Affiliate Summit West is going to be here before we know it!  This year’s west-coast conference will be held on January 9th through January 11th at the Wynn Hotel & Casino.  As many already know, Affiliate Summit is the premier Affiliate Marketing conference and continues to grow exponentially each year.  Their east coast show in New York City this year had over  3,500 registered attendees!  Last year’s Vegas show had over 4,000!  I’m sure this January will not disappoint…

Anyways, I’ve prepared a ‘Media Buying 101′ presentation where I plan on discussing the very basics on how to get involved promoting affiliate offers with a media buy, how to go about approaching websites, as well as choosing the right offer. I’ve also been selected to speak with Matt McWilliams of Legacy Learning Systems.  Trust me, our session is not one you will want to miss.

Before I can speak, I need your vote!  If you plan on attending and would like to hear me speak about Media Buying I would greatly appreciate it if you would go to this link:

http://affiliatesummit.slinkset.com/items/Media_Buying_101

and click the ‘up arrow’.  You have to register for a free account, but it doesn’t take but a few minutes!

Thank you so much I hope to see you all in Vegas!

One of the most common questions I get asked is “How do I get started making money online? Where can I go to learn all the basics?”

If you are in that situation, you should check out the Online Profits training program. My friend Daniel Scocco created it, and he recruited a solid team of marketers to produce the content (people like Neil Patel, Michael Gray, Chris Garrett and so on). All top notch guys!

The main difference of this course is the broadness of the topics covered. Here are the training modules included:

1. Business Principles (I really like that they cover this… so many don’t!)
2. Domain Names
3. Website Setup
4. Markets and Niches
5. Business Models
6. WordPress
7. Web Design
8. Blogging
9. Keyword Research
10. Online Forums
11. Online Stores
12. Web Content
13. Basic SEO
14. Advanced SEO
15. Linkbuilding
16. Traffic Generation
17. Web Metric
18. Social media
19. Selling Advertising
20. Email Marketing
21. Affiliate Marketing
22. Pay-per-Click
23. Landing Pages
24. Selling Your Own Products

Counting all the lessons, case studies and interviews there are over 150,000 words worth of content. That is a lot of stuff.

How much does it cost?

The price used to be $392, but a couple of months ago Daniel re-launched the program with one big change: the cost dropped to almost free.

In order to get access to the training program now you just need to sign-up for a hosting plan with Daniel’s partner (HostNine). That is going to cost you $10 or so, plus you get to host another website, and that is why I think it is a great program for anyone starting out.

VERY Cool idea!

Join OnlineProfits.com now!

© JonathanVolk.com – A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

Want to Learn To Make Money Online?

• Get My Facebook Advertising Guide!
• Get My Affiliate Marketing Guide!

What niche should I start in? Is one of the most common questions I receive on a daily basis from my forums, emails and blog comments. There is no definitive answer, as what might work for me, might not work for you. However, the 3 biggest affiliate marketing niches that most noobies jump into are as follows: Dating, gaming, and health.

Dating

Dating is a huge niche. We’re born to do, essentially, one thing in life: find a mate. This is your turn to help others do this. Dating is a very accessible niche, yet very competitive. However, there are mini-niches in every single demographic and offer to match them. It also works well across almost any traffic source, especially social. The best way to get at dating is to be on top of new offers (or create your own) and to constantly rotate ads.

Gaming

Everyone needs a little entertainment, and whether at work, school or stuck at home, gaming is a simple choice to ease over a streak of boredom. You can opt for downloadable game affiliate offers, or online MMO game offers. I find the simple toolbar/downloadable game offers do great on Facebook. The key is making sure you are playing correctly with your targeting.

Health

This is a huge niche, and is more a collection of many niches put under this one category. Weight-loss, stop smoking, muscle-gain, and stress are all some examples of niches you can run. And again, like dating, it is very broad. Almost everyone has some health problems that you can target and get at. Find a demographic with a wide spread health related issue and target them for all they’re worth. I’d suggest a landing page with health niches, as many of the offer pages available to you do horrid jobs at preselling.

