Can’t Get Rich

I woke up this morning to an email informing me that there’s a pretty successful affiliate marketer going to the same university that I am! Imagine my surprise. After a little messaging back and forth on Facebook, I managed to setup an interview (first interview on this site! yay). So, without further ado, here’s my interview with Matt Marcin - successful affiliate guy.

First of all, tell us who you are and a little about your site.

Well, my name is Matt Marcin and I’ve been using computers in some way or another since I was 8 or 9. I got into doing business online at the age of 14 with eBay and have constantly been trying to get better are making a few bucks online.

My blog, mattmarcin.com was setup quite a while ago as a place for me to talk about what I am doing but more recently has been focused on affiliate marketing. I generally try to give hints and tips about both incentive and PPC affiliate marketing.

How long have you been doing affiliate marketing?

I started back in November promoting a eBook from clickbank.com. I chose a niche I knew nothing about as a way to try and learn everything from market research to sales copy writing from the ground up. That campaign lost money of course but I learned a lot about every aspect of affiliate marketing and was well worth the $200 I lost on it.

How did you find out about affiliate marketing, and what pushed you to try it?

When I ran actual community sites like www.reviewtrader.com I tried to monetize them using Commission Junction with targeted offers. That was my first little taste of promoting other people’s products. A year or two later I started reading some “Make Money Online” blogs and found a couple goods ones.

What was the first site you made for affiliate marketing?

Well, the first site I made specifically for affiliate marketing was to promote some bowling eBooks from clickbank.com. It was a small content site with a newsletter and a review of 2 of the eBooks. I learned a lot from trying it out and there probably is a little money in it if you were to optimize a lot. Only reason I share what niche I was doing is because I don’t plan to go into it again.

Who are your favorite affiliates/bloggers?

I read most of the big affiliate blogs like UberAffiliate, JonathanVolk, NickyCakes and occasionally JohnChow. I’d have to say I really like both UberAffiliate and NickyCakes. Hey both give out some pretty good hints and tips. NickyCakes definetly thinks outside the box!

Failure is a big part of this site. Tell us about one of your major screwups (if you don’t mind).

The biggest screw up I’ve had was forgetting to set an end date on a campaign that I knew was scrubbing. I had the budget set to stop the campaign for the day but forgot to make it not recent the next day. When I woke up, I was $1000 poorer. That sucked. I double check all my campaigns now before going to sleep!

I see you do a lot of work with incentivized campaigns. Tell us a little about that.

I got my “real” start with incentive marketing. It seemed easier to me to convince people to fill out offers for cash or prizes than creating elaborate keyword lists and landing pages. There is still a lot of opportunity right now in incentive/freebie sites if your market them right. I tend to focus on the “Do this to earn something else” style sites. Of course, there are business philosophies that I apply that create a very loyal user base but that’s something I’ll post about on my blog!

Something I do want to try with my incentive sites is advertising them on a CPA model as it often provides better leads than PPC. Basically, you might see some of my sites on affiliate networks soon!

As a side not, if you want to get into incentive marketing, make sure you talk to your affiliate managers and have a solid plan in place to prevent fraud. There is no quicker way to lose you shirt than losing hundreds of dollars to reversals!

You have a Facebook application that promotes incentivized traffic. How’s that working out for you?

It pretty much run’s itself. I got in a bit late with applying incentivized traffic to Facebook apps but there is still plenty of room to explore in that market. The main way I differentiate myself though is I was able to work out deals with my affiliate networks to offer cash incentives rather than meaningless points. I think that it helped out a lot with convincing people to do offers.

True or False: Purdue is the smelliest campus in the midwest.

Don’t remind me! Some days it can be pleasant, but I’d take the smell of a huge city over the smell of decaying corn!

Thanks for your time Matt!

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Hey guys, check out how much money I’ve made with ONE affiliate program over the past few days:

Isn’t that impressive? I bet you’d like to make that much money in a few days too. Wouldn’t this be a great time to flash my referral link? Wow, now we can all make a ton of money together. Isn’t harmony grand?

</scarcasm>

Ok, enough bull. I’m sure you’ve all seen these kinds of posts before. “HAY GUISE, LOOK AT MY MONIES!” Wow, a five figure check. Nice job. How much of that is profit?

Keep in mind that, unless you’re getting 100% of your clicks from organic sources, chances are you’ve paid for some advertising. The figure in that screenshot above is the result of a campaign I was running on Facebook. Facebook is expensive. In fact, 90% of that money is going to go to paying for all of the clicks I received during that campaign (I told you I’m not very good at this). So, if you can do basic mathematics, you can see that I didn’t actually make very much. I got a load of useful demographics data, but dollar wise I didn’t do so well. Still, everybody loves an earnings screenshot, right?

Don’t fake it

I was chatting with a wise man on AIM a few weeks back. He was telling me to keep trying new things, and eventually I’d find something that worked. I jokingly suggested that I should Photoshop some extra 0s on one of my earnings screenshots, and was immediately rebuked. No matter how sneaky you think you are, you will get caught. When you do, your credibility will crash. Think of your top three favorite affiliate gods. How would you feel if one of them admitted that they make only 1/100 of what they claimed? Their advice, their word, becomes worthless. They’d lose their readers, and they’d fade into obscurity.

Of course, plenty of people post real checks and earnings screenshots. Those are awesome. Just remember next time you’re looking at one: That’s not all profit.

Geoff note: Keep in mind that I write these posts the night before they go up. With my luck, someone will post a huge check today and think that this post refers to them. I’ll just say it now: This post is not directed at anybody, so don’t bug me about it.

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Alright guys, desperate times call for desperate measures. As I’ve mentioned, I’m scraping the bottom of my idea barrel, so my options are limited. In an effort to keep the creative juices flowing, I’m going to resort to…

Magic brain drugs.

