This is going to be a long post and I’m gonna say a lot of stuff and I’d appreciate it if you read it all. So last night, I was doing some clearing of stuff from college (before I dropped out). I found a load of my old folders on top of my old computer and my server. So I opened them up, and found stuff I’d written and one thing that stood out to me was “Why is a goal needed?” as on of the questions in my Business folder. Then I read along a bit more and it said “To provide direction” which got me thinking about my business. I currently have no goals, and I usually laze about (recently atleast). So now I’ve set a goal and personally I’ve been doing more things to reach it. One thing that has helped me to stick to it is an incentive:

If I make X by Y I get Z. So If I make $50,000 in a week, I get a holiday for example. It gives you something to work for and towards. Make sure your target is achievable though, don’t try and set $1m a day, because the chances are you won’t see that and when you don’t it will demotivate you. I like to set a long and short term goal, then write out objectives to meet the goals and targets. $50,000 a week short term, with $500,000 a month or $125,000 a week longterm. The little prizes and rewards for your self go a long way - trust me. Make sure you have a nice big reward for when you hit your long term, and splash out once in a while. What use is ALL that money if your not gonna spend it ey? Make sure you save some for emergencies and always 1-2 years worth of living set aside never to touch incase Code Red.

Another thing I’ve found that really helps me stay focused (besides coffee) is writing stuff down / taking notes on paper rather than the screen (which you prefer is up to you). I have paper lying around everywhere, and when you see it - you remember it and do it. I also like to have a To-Do list of the day, week etc and that really keeps me in drive. I have the occasional breaks through-out the day, but the work still gets done faster. A To-do list is something I’ve only recently started using, and hell it’s useful. If you’ve not got one - get one. There are online ones too, that integrate with iGoogle and stuff so get what works for you.

The year is almost over, and what a year its been. It’s been good for me atleast, and I hope  it has been a good year for you too. I’ve met a lot of new people online (Wickedfire + IRC mainly) and hell spending that time getting to know people is probably the best thing I’ve done this year. Just want to Give a shout out to a lot of people here: foucist, Bofu, Ricdes, Harrison, Eagle, Yaxxx, Norman, Proxyhub, Cracka, d03boy, gigidawg, digga, circa2k, Eli, JustAIMe, HyperionXL, Yubrew, MatthewK, Mattaw, taky, Jon, Zigroo, BB_Wolfe and Invisible. These guys and girls have made my year great and have been an absolute pleasure to work with. I’m looking forward to a crushing 09 with you guys

Now not to forget the networks I’ve been working with which are: Advaliant, Ads4Dough, Convert2Media and Affiliate.com. These networks have been the talk of the year and have moved the industry to a new level. 2009 is gonna be imense for these guys, and let me say - if your not with them, join now! Shout outs to Ruck, Yubrew, Kaveman, Steve , Josh Todd, Smaxor, Geoff Marcy for helping me through out the year and helping me learn the industry, I owe a big thanks to these boys!

Christmas is right round the corner, and it’s gonna be a great one! This christmas, don’t be trying to whore sales and what not. Set some lower daily limits and log on maybe once or, not at all and enjoy it. Have some wine, and relax. It’s one of the few holidays your gonna get with your family and every one you know and love around you. New years eve is gonna be hottt and a good start for every one.

I hope every one has a good christmas, a good end to the year and a brilliant new year! Good luck to you all! I’ll be back in the new year! Let’s get em!

So as you’ve probably heard, if your doing decent volume with anything your going to need MySQL 5.1 on your server. All good right? WRONG! MySQL is hard to upgrade to from an older installation or can just go wrong completely. Theres no commands you can drop in or something in cPanel you can click to do it either (not that I’ve found anyway).

So what Wes from P202 says is if your doing 5,000 clicks a day or so (not hard with social traffic) then your going to need it. MySQL has some horizontal partitioning or something like that (correct me if I’m wrong - I’m not sure lol) and that helps it bring the data up faster. The current version most of us are on is 5.0.* and most hosts won’t upgrade it for you unless you pay $75-150/hr for their time. That’s enough to get you spanking server right? Yep, and that’s what you should do.

Right now I’m with (more…)

So it’s Sunday night and Google have me in the dog house (manual review) and I’m bored. So I decided to check out Convert 2 Media’s website. While I was checking it out, I came across their blog.

Ruck is a well known established affiliate, so he knows his stuff. What’s ever better is that he shares his wealth of knowledge on his blog. Today, I came accross 3 brilliant posts that you should read. If your fairly new to affiliate marketing or established and can’t break your income barrier, I’m sure this will help:

1. Government Grants - A Lesson In Targeted Conversions
2. Acai Craze - Break Into Weightloss Without Breaking The Bank
3. Do You Take Your Business Seriously?

Now after reading that, don’t be like 95% of the people out there who don’t put it into action. Because you WILL lose out.

In regards to the grants post, it is well worth getting into at this time (Nov / Dec) because January shows a HUGE rise in the traffic, according to Google Trends that is. As you can see, the pattern is consistent every year. So take the advise and get into it NOW.

Recently one of my FAVOURITE CPA Networks changed their name. They are now called Affiliate.com! What a domain ey? They are really bringing on changes to the company.

They had the official launch at AdTech I believe. Good time to start it in my opinion. Things are looking good for them litrally ;). They’ve redesigned the whole site and the Direct Track control panel.