Related posts:

1. Odd Niches Make for Big Money
2. What Offers Work Best With X Traffic Source?
3. Is Dating Dead?

Facebook has released new statistics on its Facebook+Media Page about users who click Like buttons on Open Graph-enabled websites, as well as the influence of the Like button and social plugins on site traffic and engagement. They show that the “likers” have more friends and click more links on Facebook to external websites than those who don’t use the Like button. Sites implementing the Like button get significantly more traffic, and their users visit more often, view more pages and videos, and spend more time on site.

“The average ‘liker’ has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user” meaning they may be more active on Facebook, have denser real-world social networks, or have been members for longer. Likers click links to external websites found on the news feed, profiles of friends, Pages, and elsewhere 5.4x more than the average Facebook user. This means those clicking through to websites Liked by their friends are themselves more likely to click Like buttons and share back to Facebook.

Demonstrating the gap between online and offline news readers, the average liker on a news website is age 34, twenty years younger than the average newspaper subscriber. Users who click Activity Feed plugins on Open Graph-enabled sites generate 4x more page views than the average visitor to a media site. The note also explains that Pages can increase on-Page engagement by 1.3-3x by publishing compelling links or status updates to those that Like them.

Websites which have Implemented the Like button or other social plugins have experienced the following traffic increases: ABC News (+190%), Gawker (+200%),  TypePad (+200%), Sporting News (+500%). Facebook also published various statistics about how NHL.com has been affected by the implementation. “Visitors are reading 92% more articles, spending 85% more time on-site, viewing 86% more videos, and generating 36% more visits.”

David Swain of Facebook’s Product and Platform Communications team has also quoted CTO Bret Taylor as saying that “five months after f8, about 2 million sites are using social plugins”.

These statistics show the positive effect integrating with Facebook can have on websites. The experience of other sites and the ease of adding the few lines of code necessary to install many social plugins should encourage sites to at least experiment with the Open Graph API.

Facebook now allows advertisers to set a lifetime budget for their ad campaigns instead of only a daily spending limit. This helps pace a campaign’s daily spend to be even across the period of time the campaign is set to run for. The more control Facebook offers to advertisers, the more who will be comfortable spending money on its ads.

Facebook’s new Help Center FAQ on lifetime budgets explains “If you specify $100 USD [as the lifetime budget for a] 10 day campaign, each day theoretically will need to spend $10/day. If the campaign only spends $8 on the first day, the system will try to make up the missed amount at a later date within the campaign.”

Advertisers can set up a lifetime budget for ads by clicking “Create a new campaign” in the “Campaigns, Pricing, and Scheduling” step of the Ads Manager ad creator. They then click the budget drop-down menu, select “Lifetime budget”, and set an amount to spend. Lifetime budgeted ads default to run for a month from the day the campaign is created, but advertisers can change the run dates using the scheduling fields.

Campaigns which are already running can have their budgets switched to lifetime. To do so, advertisers can click to edit budget on the campaign view, revealing an “Edit Budget & Scheduling” pop-up. There advertisers can switch from per day to lifetime budget and set run dates. Note that switching the budget of an ad will reset its spend for that day and Facebook will allot an equal fraction of the lifetime budget to the remainder of that day as the rest of the days of the campaign.

Ads set with both a lifetime budget and a daily spend limit won’t exceed the daily cap. Bulk Upload Tool users can utilize lifetime budgets by downloading the new Excel template which includes a “campaign_lifetime_budget” column. Lifetime budgets will also be available through the Ads API.

By more evenly allocating spend across a campaign, advertisers can control for high and low traffic days and spend less time monitoring. Lifetime budgets could prevent Facebook from perpetually earning money off of unsophisticated advertisers who forget their campaigns are running. However, this will likely be offset by the increased spend associated with increased confidence in the Facebook ad platform afforded by lifetime budgets.

[Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip]

Mrs. Volk

Today my wife launched a new line of products for her online store. Very in-style products that you should get for your lady friend.

