Of course, running your own business means you have to work even when you don’t want to. So, how do you motivate yourself to keep going? Here are a few suggestions…

Think of the negative

This is a big motivator for me. Whenever you’re feeling like skipping out on work, think of the negative consequences of doing so. Would it mean less money for bills? Less money for going out? Not being able to take time of later when you really needed to?

Stop barganing

Does this sound familiar?

“I’ll watch the game right now, and then do those campaigns later”…
“Hmm..now I’m tired from stuffing myself and drinking…I’ll just do double the number of campaigns tomorrow.”

We all know what happens ‘tomorrow’. Running your own business isn’t like playing ‘let’s make a deal’. The more you bargain with yourself, the less successful you will be. To combat this, make a set number of campaigns you are going to work on every day and stick to it no matter what. This will really help you understand that everything is a tradeoff. If you watch a game for 3 hours, that might be 3 more hours that you have to stay up building campaigns.

 Get some fresh air or exercise

Even a short walk around the block can kind of ‘reset’ your brain and body, and make it easier to get into work mode. Next time you find yourself staring aimlessly at your computer screen, try a quick walk or some pushups to find some motivation.

Focus on what you have to do

Sometimes working too much when you can’t get into will lead to burnout. Instead of always pushing  yourself, try completing the tasks that are the most important for that day then taking some time off. Getting away from the computer for even a 1/2 day can mean extra productivity when you return.

Set a schedule

When you had a job, you had to get there at a certain time and work a specified number of hours. People working for themselves often don’t stick to a schedule which is a straight road to being unproductive. Human’s need habit and structure..we just function better that way. Try setting a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Eventually, it will be easier to do work when you don’t feel like it because it’s part of the schedule.

Everyone who runs their own business struggles with motivation from time to time. Try adapting some of these strategies and see if they help. If you have any good tips feel free to leave a comment!

Aff Playbook forum members get the guide FREE. Tom is an active poster who helps members out with their POF campaigns through advice, lessons, and case studies.

There are several fundamental philosophies that I approach POF with from which I do not waver from. Keeping these principles in mind at all times will help you visualize the end goal and work towards that picture painted in your mind. These are principles that have worked for me and that I think are optimal in implementing my system, but they are not the only ways of thinking. I encourage you to explore what might best fit your own work style if these principles do not make sense to you or are not congruent with the way you want to do things.

Core Principle #1: Everything needs to scale.

With anything that I decide to implement, I always, always think: “Is this scalable?” In my mind, there is no point in doing anything that is not scalable, since I am not interested in making an extra buck or two on any particular day; I want to build a cash printing machine. There is only a limited amount of time in my day, and I want to spend it on activities with the highest leverage.

When I say scalability, I do not mean with any particular campaign. I can give you a successful campaign and tell you to scale it to other countries, and you will probably be able to do that with some effort since it’s just replicating what’s already been done. Can you, however, repeat the production of other successful campaigns on a consistent basis? What I want to get you thinking about in scalability is in regards to processes. You want to build a system made up of as many routine tasks as possible.

3-Step Scaling Possibility Thought Process:

1. Finding something that works

E.g. amateur images work well on POF and you might find them browsing through a free stock image site).

2. Determining whether your success can be replicated

E.g. was finding amateur images on the stock site just a fluke for that one campaign, or can you consistently find amateur images on that site, or similar sites, for most, if not all, campaigns?

3. Determining whether the replication can be scaled

E.g. I can think of 2 ways on top of my head in scaling the image example. First, outsource the stock image searching job and pay a fixed price per image. Second, purchase amateur images in bulk from a paid stock site).

After thinking through steps 2 and 3, you can then determine that you are not wasting time finding images now since you will have a solution for images when the number of your campaigns grow a hundredfold.

Here is another simple example. When I first got into POF, I realized that there were so many fields that it took too long to upload a campaign. If there weren’t available technology out there nor could I develop anything on my own to automate this process, I would not have continued with POF as I would have never been able to build enough of a cash flow stream with it to warrant the time to be spent.

One example of something that is potentially unscalable may be promoting an offer where the advertiser closely monitors the quality of your leads, micromanages multiple narrow demographics for you to send leads from, and limits your leads per day in those demos. While the payout per lead might be high for this kind of offer, I do not bother with them because I don’t believe it is worth the time and energy put into it. When you discover something that works, think about if and how you can make it work a hundred times over!

Core Principle #2: Sustainability.

