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April Affiliate Marketing News

May 7th, 2012

Oh shit it’s May. That means there’s probably some interesting news that happened since the last wrap-up post. I started this post a few days ago… finishing it up on a Monday, which is rather difficult because blogs keep updating with new posts.

In “This Makes Me Feel Old News,” Wolfenstien turns 20. Some of you were barely a glint in your father’s nutsack when that game came out.

Online and Affiliate Marketing News

Some of the biggest non-news last month and this month, has been the recent updates to the Google algorithm. SEO is dead and Google killed some pandas or something. I don’t know, I don’t follow this shit. Although I used to care back in the day, the idea of building your whole ‘business model’ around trying to outsmart Google with spam and crap is no longer appealing, and it’s no longer a viable business model. Shoemoney has a laugh at these fools in this post. You can also get more LOLz by visiting the WickedFire forum SEO section, where countless retards are complaining that their entire livelihood vanished into thin air.

The bottom line is that you’re going to have to get off your ass and build an actual, long-term business. This is nothing new. Even if it’s SEO, the days of spamming your way to the top are gone (unless they’re not gone, in which case you’re probably smart enough to not spill the beans), so commit your time to something that isn’t dependent on Google. Something worth sharing so you can actually take advantage of all that social media goodness, so people drive your traffic and not a search engine.

Now read this massive shit of a post from ViperChill. It’s huge. It set a world record for the longest blog post in recorded history. There is a lot of good information there. A LOT.

Aaron Wall of SEOBook takes a look at the penguin update too. This is one guy who’s opinion on the subject you want to read. Also, on Negative SEO and outing.

And if you’re wondering, here are the “official” changes to improve Google’s Search quality the past few weeks.

When you’re done with that, Microsite Masters has a huge write up on what to do about that Penguin update. SEO is dead. Long live SEO.

To add insult to injury, Google is now putting some value into something called AuthorRank. Finch takes a look at what it means for affiliates. If you do decide to come out of hiding and author something, KissMetrics shows you how to really take advantage of Authorship markup. 150% increase in CTR you say? Better hit the portrait studio.

Fuck it. Let’s just fire Matt Cutts. The celebrity has gone to his head.

Back to the non-SEO news…

Plenty of Fish getting sued for someone using an image they weren’t supposed to in a true.com ad. Ben links to a legitimate case study that looks at the CPM vs Volume relationship on pof ads. Also some more pof advertising stats.

This concludes our PlentyofFish news for the day.

MIT nerd builds a $10 Million “Sugar Daddy” empire from BusinessInsider.com. Compete Blog investigates where people are looking for love online. In other trend news, people are trying to get that body ready for the beach.

What is affiliate marketing? This infographic from Pepperjam explains in a racist way. Andy runs a Hate Store. He sells cross burning materials and KKK masks. Not an affiliate program I want to be a part of!

Yahoo explains how to market effectively to African American consumers with a link to a new AdAge report.

Decent post from DirectResponse on monopolizing a vertical. Apparently, you’re going to need a lot of indians.

Finch drops on knowledge – Read this and improve your conversion rates. Some solid (but known) tips on improving conversions for brands.

Negbox writes a post about a video talking about bounded rationality… whatever that is. KissMetrics analyzes some “power words” ( imagine, you, because … not so powerful out of context.) Uber Affiliate comes out of hibernation and writes Researching Affiliate Niches in 2012.

What’s the state of online marketing in 2012? This infographic bears all!

Yo Dawg I heard you like infographics so here’s the Top 6 Infographics of the Week from econsultancy. And other about mobile email stats.

Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland on human behavior and innovation.

ConversionXL takes a look at what to call your call-to-action button. Also, ridiculously effective techniques for offline lead generation. And if you’re on twitter – here are 30 conversion rate experts you can follow.

Prelaunch tricks to boost your ad revenue. A slide deck on How to convert free users in to paid users.

Ask yourself, Do questions work in headlines? What about 1 word copywriting?

How to track Youtube plays as conversions from hasOffers. Google wants people to use Adwords to push video: How every business can play big on Youtube.

Another interesting read from hasOffers – How to make an affiliate marketing calendar.

Some Facebook-ness

FBAdsLab looks at common landing page mistakes with Facebook. Also a short post on a winning CTR ad in Facebook. Mashable has a good writeup on how to drive engagement within Facebook ads.

Facebook merges the “publish_stream” with “publish_action”. Relevant if you’re messing around with the Open Graph.

Check out how Weather.com is integrating Open Graph. Notice the “Love” and “Ugh!” buttons on the left? Just another unique implementation of the Open Graph to get those gears turning.

Why moms are a hot market on a Facebook. MILC = Mom I’d Like to Convert.

IMGrind has this good writeup on How to Dominate Facebook Ads. Also, have you noticed “Trending Articles” showing up in your Facebook feed? InsideFacebook explains those Trending Articles. It looks like Facebook is doing everything it can to load the news feed with commercial intent, rather than a stream of musings from your friends.

And now back to online marketing…

Getting 80,000 some clicks to a blog post with a bunch of twitter tools.

Interesting tidbits from Certified Knowledge about Google’s new Near Match settings. Blackhat PPC also has an opinion on the “near match” change.

Really good write-up on the free analytics tools out there, by KissMetrics. Market research 101. Know them and use them daily.

A thorough guide on how to do trademarked bidding in Adwords. From PPCHero – How does Adwords assign a Quality Score even before a campaign is live?

An hour of your time well spent: Best Practices from 30,000 A/B and multivariate split tests.

Good data from Royal Pingdom: No US City is in the top 50 worldwide when it comes to internet. No shit, when you have monopolies like Comcast. I fucking hate you Comcast. Rot in a fire. [ this rant removed for another blog post ]

Speaking of monopolies, mobile carriers are killing it by overselling data plans.

Also, how does that $1 Billion buyout of Pinterest stack up to other asinine buyouts? It looks like Mark Cuban is still the king. Props for getting filthy rich before that tech bubble burst.

JP Morgan buys a 7% stake in the toolbar company Conduit. Got eight figures chillin in JP Morgan Chase…

And finally, Ad:Tech gets some harsh words from Hitler. “I thought RTB was the future!!!” “Mein Fuher….”

Mobile Web and Apps

Mobile affiliate tracking sucks for many merchants. High-end devices like Android and iThings are cookie-capable, but if the merchant’s website sucks on a device it will kill conversions.

Some mobile facts and stats from 2011 in infographic form. A collection of links about the future of mobile from BD Conference.

IMGrind takes a look at the sad state of Mobile App development. Those are some seriously depressing stats. In my experience, if you’re going to spend time building an app, you better make it good. Make it unique. Make it useful. It’s a huge time investment, so if you’re going to do it, go balls-to-the-wall and build something that actually provides value. Especially true since you’re competing against established companies.

