If you’re in the affiliate marketing space or affiliate marketing is the way you make your daily living,  then more then likely you’ve heard the name “Jonathan Volk” mentioned a time or two. If not, then you’re not really keeping up on your industry and it’s time to do a bit more reading. Anyways, besides Jonathan being a true active super affiliate & a down to earth nice chap, he publishes a very respected affiliate marketing blog at www.jonathanvolk.com. Jonathan coaches & trains new and experienced affiliate marketers on different marketing methods he uses to make a very nice living online. This is one online marketer you want to pay attention too, out of the thousands of other resources that claim to offer help, but are really just looking to make a quick buck.

Just the other day Jonathan released an in depth 52 page guide  on affiliate marketing.  Here’s a short statement from Jonathan about his newly released guide.

Jonathan says:

“In this guide, I go over the techniques that I have used to generate over $4 million dollars in affiliate marketing commissions including PPC, PPV, Media Buying and Social Media Affiliate marketing!

I have been working extremely hard on this guide and I believe that it will be of great benefit for both newbies and more experienced affiliate alike… I mean, even if you get just one good nugget, it was worth it right? Well, I plan on many of you getting more than one nugget. ”

So don’t waste anymore time, if you want to download the guide please register via this link:

JonathanVolks Affiliate Markting Guide

There is constantly new articles and information being added and new questions from publishers have been being posted constantly.  We continue to encourage publishers to keep posting questions.  Typically if you have a question,  nine times out of ten, someone will have the exact same question.

The more you ask, the more it will benefit you as well as other users.  Our coaches are seasoned veterans and are willing to help with any type of marketing technique or issue.  They know this industry very well, however we can not read minds, so keep on asking the questions.

Today I just wanted to take a minute and highlight a new up & coming scammer in our industry. His name is Pete Maughan and he owns a company called Prolero Inc. Pete and his company over the last few months has been highlighted quite a few times.  A few of the places you can read more about Pete & his company is a Facebook group called “The Deadbeat Club – Internet Advertising – People Who Don’t Pay” the group was established to bring awareness to the industry as a whole. This is where networks and affiliates can read up on all the scamming advertisers in the industry trying to play, but not pay their bills when it’s time to pay up. Many of these shady fellows will hop from network to network trying to get their offers listed with the network and  run up a bill small or large and when it’s time to pay up they can’t be reached. You wouldn’t think that this goes on much and these guys don’t have much success. But they do, creating a very lucrative business model for themselves, but leaving the network to foot their bill because typically a network will pay its affiliates as they should.  If you’re not a member of this group I recommend that you join it right away and post up any situations that are appropriate.

Another place that Pete was recently highlighted was on the C2M Blog - Ruck the one who posts there is known for calling slimy fraud affiliates out & bringing awareness to what really goes on, but not talked about so much. You can also read about him calling out Pete and his company Prolero.

I probably wouldn’t be addressing this issue publicly on the ECM blog, but we’ve had a personal experience with Pete ourselves. Somehow we let Pete & his offer Google Corkboard make its way onto our network and while we were out in Vegas recently had a bit of volume roll to it, running up a 12k bill. And when it was time to get paid, well let’s just say we’ve haven’t & don’t expect too, judging by Pete’s track record.  The funny thing is I frequently read up on the Facebook group The Deadbeat Club – Internet Advertising – People Who Don’t Pay” , but somehow I missed this one. So that’s why I wanted to give Pete a standing ovation for being able to once again have a successful, profitable experience with scamming a CPA network. I’m sure that now since  Pete’s name and company name is being smeared across the industry for being a scamming thief he’ll just roll away back under his rock and develop a new identity  to start the whole scamming process all over again.

Comments are welcome. Tell Pete and the rest of the industry how you really feel about him. Let’s make him feel welcome and invite him to make an appearance at an industry show so we can all learn what kind of person not to be like. Good luck to you Pete you’re going to need it buddy. Its people like you that really give our industry a bad name. I hope you’re proud of yourself, it must feel good to be a thief and have everyone in the whole industry think you’re a scammer.  “NOT – I don’t think so.”

Below is a picture of Pete in all his glory!

If you want to reach Pete, I’ve posted some of his details below.

