I’ve been messing around with Twitterfeed recently. It’s pretty cool. It’s not the most dependable tool I’ve used (sometimes shit just doesn’t update), but for a free utility that lets you set and forget your Twitter accounts, it’s not bad.

Here is an example of an account i set up like a week ago with Twitterfeed: GoogleNewsTweet

That’s a very broad and general example of what you can do with a Twitter account + related RSS Feed + Twitterfeed. I just followed a few random people, set up the Twitterfeed and let it go. At the time there are only over 200 followers or so, but that’s not bad for 10 minutes of work.

Now go make a thousand accounts.

A thought occurred to me today: How the heck am I ever supposed to secure my place among the super affiliates if I don’t provide any pics of my fat checks? I was reminded of this when Linkshare was kind enough to send me this rather impressive payment in the form of a paper check. I’m surprised it wasn’t sent certified. They might want to consider using a more secure form of delivery in the future. In any event, here is the proof:

If you would like to know how I did it, please PayPal $97 to offwhitehat (at) gmail. Good luck bros.

A while back I talked a whole bunch about using CL, specifically for the purpose of promoting Ebay items via the Ebay Partner Network. In that post, I talked about using redirects to hide your referring traffic source. Obviously you don’t want the good folks at EPN to know that you’re sending Craigslist traffic. Many a men (and women) have been banned that way.

Well, TinyURL is no longer useful in this scenario, as Craigslist has decided to disallow users from posting TinyURL links. As of now, other URL shortening services, such as Bit.ly, still work just fine. However, there is no telling how long it will be before they start picking off these secondary services and render them useless (for the purpose of CL, in any event).

Hopefully you already have your own domain and your own hosting anyway. If not, WTF? Seriously, take care of that. Here, have a GoDaddy aff link (free of charge).

Now, if you don’t know how to do a php redirect, I won’t judge you. Let’s get elementary. Use the code found in this txt file (the code is showing up all retarded in this post for some reason).

Go ahead and put whatever you’re redirecting to (a rover link, perhaps) in there in the place of ‘http://youraffiliatelink.com’. Save the file as “index.php”. Now, take that php file and upload it via FTP or whatevs to your server in the appropriate location. For example, you might create a directory like: http://yourdumbdomainname.com/video-rewinder, and place your index.php file in the “video-rewinder” directory. That way, when a user goes to that address, it will nicely redirect to your affiliate link.

Accidents happen, and referers still leak. Think of it as a condom breaking. Solution? Use two condoms. That is virtually foolproof, right? So you could have a directory like http://yourdumbdomainname.com/video-rewinder/awesome, and in the directory “awesome”, you could place a php redirect to “http://yourdumbdomainname.com/video-rewinder”, which would of course send the visitor through your affiliate link.

Now you have successfully protected yourself about as much as you possibly can. Basically what I’m saying is you don’t need TinyURL. The reason I’m making a whole post about it is because I see in my stats a bunch of visits from people searching for info on TinyURL/Craigslist.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

As the internet marketing world evolves, so do the different tools and services we have at our disposal. While the vast majority are steaming piles of poo, there are a few that actually come in handy and can help you increase your bottom line (that’s your monies, noob).

All good things supposedly come in threes, so here are three that I recommend. Please note that these are NOT paid reviews, and I am not using any sort of affiliate links here. These are all products that I have used myself.

KBlinker - Link Management Utility

KBlinker is a great tool to better control and organize your links. It has an awesome geo-ip redirection feature built in that was a Godsend for myself. You see, I have my stink plastered all over the internet in the form of static links I have dropped over time. Many of these links still consistently bring in leads/sales. Problem is, a lot of them are on sites that get international traffic. If I have one link redirecting to an offer that only accepts say US and Canadian traffic, then those Australian clicks are going to waste. Most likely they are redirected to some completely irrelevant or lame offer (Webfetti, anyone?).

