Make a Better Living Blog

In baseball-crazed Boston, sponsoring the Red Sox earned Exotic Flowers a marketing award and a mass of new fans.

When it comes to our drinks, green isn’t just for tea anymore. Break into the beverage industry and find success in going green–from the ground (water) up.

I have been exceedingly frustrated at times by technology being abused to the point of causing schisms within our industry… For years now I have worked to outline a model for adware behavior

It’s the end of an era. After 8 years of being online, one of the most offensive and successful web sites is finally closing up shop, the one and only TShirtHell.com. I’m sure most of you have seen the site at least once in your online journeys, but if not, the site thrives off selling some of the most offensive shirts you can buy. Whether it’s race related, or even making fun of serious attacks against our own country, TShirtHell has always found a way to cash in. Even with a bad economy, they are still selling over 3,000 tshirts a week.

With approximately 100,000 unique visitors per month and over 500,000 pageviews daily, TShirtHell ranks among the top tshirt retail sites as well as humor sites on the internet. Not only will the owner of the site, Sunshine Megatron (formerly, Aaron Landau Schwarz), be taking a hit on the income from the site going down, but also all of the affiliates who have signed up and promoted their tshirts for years. Through their affiliate program, TShirtHell was/is paying $4 for every shirt sold through their site, resulting from your affiliate link.

Now that you know TShirtHell’s background, let’s recap on why Sunshine Megatron is finally shutting the web site down. Apparently, he just can’t take it anymore! You can read the final farewell letter on their site. In short, Sunshine is taking his profits and closing up shop, in hopes to never see another “stupid” email again from people visiting his site and complaining about his shirts…. but what do you expect with such shirts as “The School Shootings Tour” and “What About All The Good Things Hitler Did“.

Just a small sample of the offensiveness offered at TShirtHell.com

Reality hit the site’s owner hard back a few years back when Sunshine Megatron was poisoned by someone who was offended by his site. This action resulted in the site removing their “Worse than Hell” section… but was soon active again, as they did not want to be the victim of others.

The site is in their final two weeks and are giving 10% off of everything and are due to close on Feb 10, 2009. As mentioned in his goodbye letter, Sunshine Megatron has no plans to keep the site up, or sell it for millions… he wants to go out in style and tell you all to go to Hell!

Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!

With a new administration, there’s sure to be more changes to U.S. trade policy. Here are eight areas you should be paying particular attention to.

Learn the difference between a patent, trademark, and copyright and how to avoid big mistakes when setting them up.

Toolbars are a very heated industry topic and I applaud Brian Littleton from Shareasale for taking the issue head on and creating a roundtable discussion about the topic

He’ll be discussing current trends and citing examples of successes that retailers have had with mobile marketing. He’ll also share opportunities that exist within the mobile space for affiliate marketers.

I previously wrote about how to find people in the affiliate industry through AIM Instant Messaging and their Twitter accounts. While many individuals are listed, the vast majority aren’t. I wanted to pull together a list for you of some of the more well known Affiliate Networks that are currently using Twitter.

Whether they use twitter to just post announcements on new offers to the network, or actually provide some useful information, you never know when you might need another resource to contact these guys.

	Advaliant (Twitter)
	Convert2Media (Twitter)
	Motive Interactive (Twitter)
	Market Leverage (Twitter)
	ClickBooth (Twitter)
	Buy.at (Twitter)
	Neverblue (Twitter)
	Rextopia (Twitter)
	MaxBounty (Twitter)
	Linkshare  (Twitter)
	affiliate.com (Twitter)
	PepperJam (Twitter)
	XY7 (Twitter)
	Shareasale (Twitter)
	AmpedMedia (Twitter)

If you know of any other useful affiliate networks using Twitter, feel free to list them in the comments section and I will have them added to the list.

Don’t forget to visit www.ZacJohnson.com and comment on new posts! Top Commenters are rewarded with fun prizes every month!

I just realized today how absent I’ve been from this blog. I don’t really know what’s going to come out in the post, as usual I’m just doing it on the fly. So I guess I’ll try and explain what I’ve been up to lately.