Good notes regarding WiFi usage. iPad users stay connected. More fun data: Emerging mobile markets worldwide. Also, an infographic called How Mobile Customers are different.

An infographic on the mobile apps economy. An infographic of Android developers.

Can you build the next Instagram? 4 Hour Work Week thinks its possible. Although, its not all fun and games. The popularity of Draw Something has been dropping since Zynga bought out OMGPOP.

So if you wanted to do that … If you need a mobile developer here is a giant list of mobile developers from all countries. If you have an app, here is a good readup on how to promote Android and iOS apps. Some overlap here, but even more mobile app promotion networks and agencies. This article explains how to do ASO, the new SEO?, aka App Store Optimization. All very handy tips.

Sure why not… one more article with tips on iOS store optimization.

Google just made it a whole lot easier to advertise mobile apps. Good news!

Removing stumbling blocks in mobile forms. Some Smashing stuff on gamification and user experience. Also, Gamification, Rewards and Dopamine marketing.

Randomness on Productivity, Design, Startups, and the Nerdy

Great read: Going from $0 to $500,000 in recurring revenue in a year with no VC money. And if you’re running a start-up, or starting a start up, you should check out this tumblr page for start-ups.

On a serious note, 10 Rules for Web Startups.

(1) Simple trick to increasing productivity. And by productivity, they mean avoiding wasting time on shit that doesn’t make $$.

Asian Efficiency has a surprisingly long writeup on pornography, masturbation, and productivity. Read it, it’s interesting. The whole series on Sex and Productivity is interesting. Goodbye, myfreecams :(

Also, a good article on Don’t Break the Chain (You know, that Jerry Sienfeld productivity tip.) This is one productivity tip I really want to implement.

Tongue-in-cheek article on How to Murder Your Productivity. Stop doing these things. NOW!

Also, Getting Things Done for hackers e-book. And How to Meditate daily. Another ritual I plan on getting into.

FreelanceSwitch does a bit on Dealing with procrastination. That morning alertness one is key. Be productive. You can also check out My Head in the Morning, a look at how that gray matter in your head functions after you wake up.

That socialist pig Obama is trying to redistribute the wealth to people who could potentially make good use of it. Why we don’t need anti-trust laws and how they actually cause monopolies.

James Altucher writes “How I Lost 100 Pounds”

Your idea is stupid. Execution is all that matters.

Removing complexity when coding is the key to being a good programmer. When you think something through before writing, instead of just typing away -> run code to see if it works, you tend to write better code. This isn’t something that you can pick up overnight, and its definitely something i have to work on all the time, but its hugely helpful to even be aware of the problem.

If you do anything related to websites, these cheat sheets could come in handy. Digging into WordPress looks at how to use Apache Bench to measure latency. Also, another way to speed up your site is with DNS pre-fetching. Useful if your media is stored on another domain or you’re sourcing files from a CDN (like Google’s jQuery CDN.) I did not know about this.

And finally, a ton of good HTML5 / CSS3 articles.

That’s all for now. READ UP!

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WhatRunsWhere Review – Media Buying and Ad Spying

May 4th, 2012

So you want to up your A game and blow up traffic till your server catches fire? That’s what media buys are for, fool!

Almost a year to this day, I sold out a little bit and wrote this WhatRunsWhere review.

If you’re not familiar with What Runs Where, it’s a service from two internet pros. One of them is shady, slightly, and the other is a goat named mattaw. Mattaw ( or Max ) has been so kind as to do a few “ask me anything” posts on Wickedfire, so if you want a primer on media buying along with some pro tips, check out Media buying Ask me anything Part 1. I enjoy Part 2 because dullspace makes an appearance.

Also Max wrote an epic guest post on BlueHatSEO called How to Start Your Own Media Buy (Linking to cached version because BlueHatSeo is down at the moment, oh noes!!)

What Runs Where Gets All Shiny and Stuff

When I wrote about What Runs Where in the past, my main complaint was the fairly confusing and slightly ugly user interface. But just in the past week or so, the entire UI has been redesigned and streamlined, so lets take a look.

The interface has been narrowed down to 3 main parts. It’s more along the lines of MixRank, which is a competing service that focuses on scraping Google Adwords data. Although it’s only Adwords data, their interface was a lot more user-friendly than What Runs Where… BUT NO MORE!

Before diving into that, one thing I’ve noticed is that What Runs Where is significantly faster than it was before. Searches only take a second or two, which is pretty surprising based on how much data they have to sift through.

Search By Advertiser

Simple enough. Enter a domain name and find out more then you ever wanted to know about an advertiser.

Warning: a search for “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” will yield different results. I’m being told this is being worked on, but if you keep getting “No Results” then this is why.

AdStrength™ – When you search by Advertiser, you can sort ads by “Most Recent” and “AdStrength” (not sure if really trademarked… or just being clever).

The formula is simple: (Times Seen x Frequency x Days Running) = AdStrength. The higher the score, the more likely it is that this is a successful ad.

Be careful of Brand advertisers though. Some companies could give a fuck about ROI, so their media teams spend the company’s money like its their job (.. it is) If you’re a performance advertiser, or affiliate marketer, you actually care about ROI. Just because an Ad Strength score is high, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a profitable ad. If it’s a brand, chances are they’re spending money to build the brand by getting the most impressions possible. For example, Google Chrome ads are everyyyywhere.

Placement Suggestions – A really neat feature when searching by advertisers. This tab will show you potential placements you can try for your campaigns. DEAR GOD, WHY IS IT SO SIMPLE?!

Search By Publisher

Let’s say you build a media plan with something like Google Adplanner. You can use the “Search By Publisher” feature to look up specific domains and see what kinds of ads are working for that Publisher. Are their more leaderboards than square? Then spend more time on leaderboard ads, lest you wonder why your 300×250 ads are getting no impressions.

On the other hand, if you’re just fishing for campaign ideas, you can look up a popular website for a demographic you’re familiar with to see what companies are advertising there. You can then find some related affiliate campaigns to promote. Better yet, you’d build up your own lead gen funnel so you can collect that juicy user data and promote several types of offers to them.

Search By Keyword

Self-explanatory when you search for Text ads. It’s gets a little trickier when searching for banner ads. Either way, you can get a little clever here and search for random stuff – “HDTV” yields results where Quibids is absolutely dominating.

Useful Ideas and Tips

Let me preface this by saying I’m not an expert media buyer by any means. I dabble, but most stuff has been in the ‘self-serve’ category, versus signing insertion orders and shit like that. They are basically the same thing apart from how the money is spent.

