google
yahoo
bing

CJ affiliates Spybot Search & Destroy Immunize is killing your Sales!

24 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on October 17, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, CJ Affiliates  

So a Few days ago on one of my computers i was getting popups randomly. So i went and downloaded Spybot search and destroy to have it search for adware etc.. and i noticed they had an immunize function now. After search ran i had it immunize also just to cover all bases. Well the next day i was coming to my site and clicked on my Yahoo search marketing banner on the right and noticed it went to a dead page. I thought hmmm….. thats odd. Maybe my link is old or something, went in and put in the new code and still went to a dead page.  I tried both browsers IE and Firefox… both dead page.  I gave CJ benefit of doubt and thought maybe just an issue and will be resolved in few minutes or hour. Well i forgot about it untill the next day, I tried again still a dead page. So i decided to email CJ about this. Below is the email response I got.

Dear David,

Thank you for your inquiry. In reviewing the link I am unable to replicate the error. The link is routing to the correct destination page. The server is not timing out on our end. This appears to be a problem with your specific computer or browser. I would advise to check your security settings. If they are set too high, they can prohibit certain images and/or web pages to be viewed. In addition, you may want to try accessing the links through another computer.

According to another publisher experiencing a similar error, the latest version of Spybot Search & Destroy v. 1.5 immunizes against our links. They had to remove the immunization for our links to work.

While you may not be using Spybot, I would assume that it may be due to similar third party security software which is not allowing the links to route through our servers to the destination page.

Thank you for your patience and please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Sincerely,
Commission Junction Client Support

After this email I go an Un-Immunize my computer, and what do you know the links all now work!!!  So be warned all CJ affiliates if your users are using Spybot Search & Destroy and Run the Immunize it will block your links and cost you sales!!!!! 

Why Not Tracking Your Campaigns can Cost you Money!

6 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 22, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, PPC, Yahoo Search Marketing  

You can read everywhere that people suggest you track you campaigns and statistics, even on this blog. Meaning not relying on Google, Yahoo, Msn or other networks to rely on them to send you just the country or target traffic you are paying for.  There are many programs out there that you can pay for that will track the IP’s of your visitors and be able to tag to a certain campaign, or you can have one built. I personally had one built for me as the ones out there worked but I couldn’t get the information I wanted or get it in the way I wanted it. Yes this cost me a decent penny to get this tracking program built, but it has paid for itself already several times over.
Take this example. I am running a campaign on yahoo search marketing and I was checking my program stats and noticed that I was seeing a lot of traffic from foreign countries and my whole account is set to US only.  So I dig thru my stats for Aug 1 thru 13 and find that anywhere from 10 to 25% is from foreign countries.  So I log into my Yahoo search marketing account and contact them letting them know what I am seeing and attach a report for just one of the days and state that I am seeing this on all days Aug 1 thru 13. A day later I get an email stating it has been escalated to their click fraud department and I should get an email in a few days. Two days later I get this email:

Our investigation concluded that your account experienced one or more occurrences of the following situations:

?        Unusual end user activity or behavior
?        System issues

As a result, we have issued an adjustment to your account in the amount of $X,XXX.XX. This adjustment should post to your account within three to four business days. You can view your billing history through the Reports section of your account by selecting the Billing Transaction Detail Report.

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with the specific details associated with the identified pattern of behavior. We want to assure you that we are always working to improve the quality of the traffic delivered to advertisers and as such we are taking the appropriate steps to help prevent these types of activity from occurring again in the future. Our sophisticated Click Protection System runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is designed to prevent advertisers from being charged for certain clicks. However, there may be instances, such as this one, where we make additional adjustments to your account.

As you can see they don’t come out and say we agree with you that you received foreign traffic, they did offer me a nice credit. With that said I was making a profit on the campaign even with this amount of foreign traffic being sent. So the credit is just icing on the cake, but this is something that is deserved by me as I am paying for US traffic not foreign traffic. This is just one example of why you need to track your campaigns by a third party software that tracks IP addresses etc. to monitor it for foreign traffic or even click fraud that you are billed for.  One other instance you can read about is from PepperJam Search and their $10,000 “Goodwill Credit” .