Ballin’ on a budget? No problem… these products are very affordable and yet… all completely hand made!

Check out the stop motion video she made to promote them:

My favorite:

I think it’s time you go buy your girl something now!

PS > Gigidy

© JonathanVolk.com – A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

Want to Learn To Make Money Online?

• Get My Facebook Advertising Guide!
• Get My Affiliate Marketing Guide!

Shoemoney calls out PPC.bz around the 3:30 mark in his latest video post.

I thought we were friends Shoemoney. Well, not friends, maybe acquaintances with some mutual respect.

When this blog first started about 2 years ago, the fun thing to do was make fun of Shoemoney. I would do it relentlessly, because its what the people wanted.

Then I met him in person, and he was cool. It was brief. I think we took this photo together. Not the huge douche I thought he would be. Since I met him in person, I stopped making as much fun of him. At future shows, I talked to him more and more, and eventually the all out Shoemoney ball-breaking on this blog settled down.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still make the occasional shoemoney joke, but It’s not like I make full posts about it with a series of wonderful photoshops.

In fact, we even talked on AIM over the years and I got the impression that we were cool.

So I don’t know what got up in Shoemoney’s ass after all the nice things I’ve done for him, like ….

1) Not destroying the Shoemoney System. Shoe gave me a review copy plz of his Shoemoney System (that’s one reason I thought we were cool…) I checked it out, and thought it was pure garbage. Does anyone remember me posting something about it? No. Because I didn’t. Nope, I just kept my mouth shut and let that sleeping dog lie. Fans of this blog would’ve love that shit, but out of respect to Shoe I didn’t do anything.

2) Nudging Rob Hustle to make his Shoemoney System Theme Song. Not like I am Rob Hustle’s manager or anything, but Hustle was apprehensive about doing the song. But since I know Rob Hustle can spit rhymes in his sleep (he does- proven fact), and since the prize was a trip to the Playboy Mansion, I was all like “hell yeah hustle, do it, even though it is shoemoney …. ”

Maybe since Shoe got into the guru game, he’s butt-hurt that I still mock gurus that might now be his friends. I don’t know….

I could seriously fucking rage on Shoe right now, and I really don’t give a fuck how much more he makes than me. I could write something so fucking scathing and hurtful he might cry. But I know it would take me hours and I don’t want to go down that path.

I’ve heard the stories about Shoe’s linkbaiting skills. I don’t know if he’s link-baiting me or is legitimately salty with me…. I don’t know, but I am trying to keep it civil.

Anyway, he wants to have a debate. Like a math debate? What the fuck is this, Model UN?

I’m not sure where this is going, but i just need to let you know Shoe, I am a master debater! You can’t fuck with my master-debating skills son!

Which Side Are You On?

Team Barman or
Team Shoemoney?

Facebook has increased the number of ads displayed in many areas of the site from three to four. In some cases the fourth ad is partially or completely below the fold of the page, meaning Facebook now serves ad impressions users might not necessarily see. This change could reduce ad click-through rates but it will also allow advertisers to access Facebook’s most valuable demographics more often. It will likely help grow Facebook’s revenue, which we previously reported would reach $1.1 billion in 2010.

By displaying more ads on each page, it’s harder for users to pay attention to each ad. But to help show the lift provided by social context information that Facebook can provide alongside ads, Facebook has recently begun providing social context metrics for ads showing the Likes of friends, and has launched a new ad unit for applications. Facebook also recently started showing domain names for ads that point off-site.

For users without especially large screens or low screen resolutions, the fourth ad on many Facebook pages won’t be fully visible unless they scroll down. This is most often true on areas of the site such as photos which display modules such as People You May Know, event invitations, or Photo Memories above the ads.

Advertisers may benefit from the increase in ad inventory available for highly sought after demographics, such as those in the United States and United Kingdom, or specific company employees. However, since most advertisers pay for clicks, not impressions, this change shouldn’t lead to drastic changes in bid prices.

