First, one thing that has not really changed since the last time we took a look at T3Leads is the different areas they are operating offers in: payday loans, car loans, and mortgages to name a few. But, that’s where a lot of the similarities end.

Now, everything looks completely different, so the first new thing to point out is the great new design and layout that they have going on.  A few of the benefits mentioned on the site for using T3Leads include simple account management, responsive service and support, affiliate forum, and bi-weekly payouts (with minimum earnings and approval).

The next cool thing about T3Leads is the lead gen forms that they now have that are greatly customizable. Instead of just having a URL that you send your traffic to, with T3Leads new set up, you can actually customize the lead gen forms that you use. You have a bunch of different options including whether you want to host the form yourself or send the traffic to the advertisers landing pages, you can customize the fields including location, size, fields, etc, and there are 1 and 2 step processes you could use.

While the lead gen forms are obviously the focus of T3Leads, the option is only available for a limited number of campaigns. Beyond the lead gen forms, you get into your more “normal” type of campaigns such as banner advertising and direct linking.

If you’re looking for a new affiliate network to test out and want to explore lead gen forms, then T3Leads is definitely the avenue to go because of it’s ease of use. Take a look and let us know what you think of them!

I’m just going to use the topic of dating offers as an example, but the tips I’ll give obviously apply to any niche or offer you pick.

Getting traffic to your offer

You can’t make money without traffic. So, getting people to see your ad, click on your links, submit their info, or even purchase something is the most important part of all of this. Deciding on where you want to get that traffic from is the tough part. There are so many options – Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. For this example, we’ll stick with AdWords and AdCenter since they are pretty similar.  Sign up for both of them as you’ll want to diversify and test which platform works better for you. Most affiliate marketers seem to believe that AdCenter converts better, but it takes longer for a campaign to ramp up and receive traffic, where with AdWords you may see impressions and clicks more quickly, but not necessarily any conversions. Test them both and keep working with them.

Within each of the sites, you’ll be able to set up different campaigns. I like to to test different keywords, so if we are dealing with a Dating offer, then I may set up the overall campaign with the offer name. Then within the campaign you can set up your different ad groups. These are the ads that will be displayed and the keywords that they would show for. I set up different ad groups based on different groups of keywords. To get off the dating example for a second, a better one to understand this might be if you were promoting an affiliate link for a discount printer ink website. You could have Ad Groups for each different printer type or manufacturer (Epson, HP, etc) and then have all your keywords relating to that manufacturer or group. This way you can see which keywords are performing the best within different ad groups. I think that explanation makes sense, if not leave a comment and I’ll try to help explain some more!

Once you’ve got your Ads and ad groups set up, set your budget for spending and let it go.

Finding Keywords

Doing keyword research is probably the most time consuming part of this process. There are so many tools out there and different websites you can use. Ian Fernando just posted a video about the Google Wonder Wheel which is an excellent tool to use and gain ideas from. Within Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter there are also keyword research tools which are pretty helpful in giving you ideas. You can just put in your main keyword and it will spit out tons of related terms and even show you the search volume for them. I’ll post more in the future about keyword research as I get more into it. Right now, I don’t really have any set method or system that I use besides the research tools within AdWords and AdCenter.

Testing, Testing, Testing

The biggest part to making this venture successful besides effective keyword research is continually testing every aspect of your ad and campaign. You always want to be changing your keywords (removing some and adding others) to see what works, changing the text or copy of your ad, and also your ad headlines. Another tip is to make as many ads as you can! There’s nothing stopping you from creating hundreds of different ads and seeing what performs the best – this is what some of the big guys do…all day. Just changing a word or two can make a big difference.

Along with testing, you want to keep checking your stats to see what keywords bringing impressions, and more importantly, are getting clicked. Also, be ready to drop some money to see some rewards. I’ve probably spent about $200 to make the $60 that I did. So there is definitely a big learning curve involved, but you could stumble on a great niche or ad that converts great and makes all that money back for you right away!

As you all know, I’m always looking for ways to make more money and I know you are too – that’s why you are reading this! So anyway, I’ve been playing around with affiliate marketing for a while now but have not had much success. I’ve been able to get a sale here or a sale there but usually for just a few bucks. So last week I decided I wanted to give it a harder shot and started doing some reading on Ian Fernando’s site, Justin Dupree’s site, Zac Johnson’s site, and many others. I’ve basically been looking for any tips, guides, or recommendations to get me started into the crazy world of affiliate marketing and PPC (pay-per-click) marketing. Well, after launching a couple campaigns recently, I had some luck last week!