So instead, I have these links point to my domain that has KBlinker installed, where I have everything setup to re-route specific countries to the appropriate offers. Of course, it takes time to find relevant international offers and maintain the thing (since offers get dropped all the time), but at the end of the day, I’m making money off of international traffic that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Check out KBlinker.com to learn more about its capabilities. You can currently get a single domain license (which is all you really need) for $50.

Article Drip

One problem a lot of affiliates face when building sites and trying to get them to rank is of course link building. We know that Google likes to see your site gaining backlinks steadily and consistently, but it can be difficult to arrange it so that links appear (get indexed) gradually when you’re buying directory submissions or social bookmarking packages. If too many links appear pointing to your site in too short a period of time, Google may frown upon this.

Another issue we face is with article marketing. We know that having articles relevant to our niche posted on several sites with backlinks is a good thing. Trouble is, it can be very time consuming or expensive to come up with UNIQUE articles for the various article sites so as to get the most value out of those links.

Andrew Scherer was nice enough to provide me with a free review of his new Dripped and Spun Article Marketing Service. This service is a great solution to the problems detailed above.

All you need to do is submit your URL, title, keywords, etc, and you will have a unique article written for you and then slowly submitted to 100 directories over the course of a month. In order to make them unique, the article is manually spun using interchangeable keywords to make each article original. Since the article spinning is done manually, the spun articles actually come out nice and readable (unlike most of the auto-spun articles I’ve seen).

This service is currently going for $44.97 and you can order it here.

Twitter Snipe

Twitter marketing has really taken off in the past couple months. I even saw #Acai Berry as a trending topic the other day. Before Twitter gets ridiculously saturated with spam, there is still money to be made.

My approach to twitter marketing is a bit different than what seems to be popular, and this tool isn’t really conducive to it, but I’m sure there are a lot of you out there that can think of several ways to utilize it.

Twitter Snipe basically makes it a breeze to follow people that are likely to be interested in whatever it is you’re promoting. For instance, if you’re pushing a weight loss offer, you can enter the keyword “diet” and have Twitter Snipe automatically follow anyone and everyone who is tweeting that keyword. The fact that it is nearly in real-time is what I think makes this tool so powerful. Right when some young lady tweets about how she wants to try a new diet, like magic, there you are following with your interesting profile relevant to her current interests (and interesting links).

What sets Twitter Snipe apart from the other Twitter tools out there is that it has a very handy “unfollow” feature built in. I talked before about how it just isn’t appealing to have 10x less followers than users you are following. In order to weed out those who ignored your follow and are highly unlikely to follow back in the future, you can remove them all with a simple click of the mouse.

In order to use Twitter Snipe, you’ll need to install it on your own server running PHP 5.0 or above. Installation is pretty painless. A copy of Twitter Snipe currently costs $77. Get it here.

Alright, I believe that’s enough plugging for today!

If you’re one of those newer affiliate marketers who is frustrated with losing money on PPC and need a bit of positive reinforcement to help motivate you and realize the potential in this here crazy business, then this post is for you.

To be honest, I’m getting pretty sick of Facebook. What a royal pain in the ass to have to constantly re-create and re-submit ads after they are disabled. I had a good run with them, but now I’m getting more involved in other things and I think our relationship is just about over.

To celebrate the burning of this bridge, I’m going to go ahead and outline in detail a very laser targeted dating campaign that will make you a few bucks. Of course, if enough people stumble upon this article and run it, it will probably become worthless rather quick. It definitely won’t make you rich (because of the limited size of the target audience), but it has always been profitable in my experience. I’ve been running this campaign and slight variations on it for over a year.

It’s also worth mentioning that this of course doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to Facebook. I’m sure with a little imagination you can find ways to run similar campaigns on other platforms.

Nerds Love Asian Chicks

Okay, to be fair, plenty of non-nerds have an inclination towards Asian women, but never mind that for now. From testing various keywords with different dating sub-niches, I determined that guys who are heavily into sci-fi, anime, RPGs, and martial arts are also heavily into asian girls. Not a huge surprise perhaps, but something you might not have considered.

You could always build an Asian-oriented (no pun intended) landing page, but I’ve always found landing pages to be unnecessary when promoting dating offers on FB. That is, as long as you find a decent offer/lander from the merchant.