Ever heard of Piracetam? Apparently, it’s pretty popular among college students. According to Wikipedia, piracetam does a load of neat things to your brain, including:

Enhancing verbal memory in healthy college students in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

If Wikipedia said it, it must be true, right? Overall, the supplement is supposed to increase cognitive function through a variety of mechanisms, or as the bodybuilders put it, “make your brain work good.”

I’d be lying if I said this site was the only reason I’m going to start taking this stuff. For one, my memory isn’t what most people would call “good”, and it irks my girlfriend. Also, my summer classes begin in early June, so I’d like to have my brain soaking in the stuff by then (my GPA could use a little boost). If you check out that link above, you’ll notice that I ordered a 500g tub, which should keep me going for the next six months.

Speaking of that link

You might have also noticed that it’s obviously an affiliate link. When I found what I wanted on that site, I remembered that I was an affiliate for that company. Come to find out, I get 10% of every sale I refer through that link, which means I get roughly $1.80 back. This leads me to my next point: Even if you’re terrible at affiliate marketing, you can still benefit by joining these programs. Being an affiliate for a company is like having a coupon for anything you buy from them. If you’re not a member of Commission Junction, I’d suggest joining and then browsing their merchants next time you want to buy something. For example:

• I wouldn’t mind having an iPod touch. As an Apple affiliate, I automatically get 1% back, not to mention all of the coupons they fill my inbox with.
• What about if I needed a new laptop from Dell? There’s another 1% back (plus affiliate coupons).
• How about a nice new TV from Sony? 2% back.

Those are just a few examples. CJ has affiliate programs with tons of merchants, so you can get a little bit back on practically any item you could think of.

What about free web hosting?

While I’m on this train of thought, here’s something that I’ve been wondering about: Most web hosting merchants on CJ offer around $100 for new signups. Some of their hosting packages only cost $60 per year. Would it be possible to get a year of free web hosting by referring yourself? I’ve been looking through their advertising guidelines, and I’m not seeing anything that says you can’t refer yourself. Maybe I just missed it, who knows.

Anyway, if you’re a real penny-pincher, that’s just something you should keep in mind.

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What can I say? I’m on a Facebook kick.

When I first started using Facebook’s advertising platform, I was using it much like I used Google Adwords: Broad, untargeted, throwing ads against the wall and hoping something stuck. Basically, I was doing this:

Eventually, I figured out that my campaigns would convert better if I took advantage of Facebook’s targeting features. I started doing this:

(There’s 80 of them, in case you’re wondering)

What if I don’t want to get that specific though? What if I have an offer that can reasonably apply to everybody? Well, I finally figured that one out too.

Learn which demographic converts best

Then take advantage of it. Like I said earlier, I’m running a campaign that promotes a service that nearly anybody can use. Instead of just throwing up an ad that targets everybody, I decided to find out where my clicks were coming from and who was converting the best. After setting up a dozen different campaign subIDs, I broke my ad group into a dozen ads. Those ads targeted the following (not a complete list):

• Male college students in the US ages 18-24
• Female college students in the US ages 18-24
• Male college students in Canada ages 18-24
• Female college students in the Canada ages 18-24
• Men in the US ages 25+
• Women in the US ages 25+

And so on and so forth. As I type this, that campaign is sitting at 150 clicks, nearly half coming from just one of those demographics. I can use that information to write a more specific ad for that demographic (for instance, including their country of origin in the ad copy), which could in turn increase my CTR and conversion rate. Also, I can find which demographics seem uninterested in my ad and either modify it or remove it altogether.

As you can see, knowing where your clicks are coming from can be very beneficial. Since I always write my daily posts the night before, I can’t tell you how many conversions I’ve gotten from this campaign yet (Commission Junction’s reporting is incredibly delayed). If it turns out that this campaign isn’t a flop, and it actually makes me some money, I’ll let you guys know how my ad targeting works out.

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It seems like I can’t get a single ad past Facebook these days.

They’ve been shutting down my campaigns left and right, citing rules that are so obscure that they could apply to nearly anything. For example: I created an ad group with three ads in it yesterday, one ad for each country I was targeting. Ad #1 was disapproved for capitalizing every word in the title, ad #2 was disapproved for violating the ‘no-scams’ rule (could you be any more vague?), and ad #3 was disapproved for leading to an iframed landing page. All three ads were exactly the same and led to the same page (with different tracking code). Also, fun fact: That exact same ad ran for 16 hours and got hundreds of clicks the previous day. Way to go Facebook.

Seriously, how am I supposed to use Facebook to make any money? If you link directly to the offer page, they shut you down for having an ugly URL. If you try to promote an email submit, they shut you down for collecting personal information. If you try to promote any digital product at all, they shut you down for ‘being a scam’. You can’t promote ringtones, dating offers, or anything that appeals to college students. The same network that allows the random hookup application won’t allow you to put a picture of a bikini-clad woman in your ad.

What about physical products? If you try to promote any sort of diet, they shut you down for ‘unverified pharmaceutical claims’. The same seems to apply to workout supplements. What’s maddening is that I see people promoting these offers every day on my personal Facebook account. Why can’t they be consistent on what’s allowed and what’s not?

It seems like Facebook is out to get affiliate marketers. If you want to advertise anything at all, I’d recommend doing the following:

• Create multiple advertiser accounts from different IP addresses.
• Create the same ad on each account and stagger the submission times by 15-30 minutes.
• Start with a large daily budget/CPC, and scale it back if your ad actually gets approved.
• Submit your ads at 4 AM. It’s worked for me.
• Start with a landing page that has absolutely no chance of violating their rules, and change it after the ad gets approved.
• Just keep trying. Your ad will either be approved or your account will be banned.

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