This incident marked one of the most stressful times of my life.

At 18 years old I was finishing my last year of college (high school). Still living at home with around $800USD in my bank, I was really interested in online business and I was hoping I could use my savings to invest in some online businesses.

I started dabbling with a few small online ventures that made me enough to  go out in the weekends and cover petrol costs. At the time I was very naive businessman. Nothing could go wrong. Everyone could be trusted. The business world was a fun game filled with rainbows and lollipops.

Mr X at the Beach

At the start of the year I was introduced to a guy called Allan Jerman from San Diego, USA. He was referred to me by a mutual friend as a good coder and entrepreneur. My friend also mentioned that Allan was a extremely strong Christian so I shouldn’t cuss in his presence.

For about a year or so Allan and I did some freelance work for people. I would do the design and he would code. It was a small but smooth operation. We got on well.

A while later Allan approached me asking if I would invest in a new venture he had in mind. It was basically creating Myspace layout sites and arcade game sites, placing Yahoo ads on them, sending traffic to them and making profit from the Yahoo ads. He was making great ROI on his own investments so I thought this was great!

Great idea, working business model,  trustworthy business partner, what could go wrong?

Investing started.

I was approaching the end of school and University was on the horizon. So this seemed like a perfect time to start picking up business. Allan asked me for some investment money around $xxx. It was big money for me at the time,but there seemed to be minimal risk. The terms were that we each put in 50% each of the money and we each got 50% of the profits. We built the websites together. He gave his secret traffic source contact “Mr Middleman” the funds. Then traffic started.

We sat and watched as money started coming in. Instead of the ROI being 1:2 it came out at around 1:4. Things were looking HOT!

But, payment terms were slow and we only ending up getting paid every 45 days. After the 45 days rolled past we got paid low $x,xxx each. Wow were we happy! So we decided to invest a lot of that money for the next month. 45 days later we must of made high $x,xxx each.

Things were getting exciting.

His initial payment to me gave me confidence. Plus his STRONG repeated references to his family’s religious adherence gave me further assurance. I invested another mid $x,xxx which was the max we were able to spend at the time (so I was told). 45 days later that money turned into around low $xx,xxx.

Wow was it the most amount of money I had ever had under my name! I had enough money to rent out as many DVDs as I could handle!

The big push forward.

I approached my parents, my sister and my girlfriend asking if they wanted to invest in my new profitable business.

My parents said yes and sent me mid $x,xxx.

My sister trusted my parents’ decision so she too invested mid $x,xxx which was a big chunk of her savings.

My girlfriend said yes and put forward mid $x,xxx which was her university fund.

I said I could return them double their investments within 90 days. I felt like a hero! I had the possibility to really help my family and girlfriend.

Allan gave me confidence that we could turn this approx $18,000 (family money) +$17,000 (my money) somewhere close to the $100,000 mark. So based on our previous successes, our solid 2 year relationship, and his “Christian” values I sent him the $35,000 to pay for more traffic.

I was told that it would take a while for Mr Middleman to “tweak” and “optimize” the traffic campaign in order for it to start running. No problem I thought to myself.

Over the span of a month he convinced me that the campaign was not running for one reason or another.  Allan was telling me Mr Middleman had a holiday, then attended a wedding, then was tweaking. There was always something new. I started getting stressed about it so I asked for Mr Middleman’s contact details.

That’s when things started going sour.

Allan kept on dodging the question when I asked for Mr Middleman’s contact info. So I took it upon myself to track down Mr Middleman on my own. I finally found his contact info.

I contacted Mr Middleman. He thought I was some CRAZY nutter. He did not want to talk to me at all.

Somehow Allan convinced him that I was up to no good and was crazy. Once I plead my case and started talking about lawyers to Mr Middleman, he came around, but, was not helpful at all. Maybe he knew what was going on and felt scared himself. Who knows?

Anyway I went around in circles for a month trying to knock some sense into the two. Each were blaming each other. I sent out legal letters from New Zealand with no response.

At 20 yrs old I was in my second year of university. In one foul swipe I had no income. I had $18,000 non university related debt ($36,000 NZD at the time) owing to my parents, sister and girlfriend. I also lost $17,000 ($34,000 NZD) of my own money. Topped off with a bunch of grey hairs (literally).

What did I learn?

• Sad to say but, don’t trust anyone with online business. Anyone I work with now have to earn my trust. It’s not there by default.
• Don’t be over accommodating. If you have a problem with something, mention it early. Push back.

It wasn’t all bad…

This scam really built a motivating fire in my stomach. I needed to make something work in order to pay back my family. There was no option.

