Affiliate, SEO and PHP Coding Blog - OOOFF.com

“THIS IS A REPOST FROM A POST I MADE AT WICKEDFIRE” But I think it’s important so I’m going to republish it here.

For those you who don’t know I bought a network to be annouced later. But this has allowed me to see things from both sides of the coin. I think a lot of affiliates don’t understand how all this stuff works. And I’d like to share with yo some stuff I’ve learned with regards to shaving and scrubbing from owning a network being and affiliate the last 4 years.

First off yes there are shady advertisers and networks that get greedy and shave and scrub just to be greedy! As you would with any business partner make sure you know who you’re dealing with.

With that said there’s also a TON of good advertisers and networks out there as well. And I’d like to share with you some of the ways they look at things from their perspectives.

From the Networks perspective:

What’s the only two things network sales reps have to sell you to bring you on board? We all know the typical AM mantra….. We have a better payouts…. and unique offers.

Have you heard that before?

I’m sure you have if you have traffic and have been around long. So lets examine the better payouts as this is what comes into play here.

Alright so 90-95% of affiliate managers have never run campaigns themselves. That’s industry knowledge. So most of them are salesmen, they come into interview and get the job because they have a good personality. This is fine but they don’t know the business that well from an affiliates perspective. So their managers arm them with “Affiliates are looking for unique offers and better payouts.” And off they go to start working with us as affiliates.

Better payouts:

Now I’m not saying all networks do this by any means but I have seen it on some ( and I’m not going to mention them so don’t ask ) now that I’m on the other side. Honestly when it comes to payouts on a network it’s all about how well their side can negotiate and how good of a deal they can get. People often talk about volume, I don’t agree with that. I find most advertisers would rather have a smaller amount of very quality traffic that converts well on the backside for them rather then a large amount that sucks. Just like we’re buying traffic from sources like adwords and ysm they’re buying traffic from you. So if the network has strong publishers they get strong payouts, bottom-line.

However there’s a lot of advertisers that offer the same payout to everyone. Networks have employees and overhead and need to make a certain % on the traffic coming through in order to make a profit and cover costs. But they also have to compete in the “higher payouts” space. So this puts them between a rock and a hard place. So what’s their other options. Shaving leads. Basically making is so your pixel won’t fire sometimes going through the network. I hear this is a “feature” in Directtrack. I run a directtrack system and have yet to find it personally, but that’s not to say it isn’t there. Now lets take an example of how this plays out in real life.

AM: hey what are you running?
You: I’m running ringtones.
AM: What’s your payout?
You: $13/lead
AM: I can get you 14$ on that

Now I’m not going to preach EPC like I always do but it’s the ONLY NUMBER THAT MATTERS!

Now lets say the advertiser is only paying 14$ a lead on this how does this new network make money and still allow them to “up your payout”? Yep you guessed it they shave.

On your old network you send through 100 clicks and 15 convert to make you 13 * 15 = $195/100 clicks = 1.95$ EPC.

On your new network you send thorugh 100 clicks and 15 convert but 1 or 2 aren’t shown in your system. Which means they converted with the advertiser but you’re not getting credit. The affiliate company gets the money and we don’t get paid on it.

$14 * 13 lead = $196/100 clicks = $1.96 EPC

Effectively nothing changed for you but everyone is still making the same money and the new network got you business. So you can see the motivation for them to do this.

Now from the Advertisers Perspective:

Email submits are a classic example here so that’s what I’m going to use. But really this applies to anyone promoting free submit or lead type offers.

Stop and imagine you’re an advertiser for a second. I know we as affiliates don’t do this to often but lets do it for a second here so you can understand why things happen.

Now most advertisers know affiliates only really look at one thing, at least newer affiliates well and even some verterans for that matter. And that’s payout.

As an advertiser they’re really buying traffic/leads just like we are with PPC. They have a conversion ratio they look at as well.

Back to email submits, lets say they pay you $1.00/submit. Then you send a email submit then they send them through a co-regestration path and on average lets say make 2$ for each visitor that fills out an email submit. Every advertiser is different of course. Now lets say the traffic your sending only makes them 1$ for example so they’re breaking even with it. In that situation they have a three choices.

