All posts in Musings

We all know how shady affiliates can be…cloaking, spamming, flogs, etc. But what about CPA networks? Yeah we know about the shaving/scrubbing.. blah, blah…how else do affiliates and advertisers get screwed by CPA networks?

Networks are middlemen between the advertiser and affiliate. As a result, their goal is to get as much volume as possible. Often, this is at the expense of the advertiser, the affiliate, or both. I didn’t know a lot about this until I met people working on both sides and saw the big picture.  Now I see how they can afford the big parties.

CPA networks have ‘compliance’ departments. The stated goal of these departments is to keep affiliates in line with the networks rules, the FTC’s guidelines, and the advertisers rules or requests (no trademark bidding, etc). If you think about it, though, they really don’t have much incentive to monitor compliance all that closely.

Here’s an example:

An advertiser has a problem with the way an affiliate is promoting their offer.  They have bits and pieces to demonstrate that the affiliate wasn’t in full compliance, but the network claims it’s not enough to reverse the leads.  All the same, they remove the affiliate from the offer because they know the advertiser isn’t going to stand for it any longer.

Cut to a week or so later when the advertiser gets contacted directly by the very same affiliate. The affiliate is wondering why all his leads got charged back. The advertiser is confused and doesn’t remember this happening. It turns out the CPA network had charged back the leads but did not credit the advertiser back.  The network says it’s all BS, and that they had already paid the affiliate.  Who’s telling the truth here?

Now let’s talk about host and post. This cautionary tale is more for advertisers who put offers on CPA networks, but affiliates might be surprised to know how this works in some cases. A host and post offer means the affiliate or the network hosts the offer and collects the data that gets submitted (leads, etc.). The networks generally present this to advertisers as a way to do multi-variate split testing on the fly to maximize conversions.

This can be great, but what is the downside? Essentially, when the CPA network gets this data they can do whatever they want with it (unless explicitly stated otherwise by the advertiser in their agreement). So what do networks do with this data? They use it to promote offers of course! Some CPA networks run huge internal operations using this data. If you own a car insurance offer and allow the CPA network you use to host and post it, they can even use that data to fill out your competitor’s offers. Yep…your competitors can be getting the exact same leads as you.  I’m sure you can guess what this does to the value of the leads the advertiser has just paid for…and the payouts they can afford to give affiliates…

And what about fraudulent affiliates?  I know it’s not cool for affiliates to “out” other affiliates, but have you ever stopped to think about what shady affiliates are doing to your payouts?  I don’t mean the weekend floggers or guys who fill out a test lead whenever they’re at a free wifi hotspot – I’m talking about the massive 3rd-world networks that make purchases with stolen credit cards or auto-generate thousands of leads with fake data.  These guys are a major thorn in the side of advertisers, and the networks aren’t always doing everything in their power to stop it.

Take, for example, a case I recently heard about.  An offer was getting slammed with phony leads and they had documented evidence.  They passed it on to one network, and the network kicked the affiliate off the offer.  Sounds good, right?  On the contrary – an ethical network would have banned the affiliate and made the information available to the networks that run their offers under affiliate accounts there…this particular network did no such thing.  The affiliate was still totally free to run offers on the network – even the very same offer, once they found another network’s affiliate ID to run it through.  Nice to know the networks are doing their part to preserve value to the advertisers and keep the payouts high…

Keep in mind – these are limited cases.  Not every network is guilty of these sins, but they definitely do happen.

The grass is always greener, or so it would seem. This is especially true in affiliate marketing where people are always looking for the next best thing. Where do so called ‘guru’s fit into the picture though? Are they the ones raking in all the money while affiliates are slaving away at campaigns? A common analogy I often hear is something to the effect that there is more money in selling supplies to the gold miners than there is mining for gold yourself. I actually think this is a useless analogy in affiliate marketing.

So who is really cashing in? Affiliates or guru’s?

Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of each.

