Ever since I got Netflix, I've been watching a lot of movies while I work. Hands down, my favorite so far is American Gangster. I'm going to watch it one more time before I send it back.

American Gangster

The movie is based on a true story where, basically, the premise is that Frank Lucas figures out how to cut out all the middle men (that would be us in an analogy) in his drug-pushing business and a team of detectives is trying to take down the drug bosses. Great premise, even better execution by the actors (if you don't want to bother with Netflix, click the image to buy it on Amazon).

Now as for how I thought it applied to you and me -- a few parts in the movie stuck out for me. Number one was this little dialogue:

Frank Lucas: What is that you got on?
Huey Lucas: What? This?
Frank Lucas: Yeah, that.
Huey Lucas: This is a very, very, very nice suit.
Frank Lucas: That's a very, very, very nice suit, huh?
Huey Lucas: Yeah.
Frank Lucas: That's a clown suit. That's a costume, with a big sign on it that says "Arrest me". You understand? You're too loud, you're making too much noise. Listen to me, the loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.

If there's one thing you'll learn as you make more and more money, it's that Frank was exactly right. The more money you make, and the more powerful you become, the quieter you'll be. You can always tell new money and the big fish apart, just by the way they advertise themselves. I know because I'm guilty of that very sin but I am deliberately quiet now.

For one thing, no one really cares much beyond "wow, that's a lot of money" before they go on about their day and for another thing, flashy people attract leeches and nosy people. Two words: lotto winners. These days, the smart lotto winners pay millions just to keep their name private. Stupid lotto winners end up broke again.

I think you get the point. Besides, there are better ways to garner publicity.

The second line in the movie that I liked was this one:

Chinese General: It's not in my best interest to say this Frank, but quitting while you're ahead, is not the same as quitting.

If only we were smart enough at all times to live by those words. I've been there countless times. I'm sure you have as well. Many a dollar in profit has been lost to prideful ad spending. In other words, if you observing trends in your clicks-per-lead (CPL) and adjusting your advertising accordingly, you are losing money. Affiliate marketing is an art and you must develop it just like a skill.

Part of that skill is knowing when to hold and when to fold.

Aside from that, if you haven't seen American Gangster, go rent or buy the DVD and watch it right now. You won't be sorry.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Click the image to Download Ringtones

Have you ever noticed the odd things your sites get ranked for? I sure have.

Most oddly, my most common have to do with Marla Singer from Fight Club, Ringaza, Sales Speeches and random things related to Incentaclick. Sure, they get indexed for numerous reasons -- people like them, no one else cares to dominate for the terms, etc. -- but part of the beauty of this sort of thing is that it's almost transparent.

If I watch from A (posting) to Z (referring clicks from the related search), I can analyze the patterns that led from one to the other. In fact, this post itself is a test in doing just that. I'm trying to see if I can get the post ranked for any related terms -- Verizon Ringtones, Download Ringtones, Sprint Ringtones, Cingular Ringtones -- you name it.

Then, and only then, will this phenomenon become useful to both you and I. That's partly why I want to do it publicly, to see once and for all whether a simple link here and there will generate not just traffic, but targeted traffic on an authoritative blog.

It's taken some time, but I am finally beginning to rank for organic terms and have them convert into actual leads/sales. It's about three (3) per week but I'm not paying for them, so it's all gravy at that point. This post is an extension of that experiment.

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you haven't heard the story, then hold on to your socks. I just read over at Jonathan Volk's blog that super affiliate Jon Fisher, after taking a two year hiatus from the industry, made an amazing comeback over the last month.

Using social media advertising and a couple hot offers, Fisher raked in an amazing $2.2 million in revenue over the last 30 days, apparently profiting at 30%. For those of you without calculators, that's an average of $73,333.33/day in revenue and $22,000.00/day in profit.

While this kind of revenue isn't unheard of and is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. The amazing part is how he pulled it off after being out of the loop for so long:

I’m completely floored by the results, its pretty unreal. A month ago I was scrounging around for information because after taking a 2 year hiatus from the industry, a lot has changed and left me feeling very newbie’ish. Total revenue, especially from the Free Credit Report offer put me at a little over the $2.2M mark. If those damn keywords weren’t so goddamn expensive to bid on, even on the content networks, my profit would have been well over the $1M mark, but I’m definitely not going to complain, because I never thought in a million years I would comeback so strong within the first 30 days alone. Two powerful niches, with great traffic sources, and even better friends around me for support and advice make me truly happy and glad I didn’t quit and just leave.