ASW Vegas/Early January

I did not attend ASW Vegas for a couple reasons. One being that I’m not 21 and just watching everybody gamble would make me want to cry. Second being I wouldn’t be allowed into the actual conference, which I have described about 1,000 times how RETARDED that is. I also felt like I needed a break from affiliate marketing and life in general.

So I decided to go on a road trip. Me and 4 of my friends drove straight from NY to Disney World in Florida, I was able to hook us up with a suite with Amex points so they were able to cut down on a lot of their costs. We had a total blast and every single day was nothing but fun. Except for the fact that…

Affiliate Marketing Meltdown

All I had been hoping for that was when I went on the road trip, everything with AM would be going fine. I wasn’t going to spend a minute doing work – and I didn’t. But a part of me just laughed and knew something would go wrong.

So in a nutshell, I have a personal bank account and a business bank account. All my affiliate revenue goes into my business bank account, and I just put what I need into my personal bank account (so it doesn’t have that much). Well for some reason I had my old personal Amex Platinum on one of my advertising accounts, and it racked up $75k in like a week and a half. I needed to go to the bank and shift 75k to my personal account, but obviously being in Florida didn’t allow that to happen and I didn’t want to have to try to find a bank in Florida and deal with it. I was on vacation and I was NOT going to work.

So I just shrugged it off and Amex froze my account. Which wasn’t a big deal either because the very next day both of my advertising accounts got slapped. Google got slapped, and Facebook disabled my whole account. The FB thing didn’t make any sense and I got it turned back on today, but the Google slap I had coming. Basically EVERYTHING got shut down, and surprisingly I didn’t let that affect my vacation at all. I got back home and got on the grind, and I’m about halfway to where I currently was. My employee put together a graph for us to laugh at, so I figured I’d share it haha. This is January :

Today I think will be 6k profit about, so the climb back to 10k is en route.

Google Updates

Just to kind of share my experiences with Google, nothing has really changed at all for me over the past few months. Go to the Adwords category of my blog and not much has changed from that information.

You can still use the destination URL trick. They still slap you out of nowhere. You still have to bid high to start and then lower bids.

Facebook Updates

Facebook has been a changing beast, in bad ways. ANYTHING diet related they know to disapprove instantly. Even if you want to cloak your ads, getting decent adcopy through will be hard because they can sniff it out. You can cloak in other verticals though and still get it through, but eventually they’re probably going to catch and disapprove it.

The trick to Facebook traffic is just volume of ads. You can make 50 ads with a $500 budget. If you delete 45 of the ads, the remaining 5 won’t spend $500 (assuming you’re just maxing out your volume). So when I have Matt make a Facebook campaign, he usually makes around 50-100 ads per campaign. That’s how you get volume. Getting things approved helps too, lol.

Employees Rock

Seriously, go out and hire one. Find a smart Chinese kid at your local college and pay him $8/hr and tell him he gets to work out of your house and gets to come to work naked if he wants. It’s worth it.

Matt is now to the point where he can create new campaigns, run, and manage them without my help. I usually have to get initial things going, make the right landing page, and give him some ad copy. But other than that, he can replicate and manage things which is REALLY nice. It gives me more time to talk to my contacts and set up better deals. And gives me more time to play Xbox.

Secret Plans

I’ve been working a lot recently on some secret plans which I’m not going to talk about right now. Maybe in a month I can speak more about it, but it’s been taking up a good portion of time recently.

Referrals Kickin’ Ass Seabass

I usually get about 95% noob referrals that never make me money (due to the nature of this blog I guess), but this month I’ve actually brought in some nice change from referrals. Here’s roughly what each network has made me this month :

CX Digital (92 referrals) : $1,300
Hydra (68 referrals) : $1,200
Neverblue (223 referrals) : $800
Azoogle (40 referrals) : $200

Judging from the crappy 2% I get (5% of the profit they make from Hydra which is even crappier), my referrals have done around $175,000 revenue in January. Not bad guys! Most of it came from a few affiliates, so more power to them.

The Future

What’s in my future? Ermmmmm…probably a checklist :

-Keep doing what I’m doing
-Secret plans
-More road trips and crazy fun stuff
-Trip to Cali next month to meet with a business partner
-ad:tech San Fran in April
-ASE this summer WHERE I WILL BE 21
-Hopefully blogging more

LOST is on soon, so see ya!