Affiliate Marketing

UK Payday Loan Affiliate Network – T.UK Review

by Melvin · May 12, 2017

This review is sponsored by T.UK

I’ve reviewed a handful of payday loans affiliate programs in the past and one thing that’s always obvious with them is how much full of hype they tend to be. Perhaps it has more to do with how lucrative that industry is but we would still need to know if the network we’re going with is the real deal or just all about hype.

We were approached by T.UK for this review and you can read more about them in this review and see for yourself.

Zero Parallel Review – Payday Loans Affiliate Program

by Melvin · Jan 22, 2016

This review is sponsored by ZeroParallel.com

Affiliate networks strictly focused on payday loans aren’t exactly unheard of as there are actually lots of them since many years ago. Because of how profitable this particular niche is, they just keep springing everywhere which makes it hard to find which network is the reliable one. Zero Parallel approached us to make a review about them so we spent some time to see if they’re worth looking at for the payday loans space.

LeadsMarket Payday Loan Affiliate Program Review

by Melvin · May 1, 2012

This review is sponsored by LeadsMarket.

I usually shy away from reviewing or associating myself to any ‘payday loan’ related topics but when Leads Market approached me and showed me some press links and resources to their site, I decided that it wouldn’t be really bad to do a review for them considering they are an affiliate program and that I have been ‘sort of’ blogging into that space with this blog for quite some time.

Introducing LeadsMarket.com

Leads Market is a ‘new’ affiliate network that seems to be focusing more on payday loan offers. Their website, on first glimpse, suggests that they are a fully fledged affiliate network. They state in their homepage that they have other offers as well such as dating, mortgages, flowers, etc., however, some quick browsing would reveal that they seem to be more functioning as a payday loan affiliate program and nothing else at the moment.

Also if you go to their website, the title of their main page is ‘The Best Affiliate Internet Marketing Program’ which sounds like a bit vague to me since it seems to be there just to target a very broad keyword. The design of their entire website, while its clean and simple, looks somewhat generic to me. On the good side, it does present some good materials on their homepage and they also have an FAQ where you can read stuff to know more about them. Here’s a good look on their site:

Overall, the site looks somehow not complete yet, as they seem to be still working out on some other stuff at the moment. And that’s why they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program for now as I understand.

Benefits & Exclusivity

Just like every other affiliate network, they’re presenting some benefits and exclusivity in their affiliate network. One of those is getting direct exclusive offers from them. Leads Market runs offers that are ONLY available to them and nowhere else. As an affiliate, this is a good benefit since there would be less competition considering the specific offer you’re promoting is not that saturated yet.

Another benefit that they are promoting is the commissions. Leads Market claims that their affiliates get a ‘lion’s share of commission’. This is due to the fact that they are an advertiser themselves, not middle-man which most of the affiliate networks are. They also do what most networks do which is providing their top affiliates with payout bonuses per month.

Speaking of payouts, Leads Market has the standard NET 30 payout which means you’ll have to wait 30 more days from the end of the Calendar month. This is a bit long if you ask me however, you can structure a more flexible payout terms with them if you are one of their top affiliates. Payments are made via check, Direct deposit, PayPal, Payoneer and PayQuicker.

Lastly, just like other networks, they do provide top-notch support and good technology (e.g. tracking, creatives, etc.). Communication with your affiliate manager is very very important as every affiliate knows. The success of the affiliate somehow depends on the quality of the affiliate manager that he has. And with that, support plays a really really vital role for this. Hopefully LeadsMarket has experienced affiliate managers and dedicated support team to help you out on this.

Conclusion

I don’t have any first hand experience with Leads Market myself since I just recently signed up, and therefore I cannot really make any personal recommendations myself on whether they’re worth it or not. As I mentioned, they are relatively new in the space and do not seem to be that popular yet. A quick search for Leads Market will not even yield that much results yet for them.

While I may not be recommending them yet, I would highly highly suggest you to at least check them out, and perhaps signup and see if the offers are enticing enough for you to stay. Payday loans are usually high paying offers which are not that hard to promote considering that its mostly cost per lead and that the consumer just need to input some stuff and meet some minimal requirements in order for them to qualify as a lead. However, payday loans are also a bit regulated and there used to be and still there are lots of shady offers existing in the vertical. That would be a pretty good challenge for Leads Market to take in this regard since they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program.

So that’s it, feel free to check LeadsMarket.com and if you already have experience with them, feel free to comment below.

Studying How Internet Marketers Roll with Launches

by Melvin · Mar 12, 2011

If you’ve been following our industry lately, you probably have noticed the buzz around this thing called the Software System. I didn’t buy it nor am I against it. And in fact, I’m not here to review it or give my take on it. The reason why I opened that up is to study how internet marketers act or roll with these big-time launches by their industry friends and business partners.