It resulted directly in leading me to pursuing affiliate marketing, and where got me where I am today.

It is likely everyone will get burned in business. Personally I’ve been burnt a few times, with a lot more money than in this story, but this example hurt the most because of circumstances.

Hopefully timing and price will be kind to you and you can learn from it.

…Oh, and one last thing. Allan if you’re reading this.

Flick me an email sometime. I’d love to talk.

xoxo

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This guide is for medium to advanced affiliates. I would not recommend running this if you are just starting out. I will explain how you can maintain high levels of inbound traffic on your content unlocker through display media buying.

This strategy works great for original video content. So, if you have a video you want to promote you will need the following:

Required Skills & Assets.

•    $500.00 investment

•    SiteScout account

•    LeadBolt account

•    Existing & Successful Campaign on LeadBolt

•    Photoshop / GIMP (Gimp is free!)

•    Banner Design Fundamentals

Again, this strategy is for people already earning and making good money. I will write some more basic strategy guides next. A simple change in a campaign can make all the difference.

Step 1. Setting Up.

To execute this strategy you will need to learn how to media buy on SiteScout (Editors note: I spot this as being a new affiliate hotspot. They serve 1.6 billion daily impressions.).  SiteScout offers Facebook inventory. The banner inventory is not the tiny text / thumbnails you are familiar with on the right panel of Facebook. Rather, this inventory is created by browser extensions. User must have a browser extension installed prior to seeing these ads.

Go forth and click “Create Campaign” with SiteScout. You will see a ton of sites.

Choose FBSKINS, apps.facebook.com, or facetheme.com. (Pro Tip: If you are a very detail oriented person you may want to create (3) separate campaigns and just keep one site on each buy as you can bid accordingly and track which site is working best.) You’ll notice there are a TON of impressions on these sites daily in the USA, so if you execute this properly, it’s EXTREMELY scalable. I have driven $2,000-$3,000 daily on my good days.

Now, add a creative. Something like this will work just fine.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ELX9KSVD

Just add a relevant video background and make sure the gif looks like it’s loading.

With the PSD file I have included you should do “okay”. You won’t do GREAT. If you want creative consulting, you’ll need to speak with me individually. Skype: LeadBoltMIKE. (Please note, I have 500+ users on my Skype, and I get hit up non-stop. So please be patient. Lastly, I can’t teach this strategy to people who are 100% new to content locking. If you do not already have a working campaign on LeadBolt I will not teach you. )

Step 2. Media Buying.

Now, set up your media buy options.

Here is something I do not like about SiteScout. They do not tell you what bids you need to get traffic. So you have to guess, and if you guess too high…well SiteScout has so much traffic you can blow through your entire budget very quickly. So, I recommend setting your CPM to “whatever”, set your cap to $5.00 all time. Let it roll, then once the $5.00 is spent, look at eCPM and you’ll know EXACTLY what your CPM bid needs to be.

It took me hours to get a 5.8% CTR (Editors note: This number alone took me to believer land.) I used over 25 WELL- designed creatives, in combination with a lot of media buying experience.

• At 5.8% = 58 clicks per 1000 impressions per $1.50
• Cost per click = $0.025 per click.
• LeadBolt’s avg USA EPC is $0.3.
• BTW, you can geo-target USA only

(Editors note: This is the kind of maths I enjoy)

Here are the best times to buy. Stick to this and you’ll never lose. People don’t click junk during the day, they are busy, at work, etc… you must target at night. 8:00PM EST on is gold.

Use default GEO settings. If you want to target another country I’d highly recommend:

• Germany
• Spain
• Portugal
• Italy
• France

Step 3. Design Creatives.

Here’s the HARDEST part. My guess is, if you have no idea what you are doing on the creative, you are going to avg CTRs of 0.20 on FBSKINS and 0.80 on FaceTheme. FBSkins is cheaper than FaceTheme.

I uploaded some basic creatives and here’s what I got:
FBSKINS CPM = $0.60

FBSKIN CTR = 0.20

eCPC = $0.30

FACETHEME CPM = $1.09

FACETHEME CTR = .80

eCPC = $0.18

So, initially, you should be able to break-even with FaceTheme. If you design the right creative, and tweak, you’ll be profitable very quickly.
Lastly, and most importantly, with this strategy you can maintain a constant flow of traffic.

Contacting Me (Mike).

Michael Skype: LeadBoltMike

(Editors note: Please don’t bomb him with questions if you are starting out. Get yourself familiar with Leadbolt and content unlocking. Run some campaigns then ask questions. He’s only human!)