Peter J Maughan

Business Address;

223 W. 1230 N. Unit #215

Provo, UT 84604

Pete@Prolero.com

FaceBook Account

Linkedin Account

I’m very excited to announce that my friend Mark Roth CEO of OfferVault has created a new and much needed program for our industry called AffiliCert. Mark’s AffiliCert is an Affiliate Certification Program designed to weed out the trusted publishers from the slimy, shady, dirtball affiliates that call themselves affiliates, but are nothing more than fraudsters stealing money from advertisers & CPA networks. These impostors make things tougher on all the legitimate publishers doing things the right way. I hope that everyone in our industry that would like to see a measurable change for the better gets behind Mark and his new program. All networks and affiliates alike need to embrace this new program so we can make it just a little bit harder for them to steal our hard earned money. Below is Mark’s overview of his new program AffiliCert .

STATUS

We are now in the final stages of development on the AffiliCert platform and expect to go live on February 22^nd. We have partnered with Payoneer a registered MasterCard Merchant Service Provider, which allows us to provide the most rigorous screening procedure in the Industry, including KYC (Know Your Customer), BSA (Bank Secrecy Act), AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) and many other stringent checks to assure that only legitimate affiliates obtain an AffiliCert Certification. Additional checks include, phone verification, email and physical address verification, website verifications and many other checks. With the extensive and sophisticated fraud identification procedures we are employing, we are able to certify both US based and international affiliates.

Participating networks (there are over 50 networks so far) will receive an AffiliCert network login and gain access to certification data on our approved affiliates. Networks will be able to look up affiliates by name or ID# to check certification status and will also have access to daily/weekly lists of newly certified affiliates. This list may be used as a prospecting pool from which to recruit new affiliates

OUR VALUE

As the situation exists now, each network spends an enormous amount of time screening affiliate applications, only to turn away the vast majority as potentially fraudulent and not worth the risk to do business with. Affiliate managers’ time would be far better spent helping their existing affiliates to become more successful, therefore increasing the income of all parties involved.

AffiliCert aims to take the burden of screening largely off the hands of the networks, thus freeing up the affiliate managers time for more valuable tasks.

From the legitimate affiliates’ perspective, there are great benefits as well. Any affiliate getting started in the business knows all too well the frustrations of having their applications denied by one network after another. It’s really not their fault, but they are getting caught in the cross fire, collateral damage in the fight against fraud. Now with the emergence of AffiliCert, the legitimate affiliate will have a much easier time getting approved into any of our participating networks. There will be a nominal application fee, and of course they must pass the screening process, but once issued an AffiliCert ID, it will be smooth sailing. As an added benefit, each affiliate that becomes certified, will receive an AffiliateCert debit card, issued by Payoneer. If affiliates choose to recieve commission payments this way, the CPA networks can issue payments directly to their Affilicert debit card which can be used as a credit card or to take out cash at ATM’s at thousands of locations worldwide. US residents can even transfer their funds from their card, directly into their bank account. For international affiliates, this is hands down the quickest and easiest method to get paid.

Among the many networks participating in the AffiliCert program are MediaTrust, Unique Leads, Market Leverage, Neverblue, Rextopia, Revenue Street, Elite Clicks Media, Affiliateer and Affiliate venture Group.

We are excited to be launching on February 22^nd when we will begin taking affiliate applications. Fraudsters need not apply.

Greg, Kim, Ricco, Ryan, Mike, Allister

The ECM team is back in the office after a long trip to Vegas for Affiliate Summit West.  We were very busy the entire week.  Starting out Saturday, the team arrived at the Rio, and we all met for dinner which led to playing some slots to end the night out.  Sunday was the first day of ASW and it was a good one to say the least.  Meet market was packed, which means lots of business being done.  Later that night we sponsored the IANteract dinner with Ian Fernando.  The dinner was at Craftsteak in the MGM at was absolutely delicious.  Below you will find some pictures of everyone in attendance at the dinner.

Greg, Jon, Luke, Laura, Ryan

Lance, Justin, Allister, Chandra, Ricco, Mike

Monday and Tuesday were big meetings days for the ECM team.  We had quite a bit of people come up to the ECM Suite and talk business.  We got a lot of work ton and built on some of our established relationships.  We want to thank everyone who spent the time to meet with us, and we look forward to taking business to the next level in 2010!  Next show is Ad-Tech San Francisco in April, see everyone there!

With January right around the corner, we are coming up on Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas.  The show takes place January 17th through the 19th in January of 2010.  The ECM Team will be arriving on the the Saturday before, the 16th of January.  The majority of our team will be in attendance, however we will not be getting a booth for this Affiliate Summit.  We will be walking around the meet market as well as the exhibit halls meeting others and making deals.

