Inside Affiliate

Success: InsideAffiliate Added To AffBuzz

2009-11-03T05:11:14Z

Thanks to everyone that requested this blog on AffBuzz, as of today InsideAffiliate.net is now listed! Thanks again Justin!

Demand InsideAffiliate On AffBuzz

2009-11-02T03:12:11Z

Justin Barr created a great little website called AffBuzz. It is essentially a blog aggregator for the Affiliate Marketing industry. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should definitely check it out. It’s a great time saver and a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the world of affiliate marketing.

There’s only one problem: INSIDE AFFILIATE IS NOT LISTED ON AFFBUZZ! There are about 70 blogs listed, including the likes of JohnChow.com, but no love for yours truly.

As faithful readers of this blog, if I’ve helped, entertained, educated, enlightened, enraged, stupefied, or otherwise touched you with my posts, please do me a favor and CLICK HERE then fill out the form to tell Justin to add InsideAffiliate to AffBuzz.

Power to the people!

How To Write A Post About Local Affiliate Marketing

2009-10-16T05:51:12Z

During the last few months, there has been a rash of blog posts cropping up left and right about local affiliate marketing. There have been good ones and bad ones and then all the guest posts by Dennis Yu. All of that aside, if you are an affiliate blogger then you owe it to yourself to write one of these bad boys. Here’s how it is done…

1. Tell your readers how there is a whole new world of affiliate marketing right in their backyard, where they can be their own boss and not have to worry about the big bad networks and advertisers scrubbing all of their leads.

2. Make sure to mention that Dentists, Lawyers, Massage Therapists, Insurance & Real Estate Agents and anyone else who commonly works off of referrals are the best worst possible candidates because they understand the value of a good lead.

3. Explain to them that this is going to take some good old fashioned salesmanship on their part, because they most likely have not harnessed the power of the internet yet. If that doesn’t scare them away, then mention that there will always be squabbles over what counts as a lead at the end of the month.

4. Bring up the fact that Google Voice is amazing and that you have been using it for local lead gen forever, even though 99% of your readers can’t get an invite.

5. Throw some massive numbers around, like how the keyword “San Francisco DUI Attorney” is going for over $20 per click on the search engines. If you have the stones, substitute in your own keyword or niche to scare them away from competing with you.

6. ???

7. Profit! Enjoy shooting fish in a barrel until the next wave of young pups learns what you have been up to and spoils all the ROI for you.

Day Parting & Campaign Caps with Zango

2009-10-10T09:13:06Z

Have you ever been testing out a new PPV campaign with a budget of $25 a day and found that it’s all used up before 5pm? This is one area that PPC withGoogle AdWords has spoiled us: you can choose whether you want Standard or Accelerated ad spend, and with Standard it will evenly price out your clicks through out the day. Most PPV networks do not do this.

Today I noticed that with Zango you can actually do day parting, which is choosing which hours of the day you want your ads to be displayed. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend turning this on right away if you are testing a new campaign, but it certainly is handy if you are blowing through your daily budget without getting any conversions. In many verticals, it is not until the evening hours that they really start converting. People are home from work, kids are home from school, people are surfing the net without worrying about the boss looking over their shoulder. Besides, it’s more likely that the home computer is where the AdWare client is installed anyway.

To do this in Zango, just login to your account, click on the campaign name you want to add day parting to and click Edit Campaign. Right above the Save Changes button you will see a new link called Advanced Options. Click this and it will pop up a window with all the different days of the week and hours of the day. You can also turn specific days of the week off, like if you only wanted to run your ads during the weekend.

Along with day parting, there are also Campaign Caps on this menu. This will let you set a daily budget for specific days which overrides the Campaign-level daily budget. This is great if you are finding that certain days provide a large amount of conversions, and you want to crank up the ad spend to take advantage.

It may not seem like much, but little tools like this can really help you optimize your campaigns and squeeze every last bit of ROI out of your PPV traffic.