When building campaigns, I am only interested in building assets. I am interested in building long-term campaigns that provide sustainable cash flow and do not require much of my time in ongoing maintenance, even if it means that the campaign generates $5 a day instead of $50 a day.
This way, I have time to expand on top of what I already have, instead of using my time to constantly replace dying campaigns. It makes me feel better that the $5 is something I can depend upon for quite a while, and if I just do what I did 100 times more, it wouldn’t be too shabby now would it?

I have seen some campaigns that produce hundreds of dollars a day but the profit numbers are highly volatile from day to day and the campaign is only profitable for a month. Why does this happen? Most likely, it is due to what the industry refers to as burnout or banner-blindness, which simply means that your target audience has seen the same ads too many times in a short period of time, thereby deteriorating your once high-performing ads.

You can avoid this by limiting the exposure of your campaigns. By limiting the exposure of your ads per user and per session, your campaigns will be a lot less prone to burnout, leading to campaigns that last long periods, and at the end of the day, serving more impressions overall than letting the flood gates open day one. The specifics of how this is done are through the adjustment of login count, session depth, frequency cap, and targeting, which will be explained in Day 4.

Core Principle #3: Play the Odds.

Performance marketing is a game of statistics and probability. If you had perfect information and could collect ten million impressions of data for each ad, you would know exactly which ads were the best and only run those ads. The downside is that data costs time and money. Ten impressions is not enough data, and ten million impressionscost too much, so the key is to find the right balance of data and make a bet that you are comfortable with.

In the initial phases of testing and campaign optimization, your only goal is to purchase as much data for as little as possible; that is, your goal is to mitigate capital loss while gathering the required data for you to make an informed decision on your ads.

What is enough data? Well, I am not a statistician, so I cannot tell you whether a sampling of data for your particular targeting is statistically significant. I can, however, use common sense and think: “Well, if an ad has 10 clicks and 1 conversion, is the 10% conversion rate trustworthy? No. If an ad has 100 clicks, is a 10% conversion rate trustworthy then? A lot more so.”

After you have obtained some data for the ad, you can then determine whether to cut the ad or continue testing it. This is where the probability portion comes in. Since you don’t have infinite data, you are making a bet on the better performing ads with the limited amount of data that you do have. You want to cut the losses of poor performing ads up to this point and continue to purchase data for the better performing ones.

As an example, for a lot of my campaigns, I will cut an ad that has a CTR lower than 0.10% after 3,000 impressions unless it is at least break even. There will always be those who say a high CTR ad does not always equate to a high ROI ad. This is absolutely right. I have ads that have run millions of impressions at less than 0.06% CTR generating high ROI’s. However, CHANCES ARE that the ads with higher than 0.10% CTR will outperform those with less than 0.10% CTR. You are making a bet on the better performers at this point because purchasing more data costs money!

If additional data is needed and the data isn’t costing you money (i.e. the ad is break even or better), then continue to test and gather free data. In Day 5, I will provide you with some specific metrics that I use to determine how and when to cut ads. You can use that as a guideline, but remember that there are many ways to do it. Make your own bets based on the amount of data that you feel comfortable with.

The takeaway of this Core Principle, however, is that performance marketing is a game of numbers and data can be used as statistical evidence to project future performance.

Core Principle #4: Compartmentalize.

There is a myriad of targeting options available in POF. As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, there are the images, the copies, landing pages, CPM bidding, different offers, networks, and more. The amount of variables may seem daunting at first, and some people will try to incorporate all these factors at once by split testing them all at once and making sure every piece is “perfect” before launching a campaign. When the campaign is not profitable, they are not sure what went wrong.

Instead, you should focus on one thing at a time and compartmentalize the various pieces that will make the system work. A simple example of this is compartmentalizing the process of finding high performing ads. The indication of POF ad performance is CTR. If that is your goal, then stop worrying about what the ROI of the ads are in the meantime. Focus on the one thing at hand, which is getting the CTR’s up.

Control the other variables in the meantime and use what seems to work for other people and go with it for now. With country targeting, just target US to begin with. With the CPM bid, if people are saying $0.50 is a competitive bid for your targeting, then bid $0.57. Hold the other variables constant so you can isolate and learn how to get your high CTR’s.

Get on the forums and don’t be afraid to ask people for help! The point is not to post a follow-along in the forums with a -50% ROI and ask people why you’re losing money. Rather, you should be posting your images and your targeting and ask people for their opinion as to why you are not getting the CTR’s you should be getting.

The key take away of this Core Principle is to isolate your focus, so that once you have taken care of each compartment that you have drawn out for yourself, you know that the whole system is about to come together.

Core Principle #5: Know Your Competition.

