Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Every so often you get into the situation where you are running a wordpress blog that has thousands of posts that need a small portion edited.  Unfortunately, wordpress does not come readily available with a “find & replace” type function.  There are some “find & replace” plugins but they didn’t seem to edit the HTML within the posts the way I wanted.  Since it took me a little time to figure out how this is done, I figured I’d share it with you.

1) Open PHPmyAdmin

2) Click on the name of your wordpress database

3) Click on the “SQL” tab

4) Type the following code

5) Hit ‘Go’

That’s it.  You can literally “Find & Replace” anything within all of your posts within seconds.  Hope this helps someone.

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I’ve always had a soft spot for merchant nased affiliate networks like CJ & Linkshare.  Their breadth of offers is just incredible.  In the past i’ve mainly used them for monetizing organic type  sites.  Lately i’ve had some ideas for pushing paid traffic to some of the merchants in these type of networks.  I’ve set up some profitable campaigns but the affiliate networks have so many flaws that I think actually keep some of the largest potential affiliates from promoting programs on these networks.

The biggest issue is that tracking is at least 24 hours behind.  It’s very difficult to push paid traffic to an offer and not know how it backed out for you for over 24 hours.  To combat this, I have to set really small budgets, wait 24 hours to see if I made a profit and then increase the budget over a day later.  It makes scaling very difficult as you are inherently taking a risk on not knowing how your campaign is performing for quite a while after the traffic is purchased.  I have to give props to shareasale here.  I recently ran a small test with them and the reporting was in real time.

Another issue is that all of the affiliate programs are run by individual companies.  You need to manually apply to most programs and wait forever to get a response.  If you are declined on CJ, there is no way to appeal.  If for some reason, one of the merchants gets a bug up their ass about your sales, they can just reverse the sales with no repercussion.

In my opinion CJ & Linkshare need true real time reporting and need to actually manage the programs for these merchants more in the way CPA networks do.

Your thoughts & experiences?

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By now, we all know of the drama surrounding Dennis Yu & Shoemoney.  If you don’t then crawl out from the rock you’ve been living under.

Shoemoney, Dennis Yu and some others were supposed to be on a panel together about Facebook advertising at Affiliate Summit West 2010.  After all of these allegations came out about Dennis, people were baffled that Dennis was still going to be on the panel.  Considering all of the drama surrounding these guys, I thought that it was a great idea to leave things as they were and see how it all played out.

Yesterday, Shoemoney mentioned on his blog that he was creating a Powerpoint presentation with facts backing up his allegations against Dennis Yu.  Shawn Collins and Jim Kukral stated that a presentation of that nature on a Facebook panel would be unnacceptable.  Shoemoney in return stated that maybe it would be better if he was taken off the panel in that case.  This left only Dennis Yu and other people involved with his company, Blitzlocal, left on the panel.

Ruck made a post today on the Convert2Media blog about how Shoemoney should be put back on the Facebook panel.  I like when people are willing to take a stand and state their position, so I completely repect Rucks opinion here.  I however have a better solution of how this whole Shoemoney, Dennis Yu, Affiliate Summit drama bomb should be handled.

Shawn Collins has a point in saying that Shoemoney should not be allowed to make an anti Dennis Yu/Blitzlocal presentation at a Facebook Panel during affiliate Summit.  If it’s a Facebook Panel, then the topic should be Facebook.  Dennis Yu’s knowledge on the topic has even been called into question.  Affiliate Summit should thrown EVERYONE off of this Facebook Panel and start fresh.  There are plenty of knowledgeable Facebook guys that can replace them.

The next thing that Affiliate Summit should do is not shy away from the Shoe vs. Yu drama.  Summit is already stuck in the middle of this so they may as well confront it head on.  My suggestion here is to create a new session.  Invite Shoemoney & Dennis Yu to both present their sides of the story.  Call it Shoe Vs. Yu because it rhymes (people love stuff that rhymes).  Get Jim Kukral to moderate it because he is an awesome moderator and an extremely fair individual.  This solution would make everyone happy!

• Shoemoney can state his case against Dennis Yu
• Dennis Yu can state his case against Shoemoney
• Affiliates will eat all of this up because their so involved in following this drama online already
• Affiliate Summit would sell more full conference passes because who would want to miss that?

I can see where Affiliate Summit wouldn’t want to feed more fuel to this fire by acknowledging this war in it’s own session, but at the end of the day, they are a business.  If they can provide what attendees want to see, they do better for themselves in the end.  Heck, if Summit feels guilt over putting something like this together, charge an extra $20 per seat for admission and give the money to charity.  At least you could say all the mudslinging was for a good cause.

I have a great deal of respect for Shawn Collins, Missy Ward & Affiliate Summit.  I think they will end up doing the right thing in the end.

So what do you think?  Does a seperate session solve this Shoe Vs Yu at Affiliate Summit dilemma once and for all?

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Justin Dupre beat me to posting about this but heck, that won’t stop me.  Around 11pm last night I got an email stating that my Google Adwords account has been disabled.  I twittered about it and a sleuth of other affiliates had their Adwords accounts disabled as well.  Google really hates affiliates with a passion.  Here’s the email:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality.  As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future.  Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling.  These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

* Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
* Sites that charge for “free” software
* Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
* Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
* Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account.  In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies.  Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
You may also review the complete AdWords Terms & Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
In addition, our FAQ about Account Disablings can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

Here are some interesting things to know.  I’ve never ran a rebill, ringtone offer or any other prohibited niches on Google Adwords.  I had a few ads disapproved a while back for running polls on the Google Content Network.  I also have not ran anything in this account for probably a year.

Whatever algorithm Google is using to suspend these accounts is way over the top.  All they are doing is pissing off customers who could potentially spend a lot of money with them.  Most affiliates are smart enough to have diversified at this point.  Those affiliates who still want to run Adwords campaigns are going to do it anyway.  About a year ago I wrote the post “It’s Time To Get Shady Baby.” If an affiliate wants something bad enough, you aren’t going to be able to stop them.

Go get your hustle on!

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Around 3 weeks ago I installed a new wordpress blog, on a new domain in order to play around with some software (which will be written about here at a later date).  I spent some time setting up a search engine optimized site with a ton of pages.  I then paid for some social bookmarking, got some link building done and waited.  The site got “indexed” very quickly into Google but the listing looked like this:

www.domain.com

That was it.  I figured it might be a new way that Google pre-indexes sites (without any meta data). I gave it about a week and then grew impatient that the bot still hadn’t crawled beyond the first page nor added Meta data to the listing.  I started digging around and determined that something must be corrupt in the robots.txt.  I checked what the default robots file looked like and it looked like this:

To the best of my knowledge the / indicates that the search engine should not crawl past the first page.  I edited the robots.txt to this

Taking out the / should theoretically let the search engine go past the index page.  I waited a few more days and still no dice.

Today, I was looking through the source of the page to see if anything jumped out at me as an obvious problem and I saw this in the source:

I thought that was pretty strange, especially considering I updated the robots.txt to not disallow anything.  I did some more digging and found that in wordpress under the privacy setting their are 2 options:

1) I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers
2) I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Guess which one was checked!

I know that i’m not possibly stupid enough to check that box, so I installed WordPress on a fresh domain.  Guess what?  It automatically checked thae box to only allow normal visitors.  I’m not sure if this is a default setting for WordPress or just on my host but it’s kind of obnoxious.

The moral of this story is that if you are installing WordPress, especially for SEO purposes, check your privacy settings.

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