Staying in the Game

2009-10-10T08:54:18Z

Last night I was awake until 4am because every time I laid down to sleep, my lower back would revolt. My wife had been telling me that I needed to go to the Chiropractor, and for some reason I put it off until I was in a large amount of pain. I tend to do that… So today I went to the Chiropractor and he adjusted me, and we ended up talking for about 30 minutes about my situation. It turns out that my hours and hours upon hours of sitting at the computer and lack of exercise has led to a greatly curved lower spine, which is not good.

According to him, unless I turn things around quickly by doing core exercises and regular adjustments I will be in a world of hurt by the time I am 40. This especially sunk in because he said something similar the last time I saw him, about 6 years ago. Things are only worse now…

So now it’s time to shape up! No, Internet Marketing doesn’t compare physically to being a lumberjack, but it does take its own kind of toll on the body. I had already decided to give Weight Watchers a try, and I’m about 2 weeks into that so far. Now I’m going to add in some core exercises so that I’ll be ready when my son is born in January. I’ve got to be in shape so we can toss the ‘ol pigskin around in the yard, right?

I guess today was just kind of a wake up call for me. I want to stay in the game now, work hard, and crush it so that I can enjoy my later years. That means that I need to face facts and start taking better care of myself. It’s super easy in this industry to forget about everything but what is happening online, but until we can digitize our consciousness and upload it to the cloud, there’s still a little bit of physical maintenance that needs to be taken care of.

HasOffers: A Legit Review

2009-09-22T22:28:48Z

Since HasOffers released their affiliate network tracking platform, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the company and the product. Most of it has been stirred up either by DirectTrack competitors or people that use DirectTrack other platforms. I thought I would pitch in my 2 cents worth since I have been using HasOffers everyday for about 4 months now. This is not a paid post, and there are no affiliate links in this post.

Campaign Setup

A lot of a network’s time is spent setting up campaigns. Besides checking Stats, it’s the one activity that I do on a very regular basis, often daily. Since I’ve started using HasOffers they have updated the Campaign Setup a couple of times and added new features, but it is still very clean and to the point. You put in the name, description, tracking link, set your prices, geo-targeting, etc. and you are good to go. There are some unique features such as browser targeting (even including mobile browsers), Campaign Groups for geo-targeting multiple offers, and allowing campaigns to convert multiple times. Most of the time I don’t use these features but it is nice to have the option. Once you have it set up and hit submit, it takes you to the pixel where you can copy & paste it to send to the advertiser, or you can just click once and have it emailed to them automatically, which is very cool. Also, it creates a test link for you which saves a lot of time.

Tracking

Tracking is probably the most important aspect of a network platform. Does it track? In a word, yes. HasOffers is very accurate in tracking conversions. The default pixel type is an iFrame pixel, which seems to work better than the Script pixels that most other platforms use. It supports 3rd party pixels for Affiliates, and on my network I have it setup so that affiliates can place these themselves with automatic approval. Also, you can choose whether you want HasOffers to track All Clicks that come through an affiliate link, or just Unique Clicks. I have mine set to All, since affiliates always complain that their clicks aren’t tracking otherwise.

Creatives

The File Manager is where you upload creatives for your offers. It runs on a CDN server, and they host all your creatives so you don’t need to have a gallery somewhere else. It supports Image Banners, HTML Creatives, Flash Banners, and Offer Thumbnails (so that a picture appears next to the offer name in the interface, similar to LinkTrust). I particularly like the Flash Banner setup, it is super simple. All you need to do is upload your SWF file, tell it what the height and width are, and it does the rest. I’ve used some other setups that are a royal pain for Flash.

Reporting

I really, really like the reporting in HasOffers. First of all, it’s fast. I can tell it exactly what information I want to see, and it displays it quickly. Coming off of using DirectTrack, the difference is night and day. I used to spend a good hour or two a day just waiting for DirectTrack to load reports. I like it better than LinkTrust’s reporting as well, which I’ve always found a bit cumbersome to use. On the affiliate side, the reporting allows them to pass a “source” variable (such as Google or Yahoo) as well as 5 separate sub id variables if they choose, and they actually work. The #1 reason that affiliates login to a network is to check their stats, and this is one area that HasOffers really shines.