Users will now see four ads in the right sidebar of the following areas of the site: personal profiles, official Pages, community Pages, applications, the photos home page, albums, photos, apps, the events homepage, the groups home page, groups, the notes home page, notes, messages, the friends home page, the applications directory, links, Invite Your Friends, and notifications. Facebook’s home page and the news feed show one ad. Areas of the site without ads include: events, requests, Questions, Impact, Find Your Friends, the Games dashboard, the Applications dashboard, account settings, and privacy settings, and the profile editor.

Facebook has been steadily increasing the revenue it brings in from advertising. We’ve estimated that Facebook’s performance advertising revenue alone eclipsed $350 million last year, and should show very strong growth this year.

Thanks to Mike Webb from social game developer iwi.com for the tip.

Facebook’s latest tight integration with a big third-party application could be coming soon — Skype is bringing Facebook to its calling, voice chat and SMS services, according to All Things D. The pairing is expected to roll out within the new version of Skype, 5.0, which is now in partial testing and expected to launch in the next few weeks.

The screenshot below, from the report, reveals a new tab in the Skype interface that shows Facebook friends. Each individual account includes the user’s phone number, with the option to call or text them.

There’s not a Skype chat option visible, though. Facebook has its own IM service, that may or may not be integrated here, while it has separately not appeared to move forward with its own video chat service. In other words, the two companies appear to be trying to complement each other in this integration, but not promoting competing products. That is different from what’s happened with two other communication service’s attempts to access Facebook data — Twitter and Apple’s Ping have both been blocked to date after trying to create their own integrations.

Facebook has previously given Skype some attention as well, in the form of trying to get its users to import their Skype contacts.

The Skype integration is not the first instance of a third-party communication application to benefit from Facebook. Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger has been finding millions of new users in recent months, according to AppData, with 5.45 million daily active users and 6.93 million monthly active users on Facebook as of today. By syncing Messenger and Facebook accounts, users can chat with Facebook friends, see their activities, and share status updates. Other third-party IM services, like Meebo, have also offered these sorts of syncing capabilities.

Facebook has more than 500 million monthly active users, around half of whom come to the site every day. Skype has a similar number of of total registered users, but substantially fewer monthly users — 124 million people out of 560 million, with a peak of 23 million of them online at any given time. Perhaps the Facebook integration can help Skype boost its engagement rates, especially as it looks to go public?

Facebook’s performance advertising system lets buyers target users based on a wealth of demographic and interest traits, but it doesn’t provide the depth of control to test creative and targeting parameters on a large scale. To allow companies to build more powerful tools for designing and managing ads, Facebook released an Ads API last fall. One company offering a self-service tool for both small and large advertisers which utilizes fractional-factorial multivariate testing to quickly determine ad components with the most significant impact is XA.net.

Having already focused on display ads,  XA.net designed a system for testing ads with different creative and audience targeting elements without testing every single permutation. This helped the company build a base of clients interested in getting actionable results without spending as much time and money. XA.net was an early tester of Facebook’s bulk uploader and now-defunct conversion tracking tool. It developed its new Facebook ads tool in-house with its managed spend team, and is now ready to offer the tool in private beta so advertisers and agencies can manipulate Facebook ad campaigns themselves.

The company is in private testing now, but the first 20 interested advertisers can get access through a special invite code, available at the bottom of this article.

Company Profile

Originally named CPM Advisors, XA.net was founded in 2008 with a focus on building audience-based advertising tools, primarily for online display ads. In 2009 it released a self-serve ads tools so clients could buy media, generate tracking tags, and use retargeting pixels to manage campaigns. The company’s 25 person, technology driven team operates out of downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles. Advertising technology investors including Jonah Goodhart, Noah Goodhart, Jerry Neumann and Mike Walrath provided $600,000 in funding for XA.net in 2008.

