www.affiliateconfession.com

I got an email on Tuesday from Debby Phillips over at Market Leverage letting me know that they featured AffiliateConfession.com on the latest episode of Market Leverage TV or better known as MLTV.

MLTV features the top 5 best performing offers of the week on the Market Leverage network and one of the offers they’re featuring this week is Vegas Baby where anyone interested can get free Las Vegas accommodations for 2 nights at the Summer Bay Resort just by filling in their first name, last and an email address. I’m making a little with this offer through search and was pretty surprised to find out you actually can make money with an offer that only pays $1.65. Little did I know how well some of these email and zip submit offers convert.

Vegas Baby converts between 20 and 30% and if you think I’m completely giving away a little niche here, think again. There is a trick to getting this to work on search that I learned from a friend and it definitely works. Just use your imagination, that’s all I can tell you.

Anyway, watch below and check out some of Market Leverage’s offers during the video and think about how you might put them into your traffic stream. The Affiliate Confession spot is towards the end.

I though Google Adwords had cornered the market on vague and restrictive rules for advertising. Not so. Facebook advertising has turned into a complete joke. Their guidelines mean absolutely nothing, they turn off ads already approved and apparently ad editors arbitrarily disapprove ads for the same reason my cat vomits, that would be for any reason or no reason at all.

Let’s have a look at what a joke Facebook Ads are. Here are 3 ads of mine below that they approved:

Now have a look at 2 ads that they didn’t approve:

Does this make any sense? The first set of ads is a complete goof and the second set is advertising a legitimate product and a legitimate business opp offer without making any ridiculous promises or unrealistic income claims.

But it gets even more unbelievable. The worst part of this whole sideshow is that they must draw numbers out of a hat to decide which Facebook Ad Guidelines they’re going to tell you that you’ve violated as their reason for not letting them run. The ad above about saving 90 cents a gallon on gas is going to this landing page that’s about what else, saving money on gas by using a fuel additive. Yet check out guidelines number 8 and 9 I’ve supposedly run a foul of:

8. Facebook references

Ads are not permitted to mention or refer to Facebook, its site or its brand in any manner, including in the title, body, image, or destination URLs.

Ads must not use Facebook logos, trademarks, or site terminology (including Facebook, The Facebook, FacebookHigh, FBook, FB, Poke, The Wall, and other company graphics, logos, designs, or icons).

Facebook site features may not be emulated.

9. No incentives

No ad may offer incentives to viewers for clicking on the ad, for submitting personal information (cell phone numbers, social security numbers, physical addresses, or email addresses), or for performing any other tasks.

WHAT? (this is when blood squirted out my eyes and across the room) Are there two different sets of guidelines, because what you’re showing me here has no relevance whatsoever to the disapproved ad? Where does my ad say anything about Facebook? Who exactly is running the show at Facebook Ads, and is anyone being trained on how to interpret their advertising guidelines.

Yes, believe it or not, it gets even worse. I’ve been trying to get some understanding on how the Facebook advertising game works by reading NeilsWeb.com and Nickycakes.com and these guys seem to be having some adventures with the gang at Facebook as well, but on a much bigger scale than myself.

Neil logged into his account one day this past week only to see that the ad Nazi’s at Facebook turned off thousands of dollars of previously approved advertising without warning and Nickycakes recently tweeted about a good performing ad he had spent over $100,000 on that was suddenly turned off. Mind you, this is all without warning. One day you’re making the big bucks, and the next day you’re done. No warning, no renegotiating, no fixing the problem and no way to contact the little elves at Facebook Ads, that’s it, we don’t want your money any longer.

Okay, if I’m a VC with money invested in Facebook, I am freaking losing my mind at this point. You did what? You turned off the adverting of a $100K spender without even so much as an email or a phone call? When I worked at BellSouth Advertising we sent advertisers like that to Daytona and gave them box seats, we sent them to Orlando Magic games and they sat in the sky-boxes and got free food, we didn’t rip their $60,000 per month worth of advertising out of the phone book because we changed a policy overnight.