PPV Targets Galore – One of the best uses for What Runs Where and other ad spying tools is the ability to generate a huge list of relevant PPV targets. If you’re running some dating on PPV, you can look up a bunch a of dating advertisers, see where they’re advertising, and pop those placements into your PPV target list. Simple as that. This applies to any niche.

This is far more efficient and effective than something like Google Ad Planner (although, you can never have too many targets) because you already know that this type of offer is already working on these publishers.

We Goin’ International Baby – What Runs Where added a few more international countries to its data. International markets are far less competitive then the US and other English-speaking countries. It is what it is because 95% of marketers won’t take the time to translate ads to another language, despite how easy it is.

The obvious thing to do is find popular Advertisers or Publishers in other countries then look-up what kinds of ads are being served there. Also, you can search by Keyword with a foreign word. For example, even though France is not listed as a country in their database, you can do a keyword search for “rencontre” to bring up a ton of French dating ads.

Hybrid Ads – Some companies like AdSonar and Pulse 360 have creatives known as hybrid ads, which is a text+image combo. Sound familiar? That’s basically what many social media ads are.

You can use the hybrid ad data from What Runs Where in a number of ways (hint: Copy pasting the ads then running them on the same ad network is not one of them). Since we know image accounts for roughly 70% of the CTR, you can easily see what kinds of images are grabbing attention.

You can port these hybrid ads to other traffic sources that support hybrid ads. Facebook and Plenty of Fish come to mind. Of course, some preliminary demographic research is needed here.

You can use the similar images and copy (or be a dick and rip them 100%) to create banner ads that look just like hybrid ads. Make IAB banners that look like hybrid ads, but run them on a banner display network where hybrid ads aren’t supported.

Or you can use the hybrid copy+image to use as a base for catchy PPV landers. Just expand that bit of text and image to a ~700×500 px window and you got yourself a landing page that’s likely to work.

What’s Really Working – You hear about those $10,000+ media buy days that people brag about. Are they bullshitting you or what? For the most part, no. ( Unless you’re selling $50,000 media buy coaching, then yeah, probably bullshitting. )

If you spend enough time digging around What Runs Where, you find little golden nuggets of valuable information. “Why are these Warren Buffet ads showing up on every financial website?” “Why does Quibids have a 50,000+ Ad Strength Rank?” “I thought flogs and farticles were dead?! Why are they all over the sites like MSBNC and Fox News?”

When you start seeing patterns of certain advertisers and types of advertisements showing up on some of the biggest websites in the world, you really get an understanding of where those $50,000 Fridays come from.

Where can What Runs Where Improve?

Export Domains – Right now I don’t see any feature for exporting a CSV of domains when you’re on a “Traffic Sources” tab. Copy and pasting the list, then cleaning it up in Excel is kind of a pain compared to exporting a ready-made CSV.

AdStrength in Keyword Search – It would be nice if doing keyword searches could be sorted by AdStrength or some other factors. I’m just nitpicking here really..

WHY U NO TRY FOR A $1

Do you have $1? Then you can try What Runs Where for 7 days.

Overall, I have to say that WRW stepped its game up. The user interface is a lot better then what it was before. The searches don’t hang like they used to. This really is a tool you want to have in your arsenal if you know the value of competitive research.

As I finish writing this post, Finch beats me to the punch with his own What Runs Where re-review. No need to go there, my review is better. SUCK IT BRITAIN!

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Affiliate Marketing News AdTech SF Edition

April 11th, 2012

There is no rhyme or reason to how and when I write these wrap up posts, so lets call this the Ad:Tech SF Edition, because Ad:Tech happened since the last time I posted a wrap up (even though I didn’t go.) I could’ve called it the April Fools edition because of how much foolish shit is going on, but whatever.

Oh hey, there are banner spots available if you want to advertise something.

I’m going to try to make this post more useful then usual with more trends and how-to’s when I find them. I seriously wade through a lot of shit to pick out these tidbits. So much “content” on the web is just written for the sake of having content. Tip after tip after tip of shit that you’ve read 50 times before. My conversion rate of considering something useful is like 1%. 100 headlines, 7 worth clicking open, 1 worth posting.

One major item of shit that I will not be discussing is the Facebook Timelime. Hundreds of lame-ass Facebook Timeline posts have plagued my reader- what to do, what not to do, and how to do it, blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s a fucking picture. Get over yourselves, social media experts.

Also don’t be offended if i don’t include your post here if you’re an affiliate blogger. For one, it’s probably not that earth-shattering, and dos, if you have any popularity then people have probably already read it.

lol. Remember Kony? I guess the luster died down after this happened.

The biggest news of the past few weeks is the Facebook buyout of Instagram. ONE BILLION DOLLARS for a photo sharing service that makes your pictures look like they were taking in 1960. I do find it inspiring that the coder of Instagram taught himself to program without formal training.

I highly recommend you watch this clip from the Daily Show for some insight into the purchase.

Shark Tank meets Mad Men. This is what “The Pitch” is about. If working in an ad agency is exciting to you, then this show is right up your alley. For me, it’s cringe-worthy.

Affiliate Marketing News

Remember those tax laws that passed a few months ago? You know, since most state governments are broke due to gross incompetence, they figured they’d get some of that internet money? Well as it turns out, those laws haven’t raised a single fucking penny for those states. Online retailers said “Fuck You” and killed their affiliate programs. In Colorado, said law has been deemed unconstitutional. There is hope for us yet, internet.

But then again, maybe not.

Leads 202 goes open source. Wait no it doesn’t. It did!

Finch sells, then asks, Is it worth cloaking on Facebook? Then, a good read on being committed to a single thing while avoiding the graceless art of ping pong marketing. And finally, a non-nonsense How to Monetize a website post.

What happens after the click? A lot, apparently. Test Everything!

Good tips from PlentyofFish Ben – Some tips for gaming offers. No, not gaming the offers, but offers related to gaming. Then there is this piece about hideous ad design. Also, there is a really nice marketing cheatsheat highlighted by Ben.

Here’s a post from Certified Knowledge on how to product video content that converts. And if you’re using that video in a squeeze page, read this article.

Examining an $1,000,000 ad fraud scheme from Behind the Enemy Lines.

InsideFacebook provides some CTR data from Facebook based on the day of the week

Social Fresh has a post on Facebook Advertising. I didn’t read it but it’s an infographic. Speaking of which, here’s one about Pinterest.

Hate Google? Here’s an infographic outlining lawsuits against Google. While we’re on the subject of hating Google, check out this awful story of Google completely fucking over a startup called Hatchlings.com.

Let’s continue the infographic orgy.
EConsultancy’s infographic about “tags”. Here’s another Pinterest infographic. And finally, a Twitter marketing infographic.

Comparing online dating and online gaming via pixels.

Protip: Those mothafuckin iPad users convert. Yahoo says so too.