Leaving Your Day Job to Work Online

16 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 20, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Working Online  

Many people know that in October of 2006 I left my day job (Electrical Engineer) to work online full time, and i get asked all the time how i did it. Well today i am going to go over some things i did to prepare for that day but also how i came to the conclusion that it was worth the risk. ***

First thing I suggest to anyone is that if you are currently doing it as a hobby don’t use the extra money to just have fun, use it to pay off debt. When i turned in my resignation at my day job the only debt i had was my mortgage, no car notes, no credit card bills. I was able to do this because i planned ahead and used the extra money i was making online to pay off those debts. I would highly suggest this to anyone that is considering leaving, that is if you have debt at all.  (If you don’t already have one, build up a nest egg that you culd support your family for atleast 6 months, i recomend a year but 6 months will do.)

Second can i handle working from home or do i need an office. This is a tough call for many but was easy for me. I don’t have kids yet only my wife, so i know the distractions would be minimal. I chose to work at home and so far it has been great. If i had kids i would probably have to rent out an office or build a seperate building or something so that they would know Dad is going away to work.

Thirdly and most important can you handle the ups and downs that come with working online. Talk to any person making money online and they will tell you about the ups and downs. Server crashes, boots from google, hackers, Clients not paying, a fad dies off, the list goes on. With that you want to diversify your revenue streams and make plans of how you handle server outtages etc.. (if 100% critical there are companies that guarantee 100% up time but you will pay for it. ) Depending on how you plan to make your living online will vary your ups and downs greatly. For me i mainly do affiliate marketing, IF an offer gets pulled or cancelled that could mean hundreds or thousands of profit i won’t be getting anymore. Do i panic…. well maybe a little but then i gain composer and move on to the next thing. But with that i also have a baseline of normal websites earning revenue for me thru various revenue streams. so even when i “panic” my earnings online will still more than cover my bills its more of man that sucks that i am not making that anymore.

How did i decide it was worth the risk??? Well it came down to a conversation with my wife as i was basically working two jobs and i enjoyed both of them. One working as electrical engineer from 8 to 5, and from 6 to 10 as webprenuer. As you can see doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for family. So after much thought and discussion. I concluded i didn’t want to look back on my like 5 or 10 years from now still working as an engineer saying i wonder what would have happened had i gone full time working online. That is what sold it for me as i never want to live life with regrets… plus what was the worst case… my wife would have to find a job and i would have to find a job. Not so bad of a failing outcome as most families both husband and wife work 8 to 5 jobs.  So from there i took the plunge into full time online work.

I do have one regret after doing this for over 9 months, I wish I had done it SOONER!

*** Please note that these are my thoughts an opinions and I am not a financial advisor. You have to make your own decision on how you want to live your life and what you want to do with your money.

Tips, Tricks, Making Money Online This Week

3 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 13, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Working Online  

This week I am going to play a little catch up on my blog and post some Tips, Tricks and talk about making money online. Last week I didn’t post much as i was out fishing with my dad catching a limit of speckled trout :) .  I have some posts in the works and will be posting a new one every day this week. I will discuss merchants, CPA Networks, Advertising Networks, Tips on making money online, and try to share a few tricks that work!

Expansion and Diversification is an Affiliate Marketers Best Friend

5 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 2, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Working Online  

Ok I know it has been a while since I posted. I apologize, I have been enjoying life too much…. Wait a second I don’t apologize, but I will be posting more. I wanted to give a little insight in this post and talk about Expansion and diversification in Affiliate Marketing.
First, if all you have had success out the gate congrats, but for most this doesn’t happen. BUT even people I know that have had good success out the gate (revenues of 100K a month), I know some that are back working their 9 to 5 or looking for 9 to 5 to pay the bills.  Why… basically they didn’t have any expansion or diversification plan… they banked one or two hot offers and they slowly died off. To really make it in this business you need to expand… try new offers outside your comfort zone.  Try diversification with other affiliate networks… whatever you do don’t just sit there and live the fat cat life for a few months only to find yourself working for the man again because you didn’t plan.  An old saying that I love is “If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail!” But I feel that if you plan to succeed you will succeed if you truly put forth the effort and don’t expect something for nothing.  A great example is Shoemoney…. He made and still makes money from ringtones, but the huge payout days have passed… but he had forethought and in turn created Auction Ads. Which was recently bought, for how much I don’t know, but I figure between 1 and 5 million. Of course he still runs affiliate campaigns and builds sites and he doesn’t want his online empire to die so he continues to look for the next big thing.  I encourage you to do the same not just what you are promoting today… but what are you working on today, that will still make you money a year from now ( 2 years, 5 years, etc..). If you don’t have anything that falls into that category you are just waiting for a bust or plan on killing yourself everyday to keep afloat.
1. Plan for Today
2. Plan for the Future.
3. In the Plans Diversify (Campaigns, companies and revenue streams)
4. Enjoy life!  (It’s no fun having a load of cash and not enjoying it)

