Monthly Archives: March 2008

Good Easter Bunny, Bad Easter Bunny…With Shawn Collins

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Affiliate marketing veteran Shawn Collins is known for a number of achievements…

If you like Shawn’s Road Trip/American Pie-ish style of humor, you’d want to check out this Easter bunny video broadcast:

Also, check out this Facebook thread where we’re aiming to hit 500 comments. Every little comment helps!

PPC Marketers Take Note: China-based Domain Phishing for Google Adwords Accounts

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I got this email over the weekend which looks like a genuine email from the Google Adwords team, mentioning that you need to authenticate your account because it’s been disabled/suspended.

fake google phishing email

Just about any PPC marketer will be concerned if they get an email like this because AdWords downtime could translate into a significant of profits.

Before you jump to the page and entering your account information, I checked that the HTML email was going to a *.cn (China-based) domain, so it would be pretty unwise to enter your username or your password.

Mozilla Firefox had earlier been patched with a “phishing site” notification, similarly Internet Explorer showed a similar warning when I tried to access the site.

Just take note of the destination URLs in your emails before clicking on them, also if needed view the message headers and you can usually spot their point of origination (unlikely that the Adwords team would be sending notification emails out of Africa or Russia).

There was also a port about this at KezNews.

Friday Podcast: “So You Want To Be An Internet Business Consultant?”…Featuring Robyn Tippins

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robyn tippinsRobyn Tippins who was formerly Yahoo! MyBlogLog community manager and now Yahoo! program manager for developer experience, happens to own two successful blogs, SleepyBlogger and GamingAndTech.

I’m not sure how long I’ve known Robyn, but I know it’s probably about 2.5 to 3 years.

I first got to know her through my blogging efforts and later she invited me to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group.

I don’t think a whole lot of people are aware that Robyn racked up about $200,000 in consulting fees in the year before joining Yahoo! and relocated from Virginia to California to take up the position.

During the Friday Podcast, I found out how Robyn got started (generating $30,000 a month from a single physical product), how she branched into consulting, including taking on projects for some of the biggest companies out there, and how someone aspiring to enter the business/web consulting field can get started.

As always, there’re lots of gems in this one.

Check it out:

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Are Affiliate And CPA Networks Shooting Themselves In The Foot When It Comes To Affiliate Recruitment?

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One of the issues that has been bothering me since I started out as an affiliate has been “why do affiliate and CPA networks pay out such miserable recurring payouts for sub-affiliates”?

If you’ve checked into an affiliate or CPA network control panel, you’ll typically see a “Super Affiliate” or “sub-affiliate recruitment” link with payouts ranging from about 1% to 2% of commissions generated and if you’re lucky, you’ll sometimes see 5% or 10%.

At those levels, is there any real incentive to go out and recruit affiliates/publishers for your network, aside from wanting to build goodwill and possibly a couple of bucks for a nice Friday night dinner?

I understand that margins can be pretty thin, especially since a number of CPA networks are the ultimate traffic arbitragers – they “buy” traffic from you at $1-$1.50 per zip/email submit lead, and attempt to upsell them into an affiliate offer or merchant-direct offer on the backend.

Granted, I haven’t seen the financials of one of these networks yet, but I’m wondering that if you are already relying on affiliates to generate your sales…why not go the extra mile and incentivize them to go out and recruit more affiliates for you? Especially with a decent payout. (we’re not even considering networks which pay you $3 or $5 to recruit an affiliate…).

By my estimations, one out of every 100 affiliates is a top performer (hence the term “top performer”), in this league, you’ll see guys like: Amit Mehta, Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman, Zac Johnson, Bobby “bluebobbo”, Jeremy Palmer, James Martell , Paul “Uber Affiliate” Bourque among others.

But I think the game of getting top affiliates is like going out on a fishing boat. You cast your nets and get a whole bunch of prospective affiliates, but you won’t know who’ll be a top performer until you haul in your catch and sort everyone out.

On that basis, the less-skilled affiliates will weed themselves out and a higher payout won’t matter anyway. On the other hand, a better performing affiliate will be motivated to go out and get results.

I think the bottomline is Continue reading →

Affiliate Summit West 2008…A Story In Images

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Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins has got the pictures from the professional photographer from the recent Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas last month (all 630 of them) and has mentioned them on the Affiliate Summit blog. You can check out the Affiliate Summit West Flickr photostream.

Here’re some of my favourites:

julia stead

With the ShareResult affiliate network affiliate manager Julia Steat at the Great Affiliate Road Rally

laura alter

With Notebook Forums‘ Laura Alter (yes, she is 6’ and wearing heels…)

tris hussey

After talking to him for about a year, I finally got to meet B5 blog network’s training manager Tris Hussey

social media justine ezarik tris hussey

At the social media session with Justine Ezarik and Tris Hussey

zac johnson amit mehta

Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta at the Super Affiliate session

engaging the media

At the “Engaging the Media” panel session with Lisa Picarille, Anik Singal, Valerie Stevens and Jim Kukral

jim kukral

I don’t know about you, but I think Jim Kukral deserves some type of award for being the most photographed!

Be sure to check out the other pictures at the ASW photo collection.

Affiliate Summit as always was a blast (I still have about 500 of my own pictures to put up somewhere…).

If you’re keen to bring your affiliate business to the next level, be sure to check out Affiliate Summit East from Aug 10-12 in Boston, MA.

Get A New PC For Free…By Cleaning Up Digital Clutter

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Although I’ve a pretty nice compact Fujitsu Lifebook ultraportable (not nearly as small as an Asus eee PC, but much more powerful), I’ve accumulated quite a bit of “digital clutter” on it over the past 2 years that I’ve owned it.

Digital clutter occurs when software is installed on a computer, then uninstalled, frequently leaving bits of code in the bootup sequence, or staying resident in the applications or device drivers loaded in RAM.

Another instance of digital clutter occurs when 2 conflicting device drivers or DLL files clash, with the result that the computer either hangs or reboots itself…

I found myself in the dilemma that the Google AdWords Editor didn’t work anymore, Firefox would suddenly hang every 15 minutes or so, and Internet Explorer hasn’t worked for the last year…

Over the past weekend, I did pretty major housecleaning and everything works like new now.

IE is speedy, so is Firefox, I’ve also downloaded the latest versions of the software I’d been using before and was pretty impressive by how much faster the new versions run and the number of new features.

In the process of upgrading however, I lost a couple hundred megabytes of email from Outlook Express. I guess I had hit one of these limits. I have folders within folders, and probably busted the 100,000 email or so limit…As a result, I’ve got my folders starting with “H” all the way to “Z”, but I’ve lost my folders from “A” to “G”.

If there ever was an occasion for a fresh start, I guess this would be it.

One useful tool was a registry cleaner I used, which helped to clean a lot of digital junk from my system.

It’s the first time I’ve used ParetoLogic’s RegCure product and if you aren’t already using it yet, you should test out the trial version.

Here’s what my scan and cleanup showed:

regcure

That’s right, 3,057 errors were found and cleaned…

My system runs much faster now, especially Continue reading →