This is just my thoughts on the a blog post here. Basically, I cannot agree more with you Mr. Finch. I was probably at one point someone he was describing, and I can only stress enough how detrimental to your business that mindset can be. When you think you have the “golden touch” you often fail to see opportunities that may arise because you are too blinded by your own arrogance. It really is a dangerous trap, especially if you aspire to make any more than a few grand a month. The problem with the younger generation (such as myself) is we let things get to our heads, because frankly, we are the exception (that is if you are actually making money). There aren’t too many other kids around still in college, and in some cases kids still in high school, that are banking a few thousand a month. In a way, you have put yourself in an extremely small class. At every single high school you may see the cocky athletes, nerds, or whatever. But how many kids in each high school can say they stacked up $10k last month? Not many.

While this is certainly an impressive feat, I can only stress enough from my own experience to not let it get to your head. In the end it will bite you in the ass, I promise you that. Keep an open mind, and if you have to, pretend you aren’t making anything at all, and you will rise to new levels quicker than you ever have before. It is easy to kick back and think “hey I have $50k in the bank I made the past few months”, well so what. That money won’t last forever. So if you’re young like myself, I highly recommend taking any ego you might have and throw it out the window, because it doesn’t do anything for you (and no, I’m not talking about confidence, that is different and is absolutely necessary in any situation).

I would like to respond to Mr. Finch in arguing we really haven’t grown up. Although financially, we may have a lot quicker than the rest of the world, which is not to be confused with maturing in other ways.

I’ve received quite a few messages here and on the WF forums regarding the PPV generator I announced about three weeks ago. Progress has been going pretty well, and LPDesigner has agreed to let me use his free LP’s he posted on the forum in the generator, so mad props to him. I am putting the final touches on it, I apologize for the length it has taken as I have ran into some things I was not expecting. I am setting a goal for myself that this be completed by next Wednesday, about a week from now.

I’ve been running some traffic lately with some of the larger PPV networks, namely TrafficVance, who uses GameVance to serve ads to its users in exchange for their free online gaming services. I would like to make a quick point today about PPV advertisements and how they are MUCH different from ads served via PPC networks.

This might seem pretty obvious, but it is one of the main reasons people fail at PPV marketing. Now, let’s think about the logic behind this. When a user clicks on a PPC ad, be it on something like AdWords or Facebook, they have chosen to click on the ad. Normally the user is interested in the topic, which is why your ad was shown (because of the keyword they were searching for, or the interests listed in their profile), which is why PPC works so well. With PPV, an ad just comes up, so it is your job to interest the user. One of the absolutely WORST ways to go about doing this is to include a huge landing page trying to sell a product. Do you really think that is going to get the user’s attention? Now, what if half of your ad is “Make $423043232 Monies A Day”, with a picture of some money and a “click here” link below that. You have a much better chance of someone clicking through your ad because it takes about .5 seconds to read that headline, which is probably the only time you’re going to get your user to look at the ad before they close it. They are never going to sit through a pop-up LP and read through pages of information about your weight-loss product.

So PPV marketers, just remember you have about 1-2 seconds to catch your users attention before they close your ad, or click-through.

Just came across this the other day, I thought it was pretty neat. Since most of us use the hosting companies on the bottom, and they took the effort to organize this, I thought I would help them out and send them what little traffic this blog gets. Check out their site here if you’re interested in learning more about it. That’s all for now!

About a week and a half ago I went ahead and made a post on WickedFire stating I would like to make a free tool to give back to the community that has helped me learn so much in the past. There were several suggestions, but the most popular were a PPV LP generator and a Facebook AdSpy. After talking to a few people, and Alex (WF Forum Member) stepped up and said he would donate a few templates to the program, I decided to go with the PPV LP generator. PPV networks have been under the spotlight recently and have been steadily getting more and more popular everyday. I would think a tool like this will benefit both newbies & those experienced in PPV alike. Pretty much anything you can do in this industry to save time is worth while, and especially if its free (which this tool will be). Just to give everyone a time frame, it will probably take about 2 weeks to complete because I have been pretty busy with school as well as getting some new campaigns set up.