Unbounce critiques 35 different landing pages. I love these types posts from them.

Also, a slide deck of Landing Page Success Stories.

The Law of Shitty Click Thru Rates. People not filling out your sign-up form? Here are 8 reasons why.

Also protip: Campaigns almost never work the first time.

Summers coming up. Are you going to hit on the summer trends?

Those Hispanics online mang….

Mobile News

The rate of growth in mobile can’t be measured in decades or years any more. In fact, months are too long of a time frame. Now, it’s a matter of weeks or days.

Mobile has changed the way we consume information, as shown in this video-info-graphic.

Android is catching up to Apple in impression share, thus iADs (the Apple ad platform) lowers its minimum to $100,000 from $500,000. To be honest I had no idea it was that high in the first place.

Trying to go mobile? Then you probably want to use HTML5. Royal Pingdom has a good round up of HTML5 articles. And if you’re using WordPress, you probably want some responsive themes so you’re not forced to create multiple versions of your website. Copyblogger explains. Also, a nice guide from Starbucks on how they made their design responsive.

Here’s a cool infographic about mobile e-commerce.

Good post from MobyAffiliates about the End of the UDID. Imagine, we can no longer identify a phone by using a unique number…. THE HORROR!

Also another good post from them- Avoiding ad decay on mobile. In fact, a few of these tips apply to many types of display advertising. For example, you can squeeze longevity out of PPV campaigns by giving them a break when you notice CTR / conversions drop from fatigue.

Interesting survey regarding QR code marketing. It’s Asia, but the Japanese are years ahead of us in QR code marketing and mobile stuff. So the data will eventually apply here in the US.

A thorough read called The Art of Launching an App from Smashing Magazine.

Maximizing mobile search, straight from Google. Also, Google takes something from Facebook by adding zip code targeting. Although I’m positive they could have done this a while ago.

And in typical ’4th Place’ fashion, Bing, everyone’s favorite red-headed stepchild, adds mobile targeting. Beta…

If you are on Android this is how to change your User agent. Interesting, an A-to-Z Guide on sending SMS with PHP.

If you are building an app that includes search, this is a good article to read on best practices for mobile search.

Can you recommend a mobile ad network? mobithinking is updating that neat list of theirs.

LeadsMob takes a look at what people buy with their mobile devices.

In App purchases will be kind of a big deal. Millennial Media reaches 300 Million users.

Mobile Groove takes a look at Millennial Media and other mobile trends. In another article, Finance and Health are highlighted.

Jesus, Google Play makes no money. The Apple counterpart is doing 8x as much. I wonder what the difference is between Admob and iAds though?

Want to build a mobile app but don’t know where to start? Take a look at these mobile APIs and see what you can come up with.

Too dumb to work with an API? It’s cool, you can always come up with an App that looks like it does something and troll what you would call the ‘lowest common denominator.’

And Then Some Random Tidbits

Business lessons from a wise, old man. He’s not actually old in real life, but it internet time he should have a long grey beard.

Always a starter, but never a finisher.

Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself… Then, read this article by James Altucher on how to be less stupid. Subscribe to his blog because James write a lot of funny articles. This one about brainstorming is pretty good.

A story of building an actual business. 3 years of progress… get’s a little pitchey though towards the end.

Rand Fishkin has a hot girlfriend.

Now, get your suit game proper. That way you’re fly even if you don’t know what to do on a first date.

And this is only being posted for the picture.

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Affiliate Marketing News – Spring Cleaning Edition

March 21st, 2012

Oh shit, it’s offically Spring. So let’s do some spring cleaning on the RSS reader to see if anything interesting is going on in the world of online marketing.

Mobile News

Here would be a number of links about the growth of mobile, smartphone sales, tablets, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, but this kind of news is getting redundant. If you haven’t gotten it in your head yet that mobile is experiencing growth many times faster than what happened with the desktop internet, you might have brain damage. Anyway…

RoyalPingdom takes a look at mobile OS distribution. Feature phones still lead, but Android and iOS are catching up very fast.

Upper-middle class chicks bridging the spending gap on mobile.

Did you know you can use an app to detect which ad networks your mobile apps are using? I use another app too, call “Addons Detector” for Android which goes a little deeper. Very fun competitive research!

Opinion: How to track mobile downloads? Part 2. UUID? Cookies? This fellow has some options on it. Networks and tracking platforms should definitely take a look at both articles.

Mobile SEO via Bing. Takeaway – don’t create a mobile version of your website (different URL) if at all possible. Use media queries, client-side or server-side detection. Google is saying the same thing.

Smaato sees impressive growth.

The LeadsMob Blog has good daily, sometimes more, tidbits of mobile commerce and advertising news. So stay up on things and subscribe.

Setting Bejeweled Free. Fly away, little Bejeweled.

Affiliate and Online Marketing News

FBAdsToolBox is a nifty little tool to instantly create a few dozen variations of a single ad image. I gave it a run, and it’s definitely a good product for advertisers that spend their day throwing up ads on Facebook and Plenty of Fish.

FinchSells speaks the truth about Mondays. Most entrepueners love Mondays, especially if you make less with your offers during the weekend slumps. But the point is get your Monday started off right, and you’ll be better preapred for the rest of the week. Start it off by being lazy, and before you know it it’s Friday and you’re saying “Fuck it! I’ll do next Monday.”

Good interview about a PPVPlaybook.com Success Story, Dr Manhattan.

I know a lot of people, for reasons unknown to me, seem to be jumping into soiling the sancity of Pinterest with their spam and affiliate links. If that’s the case, maybe you might want to know more about the average Pinterest user. SocialFresh has had a lot of posts recently about Pinterest, so you should probably subscribe if that’s relevant to you. Like this post about a mom’s purchasing decisions being influenced by the site.

Various tips on for local SEO in Google Places. Handy if that is your thing.

While we’re on the topic of SEO, Google is shitting all over it. So here’s what you need to know before Matt Cutts shits all over your livelyhood. But if you want completely useless SEO tips directly from Google, here you go.

Gender-based marketing from Econsultancy – infographic goodness!!!111 Here be some more infographic goodness, examining consumer behaivior.

10 very useful tips from ConversionXL on how people view websites. Here is another post about grabbing attention. #3 grabbed my attention, if you know what i mean.

More copywriting stuff – Verbs beat adjectives by NeuroScienceMarketing.

I love these kinds of posts from Unbounce, where they rip apart a number of landing pages to explain what’s good, and what isn’t.

KissMetrics always has good stuff. Out of ideas for your shitty blog? Here’s an a good strategy for generating topics. Awesome stuff about choosing what graphics and images you use on your website and landers. And here’s 7 more tips on that.

