Wow… just saw this and was a bit shocked:

According to affiliates and various insider forums, Epic Media Group’s Affiliate Division, formerly known as Azoogle, has not been paying their bills to affiliate publishers. The rumors of theseissues have been popping up since last summer, with some affiliates on message boards pointing out that in their opinions that there has been excuse after excuse on why they haven’t been paid. As one of the top networks in the industry, any financial problems that they are facing, could be a bad sign for the industry as a whole and have a significant impact on the financial stability of companies that depend on their payments.

via Is Epic the Next COPEAC? Non-Payment Stories Grow..

I personally never did a lot with azoogle even “back in the day” as the big stuff was ringtones and rebills and I couldn’t stand promoting either. But I certainly knew a lot of people who did a lot of business with them and they seemed like one of the bigger, better, more reliable companies out there. Definitely sounds like things have changed. What a shame, and what does that portend for CPA marketing in a broader sense, I can’t help but wonder?

Jonathan

Last year I was looking to get a Marketing Theme for use with WordPress, for easy creation of sales letters, maybe membership sites, secure download pages, and all that fun stuff.  I hadn’t realized at the time that there were actually quite a few of these types of themes out there.

After much web surfing and comparing of features, it came down to a choice between two themes – OptimizePress, and ProfitsTheme.  Both were very impressive, with all kinds of features I wanted (and some I hadn’t really even considered!)  They were the same price, and generally had the same capabilities.  Finally I had to pull the trigger, and PT came out the winner.

Why?  Well for me what truly clinched it was the drag & drop layout capabilities for structuring the content of the page.  I just love how easy it is to move elements around from the left side, to the right side, or the top or bottom, or to add custom headers, graphics, buttons – whatever.  I’ve even used it to create complete members-only sites and in fact PT is now the basis for all of my “product download & licensing” areas.  I even used it for the sales page I put up for WPGen, for my VanCluteSolution.com membership site, and it’s typically my go-to theme for general testing of WordPress.

One feature I use quite a lot is the custom script meta-boxes.  These are present on every page and allow you to easily insert your own code into the header or footer of the page.  Now that might not seem like a big deal, but this isn’t just for HTML or Javascript.  I can actually stick PHP directly in these boxes too and it JUST WORKS.  I can detect a cookie, do something based on that, set another cookie, do redirections, or whatever I need to do.  This is super handy if you do more technical types of marketing.

It can also handle membership sites with drip-fed content, will integrate to Paypal, Clickbank, and some other payment systems, and is extremely well supported by Welly Mulia and his team.  I hadn’t heard of Welly before buying ProfitsTheme but have since become a big fan of his products, and his way of doing business.  He responds promptly to emails, and always forwards things to the appropriate technical people if any question is not something he can personally address.  All around 5 stars for Welly and his products.

So if you don’t already have a solution for making these kinds of pages & sites in WP and you could use one, PT can’t get a higher recommendation from me.

Now to sweeten the deal… he’s doing a 1-day special deal for today, Valentine’s day, Feb. 14th.  Why Valentine’s day?  Apparently this is the 1 year anniversary of PT’s release, so Welly has decided to celebrate!  It will take $30 off the price, making it just $67 but ONLY for this 1 day.  So until midnight Eastern time on Feb 14th, you can save a few bucks and get yourself an extremely powerful and useful WP marketing theme.

You must use this code at checkout, to get your discount:

pt1year

Already got ProfitsTheme?  How do you like it?  Got any tricks you’d care to share?  Comment below!

Jonathan

Well, here we have another perfect example of what I love most about WordPress. It seems there’s a plugin available for basically every imaginable task!

One of my consulting club members pinged me the other day to talk about an SEO trick he’s been using for a while.  Nothing blackhat or anything, just something simple & smart, but tedious and annoying to do by hand (so therefore, who’s really going to do it consistently?)

The basic idea is something you’re undoubtedly already familiar with if you’ve ever done any on-page SEO:  using <h> tags in order to indicate the important keywords, to a search engine or other bot.

The problem of course is that just assigning h1, h2, h3, etc. to various words throughout your page, tends to result in a totally messed up and broken page, from a human-readability perspective.

The solution is really quite simple… just use some CSS to format the h tags so that they still look normal to the visitor, but the bot sees the tags in the code and treats those keywords appropriately.

It’s not rocket science by any means, but it is tedious to have to set up in your theme, and requires you knowing how to hack the CSS in the first place.

Enter – Stealth Header Tags!  A nifty little plugin that does one thing very well.  It makes it incredibly easy to format your header tags so they visually have no difference from the rest of your content, but the tags stay in your code for SEO purposes.

