LPLockdown : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good

We’ll start off with the good here. The things it does for your pages are nice, if you’re not currently doing something like this with your pages, you should look into it. LPLockdown will :

1) Cloak your pages from other affiliates. Cakes has a database of affiliate IPs he’s collected, so when they hit your landing page they’re redirected somewhere else.

2) Steal their traffic if they steal yours. if someone rips your page 100% and leaves your javascript, you can redirect traffic from their page to your page/offer.

3) Uptime/downtime monitor so if your landing page goes down you get a notification.

The Bad

While there are positives to using this service to protect your page, there are cons to this.

1) It’s not self-hosted. And seeing as Nickycakes himself said it’s “by affiliates for affiliates”, do you want to give Nicky (an affiliate) potential access to all of your landing pages?

2) I have a friend who programs and said he programmed the exact same thing for himself in 2 days. Do you want to pay $50/month for something you can pay a programmer a few hundred bucks and have forever?

3) This is interesting…reverse IP lplockdown.com. You’ll find the site 11i.us. Check the WHOIS on that info. It’s Nicky’s actual info. Do you trust a product who was created by someone that can’t privacy protect their own self?

4) It looks like I designed that site the first week I learned Photoshop. The WordArt in the video gives it a nice ‘95 touch.

The Ugly

Everyone is pretty aware that this is NickyCakes’ product. I’ve gotten the chance to meet him and chat at events and he’s a nice guy. Like with all arguing on the internet I think once everyone comes together we realize how lucky we are and the pansy e-fighting that happens doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Be that as it may, Nicky’s online persona has always been ripping others in the industry to shreds. He rips on the big Gurus like Shoemoney and Chow, and also has torn apart myself (the Goober) and Ubercamp.

So the question is : if he really made this product to “contribute” to the industry, why does he have to charge for it (more so $50/month…maybe $5-10/month would be more legit)? Especially when it’s not anything advanced, it’s like making a blog post about how to track keywords with PHP. Again I’m not a programmer and haven’t seen the backend of LPLockdown, but after talking to friends it doesn’t seem all that hard to just do this on your own (or pay someone to program it for you). I’d use LPLockdown as a fresh reminder that you should be doing your best to hide and protect your pages.

Nickycakes having financial trouble perhaps? Gotta pay those taxes.

Here’s what’s been happening with me and my product launch. My plan has been to set up a continuity offer with a product but have it be legitimate at the same time. Believe it or not I think there are ways to attract customers without offering them a Free* Trial. I’ve now been rejected by 2 or 3 merchants and am awaiting the reply on another. Because of all the scamming that went down in 2009, Visa/Mastercard are tightening their grip on things…especially domestically. And since I don’t have any real processing history, domestic is the route I have to go. So even though my offer is completely legitimate and actually charges them up-front for a sale, the banks are saying no just because there is continuity involved (I don’t want to get into the specifics, but my charges monthly would be under $20, not $110.33). This sucks pretty bad because now I may be forced to abandon that business model and try and make this work by just straight selling it. I’ve put too much time into it to scrap, but now I have to make huge changes. I have to now build a full website and come out with a mini product line so I can offer combo packages and things like that to incent customers.

That’s how 2009 impacted me, where will the affiliate industry be in 2010? While working on all of this product mumbo jumbo, I kind of “left” the affiliate industry for a while. Didn’t talk to my AMs much, didn’t browse offers, didn’t keep up too much on the news. Now that I’ve been looking to get some campaigns and other projects running again (with the product delay I have to make money somehow), things seem to be changing. Rebill offers that made up a lot of business for affiliate networks are dropping. There are still ones that exist and offers running well so it’s not like they’re completely dying, but things will change.

I think many affiliates will realize that before rebills came along everybody was still making money. Not millions every month, but there was plenty of money to be made and there still is.

I’ll keep you guys posted on what happens with my projects and how everything is influencing them.

