One event in particular this year at the Affiliate Summit West 2012 that stands out is MUNDOmedia’s party. Mundo has put on some awesome shindigs in the past, and this year should be no different. They’ve rented out the awesome Gold Boutique Nightclub and Lounge in the ARIA hotel, and will turn it into a “premier Gentlemen’s Club”. They’ve hired some incredible entertainment including world-famous burlesque dancers, and put together a really fun night for everyone so it should be a crazy night.

To check out the party website and to RSVP, click the banner below, but I would definitely recommend checking this party out.

It’s only a temporary change but I wanted to get it up and running in a basic format so people can still access it etc.

Please bear with me.

EDIT: This should now be all fixed

Anyway, I’ve never been that savvy when it comes to mysql, my server or anything like that – I mean the host I’m with has great customer service so if I have any issues then I can get a response reasonably quick and the issue resolved.

I launched a couple of campaigns and about half hour into it everything went tits up, my server went down and I wasn’t able to login to FaceBook to pause the traffic for some reason so there was nothing I could really do without consulting my host.

I submitted a ticket and had to just wait until somebody replied saying they would take a look and report back – anyway it was all way over my head but they just checked the log of my server and found the error and corrected it.

I can’t really remember the specifics so I apologise for the vague post but I’m sure it was something to do with my prosper domain having some sort of conflict.

Moral of this post is that I could have probably fixed that myself within 5 minutes if I a) knew how to do basic server maintenance b) knew what I was looking for and c) knew how to rectify the problem.

From them I’m making it a goal so that I can fully understand and manage just the basics to start with so if anything was to happen again I’m not just say wasting money waiting for somebody to help me out.

Don’t take everything for granted as sometimes things out of your control just happen so you need to be ready to get things working smoothly again, imagine if this was an expensive media buy or something – I was still pissed that I lost a few hundred bucks due to my ignorance.

I do remember trying something similar (different niche) about 9 months ago on FaceBook, if I remember rightly it was dating, something I’ve never really tried out but to cut a long story short it flopped so I didn’t really go anywhere.

I’ve always wanted to take the faster route to getting things tested, doing everything myself so it’s exactly how I want it and I can set the pace of getting things done. Including the translation using Google translator – this could have been the sole reason that my previous small attempt did so badly.

From now on I will be using OneHourTranslation for all of my translations, my main reasoning to not use them was because when I come up with an idea I want it launched now, not have to wait around for an hour before I can get any landing page or ad text translated – I was pleasantly surprised when they completed a project of mine within 20 minutes of me creating an account.

Most of you will probably know of these guys and the quality they provide but I came across a coupon for them which is the main reason (I’m not sure if this is for new accounts only but it’s worth a try if to see):

Coupon code: FACEBOOK

That gives you 25 words free, it’s not a lot but can get some ad text translated to test out.

Just out of curiosity I pasted what they gave me into Google translate and it came back perfect, but when I put the English version into Google there were slight variations so this could mean make or break on a campaign if you are speaking incorrectly to your crowd.

Let’s put a hypothetical character in place, say called Ricardo. Anyway a good couple of months ago Ricardo newly joined a fairly popular network for one offer that they had that others didn’t – ran a small test and discovered it performed terrible, I mean like zero conversions over a good couple of hundred clicks (bear in mind it was a low paying offer so conversions ‘should’ be apparent, even if the traffic quality sucked).

Anyway a quick chat with the affiliate manager to see if anything was up to which supposedly the offer was running fine. Fair enough Ricardo thought and began talking to another affiliate manager of one of his favoured networks and was convinced the offer was actually worth pursuing and something must have been a technical problem somewhere along the lines.

Later that day the offer was live in the other network and the exact same campaign was unpaused, absolutely nothing has changed bar the affiliate link. Lone behold conversions were coming in thick and fast even on the ‘terrible quality of traffic’.

Naturally I assume Ricardo tried to follow this up with the previously mentioned network to actually give feedback that the traffic was fine and the offer wasn’t tracking properly. To cut a long story short the outcome was that nothing happened, allegedly the offer was running fine for everybody else so it must have just been the link – and I heard that Ricardo was still waiting for an email about what happened months after this even happened.