This one is a no brainer. You have many competitors, and if you do better than them, then you will succeed. You must have realized by now that information is king in this industry. Therefore, you should spend time knowing exactly what else is out there competing with your ads. You need to do this in order to know what the current benchmark is and what current trends are, so that you have an idea of how to do BETTER. Monitor other ads to get ideas and learn from them. Of course, not all ads are profitable, but if they’re not, they probably won’t be there for long.

Keeping up with what is running beside your ads at all times and the sheer repetition of absorbing the different kinds of ads out there will give you a huge advantage over those who do not. There are a couple of ways to monitor your competition that will be explained in Day 2.

SETTING BUDGET AND COMMITTING TO A LOSS LIMIT

So, how much cash do you need to begin POF? In my opinion, you should be willing to invest a minimum $500-1,000 per month into this venture. If done right, most people that I have come across were able to become profitable within 3-4 months, which means you should be willing to commit $1,500-5,000 over that period of time in net loss. I have yet to see a fully committed marketer lose that much on POF and still not able to make money on there, but you might realize before that point that this is just not for you.

Can you do it for less? Yes, absolutely. I want to, however, give you my conservative estimate to broach the idea in your mind so that one month in, when you’re down $500, you don’t feel hopeless and want to quit. Too many times have I seen people quit after a few months after they are down a couple thousand dollars and decide that POF is not a profitable traffic source. That breaks my heart, since, to me, they are throwing away months of learning and experience and all the data and knowledge that they have purchased for that couple thousand. More often than not, people are a lot closer to profitability than they think, and they would see that if they were able to persevere for a few more months.

Of those who are successful on POF, they are making a bare minimum of $100 per day. A few thousand dollars of investment is, in my opinion, perfectly justified in providing you with a skill to generate the income you can attain in POF.

To mitigate some cash flow issues, you should charge everything through to a credit card. I would advise against American Express cards for POF since POF is a Canadian company, and your American Express will be charged a foreign transaction fee of about 1% on average. Plus, with the networks paying you a week, two weeks, or even over a month after you’ve earned your commissions, it’s highly beneficial to have more cash (and credit) to scale up your operations.

The capital you are committing is, nevertheless, an investment, and there is a chance that this just isn’t your thing. Therefore, there is a chance that you will not see that money again at the end of this, and you have to be able to accept that you made a calculated decision to invest your capital and your efforts and move on from there.

Setting Budget and Distribution Method in POF

In the beginning when you’re learning, you should be watching your campaigns very carefully anyway. As a failsafe, however, you should set a budget for your campaigns of $25-50. As for the option to “Distribute ASAP” or “Distribute Evenly”, I would suggest you sticking to “Distribute Evenly” for now.

Distribute ASAP means to show the ad as soon as there is a spot to show it based on what you target and bid. If there is a large amount of traffic for your targeting and you are bidding high, then it will go through your budget relatively quickly and stop getting impressions for the rest of the day. Distribute evenly means POF will try to spread your budget evenly over the course of the day.

There are two instances when you should shift to distribute ASAP. First, through experience, you may have a good idea as to when your campaigns do well during the day. You may want to start your campaign around that prime time and distribute ASAP so that the impressions you are paying for are the highest quality. That is a little too much micromanaging for me, but when you do not have that many campaigns to manage yet, it might be worth your while. Second, if you have a highly profitable campaign, and you want more traffic within the same targeting, then open up your budget and set to distribute ASAP for more traffic. This is one of the easy ways to scale a campaign up.

Once you are spending a substantial amount on POF on a daily basis, you would just stick to distribute ASAP.

Committing to a Loss Limit

Before you dive in, set a daily loss limit; I recommend $50 to begin with. On any given day, once you hit this number in net loss, you should pause all your campaigns and rerun them the next day. This is both important in framing a positive mindset going forward, since you are expecting to lose up to $50 a day, and in managing cash flow, so that you don’t burn through your capital too quickly and give up.

It is extremely unlikely that you will actually lose $50 every day. As a matter of fact, you might see yourself losing a lot less than $50 per day fairly quickly. Set this goal so that having a net loss in the first several months is just something that’s a part of the plan and that you are in an investment period to build yourself long term cash flow.

CHOOSING YOUR TARGETING AND OFFERS

In the beginning of your journey, you may decide that you want to run a particular offer and subsequently think about how to promote that offer. That way of thinking is perfectly okay. In contrast, I like to think about what targeting I want to monetize, find a few offers that might suit it the best, and pick the one I am most excited about.

