Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

This Saturday I will be attending the NYC Meetup202 event lead by Emily Thomson.  If you are in the NYC area this Saturday night, please make plans to attend.  Meetup202 events are a great opportunity to network with fellow affiliate/internet marketers, make great connections and have a great time.  This event will take place:

The Irish Rogue
356 W 46th St.
East of 9th – Upstairs
NY, NY 10036

February 28, 2009 6:00 PM

Here is a link to the Meetup Group.

I hope to see some of you there.

Ad Hustler

If you instant message I’m sure youve popped the wrong message in the wrong box and sent it to the wrong person:

[6:50 PM] TheAdHustler: did you do the wash?
[6:50 PM] TheAdHustler: haha
[6:50 PM] TheAdHustler: not for you…
[6:51 PM] AFFILIATE MANAGER: hahah
[6:52 PM] TheAdHustler: unless you wanna wash my underwear
[6:52 PM] TheAdHustler: lol
[6:52 PM] AFFILIATE MANAGER: no thanks
[6:52 PM] TheAdHustler: hahaha

Ad Hustler

If you’ve ever been an affiliate I can guarantee you’ve said to yourself  “SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS OFFER!”  It usually comes after trying a whole bunch of different ways to promote an offer that you were convinced were going to work but didn’t.  So what’s wrong with the offer?  Is it tracking?  Is it being scrubbed or shaved?  Is there something less sinister going on?

It’s a hard question to answer.  The first step an affiliate usually takes is to contact their dumbass affiliate manager and ask them “What’s wrong with this offer?”  More likely then not the affiliate manager will say something to the effect of “Looks ok across the board.”  Gee that was a lot of help!  It puts the burden back on you and makes you feel like a retard because if everyone else is converting the offer, why can’t I?

Now, I’m not saying your not a retard, because you very well may be.  All I know is that I’m not.  This lead me to a little strategy for proving to myself, that it’s not me, it’s the offer, and having some evidence to back it up.

If you’re in this prediciment you are already throwing away money because your running traffic (paid presumably) to an offer that isn’t converting.  If you are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED it should be, heres what you do: RIP THE LEAD GEN PAGE AND COLLECT THE LEADS YOURSELF!

If you have any knowledge of creating a landing page, this is dead simple.

1) Take a screenshot of the advertisers landing page.
2) pop a form on it that looks like the advertisers original form.
3) Turn your traffic on and collect any leads that come through.
4) Compare conversions against the stats you have collected on the affiliate network.

This provides you with unbiased information about how the offer is performing.  If you had a 1% conversion rate on the affiliate network, and a 15% conversion rate when you collected the leads yourself, you know something is wrong with the offer.  You can do a few things with this information.  You can provide it to the affiliate network so they have some information to back up your claims that the offer is fishy.  The affiliate network, may or may not care.  It depends on who youre dealing with.  If you can’t get an amicable resolution or answer as to why the difference in conversion rates you can collect the information yourself and monetize it privately (Of course without infringing on the original advertisers copyrights).

Stop wondering why your offer isn’t converting, and start adding this method to your testing aresnal.

(Disclaimer: This Works On Lead Generation Offers Only, Not Sales Based, Although With A Lot More Work It Could Be Used For Sales Based As Well)

Ad Hustler

Quite some time ago I wrote a post asking for some Unique Affiliate Networks that I could spotlight.  It dawned on me that my favorite affiliate network in the industry is pretty darn unique.  That affiliate network is Yep Revenue.

Yep Revenue is a network concentrated on mobile offers.  Some offers include IQ Quizzes, Crush Offers, International Mobile Offers and much more.  If you are looking for anything mobile related, these guys have it, or have the connections to get it.  I initially discovered these guys on Wickedfire.  I was hesitant at first to sign up because I’ve never heard of them.  I spoke to Elias aka “The Big L” and he disarmed me by saying “Listen Bro, Sign Up Today & I’ll Pay You Tommorow.”  I signed up, drove some traffic in and he seriously paid me the next day.  I was blown away and thats where my trust of YepRevenue.com began.

A propitiatory in house tracking system is another asset that sets Yep Revenue apart from a lot of other affiliate networks in the space.  As we all know, most networks are running on an out of the box tracking system such as DirectTrack.  Yep put a lot of time and effort into developing an in house tracking system.  Tracking is in real time and the interface is extremely clean.  They also added a lot of cool features recently, including the ability to place your own pixel, some unique reports and an EPC rank indicator.  Yep also has a large amount of unique offers as well as daily & weekly payments which is hard to beat.

The thing that has impressed me most about this network since the first day I worked with them is their honesty.  If there is a problem with an offer, they tell you right away.  If there is an outage, they credit you.  If THEY think something is funny with the offer, they investigate before you can ever even bring it up to them.  These guys are seriously on top of their game.

Yep Revenue gets the Ad Hustler stamp of approval.  I am more then happy to associate my name with this company.

Are you currently working with Yep Revenue?  If so please post YOUR experiences in the comments.  If your not signed up yet…what are you waiting for? (Ask for Jamie as your affiliate manager…he’s on top of his game!)

Please Note:  This is NOT a PAID post.  If you sign up through my links, I do get a referral commission however all statements are my own opinions and thoughts.

Ad Hustler

I am encountering a HUGE problem.  My GMAIL is Down!  When I try to login I get this error:

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

This is bad news and made me wonder, how dependant have we become on hosted solutions?

Hosted solutions are good.  They save you a lot of time and money and allow you to access your data anywhere but what happens when the service goes down?  You’re pretty much screwed.  I for one don’t have backups of all of my emails elsewhere.  That’s a huge problem and something I will have to fix, so to reduce my risk of this dependancy I will create a backup using pop3 to download my emails when the service comes back up.

A lot of us are dependant on some sort of hosted software.  What are you dependant on and how are you going to reduce the risk of your dependancy?