Moral of the story is that just because of the ignorance and shitty relationship that company has lost out on a lot of revenue over the last few months – not only that but even today I, I mean Ricardo found an offer but instead of running it through them, has asked another network to get it for tomorrow so things can get rolling.

It’s not a huge effort to click down into each campaign and check but with a good number of campaigns running it takes a little more than the 2 seconds to scan down which it used to.

I haven’t had chance to look into it fully so there might be a number of positive changes – what’s everyone think of the update?

I launched my first mini SEO site about 1-2 weeks ago just to try and get my feet wet, I picked a non competitive keyword to just try and get ranked on the first page to see how easy it was – it does get around 4000-5000 searches a month for the keyword I’ve chosen so if I managed to get to #1 I should get a reasonable amount of traffic to maybe get a steady flow of leads.

I was getting a bit frustrating because I had submitted a sitemap to Google, posting in some blog directories and submitted a video to YouTube and realised my site wasn’t even indexed so that killed my motivation and decided to wait it out a little bit whilst working on another domain – then I noticed I was checking the wrong ltd for my domain and that mine had been indexed a couple days after I had finished the site

Anyway after checking I’m ranked on the 4th page for the main keyword which isn’t anything special but it’s a start. Hopefully in the near future the strategies I’ve been using will take effect pushing it up higher.

What I Have Done

I haven’t done anything remarkable at this point as I did assume it wasn’t getting indexed for some reason, I have threw up a couple of keyword rich posts, done a little blog and directory link building and submitted a video to YouTube and a couple of other video sharing sites.

Plan of Action

I’m currently building out another domain that I have started and letting this one settle for maybe another week then intend on building squidoo and hub pages to try and boost authority.

Any tips welcome by the way, I’m a complete noob when it comes to SEO…

First off the main reason for my disappearance was that I’ve had a good few months working on another project outside of affiliate marketing which I may talk about later. Turns out that it’s looking like it’s going to bomb until I put more time and effort into it so I decided to have a break from that – perfect chance to get back into affiliate marketing!

Boy things have changed, it’s been a pretty much fresh start for me so I’ve taken the time to learn some methods that are new to me such as FaceBook and PPV. Mainly concentrating on FaceBook at the moment and I’m loving it. I’m also working on a couple of SEO sites which is brand new to me, this is pretty much the only site I have that gets organic traffic.

I do have a couple of goals for both this blog and in my affiliate marketing this year and I’m going to make sure I smash through them – it’s been my goal since the very first day to get 1,000 subscribers on my blog. Why 1,000? I’ve got no idea but it would be nice to hit 4 figures, I’m not that far away so I’m sure I will be able to get that in the near future.

I probably say this all the time but I will be posting more often now that I’m getting back into it, more importantly I’ve been learning a great deal the last month or so have a good few topics to post about.

That’s all for now, speak soon!

I had the PPV campaign running for about 4-5 days and it was an absolute rollercoaster, the very first day actually turned a good profit off the bat so not only was a building up emails they were converting on the very first offer I presented to them instantly after opting in.

I launched this on a Thursday/Friday afternoon, I can’t remember exactly but the campaign did shockingly bad sucking up all of the profit and pushing me into the red about $60. Spend was the same, optins were down and had 0 conversions each day so that got me worried a little. Thinking it maybe the weekend I let it run another couple of days just to see if things would pick up, on Monday it ran at a slight loss again but the optin rate was back up so at least I was getting something for my money.

These were the stats for those days, I have paused it to try and concentrate on the emails I had to see if I could do anything with them because I didn’t know what to expect:

Spend: $255
Revenue: $167
Optins: 132

That 132 is the number I have at this minute after a bunch of them have unsubscribed throughout the period. I have a total of 5 follow up messages pretty much being every other day, I was keen to see how those turned out and add some more to the list so that I have the best chance to get into the black and make some profit from them.

Today has seen a number of conversions from the auto responder taking the overall income to $235, leaving me just $20 in the red.

I’m hoping to report back over the next few days saying that the list has turned a profit, once this has happened I’ll probably turn it back on and allow it to gather more emails as I know 130~ is really low but it’s a start.