I see POF as many streams of traffic available for me to monetize. My goal is to monetize as many of these streams as possible, starting with the path of least resistance. From my experience, as general rules, female traffic is more difficult than male traffic; older traffic is more difficult than younger traffic; and broad traffic is more difficult than niche traffic. For your first few rodeos, I would recommend you target the easier forms of traffic. An example of a targeting that I might pick might be: black females 18-30.

When picking an offer, choose one that people have already had success running; do not pick an obscure offer that few have heard of. Use your best judgment and ASK around! Ask your affiliate managers and on the forums. I don’t want to make recommendations as to what offers to run here because I do not want everyone who reads this to run the same offer. I would recommend going with dating offers, which is what I will cover in this guide. As you become successful on POF, you can and should test other verticals.

If you are targeting niche (e.g. people who are Jewish), there are usually two kinds of offers: one, a niche dating site (e.g. a dating site for Jews), or two, a generic offer (i.e. an offer that can be applied to most demographics). The niche dating offers can work great, and I have many that are generating consistent profits currently. However, I actually recommend that you try promoting niche with a generic offer first for 2 reasons:

If you go with my recommendation, however, you will NEED to throw up a landing page. There is a gap between the niche you are targeting and the generic offer. A landing page is needed to act as a message intermediary and sell the user to fill out the subsequent form. You will be making, editing and testing landing pages anyway, so I do not see this as a major obstacle. Day 6 will cover landing pages in more detail.

Lastly, pick a well-known network that pays weekly or bi-weekly to run the offer with. Don’t be nit-picky about the offer payout; you are in your learning phase. Once you’ve determined the targeting you are going to monetize and have the exact offer picked out, you are ready to start on the actual campaign stuff!

You can learn more about the POF 7 Day Mastery Guide here

I’ve just gone through and updated it a bit. The book itself is a great primer on PPV marketing and also comes with training videos.

Hope you enjoy it!

View from the Balcony at night. It was really weird being higher than the actual Palms hotel…

Even cooler when sitting in the hot tub

It was a little unnerving leaning up against the glass looking down 57 stories, but one of the most amazing views in all of Vegas.

A couple shots during the daytime…

The inside was great too…

Sunday – Up at 7am to get ready for the mastermind and party…

The mastermind went really well, and judging by the comments I got afterwards everybody else though so too. I didn’t quite know how this would turn out, because it was the first time we did a mastermind of this length. We managed to stay somewhat on schedule thankfully!

I went first and presented 3 concepts/case studies I had been working on lately. They were pretty interesting ideas and I gave everybody some solid long term strategies.

Chris was next up and talked about how he started as a total newbie and what he learned on his way to becoming a super successful affiliate. This was a great talk because Chris really outlined what he did right and wrong on his way to success.

Next was a quick lunch followed by Stefanie’s presentation. Stefanie talked about some SEO strategies and showed the effect different experiments had on her rankings.

J-SiN was next and presented on PPV and host and post. I think this really opened up people’s eyes to the opportunity with host and post and just how much you could do with that data.

Adam was next, and talked about the mindset and strategies he uses. This presentation broke the Aff Playbook records for most profanity, shortest tie (shirt tie), and most laughter.

Jason from Ads4Dough finished up the presentation. This was a great talk and I think very motivating for a lot of people. Jason has a unique perspective as the owner of one of the top affiliate networks. Jason’s talk focused on what he sees as the biggest opportunities for affiliates right now. He also shared the story of an affiliate who recently did $95 million in revenue in a single year. This talk really opened people’s eyes to just how much money is out there if you are willing to work for it.

We had a really cool truck limo type thing waiting to take a few attendees over to Caesars who wanted to go to the Adsimilis meetup. I had pics of this but they got deleted off my phone

After the talk, we did our party preparations. A big thanks to jleone and lonelyplanet for helping carry up all the beer! We didn’t have too long to prepare before people started showing up.

Of course, we had a huge cookie table thanks to Stefanie.

I was told these cookies had a very high CTR (chomp through rate). These were a huge hit and went great with all the alcohol we had on hand…

groomez, lucidpsimc, and woyshush1 decided to jump in the hot tub…

The party was a ton of fun. I really wished I could have talked to everyone longer, but the night went super quick. Oh…the cat waitresses. So, the day before we left, we made a mad dash to the costume store and got some ‘sexy cat costumes’ (felt a little silly asking the clerk to show us where those were). I confirmed several times with the girls what time the event was, etc. and somehow they BOTH managed to flake!