Affiliate Interface

HasOffers looks and feels very different than LinkTrust or DirectTrack. Both of those systems have been around for a while, and they are starting to show their age. On the contrary, HasOffers has a decidedly Web 2.0 feel to it, with soft edges and animated bar graphs for revenue and total leads generated right on the home page when affiliates log in. It looks great right out of the box, but network owners can use their own custom CSS & logos to give it their own look. Also, a new feature was added recently to select from a variety of different Themes to change up the look with one click. I have received quite a few compliments from affiliates who are logging in for the first time, it just looks a lot fresher than the other platforms.

Last Word

I think that a lot of the venom that has been spewed at HasOffers is due to the fact that they are offering their entry-level product for free. This means that the barrier of entry to creating a network has been lowered to almost nothing. I think there is some truth to this as well as some exaggeration. A network is based on trust and relationships above all else. It doesn’t matter what software they are using. Anybody who spends a lot of time and money promoting offers from an affiliate network that just popped up yesterday and has no reputation in the industry is just asking to get ripped off. Do your homework, run with people that you trust and you will have much less risk of things going wrong.

You may have heard that HasOffers’ parent company, Adapp Solutions, is owned by the owners of Tatto Media affiliate network. This is true. Does it mean that Tatto is going to steal all of your data? If you are using any 3rd party tracking platform at all, the security of your data is a concern, but the fact is that a large part of the networks in the industry are powered by them. These service providers all put a lot of work into making sure that your data is secure, and HasOffers is no exception.

I have used both DirectTrack and LinkTrust extensively, and I like HasOffers better, hands down.

Fun With Frauders: AIM Style

2009-09-18T17:23:11Z

The following is a transcription from a recent affiliate applicant to my network, TriFoxMedia (I believe he was referred from Digital Point):

hualiwei: Hello
hualiwei: Nice to meet you..
trifoxmedia: hello
hualiwei: Please review and approval of my account
hualiwei:
trifoxmedia: are you fraud?
hualiwei: NO
trifoxmedia: quality traffic?
hualiwei: Absolutely not right. .
trifoxmedia: great!
trifoxmedia: first and last name of account?
hualiwei:
hualiwei: Huali Wei
trifoxmedia: great, i’ll look at your application
hualiwei: ok,thank you.
hualiwei: Immediately over the weekend, and where to leave ah?
trifoxmedia: come again?
hualiwei: sorry..
hualiwei: My English is not very good.
hualiwei: Language you would it?
hualiwei: You are busy with work, I am still waiting for your news quiet is better, otherwise you will think that my trouble
hualiwei:
trifoxmedia: i couldnt understand your last question
hualiwei: When I think about how to say better.
hualiwei: Where to go Sunday Holiday
hualiwei: That this will get it?
trifoxmedia: congratulations! You are approved for denial.

hualiwei: Hello
hualiwei: Nice to meet you..
TFXBoone: hello
hualiwei: Please review and approval of my account
hualiwei:
TFXBoone: are you fraud?
hualiwei: NO
TFXBoone: quality traffic?
hualiwei: Absolutely not right. .
TFXBoone: great!
TFXBoone:
TFXBoone: first and last name of account?
hualiwei:
hualiwei: Huali Wei
TFXBoone: great, i’ll look at your application
hualiwei: ok,thank you.
hualiwei: Immediately over the weekend, and where to leave ah?
TFXBoone: come again?
hualiwei: sorry..
hualiwei: My English is not very good.
TFXBoone: that’s ok!
hualiwei: Language you would it?
hualiwei: You are busy with work, I am still waiting for your news quiet is better, otherwise you will think that my trouble
hualiwei:
TFXBoone: well i couldnt understand your last question
hualiwei: When I think about how to say better. .
hualiwei: Where to go Sunday Holiday
hualiwei: That this will get it?;-)
TFXBoone: congratulations! You are approved for denial.

