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Episode 5 Part 1

WebJamAds Leaderboard Report 1:06-3:35 (2m29s)

Monica Durazo starts Episode 5 recapping yesterday’s team merge of XY7.com and ToolBarn.

$1800 Team pepperjam Network

$360.60 Team XY7.com (one former Toolbarn contestant was the only one who brought in any money.)

Team pepperjam discussion with Big J trying to eavesdrop

Elimination Time 4:08-11:29 (7m21s)

Jonathan van Clute’s team decides to give the ring to Collin De Ruyck.

Ronda Del Boccio must make her choice first and she picks Jani. She would like to see Jani show his skills more and has shown the least.

Collin De Ruyck votes Big J not for any reason and is very gracious to Big J (despite his disparaging words in private in the previous episode).

Colin LaHay also votes Big J because he is the biggest competitor and at the end it isn’t a team game.

Tom Yatar votes Collin LaHay off.

Big J Henderson votes against Collin LaHay. He explains that it isn’t logical to vote off a top player so early in the game (ie. himself) because there will be no one to defeat the strongest competition on the other team, Jonathan van Clute. If everyone votes Big J off then everyone will lose for sure.

The voting ties elimination for Big J and Collin Lahay. We see whether Jani Ghaffor will break that tie… he chooses not to.

Jani Ghaffor votes against Ronda, despit it being her birthday (also possibly because she voted against him?) and therefore leaves Guru John Chow to break the tie.

John Chow makes a lengthy speech. “Because yesterday’s team mix up Jason didn’t seem happy to join my team and also requested to go to Team pepperjam or work by himself. He isn’t happy to be here. I need a team and to build a team. I realize he can build the traffic and bring the money, but at this point I need a team, I don’t need a lone ranger, an individual. Jason has to go.”

ProFlower Confessions 11:43-14:53 (2m10s)

Jason Henderson
I can see it is a good strategy to get rid of a strong player but not early on in the game. John Chow made comments about unity and being a team. This is very interesting, considering that I have been having nothing but meetings with my real Team, Team ToolBarn. I’ve been making deals with affiliate managers that no one else has, creating landing pages, picking their offers. Evidence says he is full of it.

Actual evidence is that Chow might have a drinking problem along with the rest of the XY7 team. They are whiners and complainers and gave up because they got beat.

Team XY7.com could have killed Team pepperjam, but they were downers. John Chow is like Ken Shamrock on Ultimate Fighter, the worst coach ever. He was just on the show for Tito Ortiz.

John Chow is doing the same thing. He’s making fun of Shoemoney’s blog, shooting his own video. I think XY7 just got screwed by their own coach.

I think the current team’s chances of gelling and coming together under John Chow are practically zilch. Johny has been labelled a traitor. Colin De Ruyck is seen as a whining baby who can’t contribute anything to the team. Collin Lahay is a quitter and followed along with the plan. I would have said, “Screw you..”

They’ll get killed by Team pepperjam.

I am in the blogging idol contest, so I am trying to get as many rss subscribers as I can. I am giving away over 10k in prizes at bigmarketingonline.com just for subscribing. Looking forward to seeing Piggly Wiggly and Bunkins.

One on One with Wes Wyatt 15:25-22:30 (7m5s)

John Chow:
Tip of the day - if you are new to ppc, sign up for google adwords, it costs $5 to set up.

There are also ways to get additional free money using promotional coupon codes. Google AdWords,Yahoo Publisher, and Microsoft AdCenter have coupon codes ranging $50-200 to just sign up. Start with that money to start up your ad campaign. You can do a search for them they are everywhere…

1 coupon per new customer per credit card. There are tricks around that. Get prepaid visa, get another one, and so forth. Set up an account with Google, use a coupon from $50-250, then once the credit card is exhausted, throw it away.

Shoemoney and I area good friends, so I am looking forward to seeing Ken’s face when he sees two gurus working well together.

Ken McArthur
We took an assessment of the team’s skills, polled our members and then diversified.

So many times in other teams they go after one offer they think is a great one but we went across the networks and are generated income from 6 different networks.

The key is to getting to alot of them and diversifying skills of our assets to work as a team. One person is doing web development, another person is traffic generating. One is doing video and one is doing auto responders. We are all contributing in a way to match our individual skill sets

Team PepperJam At Work 22:31-27:29 (4m58s)

Carl Zetterlund
I am working on website development. You need a place to display your offers, a place where people can start to trust you as a marketer.