The next day we got up, checked out of the penthouse (with a tear in our eye) and headed to the show. CTRtard and I walked the floor for 5 minutes and decided it was stupid, then walked it again for 5 minutes and decided to leave. The floor is ok if you want to check it out, but not where the real business gets done. There seemed to be less affiliate networks with booths this year. Gone were the giant corner booth, in favor of small ones or not having one at all.

The weirdest thing we got on the floor was some ‘flavor inhaler’ thing (like an e-cigarette except with flavor?) that was supposed to be some weight loss thing. I got vanilla cupcake but threw it away as I thought of carcinogenic toxins flowing into my lungs.

Next, I went to lunch with Stefanie, CTRtard, Jonathan Volk, J-SiN, Justin (Affbuzz) and the Tapit crew at the Bellagio buffet.

Me with the Tapit guys

Afterwards, I had a meeting with the VP of Traffic Vance. He told me some really cool stuff that TV is coming out with this next year, that I can’t mention yet, but it’s going to be very good for affiliates. TV wanted to know what affiliates were up to these days (traffic and offers) so we talked a bit about that. We are going to be working on a few things together concerning affiliates and Traffic Vance that I’m really excited about.

After that, we went and checked into the Aria. It was nothing like the Palms Penhouse, but still a pretty cool hotel. Then it was off to dinner at Spago with Stefanie, Chris & his wife, Hung (Chris’ business partner), J-SiN and his wife, Browie and his wife, and CTRtard. Stefanie and I then headed off to see The Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian. Very cool show if you haven’t seen it.

We had plans of going out afterwards but 2 days of almost no sleep and constant talking were taking their toll so we headed back and crashed.

Every year at ASW there seems to be a theme you pick up on by talking to everyone. The theme this year was definitely that affiliate marketing is great as a starting point to building a real business. I was pretty glad to hear people talking like this because it’s something I’ve been trying to convince people of for a while, and one of the core concepts of the Aff Playbook forum. There seems to be (on average) a 1-3 year longevity for people doing pure affiliate marketing (traffic to cpa offer arbitrage). Most people then get into starting their own traffic source, ecommerce, product, network, app, etc. This theme was really consistent with everyone I talked to, and most of my affiliate friends are either working mostly on their own business, or headed in that direction.

I’m not saying there is no money in running traffic to offers. The $95 million/year affiliate Jason spoke of is proof enough of that. My point is that it’s pretty tiring babysitting campaigns all day and night, dealing with networks, traffic sources, etc, etc. and eventually people grow tired of that and see the value in building an actual business.

There is also a definite divide between a new generation of affiliates and the older generation. Most (not all) of the new generation, younger affiliates are really into the traffic arbitrage thing with no intention of doing anything else while the older generation has done that and sees there is more money to be made elsewhere.

Some other random thoughts from the show…

- Fraud is rampant in the CPA space. There are networks out there running almost nothing BUT fraud traffic.

- The pushier the people at booths are, the less I want to talk to them.

- For every traffic source of offer people say is dead, I met people who were doing really well with them.

- The smartest people don’t make the most money, and sometimes seemingly stupid people make a killing. It’s all about not outsmarting yourself.

- Nothing replaces face to face contact. If you want to grow your business, nothing can beat meeting people in person.

- There are fewer and fewer CPA networks I actually want to do business with.

- As successful as you think you are, someone else is making 50x what you are.

- There is more opportunity to become a millionaire online than hardly anyone realizes (with affiliate marketing and other businesses).

A special thanks to Ads4Dough, Dream Marriage, and Beyond Hosting for sponsoring the party. I also really want to thank Stefanie, Adam, J-SiN, Chris, and Smaxor for helping put on a great mastermind.

Thanks also to the people who attended the mastermind. I hope you got a lot out of it! Last but not least, thanks to everyone who came to our event. It was great meeting new forum members, and seeing people again.

Definitely try to make it out to the next show..it’s a great opportunity for you professionally and personally

As most of you know, we changed our name from PPV Playbook to Aff Playbook. This change reflects the fact that the forum has tons of content in addition to PPV. I was a little nervous about the name change because ‘PPV Playbook’ was so well branded. I really wanted to not appear just focused on PPV however, so decided to pull the trigger. The name change was really well received and I’m glad we did it.

2011 saw solid growth of the forum and each month we set a new record. One of the things I am most proud of is all the success stories to come out of the forum. We had people posting everything from their first $1 of profit, into the thousands. Here are just a few…

What’s even more impressive is the people whose lives have been changed as a result of joining the forum. That might sound a little cheesy I know but I meet a lot of affiliates at shows who tell me how they got their start on the forum.

