best interest to help affiliate marketers whenever they’re dealing with cash flow issues.

If you have a decent track record with the network(s) you’re currently working with, convincing them to send some money your way shouldn’t be all that difficult. Pick up the phone and give your AM a call or contact him/her on AIM. If you don’t have a lot of history with the network(s) in question, you can at the very least ask: it definitely can’t hurt! Explain your situation in detail and focus on the part a network is always more receptive to, the “what’s in it for me” one.

It’s a perfectly understandable way of thinking because let’s be honest, we’re all here to make money. This isn’t ballet class, business is business and numbers talk. Bug your AM, explain and even threaten to take your business elsewhere as a last resort. You need thick skin to survive in this industry, don’t take no for an answer.

Are There Other Options?

If the network(s) in question are not willing to pay you a bit sooner then sure, there are other options. From asking some of the people you know offline for a loan to selling stuff for some fast cash, there are lots of more or less creative solutions to cash flow problems.

Obviously, convincing the network(s) to pay you sooner is the best solution but if that is out of the question, you need to put your thinking shoes on. When you don’t have a huge budget at your disposal, you need to hustle. There’s just no other way. Be proactive and again, don’t take no for an answer: now go get ‘em!