Liveblogging the Super Affiliate panel

– John Chow talks about his start on the web. Talks about the first site he created in 1999, which was a content site, and then moved to affiliate sales on that site. Says his blog came along because he wanted a place to write about stuff that interested him. Never intended for it to make any money, just wanted a place to talk about what was on his mind. Says his blog is now the biggest personal blog in the world. I doubt that.

– Kris Jones introduces himself. He’s the CEO of PepperJam and talks a little bit about the history of Pepperjam.

– Zac Johnson talks about his history on the web. Started with Amazon doing content sites and selling affiliate links. Kris Jones tells him what everyone really wants to know is how he makes $800,000 a month. Zac says he hates it when someone attacks the industry (no doubt talking about Jason Calacanis) and wants everyone to succeed. Says he loves the industry and wouldn’t give it up for anything else.

– Kris Jones talks about Zac’s reference to Jason Calacanis’s comments yesterday. Says Jason is a flamboyant speaker, that he says things as HE sees them, and doesn’t really speak the entire truth all the time because he doesn’t know anything about it. says that each of the panelists today have a story and that they are all a success. Says that Zac is one of the most humble people he knows.

– Speaking of people who are NOT humble, Amit starts talking. Amit has a PHD in physics and used to work at MIT’s lab. Talks about his start in affiliate marketing, says that PPC arbitrage (direct linking) was the way he started making real money. He used his physics knowledge to do PPC and started making 10 grand a month. Quit his job a few months later and went full time on affiliate marketing.

– Kris asks John how he got the large readership he got. John says he started by creating content, but the real break was getting a post on the front page of Digg. He eventually had almost 30 posts hit the front page of Digg, and decided to put advertising on the blog. Made $350 the first month from AdSense, and this past month he made $30,000 from the blog.

– Kris says that Amit’s approach to blogging is different than Chow’s. Amit is more selective about what offers he talks about and uses. Says that everyone uses a different strategy to become a super affiliate. Amit finds a niche and builds unique content, optimizes for SEO, and uses highly segmented and targeted PPC traffic. Says he has a long term goal for everything he does, tries to figure out how to make money from an offer 6 months to 2 years from now. Tries to figure out how to maintain a niche without doing much work instead of working 80 hours a week, thus giving him more leverage.

– Kris talks about Zac’s check from Yahoo for several hundred thousand dollars and the huge profits he gets. Zac says his website is myspacenow.com, says he walks readers step by step through how he makes money. Says he was pushing over 180,000 uniques per day on the site, all the ads on the website were bringing in ton of revenue. Hasn’t touched the website in a year and a half and it’s still generating huge profits for him every month.

– Kris asks Zac if he’s a programmer and Zac says no. Says that MySpaceNow has over 10,000 pages of content and all were created by hand. I find this hard to believe.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

Q: For Amit, a question about PPC and how Amit uses PPC. How does he balance selling with creating great content?

A: Says that he does split testing, that creating great content for his landing pages makes conversions go through the roof. Says that his PPC keywords represent a problem that the reader has, and his landing page presents the solution. The landing page talks about the keywords and tries to help the user solve his problem.

Q: PPC is a great way to make money out of the gate. Are the panelists fearful of the PPC space becoming more restrictive in the near future, with trademarks being banned, etc.

A: Amit says that agencies focus on trademarked terms because they rely so well, but that affiliates can’t do that because it’s already restrictive. Says that his campaigns are long-tail focused and his trademark term conversions are very low, he makes all his money from long tail groups of hundreds of keywords. Kris adds that Google is already very restrictive on what affiliates can do, so focusing on long tail terms is the way to go. Ultimately it’s a very challenging issue. John Chow says he barely does PPC and does content more. Zac says he also doesn’t do PPC very much.

Q: Question about black-hat stuff, how will it hurt him.

A: Amit says the biggest way it can hurt him is he can wake up one morning and his income is gone and then he’ll have to go back to working a real job. Chow asks if the guy wants to make money long term or short term, and the guy says he just wants to make money, period. Chow says it’s just a business decision. Jones says it was a startling question and encourages the guy to keep in mind that there’s an incredible amount of risk to black hat marketing. Google has rules in place that really make it tough to make long term money using black hat techniques, says that he encourages everyone to stay in the gray and white areas. Says that people should follow Zac’s method of hard work and long-term planning. Amit says that black hat is complicated and that white hat takes the same amount of effort but is more long term.

Q: Paul Bourque asks for suggestions on combating black hat guys, talking about the famous ringtone guy who basically stole entire pages of Adsense for certain keywords and talking about people stealing content.

A: Chow says he stopped counting how many sites scrape his RSS feed. Says that he sends an ad into his RSS feed, might as well monetize the people who are stealing his content. Amit says the way he combats it is by developing a very sophisticated business system. Yeah, we get it — you’re brilliant.

Q: Asks Amit about his domain strategies for BlueWidgets.com.

A: Amit has an umbrella domain that houses all his domains and niches. For his segmented traffic, he gets targeted domains as subdomains or alias domains.

Q: Kris Jones asks the panel what’s hot right now.

A: Zac says social networking, Facebook, MySpace. Amit says he and Zac are working on a Facebook app, says that Facebook apps are the hottest thing out there right now, demand is out of control. Create a game, create something interactive that people will want to share with their friends, and monetize it with a PPA offer. Chow says he’s hiring Facebook developers, so it seems like that’s a consensus among the panel. Talks about people making 1 million on Facebook apps in seven days.

Q: What are the best PPC engines besides the obvious ones?

A: Amit says to stick with Google, Yahoo and MSN. He’s tried out other ones and they’re just total junk traffic. Conversion rate is highest from MSN, then Yahoo, then Google, but Goog sends the most traffic. Says that Yahoo and MSN convert better because Google users tend to be more web savvy about online purchases. Zac agrees that MSN and Yahoo convert better than Google.

A: Amit says that positions 3-5 are the sweet spot for conversions. Talks about WinnerAlert.com, says it’s a great tool for PPC guys. Says that constant split testing of ads is the way to get huge profits. Talks about his physics background again, blah blah.

Q: Question about what days of the week are the most profitable.

A: Amit says it depends on the niche you’re in. This is pretty much the Amit Mehta Show at this point.

Q: How do these guys get higher paying offers?

A: Zac says it’s all about relationships. Work with an affiliate manager than you know and trust, and provide them with a lot of volume, and you’ll be rewarded. Amit agrees.

Q: Does Amit see affiliates adapting to quality score?

A: Amit says savvy affiliates adapt to the quality score. Amit is adding fresh content consistently, most of the time has a blog on his site that is constantly updated. Quality Score has to do with how involved people are on your site, how many times they’re visiting and how many links they click on while there. Kris talks about Quality Score factors, including CTR, relevance, etc. Quality Score is critical — the lower your quality score, the more costly it’s going to be to rank on any ads. The higher your Quality Score, the higher your profit margin. Seems like good math to me. Amit uses one keyword per ad group, uses Efficient PPC to do his ad groups.

Q: Do any of the panelists use stand along software? And do sites like WinnerAlert keep keywords and use them?

A: Amit says that he trusts WinnerAlert. Says he uses AdWords Editor to manage his ad campaigns, it’s absolutely free.

And that’s a wrap. More thoughts later.