Affiliate Summit East 07 – Networking, CPA Networks, Kris Jones, Shoemoney

5 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on July 14, 2007 in Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Tips, Working Online  

I am back finally from Affiliate Summit East 07 in Miami. It was a blast! This time I didn’t take any pictures…. Yes I know I should have but I didn’t so sorry no photos.  Compared to This Year’s Vegas conference Miami was much better.  It seemed as though anyone and everyone was there.

Of course I talked with various CPA networks I currently use and had some interesting conversations with some networks that I will be giving a try. I gave away the T-shirts that I brought with me, I was surprised how many people stopped me to say hey or ask for a T-shirt.

I went to the Jamster Party (Thanks Shoemoney) which was actually kind of lame (we arrived 30 minutes late but were the first ones there) but I did get an opportunity to talk with a great affiliate guy (Dave) that runs Coupon Code. We had some good conversation about what he is doing in the affiliate world and what I am doing. It was interesting to discuss what has changed and where the affiliate and mobile space is headed.

The only session I attended besides the keynote speaker was the monetizing communities with Lee Dodd and Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) doing a Question & Answer session. It was a good listen, as they talked about how to start a forum from nothing, monetizing existing forums better, subscription/premium membership and using a current site to start up a forum.

Probably my highlight of the conference besides meeting all the new people was sitting down in private and chatting with Kris Jones (Pepperjam), Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), and Lee Dodd (Sprint Users). We talked about Elite Retreat but also talked about online marketing, affiliate marketing, and growing businesses online. 

There are many other great people I met during the conference (Chris, Ken, Forest, Kathy, Nathan, Paul, Jaun…)  and will be in touch with in the future. I must urge anyone in the affiliate / online world to attend an Affiliate Summit if you haven’t already!

Q&A Natural Search Engine Rank, Adwords and Landing Pages

13 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on July 5, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Google Adwords, PPC  

Today I decided to do a little Q&A due to an email i received from Edwin.

1)I rank number 1 on Natural Search Engine Rank for my niche, but should i still use AdWords?

If you have natural search engine rank for any terms that get searches daily props to you. Especially in a high volume market. Should you use adwords?  YES!!!!  On all my natural ranking sites that i make money off of and i am not capturing the whole audience I use adwords.

a. You can capture more of your audience, as i doubt you are getting 100% of the traffic that is searching.

b.  Make a custom ad towards the search engine visitors, and you can change it often to see what works.

c. Due to you ranking #1 most likely (not guaranteed) you will get good Quality Score which will mean cheap bids.

2)Do colors really make a difference in sales?

 I am assuming you meant on landing and sales pages. Yes they can make a difference. Anything from color to placement to the signup or sale process can make a drastic difference in the amount of sales or leads. The best way is to test different colors or layouts with your main sales or landing page and keep which one converts the best. In the short term you may lose a little but in the long term you will gain more profits.

If you have a question you would like me to answer use the contact form or leave a comment. Sometimes I answer via my blog and others in private. Hope everyone had a happy fourth of July!

What to do with Affiliate Campaigns when you Vacation?

8 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on June 25, 2007 in Affiliate Tips  

I just got back from an 8 day vacation, I only had internet access for 2 of the days while i was on vacation. Even my Cell reception was not good and only 2 additional days i could access my email on my cell. Was i freaked out or concerned? NO. Because i knew i had this trip coming up and i had planned for it. I will provide some of my tips for planning to have your websites and affiliate campaigns on autopilot while away.

1. Content – have someone to update your content sites for you. If you aren’t already having someone do this already look into it. Why waste your time on a 5.00 an hour job when you are making 100′s.

2. Don’t test any new offers the week before you leave. IF you just have to test the offers put them on pause before you go on vacation.

