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.