We are using a content manager system called Drupal. It is similar to Wordpress but more flexible. It is also open source software you can get Drupal at Drupal.org

ie. NotoneCent.com
Our navigation is divided into different sections and we created a video. It helps to see a person on the website, create more of a connection with the visitor.
Chad Van Norman
I am searching all of our networks looking for campaigns we can use on our website (ie. a freebie offer or survey) I look at what the ad looks like, take copy off the page and put in our aweber autoresponder.

Those who opted in to notonelist.com will receive an email about it and hopefully take the offer.

Devin Hunter
I am making a video. I take the video embedded code and put it in free classifieds like backpage.com. This is set up more for long term. I also put the ads in free content sites directing to our website.

The video has an auto play with banner and the visiotr is told to click on the banner. It then redirects to our website.

Jonathan van Clute
I am working on paid traffic and email marketing. I am using both lists I already had and also from other connections. We mail offers to those lists. We are sending mailings to drive people to our opt in page to get additional opt-ins so that we can send even more people our offers.

E-mail marketing is a numbers game. YOu have to send out as many opt-ins as you can to as big a list as you can. We continue to contact people with relevant content offers.

The challenge is the time pressure on this show. Building relationships with longer email patterns is better strategy. We are just doing direct mailing offers everyday. We would have better conversion if we built a relationship.

One on One with Wes Wyatt 27:32-30:20 (2m48s)

Ken McArthur
The strength of a leader is to delegate. Our team is wonderful in the conversations and we are always there, we are planning for long term. Everyone on our team knows to get back to the room to get on task after the meetings.

We operate as a team, live and die as a team, we have a harder task now, we need to function as a team more than ever and must win six challenges in a row.

The trend seems to be fights in the interim. If it doesn’t hit they think it is a failure, but maybe you just need to fine comb it. We test lots of things.

We knew this challenge was a marathon. We are driving traffic just as fast as we can, but also building a back end. We built a quality website so we can go back to previous people with new offers.

Episode 5 Part 2

Share Something in 60 Seconds with Jonathon Ryan 0:00-2:23 (2m23s)

Here are a few dozen websites at the contestants today say are essential to the itnernet marketer

www.StartAdCenter.com - Microsoft’s premier SEM
www.TheImpactFactor.com - Ken McArthur’s book launch
www.Entreprenuer.com - business tips and resources from A-Z
www.AdAge.com Leading voice in affiliate marketing

www.MailerMailer.com - easy and affordable email list managment services
www.ProBlogger.com - blogging 202
www.DuctTapeMarketing.com - straight market talk from industry leaders
www.RevenueSource.com - the standard in finding what you want when you want and when you need it
www.MarketingSherpa.com - practical marketing strategies and case studies

www.WordPress.com - the gateway to 3 million blogs
www.UberAffiliate.com
www.aWeber.com - creating email marketing with expert advice
www.WebStyleGuide.com - a comprehensive look at website design from beginning to end
www.ClickConsultants.com - practical advice and opportunites for the internet marketers

www.Tracking202.com - PPC’s realtime tracking services
www.OfferVault.com - 10,000 affiliate offers at your fingertips
www.AffSpy.com - gathering affiliate marketing intelligence realtime
www.TotesPromote.com - promotional products made by the blind
www.ClickZ.com - digital marketing resources and expert advice

www.WickedFire.com - discussion forum of the hottest affiliate marketing information
www.CNet.com - the buzz on everything electronic
www.Webmaster-Toolkit.com - a group of tools for any internet enthusiast

ProFlower Confessions 2:25-4:14 (1m49s)

Jeremy Schoemaker
- announces baby girl born at 11:50pm
- hospital is 4 blks from filming..so I’ll be back..
- little disappointed not a guru coach right now.
- surprised someone from his team eliminated…and asked details about how much they made…they made $300 and no one else made money.

I would like to come back in some capacity. Who knows, you might even see me work with John Chow….

[B]WebJamAds Leaderboard Report 1:10-2:25 (1m15s)[/B]

$3,707.18 Pepperjam
$ 1.60 XY7.com

WebJamAds Leaderboard Report 1:07-4:38 (3m31s)
In Episode 6, everyone is safe and will not be eliminated. Results will be reviewed and discussed.

We see all XY7.com contestants wearing PepperJam t-shirts followed by John Chow thanking Kris Jones, CEO of PepperJam for his generous donation to their PPC campaign.