We will also have a personal suite with-in the Rio which we will be holding meetings with affiliate, advertisers, and everyone else we see necessary.  We would love to meet with all of our current publishers as well as future publishers and talk about how we can work together and make each other profitable.  We ecnourage you to contact us to schedule a meeting so we can start to plan out our trip accordingly.  If you would like to meet with the ECM team, please contact your current rep or e-mail us at Network@EliteClicksMedia.com .  When contacting us, be sure to let us know the dates and times that would work best for you so we can try to form it around our current schedule.

At this show, we will be introducing a lot of new offers and members to our team.  We believe this will solidify your beliefs that ECM will be one of the premier networks in 2010.  If you happen to see any of the ECM members walking around with a jacket or shirt on, don’t be afraid to stop them and introduce yourself.  We look forward to building solid relationships and growing together.  Take care and talk to you all soon!

We have now decided to open up our coaching forum to our publishers. We have recently just finished up the design work of the forum and although it is not completely done with content, we thought it would be great to get some publishers in there and asking questions to help build the forum. In this forum you will find all of Greg’s webinars that have been taped. We will be constantly adding more and more once we start getting some feedback and questions from you guys. You can find the forum using this link :

www.EliteClicksMedia.com/Coaching

This for is an ECM member exclusive so you will need a password in order to reach much of the coaching program.  Everybody will start out at Tier 1 and in order to get into that forum, you will need a password.  You will be prompted to enter this password when trying to access the forum. Again, this forum is our initial start, it will continue to grow and grow with your input, questions, and suggestions.

I’ll admit it; I’m addicted to buying tools. Any true marketer will tell you, the best affiliate marketers blow thousands on tools and gadgets. I’ll buy almost any new tracking or information mining product or tool that hits the market. It’s embarrassing.
It doesn’t even have to be great copy, like a kid with a new toy at Christmas; I’m sucked into the possibilities. What do most of us want? More time to spend fishing, more time with the kids, more time with the wife, girlfriend, or whatever it is you enjoy doing. The dream of most affiliates is to have a campaign on auto pilot, your own personal money machine that spits out dollars like an ATM. I’m sure if my wife looked at the trends in our Mint.com account she’d probably contemplate divorce. I wouldn’t blame her, about 80% (actually it’s probably closer to 95%) of the products purchased are as useful as a fork in a soup eating contest. But, just like an old miner digging for gold, every blue moon we’ll come across a real gem. Clicktale is one of those gems.

Calling Clicktale another web analytics tool is like calling a Lamborghini a corvette. They both have wheels but, when you get under the hood two totally different cars. One of the main features that separates Clicktale from other analytical tools is the ability to record real-time movies of your visitor’s entire browsing sessions. This is powerful! You can actually watch all mouse movements, mouse clicks, keystrokes, scrolling actions, and interactions with online forms. If someone is trying to click an area that is not clickable, Clicktale will show you the percentage of people clicking that area. This could easily increase your CTR and conversions just buy making that area clickable. You want to know the best way to optimize a landing page, use clicktale.

Recently Clicktale added heat maps to their software and for me completed the missing link. If you’re not using heat maps then you’re not getting the most out of your campaigns. Just imagine, it’s like sitting right next to the customer as they’re going through the purchasing process. Wouldn’t you want to know what they’re thinking? Yes, people vote with their clicks but, they also vote with attention, lots of attention and zero conversions usually means you are focused on the wrong audience or that something about your page is driving customers away. To remedy this Clicktale uses four different types of heat maps:

• Attention Heatmap shows how much attention a specific area on your webpage is getting from visitors, as measured by average time

• Total Time Heatmap shows the total time that all visitors were exposed to a specific area on your webpage.

• Visitors Heatmap shows the number of visitors and the percent of all visitors that looked at every area including the bottom of the page(you know where all your disclaimer information is).

• Pageviews Heatmap Given that a single visitor may visit a webpage several times, the Pageviews Heatmap shows the number of pageviews recorded at every area on the webpage.

There are several ways the ClickTale Heatmaps can be used to benefit websites, here are a few examples:

• Optimize advertising location and increase its impact. By analyzing attention data and changing ad placement accordingly, website owners can both maximize their revenues and design a cleaner more fluid webpage layout.

• Maximize content effectiveness by rearranging its location. For example, you notice that content down the page is getting a great deal of attention, but it is being viewed by only a small fraction of the visitors to the page. To increase the number of visitors that view it, the webmaster may decide to move this content further up the page, where the heatmaps show more visitors are focused increasing its effectiveness.

• Reduce bounce rates. Web marketers can easily identify boring areas in web pages that visitors skip and areas that cause visitors to leave. This is especially valuable to websites that use long marketing copy, now problem areas can be easily identified without guess work, revised and monitored, reducing bounce rates and putting more money in your pockets.