Guys, get a grip on reality, I have patches over my eyes to keep them from hemorrhaging any more.

Update: As I was getting ready to publish, I read this post over at Nickycakes.com on the new guidelines for Facebook Ads and they look even worse that before, but that’s a post for tomorrow or later.

It seems like lately I’ve had quite a few requests to reveal my websites and niches from people either leaving comments or contacting me directly. Just to let you know, that isn’t going to happen and I won’t be responding to questions any longer asking me to do so.

While I have revealed a niche or two while going through the process of building a BANS store, it’s just not a good idea in general to reveal the successful niches you are working on and you’ll find that most people involved in affiliate marketing won’t reveal what their working on either. There are 2 good reasons for this.

First, if you haven’t figured it out by now, people steal stuff. That may come as a shocker to you, but it’s especially rampant on the net where a lot of things can be done anonymously, or at least appear to be done that way. I used to have a link to my top producing Build A Niche Store in my signature at the BANS Forums, dumb idea. Several weeks ago I had someone contact me through the forum asking me to take a look at their site and evaluate it. After looking it over, this person had a link to a couple more of their stores and when I clicked on one I thought I had landed on my store. It was an exact copy of my store except for the content. The colors, template, product layout and even the header image at the top had been taken from my best store. After a quick email, the person at least removed the logo, but the basic concept of the store was still there.

Secondly, for anyone to reveal their best niches to inexperienced affiliate marketers is not going to benefit those doing the asking in the long run. Most people can learn about secret money making niches from someone else and make a few quick bucks, but the problem is, if you don’t go through the process, you won’t understand why you’ve been successful or maybe failed.

Having someone else’s best paying niche isn’t going to give you the experience of understanding the customers in that niche. The reason my best eBay affiliate store will earn nearly $1,000 this month is because I’ve been interested in that general niche since I’ve been about 6 years old, I’ve read magazines and books about this niche for years, I’ve bought and sold these items on eBay, I watched the actual auction as one of these items, the most expensive item ever sold through eBay Live at the time, brought in $7.25 million and then I read all about why it was valued so high.

While I am certainly no expert in this particular field, I understand it enough to know what people are looking for, what items are higher priced than others and what it feels like to make a purchase and own one of these items. You just aren’t going to get that kind of experience from someone handing you the niche. It’s sort of like the parable about teaching someone to learn how to fish, instead of giving them a fish. Would you rather have the niche or would you rather know how to find the niche.

If you find the niche on your own, that’s just the first step in understanding it, plus you will now be able to find many more niches by using the knowledge you gained finding the first one. And you will then eventually figure out your own techniques for finding and exploiting niches. I won’t tell you my niches, but here are a couple of posts that will show you how to find your own niches.

When you’ve been through the exercise of finding your own niches several times, it’s amazing how much opportunity you then begin to see. I probably see something every day now where I start to think, ‘That looks like an opportunity I could probably take advantage of.’ You won’t ever develop that mindset, if you don’t work through the process.

Believe me, you want the process, it is vastly more valuable than the niche.

Have you ever had really big plans for something in affiliate marketing and then had it completely go south on you? Have you maybe even been making some money in a niche and started to make plans to ramp it up and all of a sudden your revenue drops like a rock before you get the chance to scale?

If you’ve been doing business as an affiliate for any length of time this may have happened to you, maybe even more than once. It happened to me in the apartment rentals niche about a year ago as I was planning to ramp things up considerably based on some very good results I was having with Apartments.com. I was making in the area of $200 to $250 per month producing leads for them at $10 each and getting one of those leads for about every 50 clicks I sent their way. Then they redesigned their landing pages about a year ago and I now produce a lead for every 200 clicks sent their way.

I’m not sure what happened there, but I was no longer able to send traffic directly to an email form that actually produced the lead. Apartments.com changed their landing pages to include a small email form on each page of an individual apartments set of pages and the conversion rate dropped by 75%. Couple that with the fact that my traffic had dropped by a little as the season changed, and I went from making an average of $225 per month promoting apartments to about $20 to $30 per month making it hardly worth the effort to continue to work in this niche.