Guru’s have the advantage of:

• Not babysitting campaigns all day long

Yep, when you have your own product there is less worrying about when a campaign or traffic source will dry up.

• Having a large pool of people who want to learn

There is and will always be a large number of people wanting to learn how to make money online.

• Not having to deal with annoying affiliate managers, networks that don’t pay, cash flow, offers getting pulled, campaign slaps, etc, etc.

Basically, a lot of the stuff CPA affiliates deal with all the time.

Sounds great right?

Here are some disadvantages:

• Getting bombarded with people who have a very unrealistic expectation

Ironically, this situation is actually in large part created by the guru’s who promote how ‘easy’ it is to make money through affiliate marketing. Now, a lot of guru’s do not answer personal email (which I think is a big mistake) but the ones that do, have to deal with a lot of people who really don’t have realistic expectations. Often it is much harder to get students to change their views on making money online than it is to actually teach them marketing.

• Having to hear about some unfortunate circumstances

Getting lot’s of email about children who are sick, relatives who are homeless, jobs that have been lost, savings that is down to their last $200 and wanting to know if you can help them make a small profit. Often these aren’t dumb people by any means, nor are they trying to get a free handout. They really want to work, they just aren’t in a good situation to do so. If you are down to your last $200, paid traffic is NOT something you should be looking into IMHO. If your kids are sick, you need to get the first paying job you can find and work on affiliate marketing when you have money coming in. Now as I said, most of these emails are ignored by guru’s but I try to answer every one I get (usually my response is steering them away from internet marketing).

• Dealing with refunds

IM products have a pretty large refund %. There is not much you can do about it, it’s just the nature of the business.

• Having products that flop

A lot of guru’s are not as successful as they portray. I know, shocking right? Most of us know that but there are actually several well known people who you would be surprised to hear don’t make all that much money. You can fail just as easy, if not easier as a guru than an affiliate.

So what are some advantage of being an affiliate?

• Getting to interact as little as you want

As an affiliate, you can keep to yourself quite easily which is great for some people.

• Having a variety of ways to make money

As an affiliate you can do SO many things…PPC, PPV, SEO, offline, blogs, etc, etc, etc. The smart affiliates diversify their income between traffic sources.

• Having a large pool of traffic

You have a lot of way’s to reach your audience as an affiliate. As a guru, you have those traffic sources available but more often than not, they are unsuitable for your product. Remember the IM niche is pretty small in comparison to what we can market as an affiliate.

Ok so who really banks harder? To be honest, based on what I have seen the advantage goes to the affiliate marketer. In both circles, there is a small number of people who are really ‘at the top’. The reason that affiliates win, is because of how they can diversify. Guru’s (for our discussion purposes) promote one thing – making money online. When I say affiliates most people think of people promoting CPA offers, but there is so much more being an affiliate can mean.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the subject.

Hmm..ok now I have to think of one!

Ad Tech is over and I am exhausted! I live pretty close to San Francisco so it was a short drive down. The exhibit hall was a lot bigger than Affiliate Summit and there were some pretty interesting companies to talk to. One thing that really stood out is how many booth’s gave no clear indication of what they actually did. Some I even stopped to read about and still wasn’t clear. These were more companies looking to help people with branding, etc but their marketing was pretty bad. If I had a booth (wasn’t that a Dr Seuss Book?) I would make it VERY clear what I did, and how it could benefit you in a way that people could understand in about 5 seconds.I did run into Matthew Lesko on the floor and got a cool pic.

I met with a couple newer CPV type traffic sources that I am curious to check out and test. I also got some great ideas for new niches/verticals to run offers in.

The Affbuzz lunch meetup was great! There was a huge turnout and everyone had fun eating cake. I got to meet the elusive Mr Green finally! I also got to meet some people I talk to online all the time but had never met in person. I saw a number of people there I wanted to say hi to but had to leave for a meeting so I apologize if I missed anyone!