As the affiliate industry has changed, affiliates have had to change their marketing tactics. Where it used to take minutes to set up a campaign and direct linking was king, these days in the era of quality scores and FTC pressure it is imperative to get the most you can out of every campaign. The faster you can optimize and figure out the clickology of the customers coming to your site the faster you maximize profits. If you can spend the same money you are already spending and get more information per visitor, the question is why wouldn’t you? Check out clicktales it’s an awesome tool.

We’ve been in the CPA game a long time and we’ve seen a lot of great tools to help affiliates in their quest to become a “Super Affiliate”.  Some have been good and some have been bad, but there is a brand new one in town that we  have to give our “Elite” status because it just blows the doors off of everything else.  If you haven’t seen Keyword Rockstar and what it can do, be sure to have plenty of napkins close by to clean up the drool from your mouth being open for so long as you read further.

The name Keyword Rockstar really doesn’t do it justice, but what do you call a tool that has every possible feature you could ever need to crank out tons and tons of PPC campaigns in minutes.  Affiliate Marketing “Swiss Army Knife” sounds lame, Affiliate Marketing “Everything But the Kitchen Sink” won’t work, “This Software Can Make You Tons Of Money” is cool, but not real descriptive.  So, in the end, I guess Jon Shugart (the Super Affiliate Developer of the software) gave it a cool sounding name and figured everyone would eventually figure out that it was WAY more than just a keyword tool.

Keywords, Keywords and More Keywords (oh yea, don’t forget the side of stats to go with it)

The name of the software is Keyword Rockstar, so you would hope that it at least gave you keywords right?  Well, don’t worry, this software doesn’t disappoint in that area.  It actually uses the Google Keyword tool for it’s data, but it completely automates the process of getting keywords for you.  You simply enter a few seed keywords, decide what settings you want to use and what addtional stats you want to retrieve, and hit the start button. It is off to the races at that point! It will find you so many keywords, you won’t know what to do.  Although, that is the beauty of this software, it makes working with all the data and keywords like child’s play with it’s filtering capabilities.  You can narrow down to the best keywords for a campaign in seconds using the powerful filtering functionality.  You want only keywords that have more than 20,000 searches per month and less than 50 competing ads on Google, no problem.  Click, Click, Done.

Domain Names, Get Your Hot Fresh Domain Names

So, now that you have all your great keywords, wouldn’t it be nice to get the perfect keyword rich domain name for your campaign? What, you don’t have time to research all those keywords to see which ones are available? That’s not a problem if you own Keyword Rockstar.  Simply select the keywords you are interested in, click on the “Check Domain Availability” option, and decide if you also want to include a check for hyphens between the keywords.  In a matter of minutes, you’ll have the availability of every keyword as a domain name for the .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .mobi, and .us extensions.  Not only that, but you can quickly sort by search volume so you know which domain is likely to get the most organic searches and potential traffic.  This is a huge timesaver for finding that perfect keyword rich domain name you desperately want!

PPC Building on Steroids

There are a lot of great PPC building tools out there, but there are none that take it to the level that Keyword Rockstar has.

Question, “Does your current PPC builder work for the Content Network”? No?

Well, “what about Placement Targeted Campaigns”? Still No?

Well, “surely your current PPC builder will build Image Ads for you on the fly, won’t it”? Still No??

What the heck are you using it for then?

Keyword Rockstar can build every type of PPC campaign you can imagine for Google Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN.  It builds content network campaigns with full blown image ads on the fly in every size Google accepts.  It will even build animated .gif’s for you.

It can do the same thing for Placement Targeted Campaigns on Google Adwords, along with finding the placements to advertise on to begin with. It even has a SUPER POWERFUL search campaign builder that includes “keyword mix”, “domain variations”, and “misspellings” all built in.  You can even use dynamic tokens if you want to use tools like LPGen for your landing pages.

Summary

The reality is that there is not another software tool available that does what Keyword Rockstar does. It makes blasting campaigns as easy for the newbie, as it is for the super affiliate.  That’s why we expect to be seeing a lot more super affiliates from the folks that are lucky enough to use it.

The fact is that it isn’t publicly available.  Jon is only allowing people to have access if they come through his valued affiliates. (Don’t you love a Super Affiliate that makes you buy through affiliates, thus giving back to the community and helping others become Super Affiliates, what a fantastic concept!)

That being said, if you want to signup, you can do so by clicking the following link:

Keyword Rockstar – Super Affiliate Software

ECM