How to track Likes and other Social Media sharing with Google Analytcs.

Yo dawg, heard you need an advertising API?

Long ass post from ViperChill on creating million-dollar web apps.

Shoemoney officially jumps the shark, accidently lands on it, then fucks its dead body. Why the fuck would this even be a post? The only reason this is a post is so he can rank for the term “zuckerberg penis,” which i assume has hefty volume. I know Shoe will sell out for almost anything, but I thought he had some respect for himself and his readers, but no, this is not the case.

CakesTV Episode 4 is out. I haven’t watched it yet, but I am dying to see the awkwardness between Cakes and Steve Howe, because know they exchanged some words in at a past conference.

Good shit from Mr.Green highlighting what works on Plenty of Fishies.

InforMarketingBlog is an entire blog that highlights old ass advertisements from the Mad Men days. Add it to your reader.

Possibily Important Randomness

This is your brain on dru… i mean video games.

Facebook is an addiction, so Royal Pingdom examines why people love Facebook so much.

Using Amazon’s SES Service with PHP to send bulk mail. Most interesting.

Asian Efficiency reviews Eat that Frog. Classic book. Brian Tracy is a legend.

Nontoxin is rarely updated, but the posts are always awesome. Who needs sleep? (You, idiot!) and some cool shit about optical illusions.

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Affiliate Marketing News of 2012 So Far

February 11th, 2012

Time to check on the good ol’ blogosphere to see if anything interesting was said since 2012 started.

Affiliate News

Nickycakes has a TV show now… apparently, called Cakes TV. I haven’t watched it, but it doesn’t really look like a TV show… more like a webcam chat. It would definitely be cooler if it was like an actual reality show with hook-ups, backstabbing, and lots of grimey-as-fuck-ness. You know, just like the real affiliate marketing industry.

I lied. I did watch a bit of Episode 2, where Shawn Collins get so heated about my friend tmoney gaming the air-tight Affiliate Summit Badge System. Skip to ~51:30. Fucking basement dwellers!

note: While I was writing this post I listened to the show and it was pretty solid. It’s interesting that a there’s a tv show about aff marketing and the guests actually know what they are talking about.

Ben at POF always has good info at his blog. Just random tidbits of info that can help you out.

Mr. Green and The Angry Russian explain why your affiliate strategy sucks.

Z6 explains some stuff about marketing on holidays (why conversions get all fucked up) then explains drops some knowledge on how to exploit them.

Shock Marketing has an excellent post on Call to Actions.

Reading sucks. You’re doing it now and you hate it. KissMetrics asks if video improves conversion rates. Unbounce examines 10 landing pages that are using video effectively.

Not exactly related, but as a lot of affiliates are one-two man shows, this article deserves a once over – Avoiding IRS Audits

If you mess with Twitter at all, really cool infographic on creating tweets with links in them that you want people to click.

Tanner Vaughn gets pinched by the FTC and lives to tell about it.

Not mentioning Finch in this post because I am going to write up something about a couple of his recent posts.

Mobile and Facebook News

This is pretty brilliant.

Semi-interesting for developers – Mobile Marketing Association releases Privacy Policy template.

Mobile will be big in 2012, and sources say it will be bigger than big in 2013. It will probably be even bigger than that in 2014.

All bullshit aside, the amount of available ad inventory (due to sheer number of devices being sold, along with the amount of time spent online diverging away from desktop to device) will soon be bigger than available inventory on the traditional web. Big brands are slowly moving their money to mobile, but not that many companies know how to make it work. There is stupid opportunity. Not copy-cat some ads and profit opportunity, but real opportunity for creating sustainable businesses.

Let’s not forget that Facebook is going mobile, whether they like it or not, so they are still trying to figure out how to make it pay for them. Currently there are no ads on mobile Facebook, but now that they are a public company, the pressure is on to make profitz.

Open Graph
Facebook also rolled out the Open Graph a few months ago. I believe it’s still in Beta, but if you don’t know what Open Graph is, it basically Facebook’s attempt to bring all their API’s together into something that integrates into all of their Social channels.

The Open Graph is definitely a lot to take in. I had to read their documents a number of times and i had to smoke a number of bowls before it sunk in.

Here are three important things you need to know about Open Graph.
1) You create the Action. You “Like” something on Facebook now. With the Open Graph, you (the Developer) create the Action. So people can “Like” “Read” “Burn” “Fuck” or whatever else you can think of, as long as its relevant to your application.
2) More Reach – Open Graph integrates all of the social channels, so instead of just “Posting Some Shit to Your Wall,” you ping the Open Graph and Facebook will show that action anywhere it can. “Open Graph activity in News Feed and Timeline, app bookmarks and requests”
3) Less friction – Before Open Graph, there were a lot of dialogs involved whenever you wanted some action to take place with Facebook’s API. If you have your Open Graph setup correctly, there is less action required from the user because you ping the Open Graph with whatever action they take, and Facebook takes care of the rest. Users had to click “Like” before – a huge undertaking of effort. Now you can ping the graph with an action whenever the fuck you want!

So what does the Open Graph mean for marketers?

The bottom line is this: With mobile growth and Facebook Open Graph, shit is going to get cray.

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Do Good Affiliate Marketing Blogs Go to Heaven?

February 8th, 2012

So it’s been a month or so since I last posted. I need a change of pace from writing Javascript to writing some words and sentences that don’t end with a semi-colon or curly bracket.

This post from Shoemoney was brought to my attention earlier today.

Basically, some fool wants to know why good affiliate marketing blogs “die out” after time. Somehow, PPC.bz gets mentioned with actual good blogs like bluehat and slightlyshady. ( Notice, unlike the bear jew Shoemoney, I link to things I talk about.)

History of PPC.bz – Why Did This Blog Start?

I did not start this blog to show how smart or clever I am. I started this blog because I had a domain sitting around, and thought it would be fun to make a mockery of affiliate marketing.

It certainly wasn’t for money either, because it was about a year, maybe two, after this blog started before I even put some ads up or promoted any product via affiliate link. I doubt any of the other blogs mentioned were started for money. If they were, shit, at least they had good content.

The problem arises when affiliate blogs are started for money. Idiots start blogging because they saw John Chow or Shoe get rich by blogging so now they’re blogging about ‘getting rich by blogging.’ These clowns are people that just regurgitate low-level information, spam referral links to ‘networks’ they haven’t pushed $1 with, or simply publish bullshit about “success” while living still living in their moms basement. ( i kid with Nick though – he is a beacon of hope in the affiliate industry.)

Whatever the case, when the intentions are about money and not providing real value, you get a shitty blog that only the dumbest, most novice people will return to. The fucked up part is that there are a lot of these mindless followers, and that only strokes the ego of said blogger so they continue with their bullshit.

