December has been an interesting month indeed in the affiliate marketing world. Mass account-bannings have seemed to be the norm, on a much larger scale than I recall hearing about before. And while some are pointing fingers at the truly scammy advertisers and scam products, the truth is that this latest sweep has hit people at all levels of adwords advertising, from the tiniest “little guy” to some big Goliaths. I know people who only ran a few Clickbank offers that got banned.
Personally I think Google has broader ambitions of shutting down affiliate marketing as a whole – but I’ll go into that more in the near future.
CPA marketing in particular has been taking a lot of heat as being responsible for this latest crackdown… and I don’t know if that’s completely undeserved. Let’s face it, an awful lot of CPA offers (but not all) are really sketchy at best.
But the fact is that you can go do a Google search right now and still find plenty of CPA offers coming up in the PPC listings. So obviously SOMEONE is still able to run these offers. Do they know something you don’t? That’s a very likely possibility… after all one of the biggest advantages in this industry is having specialized knowledge (and of course, then implementing that knowledge in the form of action).
So it’s definitely interesting timing then, that a couple of guys I mastermind with and am fortunate enough to call friends, are about to share some of this specialized knowledge with us all. You’ve probably heard of them already if you’re in the CPA game at all – Amish Shah and his partner Jay Styles.
Now I know not everyone is a huge fan of Amish and Jay – after all they are definitely “bad boys” of affiliate marketing, willing to do *almost* anything to make their business profitable. They are well known for saying things like “screw Google, they’re not the law” and opening up tons of Adwords accounts so that they can completely dominate markets. They’re known for mass-executing pretty much any profitable TOS-breaking trick you can think of.
But clearly whatever they’re doing works, because they’re still cranking away high volume CPA campaigns despite the most recent account shutdowns. I’m sure even they have felt at least SOME pain from the recent turn of events, but when your biggest problem is that your average daily revenue dropped from $20,000 to $15,000, then that’s a pretty “high quality problem” in my book.
So where is all this going? Amish has always dabbled a little bit in the “IM” world with the release of well known products like the original Google Goggles, his “The New PPC” educational video series (still on Youtube and filled with good info), the Hexatrack family of software products, and of course for this year’s Magic Bullet Seminar which was pretty phenomenal.
He’s now setting out to reveal exactly how his business is still cranking out over $14,000 per day average, in gross CPA commissions even after all the recent google slaps. I’m sure some of it is going to have to do with other traffic sources, media buys, that sort of thing. But he insists that they’re still going strong with Adwords too, and are going to give away an entire campaign – keywords, landing pages & all – so that you can see exactly how they’re doing it.
Like I mentioned already, Amish & Jay’s style (no pun intended 
) isn’t for everyone… but if you’re someone who’s willing to bend rules occasionally and care more about profitability than “being nice”, then this stuff is probably right for you. If nothing else I’m sure the free content they’re providing will give you some solid ideas and maybe even an “aha” moment or two.
So check it out and jump on any nuggets you come away with… as with most of the information out there, it’s likely that most people won’t act on it so those who do stand to profit the most!
Jonathan