1. They could call the affiliate company and say this persons traffic isn’t converting for us please cut him off of this offer ( I get these calls some times )

2. They could not fire your pixel sometimes to bring their conversions into line
with your traffic. Now this is the most transparent to us as affiliates. It sucks, no question. But how do we expect the advertiser to take traffic that doesn’t make money for them.

3. Tell the affiliate manager to cut your payout and for traffic from these pubs we’ll only pay X rather then Y. This is the one I prefer mostly.

Often times when I get cut off to an offer I go back in a re-negotiate for a lower payout if you can believe that. Because it still makes good money even at the lower payout and then everyone is happy. At least that’s straight forward and not shady.

But honestly I think most advertisers just scrub/shave on the backside because it’s transparent and they think they’re not rocking the boat as much.

So when we as affiliates hear higher payouts always question it. EPC is ALLLLLLLLLL that matters. Everything else can be fudged with.

I really think there’s a lot of secrecy on both sides of the game and the more open, honest and relationship you build with your network the better. I run all my traffic sources by AM’s I work with. But I have a lot of trust in them that they’re not going to hand it out to other people. If a traffic source is questionable I ask if they’ll take the traffic. Most of the time the networks I work with say yes lets try it and see how it does. That way when you run into issues both sides know what’s going on.

Hope this sheds some light what’s going on behind the scenes as I think it’s a huge unknown. I’ll try and cover more on these relationships and how things work as I go through my learning process.

Success,
Smaxor

If you’re looking to inspire more trust with your users an SSL Certificate is always a good way to go. For example if you’re promoting auto loan leads and have a private label offer then you should have the form page be SSL protected. Both for security and improving your conversions. Up until now it’s been 50-100$ for a SSL certificate, so normally I’d roll out a site/campaign and then if it did decent I’d get an SSL certificate for it. Honestly it will increase you conversions.

Now you can get one for free with every domain purchase. Amazing!

My favorite domain registrar has been Namecheap.com for some time. They’re interface is amazing a quick as opposed to some of the other domain reg’s out there * cough godaddyd cough *. And now they’re offering free SSL certs so I’d suggest you go check them out if you’re not already a customer. Here’s the link for the offer ( not an affiliate link as I don’t think they have a program ).

Free SSL Certificate at Namecheap.com

Also you can add this nifty little badge to your page as well.

Enjoy!

He has moved it to his own domain. He’s posted all his enlightening archived content posts from the past.

 DIOREX

As normal I started to respond to a post on wickedfire about affiliate summit west and got into a rant so I decided to post it here.

First off as I mentioned in my previous post I really like conferences and of all the conferences I’ve been to I like affilaite summit the best. Shawn Collins puts on a great conference and they seem to be getting better all the time.

However this one was a little overwhelming seems as though it had grown to about triple the size of the one last year. However felt like it didn’t grow proportionately. What I mean and what got sooooooo annoying is there were like 50 affiliate networks there. And every single one would constantly try and pitch you with the same crap.

When are these guys going to get a clue and provide a unique value proposition. This is an industry where the good people are good marketers and sales people. There’s nothing that makes me sadder then being pitched the same pitch over and over again. “I’ve never been an affiliate and made good money at it but I’m going to help you make money”.

For example, I was in the elevator with some guy going to a club and he just wanted to hard close me on being an affiliate for his shitty network I’ve never heard of. And they all say the same shit “we have the best payouts”, “we have lots of unique offers”, oh and don’t forget this one

But honestly the affiliate network space is getting more and more crowded and for those of you networks that are reading this FIND A —> UNIQUE <— VALUE PROPOSITION. Because the pushy salesman tactics isn’t going to get you anywhere in my camp And I don’t speak for all affiliates of course but if you’re looking to pull the bigger affiliates into your network give them things, that are going to make them money. As far as I’m concerned every pitch I heard was the same, they say we have unique offers and the highest payouts….. but all I heard if we want your traffic so we can make money off you.