$87.93 XY7.com
$1680.50 PepperJam Network

[B]Elimination Time 2:27-4:09 (1m42s)[/B]

Tom “The Furry Hat Guy” speaks first and says the team had already discussed beforehand that he would be eliminated. So he officially eliminates himself.

He explained that it was beause he was having some family concerns he had to attend to at home.

Team XY7.com all nod in agreement and get away with not having to publicly vote someone off.

[B]2 Day Individual Challenge 4:10-9:30 (5m20s) (NOTE: 5:58-6:14 (missing audio))[/B]

Only top 6 earning will survive

[I]Jeremy Schoemaker[/I] explains the rules of the game.

The contestants will use offers on AZoogle Ads as the producers can use their api statistics to see who is doing the best.

[I]The Twist:[/I]
Each of the people who have been eliminated can possibly coming back. They can compete with 50% of their earnings docked as a handicap.

[I]Prize:[/I] Slingbox Pro

One on One with Wes Wyatt 10:02-17:02 (7m)

[I]Jonathan van Clute[/I]: Data from your campaign can take anywhere from 30 days to 6 months to come through for analysis. Many beginning affiliate marketers are not properly financed An individual PPC campaign good start bid would be $0.30/click.

$0.30/click is hard to make money at with $2 offers. Here you aren’t trying to make money, you are just trying to see if it converts. Jonathan likes to make a decision within a hundred clicks. Though this is not statistically relevant, but you have to make a decision as speed is of the essence.

At this point, decisions are made on optimizing the keywords, removing losing keywords, finding winning keywords, trial and error. A $30 test may give an affiliate marketer an idea of whether that campaign will work. $100 expense test is common to determine the feasibiity of a campaign.

Once you’ve found that sweet spot, you don’t have to be on top of the campaign as much. However, it is common for an offer getting pulled, so if you are running a campaign that is greatly profitable, you don’t keep up on it and the offer has ended while you have continued to pay for clicks.

Popups, Banners, Link Exchanges, Contextual Text Points are other options other than Google Adwords. They also tend to be alot cheaper and there is traffic through these avenues.

There is also Second Tier Traffic, like Second Tier PPC search engines. These are not as common (ie. Looksmart,GoClick, Findology) but it is a volatile industry. As well, using second tier search engines in your advertising can bring alot of junk traffic.

Jonathan advises marketers to be aware of click fraud. He says advertisers like him could be victims of people using bots to click on ads on sites they control. These people are then generating themselves artificial income from the bots clicking on ads.

To minimize this risk, always watch your clicks, the IP addresses the clicks are coming from, and not be afraid to go back the the affiliate network you are using to provide proof about bogus clicks.

[B]Share Something in 60 seconds with Jonathon Ryan 17:04-21:17 (4m13s)[/B]

Steps to starting a PPC campaign

1. Log in and set up an account at AZoogleAds.com
2. With hundreds of ads offered for you to pitch, you can filter them to those you are comfortable representing.
3. Every offer has a #, a name, a description of the advertiser’s intent, a list of incentives or limitations the campaign may have
- details include: can a marketer use a web address a ppc trick, or email campaign, and what keywords can/can’t use
- spoofing not allowed
4. Preview the offer

5. Create your launch (ie. thru www.googleadwords.com)
6. Provide general info
- name your campaign account
- name your ad group
- miscellaneous other preferences
7. Create your ad title and 2 line description, and insert the url of the offer from azoogeads
8. If you run a Keyword Campaign vs a Placement campaign (which uses URL’s as prompts) the keywords you choose determines who will see your ad. GoogleAds usually has suggested words you can use as a default
9. Set your budget cost per day and cost per click

One on One with Wes Wyatt 21:52-25:24 (3m32s)

[I]Wes Wyatt:[/I] Who do you see will be in the top 6 of this challenge?

[I]Ken McArthur:[/I] I see at least 4 of the members from Team PepperJam being in the top 6. But our whole team probably won’t take up all the slots.

Ronda Del Boccio has a great work ethic but is not as familiar in the affiliate arena.

Other competitors are very serious and may step up to the plate on a one on one challenge.

[I]Collin Lahay:[/I] Jonathan van Clute, Ian Fernando (only if he wants to get back in), Jason Henderson, and the other 3 are up for grabs

[I]Collin de Ruyck:[/I] Collin LaHay, Jonathan van Clute, Carl Zetterlund, Ian Fernando (even with the handicap), maybe Tom if he wants to

Jason Henderson, Jonathan van Clute, Ian Fernando (if he decides to take part), Carl Zetterlund, Collin LaHay

[I]John Chow:[/I] van Clute, Collin Lahay, Collin De Ruyck, Jason Henderson (if he choose to go back in), Carl Zetterlund.