We continued to deliver awesome case studies & lessons. It was really cool that we had so many members sharing their case studies too. It’s always great to get ideas from multiple sources. We didn’t just have your run of the mill ‘My campaign that made blah blah on blah blah traffic source’ type case studies. We had some of those sure, but we also had case studies on building email lists, direct mail, product creation, offline marketing, and even manufacturing. Here are a few examples…

Another addition in 2011 I am really excited about, is the addition of the adult marketing section. This section is lead by an adult industry veteran, and the content is really great!

We continued our webinars and had some great guests like Traffic Vance…

Corey continued to develop the Affportal toolset with great new additions like the jQuery landing page generator. We also got some API access to build out the SEO toolset. Corey has a new tool coming out (preview in the forum) that I can’t talk about publicly, but it’s something that everyone is going to want. Funny story – I’ve know Corey for years, yet only met him for the first time in person at the last ASE!

Speaking of ASE, we had a lot of great meetups  – ASW, adtech SF, ASE. We do them at most of the major shows and they are always a great time. Instead of doing the loud music and activities, we usually keep it mellow with drinks and networking. People love these events because they can actually hear each other and talk. I know a few people who have developed very profitable partnerships from meeting at our parties.

If you’re going to be as ASW, you should come to our celebrity Penthouse meetup.

2011 was also the year everyone decided they were going to start a forum. This was …flattering? Funny? Entertaining none the less. Some people found out that Vbulletin + a few case studies wasn’t quite the easy money they hoped.

I’ll take it as a compliment if I make running a forum look easy, because it’s anything but. To do it well anyway. The increased number of forums actually helped solidify what Aff Playbook is all about. Based on all the comments I received, people realized that Aff Playbook is full of helpful people who are interested in building a real business.

In 2011 I started some new businesses. Some went well, but some totally bombed. I’m going to be documenting those in the forum. I think you can learn as much by failures (and often MORE) than you can from success. One of my most recent ventures has some potential venture capital funding. We are really excited about this and it will also open up a whole new area of growth for the forum.

Thanks & Stuff

I have a lot of people to thank for all their help this last year. In no particular order..

My friend Mark from CTR Tard did numerous projects for me and helped me out of a few technical jams. He helped finish the move to Aff Playbook, and got the mobile version of the forum working.

Corey for bouncing ideas around with me. We’ve had a lot of good ideas, some bad ideas, and everything in between. I’m glad we get along so well.

My awesome mods (some who have come and gone) Lee, Tracy, Jon, Mike, Joe, Mark, Andrew, Brian. I hope you guys know how much I appreciate all the help. I know you are busy running your own businesses and can’t always post, but I really appreciate all the help.

My cats, who somehow became super affiliates and Affbuzz mascots. I would also like to say thanks to my friend Justin from Affbuzz. He was one of my first good friends in the industry and has helped me a lot.

Adam Bunch who has helped out in the forum (when he feels like it) and our mastermind sessions. It seriously wasn’t too long ago that Adam was a forum member struggling for success. He told me “I’m just going to build 5 campaigns every single day from now on”, and it wasn’t too long before his income grew exponentially.

I also want to thank all my members for helping grow the forum. I try to help you guys as much as I can whether it’s telling you to suck it up keep going with a campaign, or trying to make the content in the forum the best it can be.

2012

2012 is going to be the biggest year for the forum yet. I’m not going to outline everything just yet, but you won’t want to miss this. We’ll have the usual great case studies, lessons, and webinars, but even more resources and opportunities for members to grow their business beyond what most affiliates achieve.

Have a great New Year!

I’m going to give a quick rundown of building these campaigns.

Step 1 – Finding trends

The first step is to find a trending topic. You can use any of these sites to find trending topics.

Google Trends

Google Insights for Search

Google News

Bing Social

Yahoo Buzz

Yahoo Clues

Social Mention Trends

Twitter Trending Topics and Trendistic

It’s Trending (Facebook)

Like Button (Facebook)

Hitwise

This is a good site that aggregates some of the above sites http://trendsbuzz.com/

There’s no special trick to picking trends, just pick something that has good volume.

Step 2 – A landing page

You have a few options here. The classic idea is to do a ‘poll’ on a trending topic. Just for an example, lets say I chose the topic ‘girl with the dragon tattoo’. I might create a landing page like this

Get free movie tickets! Vote now for your chance to win..

<pic of the topic>

Will you see Girl with the Dragon Tatoo?