Of course I have my people I’ve worked with for a long time and I don’t plan on changing because I have a comfort level with them and know I’m going to get paid. However if it was me and I was pitching a network I’d come up with things to offer bigger affiliates and make it about them making money and not yourself.

What tools might an affiliate use that you could help supply?

1. emails
2. bid data and keywords
3. subscriptions to bid management systems
4. use of in house coders
5. custom built landing pages
6. access to large networks to use for linking or discounts to paid link systems ( for example if you own a paid link network in addition to an affiliate network then give affiliates discounts )

My point is get creative people. And honestly make it about the affiliates and not about you. I know this is sales 101 but it just irked me walking through hearing the same crap over and over. My guestimation was there was about 1/3 affiliates and 2/3 products, advertisers and networks. Which is great for me but walking through I started to skip the booths that were networks and go to the technology booths because I know the technology is what makes me money.

Well enough ranting, I’ll throw up another post about some of the good stuff that happened when I get the chance but this one got started first.

P.S. My pitch would be if I owned a network and someone walked up to my booth I’d say

“I have a way to make you more money, are you interested in talking a little?”
“what monthly budget, volume do you do now?”
“If I could supply you with a couple things that would increase that would you be interested in running traffic to my network?” OF COURSE. < Insert Unique Value Proposition Here >

I Know I don’t usually post crap that’s not specifically coding related but I thought I’d reach out and see who of my readers is going to Affiliate Summit West? For those of you who don’t know ASW is a small to medium sized affiliate tradeshow that really caters to the smaller affiliate crowd. When I say “smaller affiliate crowd” I don’t mean income wise. The show is filled with the guys that aren’t giant corporations with 50, 100, 1000 employees. Most of the people you’ll find at this show run their own stuff or have a small team of people but are very close to the action. The only ones this doesn’t apply to are the vendors. I suppose after being around for a while there’s nothing that bothers me more then not being able to talk with the owner or one of the founders of a company. As I’m the owner and founder of my own company. Now I know organizations have to grow and most of the time that means loss of someone that knows everything that’s going on. It also means it’s a lot harder to get in contact with that person that does know what’s going on as they move higher up the food chain. If you’re interested in meeting some of the owners/ceo’s of the companies you promote first hand this is the place to do it. Introduce yourself, shake their hand and tell them how you can make them money. Really an opportunity you’ll never get dealing with an online form for signup and an affiliate manager. I don’t care what people say…. the people at the top do know more, get to them and meet as many as you can.

I’ve had the opportunity to attend both Afilliate Summits last year and AdTech SF. All were worth their weight in gold for helping our affiliate marketing company ( if you could call it that ) move along.. I’ve had some people ask me what was so great about it…. well in my experience it really wasn’t the speakers or the vendors but rather the people walking around that are affiliates just like all of us. If you, like me, don’t know a single sole off line that knows the first thing about “what” affiliate/internet marketing is then your’e not alone. Here’s an opportunity to get around some like minded soles looking to achieve a similar outcome as you. I don’t care what anyone says you’re much better off sharing information and working with other people. You can just get so much more accomplished so much faster when you have 2-3 people thinking about a problem rather then just yourself sitting there. I’m no brain but I think I’m a pretty smart and a creative guy however the people I work with come up with great ideas I never would of thought of and we all benefit. In all honesty it’s hard to know who is legit online and who isn’t. And one way to advance those relationships much faster is to go sit down with people and meet them in person. It’s much easier to get a guage on someone when you’re sitting having a drink with them rather then some forum posts.

Well I’ve said my piece. I hope to see everyone who reads my blog out in Vegas. I’m the 6′5 240lbs fellow with the blackhat on . See you there.

P.S. leave a post on here if you’re going to be there or email me and we’ll see if we can connect. I leave for Brazil tonight and am flying direct to vegas but will be occasionally checking my email while I’m down there. Have a great week. Smaxor

I don’t like to post random stuff much but this video about the current internet bubble just about killed me. Check it out if you get a chance

MetaCafe - Here Comes another Internet Bubble