I started off with the basic layout of the program earlier today, and would like to get some feedback regarding the actual functionality of the program. I’m going to be using the PHP framework CakePHP, along with MySQL as the database for this self-hosted app. I will be using Javascript to output the CSS/HTML files to your local hard-drive. I’m a big fan of jQuery and will be using it on this project as well. Ok enough of that, here are some features I am thinking:

• Easy  walk-through each step of LP design
• Background, text, colors will all be editable with a color picker
• Self-hosted app (will require something like WAMP/LAMP which most of us probably already have installed)
• Save settings for various LP’s
• Easy editing of links in LP’s (if you want to try different links just edit exist campaign and all new files with new links will be spit out)
• Save LP’s by name
• Output text file with every LP that documents basic info, such as campaign name, what affiliate link is present, background color, etc. This is to avoid having to open up each LP and see what it contains
• Mass generation of LP’s. For example, you design the LP and let’s say you want the same thing but split test between 20 different background colors, simple design the LP once, and duplicate with a different color to avoid having to go through the entire process again

I would like to add a few other things as well, but I need your feedback on this. Feel free to contact me on WF (adigitalorange) or just in the comments section of this post. Thanks in advance for any feedback. Also, if you would like to donate a template or two, it would be much appreciated.

O.K. so I know I am a little late on this stuff but better late than never. And I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t make it on New Year’s Day so I won’t fall into the 99% of people who make goals on January 1st and manage to stick to them for about 3 1/2 days… Honestly though it happens all the time (don’t act like you haven’t done it, because I know I have). One of the main reasons I wanted to create this blog is knowing someone is watching over my shoulder, and in some weird way that motivates me. Various studies have shown you are 5 times more likely to reach goals you set if you write it down, and 8 times more likely to achieve your goals if you write it down and tell someone else, as opposed to just thinking about your goal in your head. Obviously I’m going to have to work my ass off to reach some of these hefty goals, but I figure letting people know can’t hurt.

I got an email earlier asking what in particular my blog was going to be about. Unlike some of the other blogs that specialize in one area such as PPV, or PPC, mine is going to be a “jack-of-all-trades” sort of blog. One thing I plan on doing is giving various tools/scripts away occasionally for free to help the rest of us internet marketers out. Some of these may be webapps, coded in PHP of course, and others may be client-side apps. If you have any suggestions about what you want, feel free to contact me via the form on this site or just post in the comments section. I also plan to document my experience with my CPA campaigns. Hopefully a few months down the road I will be able to release a case-study to help some of the newer guys out. I’ll release some helpful hints on dealing with Google AdWords, MSN’s AdCenter, and TrafficVance along the way. I also plan on getting into media buys late in the second quarter or early third quarter of this year, and will document my experience with that.

My overall goal in terms of affiliate marketing this year is basically to triple my profits compared to last year. But anyways, here is a breakdown of my individual goals:

• On December 31st, 2010 I would like to look at my books and say I profited $300,000 over the course of the year. This comes out to about $25,000/month. If you know some of the big players in this game, they will tell you that ain’t shit, especially when some of these guys are making $xx,xxx/day.
• Take my mom, little brother and sister on a nice week long vacation this summer
• Spend my money wisely unlike last year, and make solid investments. More specifically, only spend about 5% of what I make outside of the business (tuition, ordering food, clothes, entertainment, etc. etc.). Throw as much as possible back into the business to help it expand
• Buy a car when this semester ends (mid-May, to replace my ‘99 Volkswagen Jetta)
• Work-out from now until Spring Break (mid-March) at least twice a week
• Everyday perform at least one random act of kindness
• Rid myself of negative thoughts

Well folks, there you have it. I’m gonna have my hands full with this year, so wish me luck! And best of luck to everyone’s success for the year 2010!

Hey everyone, my name is Vince Hofmeister and I am a 19 (just barely) year old internet marketer. I work with, or have worked with in the past almost every single major CPA network in this business helping them to generate sales and leads for their clients. I’ve been doing this for about a year now, but started off in web design and software development. If you want a more detailed account of how I got where I am, you can read about me here.

Everybody and their mother has a blog in this industry, so I thought I would join in. But really… everyone and their mom has one these days, but I haven’t seen many people under 20 (actually only one) who seems to make those dollaz stack in this biz with a blog so I thought I would jump right in and be one of the first. I’m hoping I can provide people with some good info, and have a good time while doing so.

Anyways, it’s getting pretty late over here (4:00 A.M.) so I’m going to hit the sack. If you want to know more about me and all that good stuff, feel free to read the blurb I wrote about myself here.