*After going through and reading/editing this article for the upteenth time I am becoming more and more hesitant about posting it. But then I thought what the hey! Why keep something for myself when I could give it away! This is just ridiculous…*

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What a hilarious misunderstanding! I’m actually talking about a virtual gate. A virtual content gateway. Gateways are not some cute technique to make a bit of extra money. They are a HUGE business. Some PPV networks have been built around this technique.

How the truck do they work?

Well, a gateway is a script you put on your lander that blocks the page to any visitors. Your lander will load, but a box pops up in front of it.  A visitor will only get access to your lander once they have completed one of the CPA offers listed in that pop over box.

CPALead is the most popular gateway provider by far, but LoudMo, Pinball Publisher Network and Adscend are great contenders too.

This is an example of a CPALead gateway:

Ok so now you know the basics of how it works.

Here’s how you make the monies:

Step 1: Find a search term that is new or hot.

Google Trends and Google Insights are great places to start.

Step 2: Create content around that search term.

For example when I looked on Google Trends yesterday I saw “Champions League” (European football league final. Go INTER!!) was the fourth most popular term. So I would probably link to a site where you could watch the Champions League, or if I wanted to be extra cheeky, my landing page would be promoting a watch TV online affiliate offer.

Step 3: Create your landing page.

The trick here is to be a tease. For my Champions League example I would create a landing page mimicking the site that would actually show the streaming game. So I would have a video player with an image of the game in the background, a description about the game, some nice images, and a chat box etc. Users would click the video play button, BOOM, your gateway pops up. This strategy converts a lot better than just popping your gateway as soon as users hit your lander.

Step 4: Create your content gateway.

Now this totally depends on what content you are providing on your landing page. For this example, I would probably run over to CPALead. You MUST create a custom skin when creating your gateway. Do not chose one of their stock skins. You need to make the gateway as similar and as relevant to your sites design as possible. Yes, this is a tonne of work for every topic you target, but the ROI is so sick it should have its own private hospital. I whipped this example up in 5 minutes:

Make sure you customize the titles and descriptions. Split test split test split test! Get really really creative with wording as to why people should fill out the survey. Think captcha or limited spots…that’s all I’m saying.

This is roughly what your lander could look like once the content gateway pops up.

You can do this technique with new movies, new software, popular Youtube videos, wallpaper sites, Myspace layouts and games. Possibilities are actually endless. There is no limit to scaling.

CPALead are basically an affiliate network going through another network providing a service that I’m sure they will cut margins off even more. Once you know how to play the game and are doing volume, try make your own gateway. Go to an affiliate network, pick some offers, and get a gateway script made. It is important to note that this is classed as incentivizable advertising. So unless you want to step in the dark zone, don’t run offers unless you get permission from your AM.

Other content gateway providers are pretty flexible and active about getting new offers in or helping you create custom landers. Just ask.

Here are some relevant links:

• CPALead.com (affiliate link) CPAlead.com (non affiliate link)
• LoudMo.com (affiliate link) LoudMo.com (non affiliate link)
• PinballPublisherNetwork.com (affiliate link) PinballPublisherNetwork.com (non affiliate link)

Summary for A.D.D readers:

• Find a new/hot topic.
• Find unique content for that topic.
• Create a teasing landing page.
• Create a custom targeted gateway.
• Once you hit volume, form your own gateway by hand picking offers from affiliate networks.
• Laugh at suckers that didn’t take action after reading this post.

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For those of you who may get annoyed at me for outing this method, don’t.

So let’s get down to business.

PPV + Branded Submit Offers + Brand targeting = $$$

Let me explain the variables in this equation. They break down like this:

Happy Richard Branson

1.) PPV – TrafficVance.com, MediaTraffic.com, DirectCPV.com and any other networks you can get your hands on.

2.) Branded Submit Offers – Apple, Victoria’s Secret, American Eagle Apparel (I am running this campaign at the moment), etc. Neverblue.com also have a good range of these submit offers.

3.) Brand Targeting – The grouping together of relevant brand keywords and URLS.

I set up the American Eagle Apparel campaign as a test for this blog post. It took me 6 minutes to get the campaign running. I always like to be top bidder at testing phases so I know what conversion rates I’m working with. I will then alter bids depending on results.

Remember when you’re using multiple PPV networks for these campaigns to keep an eye on ROI and bid prices etc. as explained in my previous post.

Nothing groundbreaking. Nothing big. Just easy money.

Do it, do it!

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