Yes – No
Vote now for your chance to win

If you need a good poll script, you can find some here

After ‘voting’ the person is taken to the offer which brings us to the next topic…

Offers

With this technique people try too hard to match the offers to the topic, and that’s not always necessary. Don’t assume you know what type of offer will convert with these campaigns. Ideally, you would rotate multiple niches until you figured out what worked. Some niches to try:

Gaming
Freebies/Sweepstakes
Downloads

If the topic is niche specific like ‘The biggest loser’ or something, you could do weight loss offers, etc.

Traffic

This works well with PPV traffic. It used to do well with search, but the advent of quality score has made these more difficult to run.

The most interesting way I’ve seen this done recently, was in a case study our forum member Yabby posted. The idea is to create a Facebook app around a polling script and use the “Precise Interests” targeting option. The possibilities with that are endless and you can often get very cheap traffic.

You could also send PPV traffic to your poll/landing page on FB.

Some of my best campaigns have produced $10k profit in a single month. Not a huge campaign, but for about 20 min setup time and a couple hours of optimization that’s some pretty easy money. Those campaigns don’t happen all the time, but when they do it’s great.

Lots of possibilities with this one. Have fun!

Come chill in our 5.5 million dollar celebrity owned penthouse. Have some drinks, play pool, poker, and maybe even a dip in the pool?

Try some of the delicious Aff Playbook Cookies, and a new drink creation – Aff Juice (don’t say we didn’t warn you!)

This is going to be a blast! Our meetups are fun because you can actually TALK to people. That’s one of the things people love about our events…they can actually meet people and have a conversation – no loud music, and plenty of friendly people.

This is also a chance to meet reps from some of your favorite traffic sources like Traffic Vance, Jumptap, POF, and more!

Please RSVP here

In our biggest and most packed event yet, we’ll be packing in a huge amount of information over the course of six hours – focusing on techniques that are making our team over six figures in monthly profits.

When & Where

Sunday January 8th from 12-6pm. There will be a short break to eat, but we have a lot to cram into 6 hours. The location will be emailed to the attendees.

Who & What

This is going to be the biggest one so far. The speaking lineup includes:

David Ford – Owner Affplaybook.com

David is the owner of AffPlaybook.com and has been a full-time Internet Marketer for over 10 years. Specializing in PPV and PPC, David will be unleashing several large case studies and examples that have netted him between $500 and $1000 a day in pure profit and show you how you can apply your own twists for maximum profit potential.

Adam Bunch – Owner Bunch-media.com

Hailing from the UK and now living in Brazil, Adam burst onto the scene 2 years ago focussing his efforts on international markets with Media Buys, PPC and Facebook. He will be sharing tips on dominating markets, massive campaign scaling, international market penetration, direct site media buys, building an effective affiliate mindset, and effective competition spying, as well as demonstrating case studies that have made him over $3000 in daily profit and lead to regular six figure profit months.

Jason Akatiff – Owner Ads4Dough.com

Jason Akatiff AKA Smaxor got started in this industry 6 years ago after buying a bizopp software package on Black Hat SEO. He quickly realized that the majority of prepackaged software lacked the content & systems needed in order to get to the next level, so he created his own before quickly and aggressively moving into large scale media buying with his primary focus being in the CPA space. Today Jason owns and operates Ads4Dough CPA Network, manages the internal media buying team, continues to run both online and offline marketing campaigns, and is building several new technology projects.

Chris Fah – Full-Time Affiliate Marketer

Chris is one of Aff Playbooks major success stories. Having joined the forum around 18 months ago and knowing nothing about Internet Marketing, his hard work, dedication, and focus on learning have lead him to great success and five figure profit days. Here he will be talking about how Aff Playbook changed his life and how you can replicate his success, getting the right mindset, putting things into action and how to find the right path for yourself. He’ll also be discussing scaling campaigns and how to outsource your work efficiently. .

Stefanie Hutson – Affiliate Manager & consultant

As well as being affiliate manager for the hugely popular “Dream Marriage” dating offer, Stefanie is a full-time affiliate marketing consultant and SEO specialist. In this talk, Stefanie will be sharing some of her wealth of SEO knowledge, cutting through the hype and providing you with simple techniques and strategies that work for maintaining a solid and stable income with SEO.

Details

The event will take place on Sunday January 8th from 12pm – 6pm with location details emailed to atendees once they have signed up. It’s going to be an action-packed six hours full of techniques and strategies but there will also be a short break for lunch.

The event cost is $850 which also includes 1 years access to the Aff Playbook coaching forums (worth $804 on its own). You will also receive a full video recording of the session so that you can re-watch the information and methods shared, as well as notes, codes, landing pages and examples discussed.