If your not with them yet, JOIN. Put in the comments:

Josh Todd as Affiliate Manager

You won’t regret it. He’s a solid AM and gets stuff done. He’s a good guy and I’m sure you’ll enjoy working with him. He’s the second Affiliate Manager I’ve met that knows affiliate marketing properly - the first being Smaxor at Ads4Dough. It’s good to have AMs that understand the concept of Affiliate marketing.

Affiliate.com have a variety of offers to choose from and if there’s something they haven’t got - they’ll get it. You can sure as shit bet on that. They also own Ringtone.net and are very flexible and can get custom stuff done if you push enough volume. Being one of the largest CPA Networks out, your barking mad if you don’t join.

I was just thinking because I’ve been banned for no reason in the past, and had to rejoin numerous times and being banned again - how do Google find me? We all know how Big G aim to automate as much as possible and have very extreme algorithms and scripts in place to run tests on us Adwords advertisers.

So then it got me thinking about their new bullshit quality score. How do they know it all? Then I remembered the Analytics tab at the top. I was thinking if it’s linked to the account and they know the domain for campaigns AND collect full stats on your pages - do they use that towards your campaigns?

Do things like bounce rate, return users etc affect your QS and how Google will send you traffic / volume and do they adjust bid prices with it? Well the answer is I’m not sure :). But I need to find out now that it’s playing on my mind. So when I have some free time (always, but I gotta sound busy) I will test this on a few zip submits for sure (yeah, when I can be bothered).

So I know I’ve not posted for a while, but I’ve been busy doing other work and important stuff. So this is gonna be my mega post with a lot of information on some of the stuff I’ve found. Just don’t expect to be spoon fed.

Well a while back now, MySpace launched their self serve ads platform (to compete with Facebook most likely). The platform is still new and lacks a lot of features, but the potential is still there - that’s for sure. Not only that, MySpace have actually taken time out to contact big spenders and get feedback over the phone. This is a sign of the good stuff to come. I’m not going to get into what needs fixing, but there’s a lot - you’ll see this WHEN you join.

The key to MySpace just like Facebook is

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For me to even push with any company, I want a great affiliate manager. They are the person you contact for almost everything you need in regards to that company and network. Need a pay rise or weekly wire? Speak to your affiliate manager. So basically, having a good relationship with them is absolutely key and can help a lot.

My AM at CPA Empire is Josh Todd. One of the absolute best AMs in the industry imo. If your new to CPA Empire, get him as your AM. The guy delivers.

Your AM is responsible for setting your rates, making sure everythings in order and there to help you find new campaings. The more you know them, the more they will help you. Yesterday, I was looking for a new campaign, and Josh suggested me a campaign. When I searched for it in DT, nada - nothing. Couldn’t find it! Then Josh told me the offer was private and had to be enabled on every account individually before you could even see it.

So keeping a good relationship with your AMs can help vastly, especially in finding new campaigns. Your AM is your portal to that network. They will sort out advertisers, get things in and help you grow. After all, your growth is their growth. Your best interest is always their best interest.

Well today, I got 22,500 air miles for FREE! No work done, nothing spent. This is from BMI which is a well known Airline in the UK (and maybe other places), so it’s 100% legit. 20,000 is enough to get 2 people to Zone 1 for a return flight, which isn’t too bad.

I got 2,500 for just taking a survey, with roughly 6 questions all boxes - no writing. So that was just easy. The other 20,000 came from joining their BMI Credit card. I HAVE to spend £250 in 3 months to get the 20,000 airmiles. This isn’t going to be a problem I’ll earn 375 extra miles from just spending the £250. The card was approved within minutes and has no annual fee.

Now for those of you who spend 4-5 figures a month on PPC, this can add up to a VERY nice life style; that’s if you like traveling of course. If you spent £10,000 a month on PPC you could have 20,000 miles a month or 240,000 a year. With 20,000 taking you to zone 1, and 24,000 taking you to Zone 2 you could get your self some pretty nice exotic holidays.

Every campaign has a golden keyword, and most campaigns share the keyworwd. This keyword is always targetted and normally has high conversion rates and extremely good ROIs. So what is the golden keyword? Well it’s the product or company name. When some one searches the name, they are looking for that product or company and are highly relevant. With a good negative keyword list, you can easily get 2:1 conversion to clicks etc. So if your promoting XYZ’s bingo, target “XYZ Bingo” rather than online bingo. It will be cheaper and will convert better.

When bidding, I generally like to (more…)

Well today is my birthday! Septemeber the lovely 4th. Though I’d let you know, so you can get me a cake or a card or if your very good on the internet, an e-card. I’m not going to be posting about that however. I’ll be covering one think mainly - Google chrome. I just want to add I’ve not been updating as much as I would like to because my timetable and work is filling up fast. So from now on, if there is a gap as such there will be bigger updates and more information posted.

So now Google are releasing software like CRAZY. With Anroid (not my alien) which is a unix based OS (I think) for mobile phones. Now they want to compete head on with Microsoft’s Internet explorer and Mozilla’s wonderful Firefox. Well personally, I don’t think this is a good move for me (because Google do hate me, and this might show in the post) because it’s going to help them keep an eye on me. Google are heading towards a big brother style organisation now. They know your health, address, emails, the works. (more…)