Later that day was the Facebook/PPV session I did with Jonathan Volk. We had a great turnout and some well known affiliates came. I thought the session went really well and I picked up some great tips myself. Jonathan brought his wife Maria who seemed to really enjoy the session. Jonathan and Maria are two of the nicest people you could meet in the industry and we had a really great time hanging out with him. Jonathan also brought Jacob who works for his company and knows a lot about Facebook marketing.

Wes Mahler also came to the mastermind and it was great to finally meet him!

It was a great show but I am glad it’s over and I can get back to work now!

You can find out where I will be here http://twitter.com/ppvaffiliate

Come say hi!

I apologize for not posting more! Between nearly 800 forum members, my own campaigns/projects, and getting ready for ad:tech I haven’t had much time for anything else. I will get back to regular posting after ad:tech for sure.

I just wanted to do a kind of random post on things I have been thinking about & working on.

Stuff Worth Mentioning

Even though I have never met or exchanged so much as an email with him, I have been a reader of Chad from CDF network’s since his blog started. He recently released a local lead generation guide which has a lot of people talking. Check it out here local lead plan

I have dabbled in local lead gen a bit and I do think there is some good opportunity there if you have the personality for it. The part I hated about it was actually dealing with the clients. I am going to pick up a copy of Chad’s guide though because I’m sure I could improve on that.

My friend Mr. Green runs the best affiliate marketing blog (In New Zeland anyway) and is always full of useful posts. Check out his posts for some great insight.

Corey and I get questions about tracking when doing pre-pop submits. Corey wrote a great post about it here Simple subID tracking for PrePop email submits

Corey and I also just finished our 8 week webinar series PPV 123. It went really well and we had a lot of happy students. We have another course coming out soon that is something all internet marketers can relate to so stay tuned!

Jonathan Volk & I will be doing a Facebook & PPV Mastermind session at ad:tech Tue April 20th. I’m really excited about that and for hearing Jonathan’s insights into Facebook.

Really Random

In an effort to break out of the work from home rut where you stay in all day I have been trying to get a little more adventerous.Recently my adventures have got me into:

• My first hangliding lesson (awesome!)
• A Trapeze lesson (terrifying!)
• Indoor Skydiving (fun!)
• and a contortion class at the San Francisco Circus school (painful!)

What I am finding is the busier I make myself the more productive I am. The days where I have all day free to work are usually when I get the least done. The days where I am really busy and have to sit down and focus to get things done I end up getting a lot more accomplished.

Ok, back to work on my presentation for ad:tech!

I don’t think it’s a secret that many people really killing it on CPA offers are up to ‘no good’. See, when I first started out I was doing everything ‘by the book’ and while I was doing ok… I couldn’t figure out how these other affiliates were driving so much volume. I was grouping my adgroups right, making sure my keywords were relevant, and making the best landing pages I could yet other affiliates were SO far ahead of me.

What I of course learned is that most of the people driving tons of volume/sales on CPA offers are at least a little shady. This can be anything from a little misleading to outright fraud. I have the opportunity to look at the back end of a very large offer on a lot of CPA networks and I can’t believe the crap these high volume affiliates are doing.

We as affiliates are NOT expert marketers. I know most would like to think they are but most of the big names out there hit on a niche or two and banked on that as long as they could. I’m not taking anything away from that, it’s certainly an accomplishment, but often when someones traffic source/offer, etc dies they never make anything else work.

Let’s look at some real life examples:

A while back affiliates were killing it bidding on ‘chat’ related keywords for their dating campaigns and doing a lot of volume. Now this was only a little shady because you can’t really ‘chat’ on most of these sites. Nowadays people are using porn sites & hiding their traffic for as long as they can until they eventually get kicked off the offer.

Some affiliates will put an offers lead form in a page about something totally unrelated (hiding all content from the offer page except the form). I saw one where a customer would think they were filling out an offer to help Haiti but in reality they were just filling out a CPA lead form.