Can you believe all the self-hype about it? I’m sure many people read “how to make money step by step” and are a bit skeptical, after all that’s what every shittyscammy bizopp promises. Will it lead you step by step to making money? Probably, if you actually digest the information properly. You can check out one of the free videos to kind of get a feel for it (I just watched about half of one of them). You can also read about it on his blog. If you’re just getting started into the industry or have some O.K. businesses running online, Shoe is a guy that’s worth listening too. If you’re just a shady aff raking it in on rebills trying to stay cloaked, you’ll probably find this boring.

I don’t want to plug it too hard because I don’t know the full system and I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but it looks like Shoemoney put a lot of work into this and so far it looks like he did a pretty good job. So, nice one dude.

P.S. This isn’t a paid review.

P.P.S. Like the category I put this in whoop whoop :p

Being an advertiser is a HUGE hassle. If (like me) you’re doing it by yourself, it seems the number of things to do is endless. I would make checklists every week, and for every 1 thing I crossed off, 2 were added in. It’s stressful, time consuming, requires money and connections, and some knowledge. I’ve been working on this for almost 6 months now, and for the past 3 my income has shot down to $0…I’ve been spending all of my time and resources on this. I’m hoping this article series will save potential advertisers a lot of time, or at least give you a good “idea” of what being an advertiser is like.
 

A Short Overview

The goal of this article is to just introduce the basic framework for creating and selling your own product.

Component A : The Product

Before you make any moves as far as setting up payment processing or any of that goes, you need a product! This is probably the topic I’ll write the least about, because I don’t know what product you want to come up with and sell. It could be acai like everyone is doing, or it could be something new that nobody has done. How did I do this part? I came up with an idea of what to sell, and then went to a very good industry friend of mine who is an advertiser. He intro’d me to his manufacturer, and badda bing badda boom. Connections have been very handy throughout this process for me. The best “first step” you take as an advertiser may be to just head to Affiliate Summit or another event and network with as many people as possible.
 

Component B : The Design

Another huge component to being an advertiser I think is your designs. I went through at least 4 designers, thousands of dollars, and 4 months before I came up with designs I was satisfied with. Things I needed to design :

• Offer page (multiple variations)
• Checkout page
• Product label
• Product box
• Welcome brochure
• Homepage

 

Component C : Checkout System

When I first started looking into this stuff, I was always confused between people talking about merchant accounts, checkout accounts, banks, etc.

The checkout system is NOT where you get your merchant IDs (commonly referred to as MIDs) for credit card processing. They link up with your fulfillment and processing, but they’re just the shopping cart aspect of your offer. All of the actual money generated from sales goes through your merchant account.

You will have your offer page and pass those variables through to the shopping cart system (goes to your checkout page). The customer fills all the info out and submits it, this gets submitted to your checkout system (CRM). You’ll have a login for this where you can look at all the orders that were placed, chargebacks, etc. This data then gets exported to your fulfillment for shipping.
 

Component D : Merchant Processing

This is usually the biggest aspect of everything. If you can’t get approved or pass credit checks for merchant processing, you can’t make your offer. If you start your offer and blow out your MIDs, your offer gets shut down. So this is kind of a big deal.

What I personally do is go through kind of a gateway company. Basically they handle all of the merchant aspects for their clients. I had to fill out a pretty big application and send them a ton of financial data. This is so the banks can perform credit checks and see that you have money in the event of your offer falling out and being spiked with chargebacks. They will need to see EVERYTHING: the finished offer page (with your call support #, T&C), years of financial history, tax returns, etc. I had to do a couple phone “interviews” as well, describing everything about the product, offer, and marketing plan.

I know the company I’m going with now has tightened up a lot since all of this FTC rebill action, so maybe I’ve been scrutinized more than other advertisers have been in the past. Maybe this won’t be the same for you, I’m just letting you know what I personally have gone through.
 