The larger plan I was seeing was to develop a big site devoted to apartment rentals for a specific niche of renters all over the nation. In looking at Google Analytics stats for my apartment sites I could see that there is an overwhelmingly higher percentage of renters in a very specific market and I had plans to exploit that to its fullest. While that idea is still on the back burner of things I would like to do in affiliate marketing, after the bust, the steam kind of went out of my idea. But the good news is, Rent.com has just revamped their affiliate program and is now paying 20 cents per registered visitor and $25 to $70 per confirmed lease, so the big plan for an apartment rental site is a little closer to reality once again.

So what’s the whole point of this discussion?

Don’t play the single affiliate program game and get yourself stuck in the position of relying on only one source of income from one or even two programs. While I took a $200 per month hit a year or so ago, it was just another day in the life of an affiliate marketer. Sometimes I do look back at all the things I’ve made money from and thought if I could only get these at the level they once were, all at the same time I’d be making $6,000 or $7,000 per month. Yes, that would be great, but what I’m really thankful for is the programs that have been in place to cover for the ones that all-of-a-sudden decided to take a dive.

You will go for a ride on the ups and downs of affiliate marketing if you stay with the game long enough. The best thing to do is have a diverse selection of niches and programs to work with that will act as shock absorbers when the ride gets bumpy. Check out my Make Money Online page for the variety of networks and programs I use to earn a living.

Working with Facebook ads is definitely a challenge, especially in the last few days. What on the surface looks to be easy to get into and easy to use can ultimately be as frustrating as working with nearly any Microsoft product. The problems come from not knowing what the team of editors who approve your ads really want and from the completely arbitrary way they approve ads, also from you not being able to correct disapproved ads (you have to start over with a new ad) and it is also extremely difficult to contact anyone at Facebook to discuss any advertising issue whatsoever.

It’s almost like the team at Facebook wants to be so different in their advertising, they don’t want anyone to advertise, which obviously makes no sense. I get the picture of a bunch of teenagers sitting around at Facebook Ads, playing video games, riding skateboards up the walls turned halfpipe and once in a while approving an ad or two so they can justify their existence. It’s probably not quite like that, but maybe it’s close.

Since it’s a bit frustrating to use Facebook Ads I’ve come up with a few ways to try and deal with them as listed below:

1. Place a pillow firmly over your face and scream “Mustard Mark Zuckerberg” as loud and as fast as you can. This will eventually produce a sound akin to cursing and you may come up with a new term that is one day included in Webster’s. Go ahead, try it.

2. Bang the front of your head directly on a 90 angle of your desk enough times that a ridge begins to form in your forehead. This way when we see each other in public it will be like a little club where we will all be able to recognize and sympathize with each other as Facebook Ads users.

3. If you continually get your ads disapproved try drinking 17 beers, or the equivalent in tequila shots, as quickly as possible to give yourself a completely different writing perspective. Once you change your state of mind, words should begin to flow quite easily and you should be able to write totally different ads, that is if you aren’t spending too much time in the restroom at this point. (lighten up, this is satire)

4. Go to a happy place. Your happy place may be in a straight jacket or in your garden outdoors, where ever it is, make a reservation and check in.

5. If all else fails, use the magic Facebook Ads button. This one has never failed to work. The button is the one in the upper right of your browser and is marked with a red x. Log into Facebook and click it, you can’t miss it.

6. Log into adwords.google.com, start an ad campaign there, earn ridiculous cash  and leave the skateboard riding teens at Facebook Ads to their own vices.

In light of all the issues I’ve had with Facebook Ads I’ll be spending the next few days throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. I’ll be going down the list at Clickbank and other some ad networks and put up as many ads as I can and work with what’s left after the editors get their say.

I’m sure I’ll have to visit my happy place several times. I already have reservations.