3. IF you are overly concerned and need some sort of an update. Get someone you know and trust to look up your info and have them give you a call only in a serious emergency.

4. Enjoy your vacation and realize even while on vacation you are making a boat load of money :) .

I know first beef i will get is why pause a new campaign before you go even if it is working. Well i had a perfect example before i left for vacation. I was running an new offer, and my Affiliate manager knew i was going on vacation so he hit me up before i left and let me know the offer was being pulled temporarily (the offer still isn’t back yet) But instead of me finding out a few days into my vacation (it wasn’t officially announced for a day later which i would have already been jet setting) I paused my campaign, which i was going to do anyways.  Which in the long run saved me some money as the offer would have been redirected. With that said new offers are possible to be pulled at any time so why risk it and worry your vacation away.  I went the whole vacation and the only updates i got was the last day before i returned. Of course i checked all my statistics etc.. and was pleased to see everything was on track or had increased. What a great vacation!

What to do when your affiliate offer is pulled?

5 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on June 14, 2007 in Affiliate Networks, Affiliate Tips, CPA Networks  

I get hit up on instant messenger or Pm’s via forums asking; what I do when an affiliate offer is pulled? (This is not when you are asked to stop running it due to poor quality or low converts, when that happens you need to look how you can increase the quality of the converts/leads) Here is my break down of things I do and questions I ask myself.

1. Was the offer very profitable?

a. If Yes move on to question 2.
b. If No why didn’t I stop running it sooner or it was on coast and you were just waiting for it to die so one less offer to look after. (Back to researching new offers etc…)

2. Is it worth my time to find an alternate offer or another network running it?

a. If Yes move on to question 3.
b. If No then it’s not a big deal that was pulled as I was only earning a couple hundred a month from it. (You may need to look deeper into your EPC and ROI to ensure it’s not worth your time and if not (Back to researching new offers etc…) )

3. Have I seen other networks running this offer?

a. Yes move on to number 4.
b. Unsure, check out your competition see if they are still running the offer. Many people don’t cloak links so link at the root part of the url and see if it’s a different network. Contact that network even if you aren’t a member, then move on to number 4.
c. No move on to number 5.

4. See if the other Network is still running the offer?

a. Yes, well start running it with them. Many times advertisers will pull from some networks but not all.
b. No, I don’t see it in their list of offers.  Move on to number 5.

5. Ask an account manager or a network rep if the offer is a private offer.

a. Yes, Many Networks will have some of the same offers but sometimes they are private and you will never know unless you ask. Start running the offer.
b. No, move on to number 6.

6. Find another offer that would appeal to the same audience and try promoting it in the same manner. This may mean a new site/landing page or may just mean changing an image or two and the links.

7. Once changes are made, either new offer or another network. You must still monitor the information, just because it converted as a great EPC/ROI on one network doesn’t guarantee it on another because many use different tracking software methods etc… So monitor it.

So that is it, those are my questions and steps I go through when an offer is pulled from an affiliate network. I go through similar steps when there is a drastic decrease in payout on a network. If you have any advice, tips or questions feel free to leave a comment.

Insanity Marketing – To many affiliates do this.

6 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on June 6, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Working Online  

Instanity Marketing, this thought popped into my head and figured i would blog about it. First off lets break it down.

Defininitons:

  • Insanity – extreme folly; senselessness; foolhardiness. I heard one guy describe it this way Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.
  • Marketing – the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling

So what is insanity marketing…. to me it is doing the same thing over and over but yet not improving your sales or leads. The funny thing is that i get emails like this ALL the time, I was marketing just like they said on Digital Point, Shoemoney, (insert any blog or forum you regulate ) etc… but yet i am bearly making money or even losing. I can’t seem to make more but i keep applying the same marketing techniquess. 

Well Duh… change your techniques, try something different. So many people are followers and they will do just as you say. The key to really make it in online marketing is to not be an Insanity marketer but to be a Shape Shifter Marketer.  Still apply what has worked in the past but change to make more and to appeal to a new crowd or to stand out so your offer doesn’t blend in. If all you do is try the same stuff over and over you may make money but you are not going to break out and make huge money. The online world changes and adapts daily so does your online marketing.

Don’t be an Insanity Marketer.

« Go Back — More Affiliate Information »