Money is tight. Do you think you would like to do pay per click marketing to conquer a niche and start earning the kind of money that super affiliates make you in those incessant emails that arrive in your inbox every day? Then what do you do?
I was asking myself that very question when an ad popped up in my email inbox from someone whose newsletter I had been on for a couple of years. But unlike those other annoying affiliate marketers, this one rarely makes me feel anything. Which was kind of weird because he was one of the most respected and well known super affiliates of our time. His name is Jeremy Palmer, and he was getting ready to launch something he called the Black Ink Project.
Jeremy had made his name in 2005 when he released an eBook called High Performance Affiliate Marketing, which he now gives away. In it, he detailed just about everything he knew about how to do successful pay-per-click marketing. Things that had earned him a Commission Junction Horizon Award for Innovation in 2005 and over a million dollars in affiliate revenue a year. His book went on to sell more than 5,000 copies.
But then he started to get sour at the idea of dealing with digital products. It seemed to him that the industry was awash in false promises and unrealistic marketing copy that brainwashed would-be affiliates and virtually guaranteed they would be doomed to fail.
So he took a break from dealing with large-scale affiliates and ran some experiments with a handful of affiliates that he could coach one on one. Was it possible, he wondered, to teach the things he was successfully doing to others who wanted to achieve the same level of success with pay-per-click strategies? It didn’t work with e-books, he had discovered. Very few of his eBook customers actually did anything with his new insights. He was sure that a more practical approach was needed.
My Black Ink Project Review is a summary of what he finally came up with.
As for the few lucky affiliates that Jeremy took under his wing, well, 4 out of the 5 that he mentored made over $10,000/mo from their PPC based affiliate marketing efforts. One went on (with his business partner) to earn a stellar $4 million in the next two years. You can see a video of this very affiliate on my site. Clearly the hands-on approach was far more effective than even Jeremy had thought possible.
So when that email from him showed up in my email box that morning, it was to announce that he was accepting an initial 2000 members to participate in a course that would take affiliates from an immobile position to one where they were operating in black. That is, they would have profitable campaigns.
The course turned out to be very informative and got a thumbs up from everyone. But then again, Jeremy wasn’t completely satisfied. So he ran a second version of the course, in which he allowed his audience to see everything he normally did to launch a new campaign. Everything from niche selection, keyword research, site planning and building, and final setup of pay-per-click campaigns, complete with often-overlooked ad tracking to maximize profits. This course later became known as Black Ink 2.0