Here’s something I posted recently to the spectacular AffiliIt Affiliate Marketing community. It got a lot of positive feedback and I just wanted to pass it along because it took me so long to get my own thinking to this point… hopefully it can save a few new affiliate marketers some pain.

First, here is the process a lot of new affiliates go through when they’re picking something to promote:

1. Look at your network’s offer list and pick something that seems like it’d work well on a traffic source somewhere.

Now, here is how a pro does it:

1. Pick a vertical that you have the most experience/interest with.
2. Contact your most trustworthy AM on your favorite network and find out two things: A) what are the hot/breakout/high EPC/high conversion rate offers on his network within that vertical; B) which traffic sources the volume for these offers is coming from.
3. If the AM will not give you that info, find a new one, and/or contact some of the most promising advertisers directly for it. Advertisers LOVE to give you this sort of info along with lots of campaign tips.
4. Go check out the ads running on the traffic source, to verify that people are really running this vertical on it. Make a scrapbook of the best ads you see for offers in your vertical. Microsoft OneNote works great for this, Microsoft Word works just fine too…
5. Now it’s time to build your campaign on either the recommended traffic source, or a similar one. Start by creating ads similar to the best ads you’ve seen for similar products. The best ads are usually the ones getting the most premium inventory (e.g. on PoF, the first ones that show up when you log in).

Do I take my own advice every single time? No But it’s saved me hours of time and thousands of dollars in testing when I have.

I just got back from Affiliate Summit West ’10, my first time attending a conference dominated by the performance marketing industry. I’m already getting asked left and right, was it worth going?

Let me first say this: there are a lot of people out there who chirp sunshine and rainbows at you every time you talk to them. Everything’s GREAT, they’re always SUPER excited, their business is doing AMAZING and you should TOTALLY buy that product because it’s soooo helpful!

I am not one of those people. I’d rather be credible than be Pollyanna.

So rest assured, if I recommend something on my site, I have a good reason for it other than trying to line my pockets with cash. (Not that I won’t sell you shit. I’ll sell you shit left and right. I AM a marketer, after all.)

With all that said, was Affiliate Summit worth going to?

Categorically, unequivocally, yes it was worth it. I think if you’re in the beginner/intermediate stages of affiliate marketing, you must go to Affiliate Summit at least once. If you’re an advanced affiliate marketer — well, you’ve probably already been.

Here’s why: if all you’re doing is sitting alone in front of your PC, IM’ing with a couple of your affiliate managers, posting to PPC Coach or AffiliIt, you’ll never understand the breadth and diversity of this industry.

PPC? CPV? SEO? Web site? No web site? CPA? CPS? Lead gen? Rev share? Everyone is here. In every category, there’s someone banking HARD.

I met a guy who sells pool cleaning equipment, for Christ’s sake. His company just rolled out an affiliate program, so there he was, at Affiliate Summit. How many businesses out there have affiliate programs you’ll never hear of unless you get to a conference like this and mingle with people? How many thousands of affiliate business models are represented at this conference, which you’ll never know exist unless you go? What if you’ve got an idea rolling around in your head, but you’re not sure it’ll work, while meanwhile someone out there has already made a million bucks off of it? What if the AM at your network is a dickhead, but you’re afraid to piss him off because you haven’t realized there are five hundred other networks out there begging for your business?

Seeing everything on offer at this conference removes the fear. It bolsters your resolve. It drives home the point that there a million and one ways to build a business online, and if these guys can do it, so can you.

Anyone who hasn’t been to Affiliate Summit should go at least once for that reason. There are great opportunities for networking and education, too, but this is the dealmaker.

The only person who maybe shouldn’t go to this conference is the guy who won’t take any action. If you’re not already launching campaigns, I’m not sure attending a conference will change his behavior. It’ll just feel weird because everyone around him is banking hard and he isn’t. I don’t know, maybe that would be a good kick in the pants. But it’s not really designed for people who are still at the stage of asking “Durr, can you really make money online?” Practically every one of the thousands of attendees is already doing it.

It’s been nearly a decade since I registered this domain and launched the first incarnation of Aaron Command on my dorm room PC.  The original plan was to share files with my buddies and host some school-related projects. We had no idea what a ride we were in for.

By 2001, blogs were all over the news so I decided to start one. It was old school, straight HTML, hand-crafted in Notepad. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was even less interested in writing about what I had for lunch than the world was in reading about it.

Amazingly Facebook now drives $800M in business annually by getting people to babble on about that kind of crap. Actually, the truth is all that money actually came from shady CPA offers on Farmville, but we’ll save that for later posts.

Fast-forward to 2003. I decided to throw the doors of the “blog” open to a couple of cantankerous friends and for the next couple of years it was a glorious upward spiral of testosterone, poo-flinging, ranting about politics, culture, the decline of Western civilization etc. – basically young, angry American males at their best.

After a few years of this we all decided that we’d rather get laid once in a blue moon instead of pissing and moaning on the Internet full-time. So we stopped blogging. Rohit moved to Florida and got rich. I somehow ended up in the middle of rural China getting my ass kicked by Shaolin monks and coughing up blood. I think Kyle spent a lot of time getting drunk and passing out in ditches. I think he still does.

The site was neglected for a while and ended up being used mostly by Chinese spammers to sell Cialis and other male enhancement products (boy, did they have our demographic figured out). By 2006, no one was posting anymore, but I wanted to keep earning my precious 37 cents a month from Adsense, so I wrote some code that would scrape headlines on big news sites and post that instead. Gotta fund my addiction to those $3 Big Bite hot dogs somehow, man. Once every ten months I got to treat myself.

Earning 1.2 cents a day on Aaron Command is how I began to make money online. (Guyz – if I link to myself will I be #1 on Google tomorrow?!?!) Fast forward to 2009 and I’ve gotten a little wiser about how to play the game. Command Media was born shortly thereafter and let’s just say I’m doing a little better than 1.2 cents a day.

With 2010 and the Command Ten Year Anniversary looming on the horizon, I’m doing a hard reboot of the site and giving it a new purpose, but the truth is that it’s really the same thing I’ve been pursuing for years. The Information Revolution has freed us from the constraints around where we live and how we work that the Industrial Revolution imposed. I’m going to use this site to show you how to live and work anywhere, make money doing practically anything you’re passionate about, and live by your own rules.

And just like on the old site, I still plan on calling things the way I see them, even if it gets someone’s panties in a bunch. These days I’m old enough to know better, but young enough not to give a fuck.

-Aaron