The last session we ran at ASE sold out extremely quickly and we had a LARGE number of people who wanted to come but couldn’t get a spot. For that reason we’ve decided to let a few more people into this session but we are limiting the numbers to just 30 people to ensure that the highly sensitive information does not get saturated.

To ensure the tactics and techniques discussed remain exclusive to attendees, we will NOT be releasing or selling a recording of this session to anyone who does not attend the ASW Mastermind seminar.

The signup link will stay active as long as there are spots still available but act fast to avoid disappointment. Click here to reserve your spot. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This is business and I’m doing this to make money. I can be friends with anyone I want, but I am going to run with the network that gives me the best results.

With that in mind, I tested the average offer page load time for 4 popular networks. I am going to leave these anonymous so you can do your own testing and reach your own conclusions. Chances are, you are running with one of these networks though.

I tested 4 offers in different niches for each network. I used the same offer if it was available on the networks.

The best network had an average offer page load speed of 1.7 s. The worst network had an average of 2.9. That’s a full second slower than the second slowest network. If you don’t think that would have an effect on conversions..well, 1. You’re wrong and 2. Split test it for yourself.

Here is a chart showing the results

I see over and over again in the forums people who say “I’ve done so many campaigns and I can’t get anything to work!’. There can be a lot of reasons for this, but one of the simplest it to split test offers on different CPA networks.

I really encourage you to test your offer page load times. It can make a HUGE difference in your conversion rates.

*edit* After reading the comments, I realized I should show you how you can test. You can use http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ (you can pick where it runs the test from).

I also use Live HTTP Headers and http://wheregoes.com/ to see the redirects. You won’t believe how many redirects some affiliate links go through.

This isn’t going to be the usual ‘improve your CTR’ or ‘case study’ post, and I know it might not appeal to a lot of people. This will however help you make more money in the long run.

What we do for a living is great. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Unfortunately, sitting at the computer for long hours is one of the worst things you can do for your back. The human body was designed to move, and not sit at a desk all day. If you don’t have back, neck, shoulder, or wrist pain that’s great! If you work at the computer for years and years, you probably will eventually if you don’t do something about it.

The Problem

There are many different back problems. Some of the more common include:

Herniated discs

This is when the disc between your vertebrates bulges to one side. The protective coating surrounding the disc contents can also rupture which is called an annular tear. These can occur from the low back all the way up to the neck.

Degenerative disc disease

This isn’t really a ‘disease’ but a condition where the discs degenerate to the point of causing painful symptoms.

Sciatica

Sciatica is a condition where the nerves coming out of the spinal column in the low back get irritated, or compressed. It can cause pain in the back as well as the legs.

There are many other problems ranging from muscle spasms to more serious conditions. It’s always a good idea to get lingering back pain checked out by a doctor.

The Solution

There are a ton of ‘solutions’ for back pain ranging from supplements to doctors, devices and everything in between. I’m only going to talk about a few that I’ve either got relief from or a good number of people have.

Since there are so many causes of back pain, one treatment might work for one person and not another.

1. Get up and move around

Many experts think that back pain is just a symptom of not moving enough. We move WAY less than our ancestors did, and also have a lot more health problems.

So, one of the easiest solutions might be to just get out of your chair for a break regularly. Regular exercise and maintaining a healthy weight can go a long way to preventing and relieving back pain also.

2. Accupuncture

A lot of people get relief from acupuncture. The needles don’t hurt so don’t worry about that. A good place to find a local practitioner is Yelp.

3.  Inversion therapy

This can be particularly helpful for low back pain, herniated discs, and pinched nerves. Teeter makes really good products for this.

4. Pilates and Yoga

Many people swear by these. They do work for some, but you have to be very careful depending on your condition. The amount of forward flexion in yoga can exacerbate symptoms. The best DVD I’ve found is this one. It only takes about 20 min, and seems really effective.

5. Massage

You can go somewhere and get this done, or invest in a self massager. These can range from the little handheld gadgets to full body massage chairs.

6. The Egoscue method

This is a really popular technique that almost always gets positive reviews from people. It’s a series of exercises/stretches done in a particular order. You can watch a video showing a few of the exercises here

This Egoscue book has almost 300 5 star reviews on Amazon, and is worth checking out.

More information on the official website

Conclusion

Like I said, this isn’t something that’s going to make you more money tomorrow. It will absolutely make you more money in the future when you don’t lose work time to back problems. Even if you don’t have back or neck problems now, a little prevention is MUCH easier than trying to fix an existing problem.

Even if your back just hurts a little, or gets sore, etc…taking the time to take care of it can really boost your energy and productivity.