People made a LOT of money off of flogs/farticles. I shouldn’t have to explain how shady this is. I’m not judging, I’m just saying fake testimonials are not exactly on the up and up.

So can you make money being a nice, well behaved affiliate? Sure! But next time you see a huge affiliate doing numbers that make your head spin you can almost be sure that something anywhere from 1-10 on the shady scale is going on.

I wanted to do a Q&A here so post any questions you have in the comments section or through my contact form and I will post the Q&A here for everyone to read.

…It can be hard to get to any mar-ke-ting but I somehow, some way keep avoiding time wasting crap like every single day.

Ok, so my rendition might not make it on a Snoop tribute album but..

Why do people love drama so much? I admit I get suckered into reading a thread or blog post every once in a while but some of this crap is getting a little ridiculous. I think a little affiliate news is important to keep up with, who is doing what, etc. but just get a sense of it and move on. Do you really need to spend an hour reading pages and pages of drama on internet marketing forums to help you make more money? If you like that sort of thing fine but I would rather spend that hour setting up new campaigns, or working then spend my goof off time AWAY from the computer.

I know a LOT of affiliates who spend hours reading forums & blogs. There is some great info out there but do you really care who in the affiliate world is mad at who, thee secret dirt behind somebody, or whatever?

If you can’t resist reading that stuff fine…just use Egg Timer and keep it to a minimum.

We know Zynga took a hit when they had to take off all their incentivized offers. Now, it looks like Zynga might be trying to do something with PPV traffic:

http://toolbar.zynga.com/

So what is Zynga going to do with this? Well if you hurry and download the toolbar today – “you’ll be the first to know about new features for your favorite games. Best of all, we’ll also give you a free item!”. Now what they don’t tell you (but I suspect) is that you will also start seeing ads very soon. My guess is they will just keep this to themselves to generate traffic to offers.

So start targeting http://toolbar.zynga.com/ with your PPV campaigns and siphon off some traffic. What you could do is build your own toolbar and convince people to download that rather than Zynga’s. Just a thought

Affiliate Summit is over and I am tired! We had a great time but it feels good to get home and back to work.

Affiliate Summit

This was our suite at The Palms Place:

The view at night was great but the pics were a little blurry (time to upgrade the camera!)

I didn’t have too much time at the meet market because I had to leave to meet Justin Dupre and get ready for the PPV Mastermind session. We met everyone down at the Rojo Bar in the lobby and then went upstairs to the suite to start the session. We had a bigger group than originally planned but it was great because there were a number of experienced marketers there which lead to a good discussion. We talked a lot about targeting PPV traffic, landing pages, and Justin gave some great advice on cloaking. We also talked in depth about the best ways to monetize PPV traffic which were not just driving traffic to CPA offers.

The next day I walked around the floor talking to networks and other affiliates. I was so busy I forgot to pull out my camera!

A lot of people recognized me from ‘PPVPlaybook.com’ written on my badge so it was cool to talk to some readers of my blog and forum. I also got a lot of questions from networks with affiliates are looking for traffic sources outside of Google and media buys.

Affiliate Marketing in 2010

I kept hearing the same things from virtually every network I talked to; most networks are going to be moving away or trying to distance themselves from rebills and focus more on lead generation offers. This is fine with me because I run lead offers almost exclusively. It will be nice to have more offers to choose from but we are going to see a lot more competition in that sector this year.

Most networks I spoke to also expressed the desire to work with a smaller numbers of affiliates who can actually drive leads and traffic as opposed to a larger number of new publishers. I think this year networks are going to get even stricter with letting new affiliates in their network. I was able to make some deals with a couple networks so that the affiliates I coach can get into their network. Mostly the networks just want to focus on experienced affiliates because they usually take the least amount of time as far as support goes.

The best part of ASW was getting to meet people in person who you usually only speak to over the computer/phone. It’s amazing how much information people are willing to share. It seemed like everyone was more than eager to ‘dish the dirt’ so I picked up some great tips.

Anyway, it was great meeting everyone!