I made $60.

Yes, you read that right, $60. Now, its not exactly anything to jump and scream about when guys like Jonathan Volk are earning thousands of dollars a day or even people making a few hundred a week. However, it is fun to see the small amount of work that I put into it start to pay off somehow. So, I wanted to go through a few things that I did, the process I went through, and hopefully it will give you some ideas and tips on starting up some of your own campaigns to earn that extra money.

First, you’re going to need to be apart of an affiliate network like Market Leverage. The folks at Market Leverage are great and I highly recommend going with them as they have a good variety of offers in a number of industries/niches. So, start out by signing up with them and then get familiar with the dashboard and looking through the offers. Another great option is Commission Junction which is a very popular network with tons of online stores, sites, and programs.

Next, you’ll need to decide what kind of offers you want to run. Now, you have a bunch of choices. If you have a large email list built up, you may want to run email specific offers or if you know where you can get a large amount of traffic from, email or zip code submit offers may convert better for you. But if you don’t have an email list of thousands of people or large amounts of traffic you could direct to a landing page, there is always the option for advertising your campaign through Facebook, MSN AdCenter and Google AdWords.  These are the three traffic sources I have been using lately, but there are tons of others – pretty much any search engine has an advertising networking you can join.  If you want to just push out some affiliate links and test a bunch of different offers, offers that allow for search traffic will be what you want to go with.

Once you’ve decided on the type of offer you want to run, you have to decide on the actual offers to promote. This is where it gets tricky. Obviously a network is going to have a lot of offers you could run including niches like weight loss, mobile/ring tones, home business ops, dating, and more – so narrowing down what you want to promote is important. However, you easily could just start picking random offers and trying them out. It just depends on what you want to do!

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In part two of this short series on affiliate marketing, I’ll write more about actually setting up ads with AdWords or AdCenter and testing different things to see what works. Look for that coming shortly.

So anyway, I’ve been signed up with Market Leverage for a while now and haven’t done much with them until now. I’ve started talking more with my affiliate manager (AM) and getting some more information to read up on and find out good approaches to make money.

While I was in Orlando, FL I had the chance to do more networking then I have at home. Market Leverage is located outside of Orlando and one day while I was there, my AM called me up and I told her I was in Orlando and to my surprise she told me that that is where ML is headquartered. So, that of course led to being invited to meet in person and check out the office. So, one Thursday I went over (about 10 minutes from where I was working) for lunch and to meet some of the crew.

Let me tell you, they’ve got a pretty sweet set up. Very nice and open offices, a non-traditional “cubiclesque” set up, great people, and on top of that, a catered lunch EVERY DAY! I know, I didn’t believe it either. And I’m not talking about just pizza…a real cooked meal.

Most of the crew at ML is young (mid 20′s to early 30′s in age) and as you would expect that leads to a HUGE range of topics during the daily lunch in the conference room. As people started to sit down to eat, I very quickly got a warning of the vulgarity and randomness to come, but I was expecting nothing less anyway.

The group at Market Leverage is incredibly nice and extremely willing to help those new to affiliate marketing and newbies like myself start earning some money through their offers. So if you are not already signed up with them, I strongly recommend you do so. It’s worth it! You’ll get an AM to keep in touch with, bounce ideas off of, and get tips on which campaigns are converting well.

Plus, maybe you can score yourself an “I’m Blogging This” t-shirt like I’m sporting in the above picture.

T3Leads.com is one of the many pay per lead affiliate networks available on the internet for you to sign up for. If you are on the fence about which networks you want to sign up, maybe this review will help you to decide. One thing to remember is that you can not make any money by just sticking to one affiliate network, so be sure to sign up for multiple, test out their systems, and see which ones work for you. Many times they will have different offers and offer different payouts, so a combination of different networks is probably the best way for you to make money online through affiliate marketing.

About T3Leads

T3Leads is one of the leading companies in the affiliate marketing arena and is based out of California. They focus mostly on the financial section of the market. It also has offers from markets such as pay day loans, student loans, auto insurance, and more. They try to help you in 2 main ways: by looking at the traffic you are getting and suggest banner and website development changes to raise the effectiveness of the campaign and also by providing the tools to help you optimize your landing page.

