Category: Services I Recommend

Ever wonder, how you can get more done in the same amount of time?    It has to do with organization – now there are a ton of project management, and efficiency tools out there; however in our industry we have specific needs… so I went on a mission to seek out a solution…

I’ve just spent a good week evaluating various project management platforms from Basecamp, Trello all the way to Yalla (yea there’s a project management tool named like that – and no it’s not the song from INNA; although that’s a pretty cool song and sexy music video – check it out here )

I was very, very disappointed 99% of these project management tools don’t have native budget and expense tracking built in; many say you can add in apps to track expenses but even then, the expenses tracked are based on the time logged doing the work.     I’ve been busy and looked at these:   Breeze, Zapier, LeanKit, Smartsheets as well as the aforementioned ones above.

ONE BIG PROBLEM TO SOLVE

We are not freelancers, we do not get paid hourly.

We are running various projects (campaigns) as affiliate marketers, and they all have different costs like:

-Cost of domain name (we use namecheap)
-Cost of hosting (I use BlueHost in the USA and Rackspace Cloud for our landers – TIP: I wrote a guide on how to host landers on Rackspace CDN right here)
-Cost of design of landing page, ripping of landing pages like what bannerslanders provides for $40 
-Cost of labor like setting up the campaign, getting a video ad made, or whatever
-Cost of angles (anglesaurus)
-Cost of Tracker (voluum)
-Cost of Email Service Provider (aweber)

Of course, the above are just “some” of the potential expenses a project might need;  it all depends on what you do.    Nutra, Cloaked or Uncloaked, Whitehat or Blackhat, Pin Submits, App Installs, Lead Gen, SOI/DOI, Dating, whatever.      It was really disappointing to see that most of these so called project management tools lack the ability to enter expenses at a task level and then have a summary of it all on a project level, which you can assign per client (if you are working in JVs or something).

But then I came across the tool I need, the tool that is going to make it a breeze to take all our ops we’ve been doing via email chains, and trello and back and forth via skype and put them all into one place.

This tool lets you create a project, then add tasks, delegate these tasks to different people in your team, and then when they do it,  have them add the actual cost vs the budget that was allocated and monitor everything on one screen.    You can also generate quick reports, both visual and table style to share with JV partners if needed.

This tool is WRIKE, and it’s one of a kind.    Get a free trial here; it’s a game changer if you want to scale your operations.

I get this question a lot, and it goes something like this “I am new to affiliate marketing, I don’t know how to code, I don’t know photoshop, I just want to make money now – so who can make my landing pages? Freelancers???”

My answer is “Stay the F*** away from FREELANCERS!!!” and here’s why! Freelancers just just that “FREE” lancers. Meaning most aren’t committed to be there 24/7 when you need a lander done, they are working as freelancers so they can have free time, and when they feel like it do some work to have some money to continue living FREE.

You don’t want a freelancer when you are running a serious operation; because things change on a dime in the internet marketing industry; you might need 10 landers in 1 day, or you might need 100 banner variations – you never know. Working with freelancers comes with one of many problems – one they usually want a lot of money for ONE task – because they are free, and they want the most for the littlest time possible, or they are artists who consider themselves to valuable they just want to charge a lot.

Or they make a landing page or two for you, you seem happy only to experience them disappearing because their dog died or ate their flower or fell out the balcony, or they had to go to a wedding this weekend blah blah blah.

Bottom line, freelancers aren’t professional (ok there’s maybe 1 out of 100 that is) and you just should NOT build your business on someone that wants to be FREE. You need reliable staff, that is there when you need them and can act right when you need them to, to create landers for you, make variations, design new banner ads, whatever.

Years ago, this was a real problem, it was a problem for me, and it was a problem for my super affiliate friends. Then I created a company comprised of staff working around the clock to solve this freelancer freedom issue once and for all. I named my company Banners & Landers – because DUH, they do banners and landing pages!! This company is always around, you can rely on them, and they won’t vanish because of ____fill in excuse here____. Deadlines are met, and exceeded – and most clients come back over and over again.

SO if you need some work done, landers are $40, banners are $10 animated or not – plus they offer a wealth of additional services you will best find out if you talk to my Customer Service guy MIRO via skype at miro.netmarketing

or just email him via the website at www.bannerslanders.com

TIP:  Increase your conversions by 37% by including a short URL in your Facebook ad angle.

This is a fact, I tested it, go ahead try it to confirm.

We launch so many different ads every single day that I was sick and tired of having to create short URLs by hand. So my coder wrote this awesome tool, which will take long urls and generate tiny urls from them in bulk.

Why tiny URL and not bit.ly?

The reason is simple, bitly doesn’t forward HTTP headers (think UTM tracking codes attached to domain for tracking purposes) while tinyURL does.

Here’s the tool, sharing is caring baby!!

http://bulktinyurlgenerator.com/

If you are running ads on Facebook, Google Adwords, or any traffic source for that matter. Doesn’t matter if its blackhat like tech support PPC, or diet, skin, muscle or white hat like VPN offers, or app installs there comes a time where your landing page, URL, or offer URL might be flagged.

This can have many cons, including you losing visitors to alerts shown by their virus scanners, or worse web browser like Chrome. Or, your traffic source detecting your site as ‘malicious’ and banning/suspending your account.

This is why it’s important to do some periodic due diligence. I like to look up my offer and landing page URLs before I get my assistant to setup the campaigns on the traffic source. And then, have them checked every week or so to ensure we’re in good standing. We also like to run through these checks if the numbers go bad really fast from one day another; it’s always a signal for alert.

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BIT.LY SUCKS – Use Tiny URL… why? because it allows HTTP headers to be forwarded; which is super important if you want to pass variables to your tracker like voluum, funnelflux, thrive, adsbridge and more.

Problem with TinyURL is that it’s kind of a pain to create URLs in bulk; so if you are launching a ton of campaigns like we do; you waste a lot of time going back and forth; unless you use a bulk tool to get it all done in 1 click.

Here’s a good one we use http://bulktinyurlgenerator.com/