It just goes to show, if you don't give up, you can see big results. Also, don't ignore the power of having good friends and connections in the right places.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ringtones just went Global

Not sure if you're aware, but Ringtones.com just went global.

Cellular-news.com just released a story a few days ago about how the company expanded the service to the world:

Mobile content vendor, Mobile Streams has announced that its direct-to-consumer portal, Ringtones.com, is now available to customers around the world following recent launches in Germany, Australia and Argentina.

First launched in the UK in 1999, Ringtones.com offers thousands of pieces of content from a myriad of content suppliers including leading international media companies such as Home Box Office (HBO), Sony BMG, PA Photos and Turner Broadcasting.

With over a decade of experience, Ringtones.com has compelling customer conversion rates and lifetime subscriber values and is the one-stop-shop for quality mobile content downloads. The intelligent retailing capabilities of the site ensure customer loyalty through advanced features such as: arrival reactivity which creates a personalised store for each customer based on their route of entry; dynamic content generated by order, relevance and time sensitivity; as well as a clear and simple click through purchase process.

Of course, other carriers have long offered ringtones in various countries, but I felt this was notable as it was about ringtones.com. Also I thought it would be neat to make a global ringtones graphic, however cheesy it may have turned out.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Scott recently wrote about saturated niches. If you missed that post, make sure and read it, especially the last paragraph. Niche marketing is without a doubt the way of the foreseeable future. Google makes that perfectly apparent. Gone are the "Wal-Mart" days of sites like Buy.com that stock everything but specialize in nothing. Here to stay are the small sites that sell a few of the best products at good prices, so how do you break into those niches?

Here are a few pieces of advice from someone who has successfully broken into niches with no budget and competed against companies that spend thousands per day.

1. Start with something you know. The easiest way to build a presence in a niche is through expertise. While you may not be an expert in the niche you've chosen, it's easy to fake if you know something about that niche. You may not have ever purchased office furniture, but if you've sat in it and used it for the last five years, you know something about different chairs, desks, layout, filing systems and more. Start with something you know and writing for and promoting in that niche is much easier.
2. Build a strong base before showing your colors. It is a common war tactic to try to lure the enemy into a trap. With your niche, your website is your trap, it's what wins the war (generating you a profit). So before you try to get those visitors to your website, have something to show them. If you're starting with an empty website and paying for customers, they'll leave without giving you a chance. I always have 5-10 pages of the website ready and waiting before doing any kind of marketing. This gives new customers something to look at and gives you a professional presence.
3. Never stop writing. While 5-10 pages of good content can get you a long way in your niche, you can never outgrow any niche. You might disagree, but I have been writing in one niche for 4 years. To date I have nearly 400 articles on a niche that is pretty small. Most of them are long tail keywords but just about all of them brought in a few visitors, and that is what you want.

In niche marketing you may never have the advertising budget of a Fortune 500, but that doesn't mean you can't compete with them and steal some of their customers!

Brandon Hopkins has websites dedicated to over 100 different niches and is currently working on a free website hosting project called 22 Gigs.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Saturated Niches: Not For The Weak

From weight loss to payday loans, there are certainly some niches that are nearly impossible to break into without some serious dollars up front. That is, of course, unless you're clever.

As you know, I've been doing a fair amount of research into organic affiliate marketing (AKA bum marketing). Quite obviously, the people who do the best with this type of marketing are the ones that have websites that already have a huge amount of traffic to a niche keyword and another thing I've noticed is that these sites are typically service-based vs. information-based.

Sure, article sites have their place but service-based websites keep people coming back and they bring people back in. And these days, service-based websites are also lucky enough to feature user-generated content. That means a lot less work for whoever's operating the website itself.

Now that's great and all but the thing is, not all of us are able to create social networking websites and even if we are able to, even fewer of us could market it well enough to make it work for us the way I'm talking about now.

So what's left? You've got viral marketing, which is never as easy as people like to make you think it is. You've also got things like e-mail marketing, putting banners on other peoples' sites (banner arbitrage) and, of course, pay per click. Only one of these is strong enough to do any kind of volume and it's the most difficult of all previously mentioned, so whether you want to spend the money to make it worth your while is up to you. For some, that could mean tens of thousands before they start doing real volume sales that bring them any kind of ROI. And even then, nothing is forever.

With that said, it's really up to you whether you think saturated areas are worth your attempts. While there's definitely money to be made (or it wouldn't be saturated), breaking in is far more costly than many are willing to bear. My advice? Focus on smaller niches from the start. Master two or three spins on products and once you have the money, THEN break into the more saturated markets. Hell, you can even pay developers to make you a social networking site and market the hell out of it. Saturated markets aren't for the weak as they are naturally the most competitive.