Ah, the glory days…

At the time when PPC.bz started (late 2008-ish), it was the heyday of flogs and acai berry rebills. “Oh what’s that? You need a colon cleanse too?” Facebook Ads were calling out ladies with ‘muffin tops’ and Obama himself was giving out government grants. One simple trick.

At the time, networks respected their affiliate managers because you couldn’t just hire any person off the street to do this job ( I mean you could, and that’s what networks do now- but still.) Networks like Copeac still paid affiliates because money just flowed in – people like Deepak Agarwal were still paying those networks because they weren’t on the run from the law getting their assets seized.

At the time, Vince Offer was pitching Shamwow all over the TV, instead of going to prison for slapping hookers.

At the time, the greatest Pitchman of all, Billy Mays was still alive and pitching. R.I.P. Homie. :: pours one out ::

So I threw WordPress on this domain, gave my friends accounts, and people posted a whole lot of funny bullshit.

But it was also a good time for “gurus” who churned out shitty info products at an alarming rate. This excess of informational product bullshit sparked some ideas so I cornered the niche on breaking guru balls. If there was a guru out there promoting shitty shit, you best believe I was gonna Photoshop jizz in their face.

The craziest part of all was the affiliate rap music. I mean, there was some honestly good shit produced. This is still my favorite. SPAMTECH COMING WITH THE FORCE CANT HOLD US.

How fucking high were we?

Why Do Good Blogs Really Die?

Yo what the fuck was I talking about anyway? Gettin’ sidetracked reminiscing on the good ol’ days.

I do hate to do this, but I agree with Shoemoney in his post.

The more you know, the less you want to share. Especially in an industry that severely lacks in the originality department. When you provide good value, you get linked to and talked about. At first PPC.bz provided little value, but the content was funny and caused controversy. The popularity increases your reach, so when you give away a specific technique or resource, it gets pounded into uselessness much faster (concerning useful blogs, of course). Strategy X or Z is no longer exploitable when every body knows.

But there is something that Shoe forgot to mention. Earl Grey addresses it in that post’s comments: …Some people just cant multi task. Or more specifically: Writing content that provides value takes a lot of fucking time.

I don’t know why the other blogs mentioned died off (I think nickycakes has a podcast or something now though) … I can’t speak for them, but thinking about it now, some of my best posts took a solid half a day to write. Sometimes it is just exhausting to write this shit. I can’t imagine how long it took Eli of Bluehatseo.com to write some his posts that took like 20 sheets of paper to print. YEAH BACK IN THE DAY I READ SEO ARTICLES ON THE TOILET. WHAT OF IT?

But there was definitely a time when I was pumping about 3-5 posts a week here, maybe more.

For me, writing is a labor of love. The ROI on writing is pretty dismal, so when I have goals to reach I actually work on them instead of spending 5 hours writing what is essentially a book report. Sure I can pitch some more shit, but then the value of the blog decreases when every other post is “here buy this!”

You can make more money simply by applying the shit you’re talking about. That simple. After the first year or two or three, the novelty wears off. Time is valuable and you don’t want to waste it. There are only so many guru products I can bash before it becomes more “work” than “fun.” (I still can’t believe I am #1 for his name. Buddy, I will delete that post… for a small price, of course…)

There is only so much time you can dedicate to blogging before you are choosing to go down that path….

Does one focus on the actual work of building a campaign or business, or does one try to brand himself as the business? “Do I want to write every day?” “Do I want to be at every single conference, snapping pics of my dinner plate that some network paid for?” “Do I want to shill myself for company XYZ6 even though most of the industry hates them?” “Do I want to cater to newbies?!” No, No, No, and FUCK NO! (OK I did the last one a few times but I try to keep it classy)

You’ll blog less because its more profitable to do other things – or you just don’t like being a conference going-whore picture whore. If you want to get rich blogging (ie; make it worth your time), you have sell the fuck out. I shudder at the thought.

Finch is starting to figure how to make blogging pay consistently, but he’s British and they study the Oxford Dictionary in grade school. I bet he writes those posts in his sleep. They fucking love to write.

Will PPC.bz Go to Heaven?

Let me just say that PPC.bz isn’t dead yet. Yeah, the time between posts seems to get longer and longer, but I still do enjoy writing [this very post you're reading!] But at this point in my life, I’d rather spend my time working on my own business then spending all my time trying to become a full-time, full-fledged, free-dinner-grubbing, blogger.

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Best of Affiliate Marketing News 2011

January 4th, 2012

So it’s like 2012. Let’s see if anything interesting happened since my last affiliate marketing news roundup post. Thank god for the holiday break though… less shit to sift through overall.

Affiliate Marketing News

The Secret to Getting Rich in 2012 is APIs. Yeah, that’s kind of a bullshit headline, but a good read nonetheless. There are many APIs available… creating a new service is just a matter of mashing these APIs together to provide something fresh and useful.

Probably the most interesting article you’ll find in this post: How to block AdBlock.

FinchSells launches Premium Posts Volume 3, one of the few things worth paying for in the affiliate marketing world.

Finch then writes about a flog with 7 offers on a single page. I see your 7 steps Finch, and raise you the 15-Step Flog.

One last one from Finch. How to really get rich in 2012. Pro-tip- it involves putting your head down and pumping shit out, not dicking around on Wickedfire or worse- writing blog posts!

Speaking of optimizing your time, here are 10 Firefox Addons for Freelancers. May not be relevant to many affiliate marketers, but the WOT Plugin is very useful for Facebook Advertisers.

Everything I know I learned from Eleah.

RedFly (not updated often but a great blog nonetheless) has a thorough post on using Google’s in-Page Analytics.

Here’s a neat breakdown of the Louie CK experiment. If you don’t think Louis CK funny, kill yourself with AIDS.

Really cool post about a “Searcher’s Mindset” and there’s an infographic involved!

Nickycakes writes about the excellent WhatRunsWhere service. What’s this… Cakes updating his blog more than once a year? That’s right, another post to unlock the time-saving power of virtual assistants.

Speaking of ad spying, Zac Johnson ( I apologize in advance for linking you there) has a post about Moat.com, another neat tool to add to your arsenal.

Mr. Dan Palanchuk has a couple good reads. Some shit you can learn from Mr Green, and 5 Weird Facts about Affiliate Network Offers. Good information in there… go direct whenever possible!

Hilarity from Mr Green as he describes 5 types of affiliate managers.

Great post on PPVPlaybook – Making Chee$e with Trends.

Direct Response has a good breakdown on sweet, juicy cloaking.

White Label Dating launched a mobile platform. I’ve never worked with this network, but there is definitely some opportunity there.

Four ways to unlock the traffic power of Browsers. Good stuff – make a toolbar or plugin that sticks to the user’s browser. Still clueless? Here’s how people are doing it.