The best converting offer I’ve used this with was Spicey or Sweet which I was running through Affiliate.com (who no longer has it). They had me at $3.50/lead. Copeac still has Spicey or Sweet with several landers, but I don’t see an Asian one currently. If you ask your AM nicely, they might be able to hook you up with one.  Ads4Dough also has Spicey or Sweet. You will probably have to cloak the offer to something a little less “suggestive” to get it approved by Facebook.

Check out the Finding Singles offer from Neverblue. They have some customization options you can utilize, such as changing the graphic on the LP (say, from a blond white girl to an asian girl in glasses). You can also change the title text on the LP. The Facebook nazis seem to be alright with Finding Singles. You might also want to try actually running it. It doesn’t convert as well as Spicey, in my experience, but it was still profitable (about $0.19 EPC).

If you know of any other Asian themed dating offers, feel free to test them out as well.

The Campaign Details

Since I promised full details, here are the exact interest keywords I targeted for one particular ad:

Anime, Anime Club, Anime/Manga, Animemanga, Bleach, Chobits, Dragonball Z, End of Evangelion, Final Fantasy, Full Metal Alchemist, gundam seed, Gundam Seed Destiny, Gundam Wing, Hellsing, Inuyasha, Love Hina, Naruto, Naruto Shippuuden, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pokemon, Prince of Tennis, Robotech, Wolf’s Rain, Yu Yu Hakusho orrr yugioh

Feel free to add your own. I can’t remember exactly (that’s from a now-disabled ad) but I believe the target audience was around 100k. Single males, 18+, of course. Here, take the creative, too, you greedy bastard:

I ran that particular ad for several months, only in the evening hours and consistently on Thurs, Fri, and Saturday. I would throw in other days randomly as well.

If you have any experience with FB ads, you know that an ad’s effectiveness will dry up if you run it too often. At the peak of this one’s performance, it was getting a CTR of nearly 2%. The all-time CTR (after running it after it had cooled down significantly) was %0.30. I had to pay 11 cents per click to get decent volume, but I could run it at 3 cents without getting a “bid too low” warning from Facebook.

I ran this ad using a URL redirect which some of the time directed to Finding Singles with Neverblue and some of the time to Spicey or Sweet (Asian) with Affiliate.com. Here are the stats from Affiliate.com:

“Main” of course is the subid of the campaign detailed above. “you2b” is shitty YouTube traffic which obviously doesn’t do anything spectacular. “MA” as you can see has a slightly better conversion rate. “MA” stands for “martial arts”. It was an identical campaign except it was targeting males 18+ with martial arts related keywords on their profile. This target was somewhat bigger, but for whatever reason the CTR just wasn’t quite as good and I had to pay around I think something like $0.19-$0.25 per click.

Since I’m feeling generous, here is another creative that was effective with similar campaigns:

Not quite as effective as the first, but still pretty good. Hopefully those two creatives will give you an idea of what works and what you can realistically get approved.

In Conclusion

Like I said, this specific campaign isn’t going to make you rich, because of the low volume. But hopefully it will be that “ice breaker” for someone out there, or at the very least give you a little insight on a successful campaign to inspire you. I’m willing to bet some of you already have some ideas on how to take the fundamentals of this campaign and apply/scale elsewhere.

Best of luck.

EDIT:

I guess it wouldn’t be full disclosure if I didn’t give you the title/body of that ad.

That’s right. Nickycakes is notorious for doing cool shit. Why, just last year he gave out a thousand bucks to folks in his IRC chat for participating in a silly game. He’s probably the only person that gives stuff away just for the hell of it in this business.

Check out this new post on how you can win a TV that Nicky simply doesn’t need. You’ll need to follow him on Twitter to participate, that’s the only “catch”.

Good luck you free loading bastard.

I know there are a lot of anti-Twitterers out there crusading against the rapidly growing Twitter monster, but aside from the ethical debate over whether or not it is socially healthy to be hyper-connected to each other with play-by-play updates of our daily lives, there has also been much discussion on how to monetize this strange new obsession.