The T3Leads System

• On Time Bi-Weekly Payments – T3Leads pays out within 15 days after the end of the pay period twice a month. Not bad right? If you make more than $1K in weekly commissions, you can request to get weekly payments.
• 10% of gross commissions on referrals! The affiliate referral bonuses are great. Nothing like getting 10% of what all your referrals makes right? I didn’t think so.
• They offer a rapid and dedicated support team 24/7, even available in 3 different languages! I haven’t seen that anywhere else!

Using the interface can be a little confusing. Right off the bat after logging in, it is not obvious where things are. If you are looking for the offers/campaigns, then you need to check under the category “Websites”. Why its not called “Campaigns” or something similar, I am not sure. If you want to get banners for the different campaigns, don’t look for them with the campaign or under the “Websites” tab. You’ll have to go to the “Bonuses” tab. Again, why things are not grouped together logically I am not sure. However, once you know where you are going within the system, you can pretty easily find what you need.

One nice thing I did find within the listing of campaigns is that if you click the little note pad icon with each offer, it will open a new window that has a list of relevant keywords that you can use to help promote the offer. Who doesn’t like a little help right?

Well, there you have it. T3Leads looks to be a pretty solid network, they have lots of reviews popping up around the net and they seem to be fairly stable. Definitely check them out if you are in the financial/debt niche and want some related offers to promote!

The cool thing about Motive is that they have recently released the Advent 2.0 system, so it is still pretty much brand new and ready to be used. Motive Interactive has some of the highest payouts in the industry and also offers many exclusive offers for its publishers so it definitely works to provide publishers with the tools to maximize their revenue.

Their lead generation platform allows publishers to launch streamlined campaigns with easy-to-use tools, while ensuring that you’ll be provided with accurate and reliable payouts and attentive customer service. With Motive, you have the power to launch campaigns that will succeed the first time and every time!

Now, it is safe to say that just about every affiliate/CPA network out there considers themselves to be the undisputed champion of the world, much like Hulk Hogan. Well, Motive Interactive is no different and here are some of the reasons they toot their own horn as the industry leader:

• Top performing highest paying offers, if you find a better payout – tell them and they will beat it
• Exclusive Offers
• Most lucrative reward program in the industry! 5.50% GROSS revenue lifetime referral bonus for each Publisher you refer
• Proprietary Technology that works to make you more money!
• Best in class web 2.0 Interface
• Advanced real time tracking and reporting
• Advanced metrics: eCPM, eCPC, eCPL
• Exportable Reports

Like I said, these are just a few of the main highlights of working with the Advent 2.0 system.

For more information about their publisher solutions, check out their site. They also have a couple videos online that are CPA and CPM demos that are helpful and informational!

Like I said in the other post, I searched for costumes that did not have many active listings, but were selling successfully for any listing that was up. So this meant that I listed popular items and with any luck the demand would be high. Well, the demand was high. Total, I had 26 costume sales on eBay, pretty damn good for about 72 hours. It was roughly $1000 worth of business in eBay’s eyes…to me it was $136.

So anyway, here are the problems I ran into.

1. With my first few sales, the price I listed it the costume at was too low to cover the eBay and PayPal fees and to cover the actual cost of the costume. I lost between 50 cents and a dollar on 4 sales, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. To rectify the situation, I increased the listing price and added a a little bit to the shipping price the buyer paid. This then covered the fees and cost of the item and gave me now a small profit of between 50 cents and a dollar on each sale.
2. I placed 6 orders with one company whose affiliate program I was apart of one night. Then the next day I processed a few more with no problems. However, before heading to bed that night, I went to place a couple more that had sold on eBay…yet they were out of stock! This put me in a panic. I had to search for another company that was selling the same costume for the same price or less AND become an affiliate of theirs immediately to be able to process the orders that night. Luckily I was able to find another website that I could use and processed a handful of orders with them.
3. The third day my second ‘supplier’ was out of stock when I went to process another batch of orders. Well shit on me! I was even more worried about it now because I knew these were hot items and finding another website that had a good stock of them would be a problem. Luckily I got approved for another affiliate program with costume website and I started processing orders.
4. This past Monday (the 20th) I get an email from the 3rd supplier telling me that they were out of stock of everything I ordered (even though their website showed it was in stock) and that ALL of my orders had been canceled…all 10 of them! I called to find out what the problem was because I placed all the orders on Friday, the 17th and the website said everything was in stock. Well apparently it takes up to 6 hours for the website to reflect the real inventory levels and when the site updated to being out of stock, I had already processed all the orders I had and they could not ship any of the costumes. All the charges I had through PayPal and my credit card had been refunded and all of the sudden I had an extra $600 in my PayPal account. Well, it was a popular costume, and after trying another 6 websites, just to process the orders – even if I could not get affiliate commissions from them, everyone was out of stock.
5. I had to refund 10 orders…this hurt…bad. Not only did I have to go through and individually refund 10 people’s money, I had to make sure they all went through, document the refunds (to make sure I was keeping track of everything), and contact them all to let them know what was going on. I emailed everyone and explained the situation, sent the refunds, and then left feedback on eBay for them all. Some have left feedback for me and I hope the rest will as well.
6. I still got charged the eBay fees!!!!!! When you refund money through PayPal, you get the fee refunded as well – so if you send me $50, the PayPal fee may be $2, netting me $48. Well PayPal refunds the $2 fee if I refund you the $50. BUT I still incurred the eBay fees for each costume purchase (this is about $4.50 a costume). So, now I am going to be down about $40 because of the stinking eBay fees. It’d be nice if eBay could follow a PayPal refund and then you could ‘cancel’ a sale within eBay so you are not charged the fees because the transaction was not completed. Oh well. Luckily this is not coming from out-of-the-pocket money, but it will be covered by my affiliate commissions.