Jay Weintraub dissects a good internet marketing scam.

I’m only linking to this because the stock photo being used is HILARIOUS. HAHA Grandpa, you ol’ pimp you.

Mobile

Smaato releases new metrics on mobile ad network fill rates and response times and such.

Pingdom don’t fuck around. The Mobile Web in Numbers.

Facebook is slowly but surely blending ads into their mobile apps. Judging by how fast Facebook’s mobile traffic is growing, great opportunity lies here in 2012.

Infographic Mania

Because if you read it in an infographic, it must be true.

Good one via IMGrind on the Anatomy of a Killer Facebook Campaign.

The decline of Organic Links via SEOBook. Next up, Google Affiliate Marketing Infographic.

Every CEO (or whatever you are) should understand gamification.

10 Mind Blowing Mobile Inforgraphics that will blow your fuckin’ mind FUCK YEAH!

2011 Round Ups

Yo dawg I heard you like posts so we put some posts in your posts….

Best of Royal Pingdom 2011

40 Facebook Marketing tips from 2011 via Luna Metrics.

Best of KISS Metrics 2011

That’s all folks!
Now get to fucking work and
stack paper high as skyscrapers
in 2012

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Posted in Industry News

Affiliate Summit West 2012 Viva Las Vegas and Affiliate Balls

December 19th, 2011

This post is about the upcoming Affiliate Summit West show, happening in Las Vegas January 8th thru 10th.

Now, there are two main things that people keep pestering me about… Am I fighting Shoemoney and Where the Parties At?

Affiliates with No Balls

Let’s start with Shoemoney.

No I will not be fighting Shoemoney.

As much as I wanna do this, Shoemoney has health concerns regarding his precious appendages.

While I’m not going to run around claiming this cheesy, give-away victory, I do encourage all of my readers to call Shoemoney a pussy, bitch, or nancyboy at every opportunity.

Also, Clickbooth jacked the Fight Night idea, but theirs will probably suck. It doesn’t look like there will be actual fights. Just meet Randy Coulture and shake his hand or some shit.

Affiliate Ball

Next is some information on one of the better parties for Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Ball.

PPC.bz ( The Party Planning Committee ) passed on the party torch to Darren at last years ASW 2011. The performer was 3 6 Mafia and it a lotta fun, but I’m not even going to lie and say my brain wasn’t warped on drugs during that whole conference. I haven’t been to a conference since last year’s Vegas, so I can’t say anything about the awesomeness of Affiliate Ball parties since, but Darren is a godamn professional.

Below is Darren’s detail’s of the Affiliate Ball. Sign up or Sponsor, FOOL!

Sponsorships are still open.
Hit up Darren – info [@] affiliateball.com!

This time around, we really stepped up our game up a notch.

MaxBounty Presents The Affiliate Ball will have a top 3 performer of the decade named by Billboard, Nelly. He’s going to perform a full concert infront of 2500 invited guests of the Ball. I recommend everyone interested in attending should register online at http://affiliateball.com/registration.html to guarantee their ticket. All passes can be picked up at our Affiliate Ball Meet Market table.

We are the only “official” party of the Affiliate Summit on January 9th. We welcome everyone at the show to come party with us. For those who don’t like Nelly’s music, we still have a few DJ’s that play a mix of everything and some smoking hot Go Go dancers provided by our friends at EnvyusMedia/Scrubkit. YT Cracker is one of our super star DJ’s. The other is DJ Diamond who was also the DJ for Beyonce, Prince, Diddy, Executioners, Making Da Band and more. He’s a battle DJ and puts on a crazy show.

This event has a few reserved tables left, all of them come with HUGE exposure. If anyone is interested, I’ll put a logo on the big screens all night in rotation, text link on the site and promo in our RSVP’d newsletter, thanks on the microphone and 20 VIP’s with every table. Super deal right now,your peeps can hit me up directly at info [@at ] affiliateball.com. Trust me, I’m not breaking the bank on my prices. I will guarantee this party will be regarded as the best party and the biggest of all time. I’ve thrown some good ones too so that’s big statement ;)

For those who don’t know, the party is on January 9th (Monday night), starts at 9:30 until whenever. Same venue as last years when we did Three 6 Mafia, Crown Theater at the Rio.

Oh yeah, one last thing I’d like to address. In the past, before I started throwing the big parties at these trade shows, there were horrible girl to guy ratios at industry parties. That has changed this year with the Affiliate Ball. Also consider that most women at the show are dying to see Nelly and are huge fans. You might even see more girls then guys this time!

Get in where you fit in…

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Best of November’s Affiliate Marketing News

November 28th, 2011

Holy shit it’s almost December. At this rate, by the time i finish this sentence, it will be just after Christmas.

Now, let’s see if Google Reader has anything good for us during this month of November. Overall, it’s a relatively quiet month compared to my previous “Best of” posts. Probably because everyone has their heads down grinding the fuck out till Christmas Eve.

Industry News

IMToday bought a banner recently so let’s give them a shout out. It’s kind of like Affbuzz, but apparently its handed-edited, unlike Affbuzz, which uses an algorithm of hits and clicks and a sprinkle of pixie dust.

Do you run traffic on Lead Impact? Are you a fucking ninja? NO?! THEN BECOME A LEAD IMPACT NINJA. THIS ISN’T NEWS BUT THE LANDING PAGE IS SO FUNNY ITS WORTH MENTIONING. WHY AM I YELLING?! Ninjas don’t yell…

Take a knee. This is my new favorite website.

OK on to some real news.

Affiliate marketing is still dead or dying, because this post on DirectResponse.net says so. Joking aside, there are many good points there on why the affiliate ecosystem tends to eat itself. There’s another good post on DR that can help you reduce charge backs.

If you’re feeling voyeuristic, DR also posted up this recorded call that has some good insight into the advertiser side of the online marketing space. Definitely worth a listen.

Do you suck at Google? That’s probably because you’re not a brand. Everything Google has been doing the past few years has been giving preferential treatment to brands, and kicking SEOs / small businesses to the curb. Aaron Wall says so in this fancy infographic.

I’ve been too busy to post about WhatRunsWhere again, but Finch did it so you can just head on over there.

Mr. Green has a new case study on the 310px ads at Plenty of Fish. I ask, is there any traffic left on PoF that isn’t going to Mr. Green’s case studies?

Here’s a good post on image ad blending. Basically, making your ads look like content of the targeted website.

Are you doing Lead Generation? Silly question, but Kiss Metrics has a nice post on improving the effectiveness of your lead gen sites.

Speaking of Leadgen, eConsultancy has a good series on improving your skills. Part 1 and Part 2.