I do have a personal twitter account, but I try to keep it separate from business. However, I do have a few additional accounts that I use for marketing purposes.

None of my friends “IRL” are into internet marketing in any capacity whatsoever. The closest is probably a friend I’ve had since kindergarten that used to bank pretty nicely selling bootlegs on eBay back around the turn of the millennium. Just the other day a female friend of mine followed me on Twitter, so I went to check out her page and see who her followers were. Who did I see at the top? John Chow.

I suppose that is one approach. Just follow as many people as you possibly can since you know that some of them will invariably follow you back. Then just speet (spam tweet, I just made that up) all day and wait for the $ to roll in. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not the “hello friends! I want to teach you how to increase your passive income!” type. At least not when my real name and likeness is associated, in any case…

Where I have found success with Twitter is by cultivating a follower base with a sincere interest in whatever it is I’m doing. Many people have found success doing this with celebrity-based Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, some of you have gone as far as impersonating notable personalities. This will work in the short-term, but has no real longevity. On the other hand, acting as some sort of obsessed fan tweeting about the same person all day will also turn people off real quick. So what is the off-white hat solution?

Without revealing any of my awesome Twitter accounts (best one gets around 200-300 new followers per day, and I don’t do shit other than tweet maybe once a day), here are the steps I take when creating and priming a new Twitter account:

• The Name - Obviously very important. Using the exact name of a celebrity/band, etc might be a bit much. Try to incorporate something else into it that gives people the impression that you are the “official” Twitter for that personality, even if it that specific celebrity is not actually the one updating the account. You may or may not want to actually use the word “official”.
• Tweets - Obviously don’t spam crap, especially right off the bat. Just do a quick Google news search to find relevant info and make a tweet about it. Include a link. You can check the official website of your subject for updates as well.
• Be selective about who you follow - Any Twitter savvy user can tell you, your follower:following ratio determines how cool/important you are. Keep your list of people you are following to a minimum. Many Twitter-crazed youngsters will see your impressive ratio and follow you based on that principle alone.

Monetization

Okay, great, you have a ton of followers. Now how do you capitalize? Well, luckily famous people and bands are always selling something that their fans want. Whether it be an album, a DVD, concert tickets, memorabilia, whatever. All of these things can be monetized through the proper affiliate marketing channels. And boy, does Twitter make it easy.

Tiny URL

The fact that Twitter automatically appends just about every URL you post into a Tiny URL is a great blessing. Over the past few years people have become more aware of and more put off by affiliate links. This may have been the fate of Tiny URLs as well, if it weren’t for Twitter making them totally mainstream and acceptable. So you can go ahead and convert that obscenely long iTunes affiliate link through Linkshare into a Tiny URL link, tweet about Joe Blow’s new album release with your link, and the user will have no idea whatsoever that they just clicked through your affiliate link. On top of that, iTunes (or whoever) will have no idea where you are sending the traffic from (unless the referrer leaks…if you’re that paranoid just use a double redirect).

This concludes my Twitter marketing seminar. Sign up as an official consultant now for $50,000. That’s $150,000 off the usual rate. Refer your mother and your grandmother to become consultants and you’ll get your own island.

When I’m on a quest to manually build relevant links, there are a couple tricks I employ. One such trick is what I call the “recent comments” trick. Oooooooh, fancy.

Let’s say I need to build some relevant links for my marbles site. My bad ass marbles site. Obviously, I want to drop as many links as possible in as little time as possible. Doing it manually ensures that the vast majority will stick, but it can also be slow as molasses.

So, what I do is execute a quick google search for “marbles” “recent comments”. Note that each keyword is in its own quotes yet in the same query.

Basically what you’re looking for are blogs with a sidebar widget that displays the most recent comments, along with links back to the author’s site (if any). If the blog has 400 pages of unique content, and those little crawlers just happen to come by while your link is there (good chance they will), then you get a butt-load of backlinks.