Component E : Fulfillment

In most cases (mine at least) you’ll have some sort of physical product. Even if you’re offering a digital membership as your offer, it’s generally recommended that you send them some sort of physical product (in the case that you’re doing a rebill/continuity program).

The fulfillment center will store your product and ship it out to customers. You’ll make an initial order to the manufacturer (my first one is 2,000 units), put that on a semi and have it shipped to the fulfillment center. There’s not too much for me to say about this, it’s probably been the most painless aspect of everything so far.
 

Component F : Call Support

You’ll be needing customer support for your product. There are a couple pieces of software online where you can do automatic support/cancellations from your website, but I wouldn’t recommend just that. If you have an actual live agent on the phone, you can find out more from the customer about why they’re canceling, and you can also try to offer them 50% off or something to keep them on.

Depending on where you get your support from, there will be some kind of training package you will have to prepare for the agents.
 

Component G : Strategy

Strategy has definitely been the trickiest part for me going forward. You have to decide how you actually want to sell your product. I had initially planned on going with the basic continuity rebill, free 7 day trial just pay shipping, rebilled every 30 days after that. That had been the plan for the last five months, up until last week when I decided to change everything haha. I’m still going to be setting up a continuity program (they’ll receive the product every month), but with a little bit of a different twist. At this point all I’ll say is that it makes everything MUCH more legitimate, will really cut down chargebacks, and really does make it a nice deal for the customer. Will it convert? I don’t know. I’ll have to wait and see what happens before I let you know.

Other things to think about with strategy are :

• What size product do you want? (you may have a choice between a 4oz jar for $4 and a 6oz jar for $6…6oz is more expensive BUT is a better value to the customer)
• Set up combo packages with other products?
• If affiliates are running the offer, how much can you afford to pay out?
• What do you need to set your price points at to profit?
• What can you do to limit cancellations and chargebacks?

Component H : Marketing

I would have to say one of the more important things about being an advertiser would be the way you actually get sales to your product. After all, you can have the best product out there but if nobody is selling it, how can you make money?

Here’s how I’m going to approach it :

I’m going to run the offer internally for at least the first month or two. First I’ll need to see if the offer is converting at all, after that I need to get customer feedback. Are they happy with the product? How many want refunds? Before I break into the affiliate market with this, I need to know at least those two things. Once I can set an estimated value per customer, I can see if I can come up with a payout that will compete with other offers.
 

Start Up Capital

This isn’t really a component, but I know a lot of people out there are asking, “so much much does it cost to set all of this up?”

Just to set everything up, buy the product, get the designs, and set up all the components…I think I’ve spent around $16-17,000. Over half of that is buying the product itself. Thousands have been spent on designs and set up fees, though.

All in all, you can see that a lot goes into all of this. It’s hard enough to get each individual component set up, it’s constant emails and phone calls for months. What makes it even harder is pulling everything together into 1 single business. Checkout needs information from Fulfillment and Processing, Fulfillment needs information from Manufacturing, Processing needs information from everybody, and everybody needs information from me.

Just typing up all of this gave me a mini-headache, because after this I need to make more emails and phone calls, yes!

I don’t even know what the other parts of this series will contain or how they will be structured, but I’ll find some way to get info out to you guys. Just know that this isn’t easy, and can’t be done fast.

Pretty neat. Centurion card members can maybe post what holiday type gift they received from Amex (if any).

As far as the card goes itself, yeah it’s the poor man’s Centurion. Membership fees are $500/year (same as Amex Platinum), and the worst part is…the card is plastic. Point/cash-back wise, it’s no different than any other card really. Benefit wise, so far it doesn’t seem to really compare to the Amex.

A lot of times when I’m out at stores and use it, the cashier asks “Is this a real black card?” Unfortunately I always respond “Nope, this is the Visa version.”

All in all Visa thanks for the gift and all, but I will probably be canceling the card before the next membership charge.