Mobile, Facebook

Ruck has an extensive rant on mobile click fraud. Mobile marketing is dead already.

Mobile is exploding. Yes, still, even though its dead. Check out these pretty charts from Unbounce as they look at some sweet Swedish mobile traffic.

Check out how mobile apps are being monetized. Hint: Its in-app sales. Not convinced? Here’s so more data off Techcrunch.

With all these talk of “the future,” there’s still opportunity in video, whether desktop, pad, or phone.

Copywriting and Sales

I like info marketing blog because it talks a lot about old school copywriting greats. This is a new blog I follow so I won’t link to anything specific, but check that shit out if you’re a fan.

Direct Creative Blog has a good post on working with testimonials, and how you can integrate them properly into a marketing campaign instead of pasting them randomly on a page.

Are you building email lists via mobile? Here are some tips for making that more effective. Time is critical!

Motivation

Do you like to look busy by scribbling stuff on paper? I know I do ( if you only saw my desk…) Finch has a good post on why this is bad at Filthy Rich Mind.

Also Finch is banking pretty good with those Premium Posts. Maybe it’s time other bloggers to start providing real quality content over the drivel they post daily ( * just kidding John Chow doesn’t know anything worth paying money for.)

And finally, How to have a 36 day. Better yet…. how to work from home without going insane.

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Affiliate and Online Marketing Reads from October

November 1st, 2011

It turns out I start writing these posts as drafts, then I forget to finish and post. So technically some of these reads are from September. This very post took like 2 weeks to write. Stop judging me.

What’s good in the affiliate marketing blogosphere? Not a whole lot really, because most blogs are shit. Also i hate the word blogosphere. Almost as much as I hate that new buzzword “mocial” (mobile social media)

Anyway…

Google is getting audited by the IRS. Finally, Google gets fucked over. Sweet merciful justice. Although I’m sure their legal team is ready to ride…

Affiliate and Online Marketing Stuff

While we’re on the topic of saying F4WK J00 to Google, here are some leaked Quality Score Guidelines.

There’s probably no point to reading the rest of this post since Affiliate Marketing IS DEAD! Get out as soon as you can while there are still job openings at Subway! HURRY! RIP 11/1/11 Never Forget.

Wait, maybe it’s not dead. If you look at this survey about affiliate marketing from Econsultancy, then it looks like the space is actually getting busier. Now I’m confused! Who can I trust?

What’s Jesse Willms up to these days? Shock Marketer investigates.

CTRTard has a good bit on payday loans. Does their seediness know no bounds?

How to Bank on the Football trend from Palanchuck.com.

Prosper 1.7 was released. I haven’t messed with it yet, but CTRTard is already on it with some mods.

How big is Facebook’s dick? Sorry Pingdom but I like my title better. Pingdom also takes a look at the popularity of various social networks around the world.

DirectResponse says the Force Factor landing page is pretty good. DR also has an “Insider’s Guide to Media Buying” that is pretty interesting.

But some good news! Z6 to blogging and reveals some life lessons, then reveals a campaign. Nothing fancy, but boobies work!

ThinkwithGoogle has a pretty badass post discussing consumer behavior in real time. The data is awesome.

Do you do e-commerce? Kiss Metrics has a sweet post on killer product pages.

Mobile tap and pay will be some crazy stuff. Pay with your cellphone. Soon they will be embedded in our wrists. I just want something to vibrate inside my body when pixel fires.

As usually Finch has posts that are worth reading. Here’s a handy global market finder. I greatly enjoy this 7 Deadly Sins of Dating ads post.

Oh shit, Stack that money is getting in on the dating action too! What Women Want.

Here a little part of me dies inside because I’m linking to Zac Johnson’s post with more dating landing page tips.

Yo Dawg I hear you like posts about conversions so we put some posts about conversions in your posts about conversions so you can convert while you convert.

Aaron Wall takes it to big G. Then he proves (as if you needed proof) Google hates affiliates. Pro Tip: Stop calling yourself an affiliate and start calling yourself an Agency or some shit.

Have you ever wondered, Why Affiliate Marketing is like Picking up Chicks. Because your success rate is .04%? Because you try to do both from your mom’s basement? But seriously, Mr Green tells you.

Snoop Dogg is an old ass G.

Are you doing everything right but still failing? David at PPV Playbook looks into why this could be. Solid post.

People can’t stop clicking ads on their mobile device (at least in the financial sector). Compete has a report on this, and there are some “free” whitepapers at the end of this post.

Copywriting, Sales, and Design Stuff Stuff

Looking to mindfuck your customers? Here’s some tricks our brains play on us when it comes to sales and psychology.

I’m not going over all the good stuff at BoostCTR.com. Just subscribe and read the great content yourself, you lazy slut.

Ever wanted a shit ton of user testing tools? Smashing Magazine has you covered! Learn how people interact with your pages – you never know what you’ll discover about your users. Here’s a post from Kiss Metrics with a real eye-tracking case study.

Who doesn’t love a good infographic? Kiss Metrics has a sweet infographic with tips on how to sell more with your website.

Need free website graphics? A handy design resource from Copyblogger.

Marketing to Moms? Yahoo has some tips for you. That sweet, sweet, mommy demographic. Oh look, Yahoo has some tips for marketing to digitial dads too.

Want to reach that pesky student demographic outside of Facebook? Compete has a post on that. Here some more info on recent graduates and their student loans.

You don’t market to moms or dads or debt-ridden college grads? What about Hispanics? Please tell me you’re marketing to somebody at least!

Here’s an interesting story from Daily Conversions about consulting. Moral of the story- if you’re knowledgeable don’t sell yourself short because people might not take you seriously. The good ol’ perceived value thing.

Facebook Stuff

DM Confidential posts this press release that dives into which Facebook Posts get the most attention.

Motivation Hacks

Some of this stuff is a little cheesy, but hell, we’re not perfect. Sometimes we need a kick in the “arse.”

Looks like Finch is expanding his writing portfolio by writing a post for Filthy Rich Mind called How to Improve Your Concentration in 4 Easy Steps.

Here’s a great read on fighting micro-burnout from the creator of AppSumo. Sometimes you can lose motivation even when you love what you do.

A buncho crap from Strategic Profits: Self-confidence = power. Self-confidence boosting techniques. Take Inventory of your life. How to get motivated to do anything.

Random Stuff

Check out this great piece of journalism: How Spamming Craiglists gets your company a $1 Billion+ valuation!

14 Social Media Fails. How a single tweet can bring a company to its knees. Or politician. Whatever. Wiener.

More Facebook and Mobile Stuff to Come

I’m planning on creating a little resource for blogs specific to Facebook and Mobile Development and Marketing. That way, I will refer your lazy asses to said resource instead of reading the shit myself and making posts out of it.

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