Be aware that not every page with the text “recent comments” is going to have what you’re looking for. Fairly often you’ll come across something like “recent comments from marble enthusiast Dwight Fiddlerbachen suggest…” bla bla bla. Similarly, people using this method may very well end up on this site due to the title of this article. Sorry, guys.

If you’d like to narrow it down even further and only look for do-follow blogs, then that’s another story. But, as far as I’m concerned, I’d much rather have 400 no-follow backlinks with proper anchor text than one crummy do-follow backlink.

I hold “no follow” in a similar regard as the alleged 1969 moon landing.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a decent piece of software to aid you in the manual link building process, check out Fast Blog Finder.

Peace be with you.

You may already know that I love me some Wickedfire. I just thought I’d post here in case you haven’t stopped by that Gay Webmaster Forum lately, because there is a pretty hilarious thread dedicated to Warrior Forum “guru” Kim Standerline that you don’t want to miss. Will this result in an epic forum war? I sure hope so.

First of all I want to say that personally I think the best way to make money with the Ebay Partner Network is by builiding Phpbay sites and using good SEO practices to generate organic traffic. However, I also know that this process takes time. There are several other somewhat underhanded (aka off-white hat) methods of making some quick coin with EPN, one of the most popular being Craigslist posting.

It’s no secret that there is money to be made advertising ebay auctions on Craigslist (via EPN). The main reason it is so lucrative is because Craigslist surfers are generally very motivated buyers with cash (credit cards) in hand. You would do well to drop as many cookies into the browsers of these Craigslist visitors as possible.

If you can’t afford one of those fancy auto-posters (or find one that still works), there are two different manual ways you can go about this. Flying under the radar with CL posting is the best way to get your ads to stick and maximize profits. If you don’t have easy access to PVAs (phone-verified accounts), then doing things manually is probably a better alternative for you anyway.

Email Autoresponder

In order to keep CL postings anonymous, some folks like to only send affiliate links in auto-responses to emails sent by interested CL users. Gmail has a “vacation responder” built in that will serve this purpose. However, unless you’re just pimping one specific product, this way is a bit inefficient. Manually responding to emails will definitely reduce the frequency of your ads being deleted, but it will also be a pain in the ass, and not worth it in most cases.

Also, keep in mind that every new post will have a confirmation email sent to you by Craigslist from noreply@craigslist.org. I have no evidence that Craigslist actually tracks emails sent to that address, but if you’re paranoid like me as a result of trying acid a few times in high school, then you don’t want your spammy auto-response email being sent to Craigslist every time you make a new post. Something to think about.

Dropping Links

Dropping a naked “rover” link into a CL ad is a great way to get your ass banned in a hurry. You might get away with it once or twice, but inevitably it will result in you losing your EPN account.

Instead, a much smarter idea is to use a redirect. If you really want to instill trust in CL users, you can take it a step further and actually made the destination URL related to what you’re advertising. For instance, if you were posting an ad for a 1996 Mustang, you might set up a redirect at “http://www.yourcardomain.com/cityname/1996-mustang”. This way you can drop your link right there in the ad and have it appear legitimate. In that sub-directory, of course, will be your php redirect (or redirect of your choice) to your rover link to that particular auction.

I usually use copy like: “To see more photos or to request more info, please visit: http://blablabla”

Your click-thru rate will undoubtedly be better by taking these extra steps, but it of course takes a bit more time to set up.

Further Protection

Referrers leak all the time. Well, not ALL the time, but it happens. If you want to further protect your EPN account, you might want to consider a double-redirect. The quickest way to do this is to use Tiny URL or some similar service. That way you can quickly create a Tiny URL link that points to your EPN affiliate link, and then point that subdirectory you made on your domain to that Tiny URL link. I know it sounds like a hassle but once you get used to doing it, it’s no big deal. Plus it will give you some added peace of mind. You might also want to consider wrapping your PC with tinfoil.

If you Get Banned Anyway

Or if you simply can’t get approved for EPN, there are a few other affiliate networks that carry the Ebay program. One such network you can use is Pepperjam.