It’s All About Affiliate Marketing

A long time ago, I wrote a post called Affiliate Marketing in blogs where I discussed that unlike in PPC-CPA space, affiliate marketing in blogs is all about building relationships and recommending products that are really really congruent not just with the market, but with their specific needs.

So for example, you can’t just promote a product about making money online in a making money online market. You have to dig deeper into that and find their inner needs. Is it making money through memberships? or about blogging? product launches? This just doesn’t apply to blogs, it applies to people with lists as well.

As you can see, you will get nowhere when you don’t identify the inner needs and desire of your market. With this, you really really have to be specific with your offer.

The Software System Launch

First and foremost, I would like to give this disclaimer that I’m not a product launch guru. I really am not that’s why I constantly watch and study different things. What I’m going to outline here is just all my 2 cents.

Obviously the software system isn’t your typical “make money on the internet” kind of hype. It focuses on creating softwares and selling them to a bunch of people and making tons of money. During that launch guys like John Chow, Jeremy Schoemoney, Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and a bunch of smaller marketers and bloggers jumped on the bandwagon and promoted it. For this post, I would be using the big 4 mentioned above.

During the period, these guys were emailing people like crazy and for almost everyday (twice a day for Kern for instance). Now let’s (briefly) take a look at some of their emails during the launch day:

John Chow’s Offer:

Jeff Walker’s offer:

Shoe’s offer:

Kern’s offer:

Noticed the same patterns in their emails on that launch day? Hmm, interesting…

Incentivization – the art of bribing

As funny as it may sound, all of them (and some more others) have this kind of a bribe to further more try to convince their readers to purchase UNDER their link. And all of them are claiming that by spending $2700 on that product, they would get over that price value in return. How unreal could that possibly be? Can I buy a Kia and get an Audi in return?

I know it sounds crazy but incentivization is a big part in launches and also a big reason why marketers (both the owner and the affiliate) make so much money. The incent value that they’re giving away is just the “perceived value”, not the real price tag but since a lot of smart marketers have built good communities around them, most people trust them and believe that they’re really getting a good value for the amount they’re spending (w/c maybe is true or maybe not).

So I think that’s the important thing to learn here. People’s averseness (means resisting) to buy something online these days makes it much harder for us, marketers to go out and sell our own stuff w/o giving away a lot in return. It also speaks on how crucial relationship building is in this type of business since people obviously won’t buy from you and anything you recommend, unless they trust you and see you as a prominent person in your market.

This trend started a long time ago and I believe it would only continue for a very long period of time. As an internet marketer and/or blogger, are you in this game too?

How to be Great at Your Affiliate Business with Content

by Melvin · Aug 19, 2010

In this guest post, Corry Cummings discussed the role of high quality content in succeeding with affiliate marketing.

If you are familiar with running an affiliate business, you know how important promotion is. You must promote your business partner’s product in order to be successful. The factor that determines whether or not your business generates profit is whether you can get the visitors to your website interested in the product. One of the best ways to do this is with high quality content. You must make sure that your content is professional, clean and attention-grabbing. If you can manage this, your website will garner attention, gain credibility and most importantly, be interesting to your visitors. Here are some suggestions for how to become great at your affiliate business with content.

Choose the Right Type of Content

Different business plans will necessitate various kinds of content. Think about the direction that you want to take your business in and the type of content you think will appeal to your readers. Every business will have different needs, but the kind of content that tends to work best for affiliate businesses include the following:

Blog Posts
Reports
Articles
E-Books

It may be helpful to mix and match in order to appeal to a variety of people. Consider your product when deciding what kind of content to use. Is it a relatively uniform demographic or are you writing to people of multiple ages or different countries of residence? Think about the needs and desires of your readers. If you can satisfy those needs and desires, your readers will be more willing to explore the product further.

Choose Your Topics Carefully

Just like choosing the form your content will take, it is important to carefully plan your topics. You will want to feature content that is varied but can all relate to your topic. Do not just ceaselessly promote your product. In general, customers will be put off by obvious advertisement. Instead, you will want to get them legitimately interested in the product. Provide content that discusses the history or simple facts about the product. Keep in mind that you are still trying to sell a product, but approaching that goal from multiple angles might increase your chance of success. Again, consider your audience and choose topics based on what you think they will want.

Provide High Quality Content

Having a variety of content with multiple forms and topics can help draw interest to your business, but only if the content is high quality. This is perhaps the most important step. If your content is poorly written or simply uninteresting, it will not matter what the topic is. The visitors to your website will associate shoddy writing with an unreliable seller and a substandard product. One recommendation is that you consider hiring a content writing service. This way, you will be guaranteed high quality content from professional content writers. You will still have control over exactly what you want from each article, and you can be confident that the end result will be clean, professional and interesting to your visitors.