SO, if you are thinking about doing this sort of thing in the future, here are a couple tips I have.

• Contact an affiliate manager and make sure that what you want to do is alright with them and does not violate any terms or conditions.
• Contact the company you want to process orders with and make sure they are alright with you selling on eBay and processing the orders through them.
• Make sure the company has enough of the item in stock to fulfill your demand! If you can, get a certain number of the product reserved for you so that you know you have a certain number available to sell. This is the biggest thing I will try to do next time I do something like this.

Good luck with if you want to do this type of making money online experiment in the future and see how much you can earn in affiliate commissions. When I do a blog income report at the beginning of November, I will include this affiliate commission amount, but I will figure out what the real number is (my earnings of ~$136 minus eBay fees) to see how well I really did.

Once I had a couple affiliate relationships set up with the companies, I started to do some promoting on my sites and through over avenues…yet nothing seemed to be working. So, I went to what I know best – eBay. I took the description from the costume supplier website, created a list on eBay in my store, and built the price up a little bit to cover the eBay fees.

Within almost an hour of listing the costumes in the store format on eBay, I received sales and payments. Now I needed process the orders and this is where the money making comes in.

I had an referral link for the company that I was going to be ordering from and placed a button on a couple of my sites (including Dorm Room Biz). I booted up my laptop, launched a browser, and clicked the link. I made the purchase through my affiliate link, using my billing information and credit card and then had the costume shipped directly to the person who bought it from me on eBay. Essentially I created my own drop-shipping service. Now the important thing to remember when doing this is that the websites track the orders through cookies, so in order for all the orders to count towards your earnings that you place, you are going to need to delete your cookies, history files, and temporary files. This clears everything out and gives you a fresh launching point. The you just repeat the process – visit your referral link, place the order, clear your cookies etc, and so on.

Through eBay I made about 25 sales of a few different costumes which came to about $136 dollars. The best part of this? It all happened within about 72 hours of putting up the listing. I started the auctions on Tuesday and was going away for the weekend so closed everything on Friday. I didn’t actually get any orders on Friday, so everything pretty much happened within 3 days.

Finding which costumes to sell was the hardest part of this whole process. Basically I searched for about 15 different costumes on eBay and found which ones had few listings but always sold and for a good price (at least what it would ‘cost’ me from the supplying website or more). Once I came across a couple, I set up the auctions and let them roll. The orders just continued to come in sometimes within an hour of listing an item in my store with a quantity of 5 available, they all would sell and I would have to relist it.

Now, I do not know to what extent this is bending the rules of an affiliate program as I do not do much work in the area, but I thought it was a clever way to make some eBay sales and earn some cash through an affiliate program. It is a win-win for both parties – they are selling their products and still making their profits, and then I am making money from promoting their items. However, this is not something that I would continually do over and over again unless I spoke with someone in depth about this either on the site of the actual company or an affiliate manager.

Anyone else “gamed” the system this way to take advantage of the holiday season? If I could find a product that would do this well related to Christmas I would probably start promoting it on eBay right away! Later, I will discuss a couple of the downsides to this plan and money making experiment that I encountered.

This is a great way to make money online or make money from your dorm room for not doing much work. Try it out next year!