Keep that in mind.

Popularity: 4% [?]

So I'm about a week into my experiment and I actually have ranked for some long-tail keywords. The particular keywords I've chosen are high volume so they're naturally going to be difficult to break into. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this difficulty has been the rumored 'sandbox' that Google places new websites into when they're related to high volume (and therefore, high spam) topics.

I've gotten a trickle of traffic from Google for the long tail keywords and I'm on page four for both. I can definitely hear the rushing rapids of pages one and two coming up soon though. It just pushes me foreward. The funny thing about this is - I've only paid for a few websites to advertise my link. Other than that, I've been writing articles, posting in topical forums and manually submitting unique descriptions to directories (although none have kicked in yet). Oh, yes, and I've been paying people to post on the website's forum.

All this and I get page four for long tail keywords! Ouch. This could get rough.

So now I'm researching other bum marketing methods as well as just methods that just flat-out help you climb the rankings. I'm also trying to think of a few clever ways as well, like link bait articles or some sort of side service that gets people to back-link the site. It works well for my Myspace Layouts site.

So that's where I am right now. I'll keep you posted on the status of this project.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I've heard some good things about Ringtones lately and I was thinking about jumping back in it.

Are any of you still doing Ringtones?

One thing I don't like is all the extra steps that keep getting piled onto these types of offers. That, and the way the top dogs are in bed with the ringtone suppliers already.

Other than that, I think I've learned some valuable things that would make it possible to do a few thousand a day in ringtonage but I'd like to know what you guys think.

Popularity: 5% [?]

These are my top five speeches about making money/sales. Feel free to comment if you disagree but these are the five sales speeches that make me feel inspired to stop being lazy and make it happen (it being money). I say NSFW due to the use of bad language, not nudity.

Boiler Room - Group Interview

If you can watch this without being inspired in some way, you might be dead inside. I've seen this clip more than fifty times and I'm still not tired of it. You should watch this at least once a week to remind yourself why you're in this game.

Glengary Glen Ross - Always Be Closing

I hadn't seen this until today when my brother in law showed me. What's good about this is that it shows what it takes to shake people out of their comfort zone and that's what it takes to make someone a closer. If you aren't closing, you're fired.

Wall Street - Greed Is Good

I couldn't make a top five list like this without including Gordon Gekko's speech in Wall Street. It's a way to remind ourselves that what we're doing is for the benefit of man kind. Greed makes the world go 'round.

Boiler Room - Telemarketing Pitch

Pay close attention to this one. This one makes me think of the myriad of cheesy landing pages out there. People just aren't trying and it's the biggest reason you hear complaints from people. "I can't make sales." Then you get the complaints on the other side from people having to wade through all the spammy sales pitch pages. Do yourself a favor and actually SELL your audience. Go the extra mile to have them choose you over the next guy.

Jerry Maguire - Show Me The Money

It's simple: "Show me the money." Enough said.

Popularity: 11% [?]

After talking with my buddy Will today, I was shocked to find out that he has alarming proof that Incentaclick was scrubbing leads shaving sales. If you weren't privvy to the commotion yesterday on WickedFire, check out his post here-

CX Digital... Massive Fraud?

It's a well known fact that affiliate networks scrub some leads here and there and as mysterious as their reasons seem, it's usually something logical (someone signed up twice, tracking was down temporarily, etc.).

But it's only when you can compare the same offer on another network (Will has now switched the same offer to eAdvertising) that you begin to see where lead scrubbing goes from slightly annoying to down-right damaging financially. And what's worse, CX Digital's own CEO apparently called Will and tried to smooth things over. Of course, Will blew him off stating something to the effect of "I said my piece. Read the forum post. I don't want to talk to you." and hung up.

And this isn't the first time people have reported being ripped off by CX Digital. Numerous other people responded to the thread with similar stories and it's certainly not the first thread on this topic.

To me, it's a huge red flag when the top dog of the company individually calls its affiliates to smooth things over when the company is obviously at fault. Sure, it would be great if my Gmail account got disabled and Eric Schmidt gave me a ring. But that's one thing, and this is definitely another.

So, CX Digital, what gives? Isn't it bad enough that we have trust issues with affiliate networks already? In order for our relationship to function properly, I have to be able to trust you to properly track sales, leads, and to not screw me out of money that is owed to me. Without that, I have to have faith that you'll just ... get around to it.

Well, I don't know about you fine readers, but I don't have that kind of time. This is pretty bad. I don't think I'll be using Incentaclick anytime soon. How about you?

Popularity: 16% [?]