Clients helped to buy Facebook ads by XA.net include both direct advertisers and agencies representing industries including financial services, online education, retail, and consumer goods. XA.net also helps publishers, developers and media companies who want to drive traffic to their Pages and apps by using their permission to target ads to the Page and App’s existing audiences. Client average spend varies greatly, down to small advertisers spending just a few hundred dollars a day. Many Ads API tool providers only license to enterprise class advertisers, making XA.net an option for those looking to spend less. The company charges a percentage of buy on top of cost, with smaller, short term clients paying up to 20%, with that percentage dropping as clients spend more and commit to longer buys.

XA.net is taking a “Silicon Valley 2.0 approach to releasing the product” said founder and CEO Rob Leathern. “Put the product out, see how they use and respond to it, how they like it, make changes and enhancements, and find the right way to charge users to incentive use.” Currently these is still some interaction with humans at XA.net when using optim.al, but the company is building towards creating a no-touch technology platform.

XA.net’s optim.al Ads API Tool

Optim.al will not only be for Facebook advertising, but will also integrate other text and image advertising channels over time. The product currently only runs Facebook ads, but users will eventually be able to take the Facebook ad content that’s proven to work and use it in display ads.

Since Facebook’s CPC estimation and optimization algorithms tend to bias traffic towards ads in a campaign which perform well early on, optim.al helps users run ads on a CPM model to get relatively even traffic. This helps clients perform accurate multivariate testing, then translate the results into CPC campaigns.

XA.net believes some Ads API tools pull back inaccurate segment sizes when targeting keywords and cities. Therefore, the current release of optim.al only allows clients to target by region, state, country, age, gender, sexual preference, relationship status, education, and Page connections if optim.al has permission to target or negatively target a Page’s audience.

Clients can dump images into an image library where they are automatically re-sized and made available for use. Once ads are completed, clients can view previews of ads, or see their images in-line with targeting and other creative info in the campaign creator. Unique to optim.al is that ad body copy is split into two lines in the ad builder. This allows clients to break out and separately test an explanation and a call to action within a single ad, or keep the first line of the body copy the same while testing variations in the second line.

What differentiates optim.al from many other Ads API tools is the ability to use different creative element multivariate testing models. Along with standard full factorial testing where every permutation of targeting parameters and creative elements is tested as its own ad, optim.al offers fractional factorial multivariate testing. This allows the tool to only test variations where a meaningful variable is different, producing optimization insights without having to spend as much time and money to reach a sample size of test data on insignificant variations. in some cases clients can get comparable data at 25% of the cost, the company says.

Optim.al provides optimization suggestions based on the tests, and in the future clients will be able to set conditions such as “if this ad performs 30% better than this one, shift additional budget to it”. Currently clients can only use the multivariate test builder on creative elements, not targeting parameters.

To allow for accurate performance reporting, ads are dynamically fitted with campaign or ad IDs for tracking, clients can install a conversion tracking pixel on their landing pages, and clients an upload conversion data from their own analytics systems. Data from optim.al can be exported as .csv or Excel files, and eventually the tool will include native data visualization and graphs. Optim.al’s reports can interface with XA.net’s display ads self-serve tool CPMatic for advanced reporting across channels.

To assist clients with writing high performing ad headlines and copy, XA.net has partnered with BoostCTR, a company which optimizes text in ads. Clients can give BoostCTR access to their account, and the company will go in and provide suggestions for better copy.

Looking For More Data

XA.net is building their tool according to what its clients want, which so far has been testing efficiency. Leathern says there’s lots for Facebook to improve on the Ads API, but XA.net have been pleased with the responsiveness of Facebook team’s to feedback. It hopes Facebook will expose more of the data users add to their profiles to advertisers for targeting. Leathern says he’d “also like to see more defined control around frequency, as frequency is a big driver of performance.” Currently, audience exhaustion and creative rotation is a big concern, and better tools for monitoring frequency would help.

While still evolving, optim.al is a powerful tool for smaller advertisers who can’t afford large full factorial tests. By concentrating on offering a cheap and fast way to gain more data with less tests, and eventually integrate that data across channels, XA.net can find its niche in the growing Ads API industry.

The first 20 advertisers interested in trying out the private beta of optim.al can input the code ISFB01 on the optim.al sign up web site.