The only win that counts is the last one, it doesn’t matter if you lose consistently, as long as you win the last one, you are the winner.

Proflower confessions 25:25-26:30 (1m5s)

[I]Carl Zetterlund:[/I] John Chow is a total joker anyway. His blog is only so popular because he gamed Google and Digg, he is pretty much banned from all of them. I am not surprised he is goofing off.

It’s almost like he thinks it is a guru challenge or something because he doesn’t care about his contestants, he’s not really teaching them anything…that kind of sucks…”

[I]Collin Lahay:[/I] John Chow games systems, that’s what he does, that’s what he’s good at, they brought him on here to make money. But aside from making money, the one thing he knows is how to work a system,when he finds a hole to exploit he does it. To him, this show, he found an exploit in it and so far he’s been working it. when he said that the last competition is the one that matters, he is right, he’s got permanent immunity. To him the last match is where it’s all at.”

[B]One on One with Wes Wyatt 26:31-27:58 (1m27s)
[/B]
Ken McArthur: It’s a sad situation. I think it is sad for the members… Things come from the top down. Attitude is set from the beginning. Our team is really serious with what we are doing. We tried to make sure we were covered no matter what happened, because there are always surprises.

For my personal tastes, there is way too much stuff going on. This is a serious competition. We are in it to win it and the people who came to this event were serious about being here.

If that attitude gets polluted then it is a sad thing.

[I]Collin De Ruyck:[/I] If I can’t win this show, then I want someone to win this show that deserves and needs and will benefit from it 100%

If there are people here getting in the way of that, because there are alot of people here who could benefit from being here, I’m going to call them out on it.

[I]John Chow:[/I] I’ve been known for exploiting weaknesses in systems, that’s what I do. I find a weakness in Google, so I become #1 there.

I found a weakness in Digg, that is how I got to the front page because it is another system, so I am doing exactly what I’ve done. I am finding weaknesses in a system and exploiting those weaknesses.

Proflower Confessions 28:46-33:53 (5m7s)

[I]Jonathan van Clute:[/I] A mentor once said, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

I really find that to especially be true here. I am watching whats going on between the people here. I am watching the way that they do anything and I am seeing it in how they do everything.

Doesn’t matter what it is, you either take it seriously or you don’t. You’re either a goofball or
you’re a hardworker.

I am just seeing that over and over how everyone is doing any little thing, it is pretty much how they do everything.

Collin Lahay: I think the show is mainly for the contestants. I don’t think the Guru’s need anymore publicity. I think people know who they are.

Ken McArthur: I’ve heard a few strategies and it really comes down to sacrificing a team for a last ditch effort.

I’d really hate to see that in anyway. I think that the people who came to this competition shouldn’t be competing against a Guru. They are really here to prove what they have and to step up to the plate themselves.

We want to help them through this process but this shouldn’t be a contestant against guru competition. That’s not a fair match. If that’s the strategy to just sacrifice your team for your own individual glory, that doesn’t line up for me.

Carl Zetterlund: I pretty much overheard what John Chow was going to do for the rest of the competition. It entails losing everyday, losing all his teammates, and since he knows he’ll be one of two Gurus left in the end, he’ll have one person left for sure. He’ll just spend all the money, All the money is collected and the resources and call a network or one of these affiliate networks and get money inserted in the campaign. He pretty much thinks there is no way to combat this.

Collin De Ruyck: The purpose of this show is to crown a contestant, the Gurus are already well known.

Jonathan van Clute: John Chow has a pocketful of cash and when he gets down to one contestant, whoever it is, he is just going to buy the win by using the pepperjam bonus referral system, or something like that, and inject a whole bunch of money into the account and win the show.

Is this even possible, how would that work? He has absolutely no regard for the contestants who wanted to be on this show so badly. This is a life’s dream to get this exposure and eyeballs on what they are doing. Chow is throwing them under the bus in turn and doesn’t care who is left in the end. He can say, ‘Ha! I was the Guru who had the winning contestant on Top affiliate Challenge’.

We were scratching our heads asking why isn’t anything going on with him. We find it is actually a deliberate play. This is just messed up.

We all came here to do our best. We did not come here to go halfway or to get in the 10%, 50%, 90% effort. We came here to be ALL IN.

I came prepared to win.