Corry Cummings is the owner of Content Customs, a content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services. He also runs a blog over at Content Customs, which is managed and written by one of the head writers of the company.

Being Just a Marketer & Not an Internet Guy

by Melvin · Jul 19, 2010

In the internet marketing world, I see three different kinds of people. The first kind is a techie person who knows a lot about the internet but does not have any knowledge in marketing. Basically this is where most people are coming from. Second is the type of person who has offline marketing experience but hasn’t really have much idea on how the internet works and third, is a someone who does not know either, meaning a newbie or newcomer.

I’ve been into this space now for quite a while and I’ve noticed a lot of things. Most of which is directly related to internet marketers who aren’t that geeky enough to understand the internet.

Remember my post on how to easily steal an eBook? That’s just one of them. I mean that post was even outdated by now yet a lot of people still seem to fail to comply to that. Just take the simple way of hiding their eBook from public access is something that most of them, if not us, could not do.

Why this is a Big issue?

I know most marketers would say that “who cares? my customers aren’t geeky so Im just contented” This is a big issue just because of the fact that there’s so much ripping and fraud going around. I mean if an eBook you badly want becomes available for free on some blackhat type of forum, are you still gonna pay for it?

How about a membership site where you can literally access it even without you being a member? These days there are so many tools that are available (not for free of course) that can really help you with this thing. Being a marketer and not an internet guy, you can always seek help from people who know more about these technical details.

How about free reports to build your list? It’s funny because I’m seeing quite a lot of people offering freebie in exchange for an email but the thing is that freebie is freely available even without giving up your email. Yes, most people fail at this.

The Solution

Well this is a very broad topic and the solution would have easily been very lengthy if I state it all here. The best way to see if people can rip your files off is to simply just become that *other people. I mean why not do a thorough search on your own stuff and see if you can get it for free. If it’s the case, then it’s a major problem for you.

It also does pay to ask for help in related forums where people do the same thing. For instance, if you’re an eBook whore seller, then maybe hang out quite a bit in Warriors Forum and see if people can provide you some help. These people are just in the same situation as you and as I’ve people in forums are always ready to help.

Lastly there’s a lot of tools out there to help you. If you’re doing a business online, having all of those needed tools is a worthy investment after all (even if they’re expensive). Would you rather not spend money and lose a lot of money with your product getting freely shared or the other way around? Again, it may be hard for you if you’re not a “tech” person to make those third party tools to work but that’s why you outsource right?

I’d like to of course get your take with this subject matter. I’m sure most you do the same thing as I do and have you found any tools and techniques that you can recommend to the community?

And lastly, are you just being a marketer and not an “internet guy” as a whole?

Conversion Testing Is Old School

by Melvin · Nov 21, 2009

Anyone in the internet marketing niche would easily agree that conversion testing is vital. For those who don’t know it, conversion testing is simply doing different testings (a & b or c&d or whatever!) that could make an impact on conversions. Let’s say I’m selling an info product. I created several landing page with totally different looks. One has red fonts and the other one has white big fonts (just an example). After quite some time I found out that the white one converts 10% more than the other.

Conversion Testing Is Important Yet…

Doing several testings could give you an increase (or decrease) in sales as high as 200% BUT I’m going to tell you it’s mind-boggling. Why? Because you really have to study a lot of variables side by side! And these are variables that we rarely have control about.

Example is if you changed lets say you’re buy now button to orange and increased your font by 1px. Then you saw a 10% increase in your sales, does that mean the change in buy now button impacted the increase? or the increase in font size? Or maybe that’s because it’s promoted during weekends (where most people don’t go in office)? Get my point?

Testing is something that I have deal with for a long time with me being an affiliate marketer. Rotating multiple ads, using several trigger statements, split-testing on different keywords, name it! And yet I don’t still consider myself a good one and mostly people really don’t become one.

Build Good Relationships Instead…

Yaro of Entrepeneurs-Journey once revealed he hates all conversion testing stuffs and so he doesn’t do it. Yet, he makes a good chunk of income with all his products and membership sites. And that’s because of how he was able to manage good relationship with his readers and subscribers, his potential customers.

Building a good relationship ALONE can make a big difference. And unlike conversion testing, this is something that you have control with. Write good blog posts, provide something for your readers, give free high quality products, reward loyal followers and the list goes on.

When these people at certain point see you sell something to them they would say, “Ah, this guy treated me well. I learned a lot from him and he’s awesome. Regardless of whatever pitch, I’m going to buy because he has proven he’s for real!” Isn’t it heart-warming to hear that statement from your customers?

What Now?

All those testing and marketing stuffs have been there even before internet marketing started. And they would stay forever. But why jump into it if you can do it the different way, yet easier and probably more profitable? I don’t know but I think marketers have to start thinking “modern ways”. Love to hear what you have to say about it..