Pick a Good Web Host For Your Incentive Marketing Business

To make money with incentive marketing, you need a lot of traffic. And to handle a lot of traffic, you need some decent web hosting. I'm not talking about those cheap-o web hosting either. You know, the kind that costs $3.95 a month. If you're so cheap that you don't want to spend money on decent web hosting, then don't bother with incentive marketing or even CPA marketing at all.

That said, not all shared hosting is bad. There are some decent web hosts in this space, including Hostgator and BlueHost. They can't handle thousands of dollars worth of traffic, but they should be ok for medium sized budgets. The thing about shared hosting, is that you are sharing your server with a bunch of other people. So even if you aren't using all your server's resources, someone else on your server could be. They could slow down your sites, or even worse, cause them to go down.

There's nothing worse then being in the middle of a media buy for your campaign, and your fricking server craps out on you. Paying for clicks that lead to no where is probably the worst feeling in the world. Check out this post that shows what can happening when your web host screws up.



I know most marketers are reluctant to invest in dedicated hosting, but at least look into investing in a decent VPS hosting provider. A company like WiredTree, BurstNet, ServInt are reliable companies and you can get VPS hosting from them for around $50 a month. This should be enough to handle traffic from your pay per clicks ads or medium sized media buy.

Remember, before sending a surge of traffic to your chosen web host, test it out first with a smaller campaign. See that your chosen host can handle the traffic first before scaling up. It's better to lose $100 on a small campaign, then a few grand on a big one.

So keep this in mind, before you start scaling your CPA campaigns up. Sometimes incentive marketers don't think about things like this until it bites them in the ass later. So don't say I didn't warn you.

Adscend Media Review

Adscend Media is one of the main incentive marketing affiliate networks out there, competing with the likes of CPA Lead, Blam Ads, and Leadbolt. It offers it's own content gateway solution for monetizing content, a virtual rewards platform for monetizing digital goods like online games and services, and a diverse set of incentive offers for affiliate marketers. Overall, they mainly target the US market, and reach millions of consumers each day.

If you are an affiliate marketer, Adscend media does offer quite a bit. They have a real good support team, and your affiliate manager will be your best friend. Ask them to suggest the best offers to run and ways to promote their offers. Offer wise, Adscend Media has a diverse set of incentive offers to choose from, both US and International. One unique feature that Adscend offers is their SuperURL tool. This cool product helps you to create urls that split test and geo-target to relevent offers. Adscend media offers Net 30 payments, although you can get better terms if you drive enough volume.

Like other incentive networks in this space, Adscend Media has its own content gateway. This lets webmasters generate revenue from their content. If their content is compelling enough, like a cool video or download, webmasters can make good revenues using the Adscend content gateway. The gateway is completely customizable, and you can design your gateway how you like it, using the built in templates. To install the content gateway on your site, you just need to add a small piece of javascript to your page.

Developers can take advantage of Adscend Media's virtual rewards platform. This allows you to monetize your online products, especially games and software. Mobile is a rapidly growing market, and you can monetize your mobile solutions using the virtual rewards platform as well. Adscend Media offers an easy to use API which you can incorporate very easily into your product.

All in all, Adscend Media is an incentive network worth joining. If you are an ad publisher, looking to make some extra cash, definitely give them a look.

http://adscendmedia.com

Blam Ads Excedo 3.0 Content Gateway Is Out!

I was pleasantly surprised when I logged into my Blam Ads account the other day to see that they had finally released their Excedo 3.0 content gateway. This new content locking technology is awesome, and I've been testing it out on some of my sites. The results so far have been quite promising, and I think it has the potential to make me quite a bit more money. So first, let me introduce you to some of its features.

The main highlight of the Excedo 3.0 is that it will automatically select the best converting offers to display on your content gateway based on your conversion rate and EPC. Self-optimizing content locking gateways! How cool is that? If you have been using content gateways in the past, you know that the hardest part of becoming profitable is picking the right offers to run. For many people, rotating offers by hand is too time consuming, and that's why most affiliates fail at this kind of marketing.

The second cool thing about Excedo 3.0 are the templates that it comes with. For people who don't have time to design their own content gateway templates, you can just use the pre-made ones. Which kick-ass by the way and they are going to be adding new templates as time goes on as well. As you know, a good looking template that matches your site is key to getting people to getting people to complete the offers on your CPA gateway. If you have an ugly looking template, then you're basically going to just chase away all your visitors.

Finally, if you have been getting mobile traffic, Excedo 3.0 is the first content locking content gateway that helps you make money with mobile traffic. It's been perfectly optimized for iPhone, Android and other mobile smartphone platforms so you can start taking advantage of the exploding mobile market. This is going to rock, and you should get in on this while the market is still unsaturated.

I love what I've been seeing from Blam these days, and their new technology has certainly leapfrogged the competition. If you are already a Blam member, you can already access Excedo from your account. Take advantage of it and start making some big bucks.

Online Advertising Services For Incentive Advertisers

If you are looking for a place to advertise incentive offers, there are only a few online advertising services that really specialize in this option. When looking for a place to advertise your offers, you should keep the following things in mind.

An online advertising service should:

• Work with thousands of QUALITY affiliates


• Ensure that affiliates are generating QUALITY leads


• Good compliance and brand protection departments


• Understands advertiser quality metrics


• Have a team in place that works directly with you to help you optimize your offer

In the incentive advertising space, there are four well known online advertising services.