When Inspiration Strikes

2009-09-16T22:19:27Z

When inspiration strikes, it comes hard and fast. You have the idea, everything is clear. It’s like when you wake up from a dream and everything is so vivid in your mind. The problem is, much like when the dream starts to fade after a couple of hours of your morning routine, the killer idea can fade as well. Here’s what I like to do: document every single detail that you can about the idea while it’s fresh! This doesn’t sound like rocket science, and it’s not. That being said, I can’t tell you how many times I have neglected to do it because I was sure that I wouldn’t forget it and then the next day it’s *poof* gone.

This happened a lot back in my band days. If I was sitting down at the guitar just jamming away, minding my own business, a lot of times that’s when the next killer hook for a song would show up. Sometimes it was an accident, sometimes it was playing in a different tuning than I was used to, either way it would happen and then 9 times out of 10 I would tell myself that this hook was so awesome I would never forget it. Then I put my guitar down, went and had some dinner, went to bed, and the next day at practice time I couldn’t even remember what chord the killer hook started with. To this day I am convinced that I have written way too many monster songs and then forgotten them all. What was the solution? A simple tape recorder. If I hit record, got that idea on tape, then it was there forever. Maybe I wouldn’t even come back to it until months later, but it still rocked.

You can do the same thing with your marketing ideas. Get it on paper somehow. Maybe you carry a little notepad & pencil with you everywhere (you never know when inspiration will strike), or maybe you type it into your iPhone or Blackberry, or maybe you call your own voicemail and leave a verbal copy of the idea. Next time you don’t know what to do, go through your killer ideas file, you are almost guaranteed to get fired up about a concept that you forgot and voila! Time to make some money!

That’s all for today. I’m out.

The Hot Offer Chaser

2009-09-16T05:30:42Z

The hot offer chaser is constantly looking for the next big thing. This affiliate will contact his Affiliate Managers on a weekly or daily basis to ask what the “hot offers” on the network are. The Affiliate Manager will give him a few arbitrary offers that are performing well on the network, it really doesn’t matter what they are. The hot offer chaser takes these recommendations, files them away somewhere, then goes along on his day of doing whatever it is the hot offer chaser does (it certainly isn’t marketing).

The hot offer chaser doesn’t create niches and new trends, he borrows, steals, or copies them. At least that’s what he should be doing. In all actuality he really doesn’t even do that. Why spend the time to create a landing page and a content network campaign for the offer he was just recommended when he can ask his Affiliate Manager for the new hot offers tomorrow morning?

In case you haven’t figured by now, the hot offer chaser doesn’t make any money. The hot offer chaser dreams of the day that he can have a $100 a day campaign. He is so focused on getting all of the information together so that when he finally launches that magic campaign, it can’t possibly fail. Problem is, he will never get around to it.

Don’t be a hot offer chaser. Create those hot niches. Pioneer those new marketing techniques. Be creative. Do some marketing.

Fraud Alert: Email/Zip Submit Freelancers

2009-09-11T22:53:58Z

We had a surge of bad leads on Email & Zip Submit offers on my network in August, so I’ve been digging into where this traffic is coming from. The thing that was puzzling me is that some of the fraud leads were coming from established affiliates that we know and have done business with for a long time. Weird, right?

Upon further examination & questioning, the truth came out. My affiliates were suckered into hiring freelancers that promised that they could “get lots of email & zip submit leads” for them. Of course all the freelancers were doing is submitting fake email addresses & zip codes into these offers on a massive scale. I’m assuming that they were paid up front for their services, so they don’t care what happens to the affiliate once the advertiser discovers the bad leads.

So… If you are cruising eLance or BlackHatWorld and find someone selling their “excellent” email & zip submit marketing services to you, don’t fall for it. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Long story short, here’s what will happen: you will not be paid for the fake leads, you will most likely be terminated from your affiliate network, you will scar your reputation in the industry so it will be harder to get into other networks, and you will be out the money that you paid to the freelance scammer. There are plenty of legitimate ways to promote email & zip submit offers, if you need help just ask your affiliate manager or listen to my podcast with Andrew Wee where I discuss a promotion method.

Stay classy San Diego.