And it’s super cheap.  I love plugins like this, that do something genuinely useful, save me some time and hassle, and are incredibly affordable.  Sure, super-sophisticated plugins that cost a fair amount have their place too, but I’m a sucker for little “utility plugins” like this one.

Anyway it’s releasing in a WSO for a whopping 7 bucks for a personal license, or 12 if you want the "developer" version which allows you to include it on sites for clients, or that you resell, etc.

A nice, simple little plugin that solves a common problem at little cost.  What more could I ask for?! 

Jonathan

In preparation for the webinar I’m holding Tuesday on creating affiliate landing pages, I thought I would share this video which shows in under 3 minutes how you can create your own landing page from nothing more than the offer page itself, and a free Paint tool.

You can download paint.net for free (Windows only, Mac users will have to use an alternative like Gimp) and give it a spin.

Enjoy!

Jonathan

One thing I get asked about quite often, is various aspects of actually creating a landing page.  People get stuck on all sorts of things when really they’re just making it more difficult than it needs to be.

I’m holding another webinar for my marketing community on this very topic, and I’ve decided for the first time to let non-members in as well, for a modest price.

For just $49 you can attend this webinar live, and will also receive access to the playback after it’s done.  This will be your chance to learn some of my tricks & techniques for building affiliate landing pages quickly and easily, without wasting huge amounts of time, using expensive software, or paying a designer (and trust me – I’m no designer myself!)

WEBINAR IS OVER BUT THE RECORDING WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON

Among other things I intend to discuss:

• Test quickly by swiping design elements from existing pages and making them your own
• Quick & dirty image manipulation without Photoshop
• Simple HTML tricks without using any fancy HTML software
• How to clone nearly any web page in seconds
• Ways to use WPGen to get the best results
• Whatever else you bring up!

Join us and have your microphone or telephone ready if possible, as I love interacting on my webinars.  I plan for this to be 1 hour long but if you’ve been on any of my past webinars, you know that I generally will stay for as long as people have questions… my record so far is 3 hours straight without a pause! 

Register now so you don’t miss out, I look forward to showing you some things and answering your questions!

Jonathan

There’s a relative newcomer to the IM world, and they’re adopting the “Group Discount” model ala Groupon, but for Internet Marketing related tools and other products.

My KWBot keyword tool was featured there recently, and I allow other products of mine to be featured there at some point in the future.  They call themselves “The Daily Gangster” and while I’m not crazy about the whole “Gangster” motif personally, I can see that they’re having some fun with it.

Anyway, check it out and see if anything grabs your fancy.  If you don’t have to pay full price for stuff… don’t! 

Jonathan

OK all you closet Dungeons and Dragons players! Now is your time to shine!

Wait… what??

Sorry… let me explain.  Based on looking over the recent Google Quality Rater Guide that was leaked out, I believe that for marketers, this is the “Age of the Persona”.

Now it’s not exactly a new concept to use a pseudonym, or even an entire other persona, when marketing online.  But Google has very clearly stated that they want to see “experts” delivering useful information and opinions on web pages.  And that their raters have been instructed to see through the “thin affiliates” and all the other games & tricks, to determine who is REALLY an expert, and who isn’t.

So, does this mean you have to go become a leading expert on everything you want to market?

No I don’t believe so.  But you better LOOK LIKE ONE!

This is where the RPG reference in my title comes in.  If you’re going to market something and don’t want to put your personal name on it (which often makes total sense to do), then you better make sure that whatever name you DO use, appears to be a genuine expert in the field.

So if you’re a man marketing fitness products for women, you’d better create a female “character” and really flesh her out.  Figure out her stats… give her a backstory.  Create profiles for her on social networking sites, business sites, etc.  Make it so that if someone looks her up, she’s real and “out there” and has the appearance of credibility.

I think that now more than ever might be the time to really dive deep into your “alter egos” and let them shine.  Give them a Flickr album of personal photos, an active twitter feed, friends who actually write to her on her Facebook wall… etc.

This should go a long way towards pleasing the quality raters if they come to her product site and decide to look her up to help determine if she’s truly an expert on women’s fitness.

So no matter who you really are, learn to create believable characters and portray them as fully as you can.  Doing so shouldn’t really take more than a few hours to set up a few accounts and post some content… and could provide you some long term benefits!

Jonathan

I just put this video together real quick to point out something I think is just absurdly awesome…

http://screencast.com/t/COHuk5yJCJBI

If you aren’t already familiar with Remarketing, and aren’t yet a member of VanCluteSolution.com, then you might want to check out my Remarketing Unleashed videos.  For the cost you won’t find better info out there on the subject.

Are you doing remarketing yet?  If so how’s it going for you?

Jonathan

I just read this article and thought it was a very good reminder of the basic principles needed for an effective landing page.

Check it out and see how many of these things you are, or are not, doing yourself!

Jonathan