BlamAds - Run by Ryan Eagle, who is well known in the incentive and CPA space. Blam and it's parent network EWA have some the highest quality affiliates around. Since they are a private network, they can pick and choose who to accept.

CPALead - Probably the best known incentive network. They've been around for a long time now.

Adscend Media

LeadBolt

As an incentive advertiser, I would probably look at Blam as giving the most bang for your advertising buck. Blam does a good job of keeping your lead quality high, and affiliates love them, so you will always have affiliates pushing traffic to your offers.

It's important when choosing from among these online advertising services to pick the one that will get you the highest return on investment. There's no use trying to capture leads for your offers if they all turn out to be fraudulent. So please do your homework first.

So take the time to do your research, and pick the online advertising service that works best for you.

Adsense Alternatives - Why Incentive Marketing Is Better Than Adsense

Are you trying to make a living earning money with adsense? You might think that sticking some adsense ads on your website is all you need to do. Unfortunately, to make good money with adsense, you need to have to be getting a lot of traffic, for the right keywords.

Sure there are some tools that tell you the CPC of certain keywords, but in reality, it's all a crapshoot. Who wants to make an adsense site and discover after it gets some traffic, that the adsense ads on your site aren't making much money?

That's why I feel that incentive marketing is one of the best adsense alternatives out there.

Here are a few reasons why.

1) You know the exact payout of an incentive offer before you start to promote it. In general, payouts are higher too. With adsense ads, you never know how much a single click will pay you.

2) You can incentivise incentive offers...hence the name! With adsense ads, you aren't allowed to draw attention to them or ask people to click on them. With incentive offers you definitely can! This means better conversion rates and more money for you.

3) You have more flexibility when promoting incentive offers. You can promote them using banner ads on your website, you could create your own incentive rewards site, add them to content gateways, and many other methods as well.

4) With Google adsense, your earnings are based on the whims of Google. If Google changes its Adsense payouts, you have no way of knowing. Plus, they can boot you of the program whenever they feel like and there is nothing you can do about it. With incentive marketing, at least there are alternative incentive ad networks out there that you can join.

Basically, if you are just sticking with adsense ads on your website, then you are severely limiting yourself. With incentive offers, you open up your site to better earning potential. The most innovative incentive marketers are making thousands of dollars a day. This is why incentive marketing is one of the best adsense alternatives out there.

Ads On Your Website For Incentive Offers

One of the easiest ways to make money with incentive advertising is to just put some ads on your website. There are plenty of incentive offers that you can use that will work well with this method. In terms of ad types, banner ads will probably work best, and be the most common ads on your website.

The important thing is to include a good call to action in your banner. For incentive offers, that means to include your incentive as well! Without a good incentive, you aren't going to see good conversions.

Creating Ads Yourself

Creating banner ads isn't actually very difficult. You can create them using a sophisticated software like Photoshop, or just grab a free copy of Paint.net. You don't need to be a great artist as well. In fact, ugly banner ads are often the most effective. Read this post by Mr Green for some good examples of this. I've had lots of success with creating banner ads that are mostly text and maybe a single picture.

When creating ads for your website, try to stick with the common banner sizes. My favorites include 468 x 60 (full banner), 300 x 250 (medium rectangle), and 728 x 90 (leaderboard).

Outsourcing

Perhaps you don't trust your own design skills to create your own ads? That's ok, you can always pay someone. The problem is finding a good designer, which can often be difficult to find. The first place, I would look is to go to a site like Fiverr. There are some decent designer on the site, and they'll do your work for just $5! Pretty cool stuff. This is probably the best way to get good looking ads for your website.

Another option, is a crowdsourcing site like 99designs. This is a decent option, although you will pay quite a bit more money compared to Fiverr. However, you will have the option of looking at several different banner ad designs at once, so you can compare and pick and choose the best of the bunch.

Conclusion

When the proper banner ads on your website, and the right type of traffic, you can easily make a lot of money with incentive offers. Having the incentive in your call to action, provides the proper kick to get great conversions. Add some ads on your own website and see how it performs for you.

Intro To Incentive Marketing

Many affiliate marketers have heard about Cost-Per-Action (CPA) marketing. It's an extremely lucrative way of making money online, especially with paid traffic using methods like PPC and PPV. Did you know though, there is a subclass of CPA marketing called incentive marketing? This is where you can offer visitors incentives to complete offers, and when they do, you get paid!

This is an extremely good business to get into, especially if you do it right. You can promote incentive offers using many of the same techniques as regular CPA offers. But you can monetize these offers in other unique ways as well. One of these, is through content locking technologies like content gateways. These are scripts you setup on your site that prevent visitors from accessing content on the page until they fill in an incentive offer.

With the right type of traffic, you can make tons of money following this model. It's quite lucrative.

While there seem to be 1000s of CPA networks out there, there are only a handful that cater to incentive marketers. They are:

CPA Lead
BlamAds
LeadBolt
Adscend Media

There aren't too many blogs that specialize in incentive marketing, so that's why I'm starting this one up. Add this blog to your RSS feed, and come back to it daily. I'm going to show you how to make some money using incentive marketing.