Failing at Success is a Great Hobby

Austin to Houston and the Day Before #ASC12

Ian — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:24:43 +0000

Texas is BIG, I mean really BIG. A couple days ago I posted I was flying to Texas and guess what I am sill here. I have been exploring Texas for a couple days now and let me tell you it is totally different feeling from Jersey. Everything is so wide apart, when someone says 20 minutes is close, I just look at them blankly because in ‘Jersey time’ thats a long distance.

Anyways, I want to update everyone what I have been doing, similar to what I did when I went to Morocco. My first couple nights was interesting I simply toured downtown Austin and went to 6th street, as that is what everyone is telling to go visit. 6th street isn’t really that exciting, must be cause I am extra old and college kids kinda of annoys me.

Well I will tell you one think I enjoyed a lot in Texas, the food! Amazing. We tried out BBQs and seafood here and they are very distinguish foods. I think Thursdays for lunch we went out to Iron Works BBQ and the BBQ there wasn’t the best I had but it was still compelling and good. Here is a photo I did on Instagram of the sampler BBQ I got. Essentially, I wanted to go to Franklins BBQ as it has been all over Food network but they ran out of food by the time we called.

Food from Iron Works BBQ…

Friday cam along and I decided to head to the capital of Texas, it was only a couple blocks away from the hotel, so why not. It was 3 floors and each floor had its own conference area where I guess legislations were discussed. The time we were attending, there seemed to be a school trip that was happening and I think like 5 schools or 5 grades were attending.

Pictures from the capital building…

That same night we went ahead and tried to see what 6th street was all about. They blocked off the whole street for the night and it was intense. My cousin came up from Houston to show me the best places to be at during that night. It was crazy intense from bar to bar to bar. The drinking really didn’t stop. Luckily they have burrito trucks and they easily cleared my what should have been a hangover the next morning.

The next day we prep and got ready to head to Houston, Texas. Austin was a bit small and I have been in Texas for almost 4 days and I felt like I didn’t do much besides eat. We went ahead and rented a car and drove 3 hours to Houston. My cousin showed us around for a bit and then we headed out to downtown Houston. Again the same college scenery but it was more intense than Austin 6th street.

I had a really good time that night and thank drank the bar away while meeting a lot of new people. Everyone seemed to be very friendly here in Texas and it shows with the people you talk to.

We also went to a restaurant that was a Hooters replica called Twin Peaks, the girls here are hella cute. I had the country fried steak and damn it was filling and HUGE.

Even this chain restaurant food was good. It had mashed potatoes and vegetables right underneath it and the cream sauce was a bit heavy but still worked well with the friend steak.

The next morning we started prepping to head back to Austin, but my cousin wanted to take me to a real crawfish place called Boiling Crab. When we arrived it was a hour wait, luckily we waited only 45 mins. Still a long time for some mud bugs. Anyways, I ordered a bag of crawfish and the seasoning they use is amazing.. it was a mix of everything.

I was extra tired from driving 3 hours back to Austin, so yesterday I took the night to bed and catch up on some work. I had a lot to do so I did the catch up with calls and stats and optimize and stuff affiliate entrepreneurs do. After that I crashed, took it to the bed and relaxed. Tonight is the start of Affiliate Summit Central, where there is going to be an opening party at Maggie Maes bar on 6th street.

Hoping to see everyone there and tomorrow as that is the official day of Affiliate Summit Central! Also make sure you are following me on Twitter and Facebook to check out more photos from my trip.

On My Way to Texas for Affiliate Summit Central

Ian — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:53:29 +0000

I am currently at the airport and using my iPhone for some data connection to write this post, thank you Tether.com. Rohail Rizvi and I are going a couple days earlier prior to the actual date of Affiliate Summit Central to be a tourist in Austin, Texas. Since I have never been I am looking forward to go and do some sight seeing. A couple of the NJ affiliates are also attending this show and as well as other known affiliates in the industry.

This is going to be the first Affiliate Summit that is being held in Austin, Texas, granting the central terminology. Ever since my fellow Jersey buddy, Shawn Collins moved to Texas, I assume he wants a summit in his local area. He knows he misses NJ.

… the current weather here is glooomy rain, with dark cast of clouds. Actually glad I am going to Texas to get out of this NJ dull weather that has been happening for the past 2 weeks.

A while back I posted the question on Twitter, what will I do in Texas and Shawn responded and provided me with some locations to go. He provided a list of areas to see in Texas which is around Affiliate Summit Central and even some restaurants and foods to try out. So I am looking forward to attending the first Affiliate Summit Central and seeing who else is attending.

If you are attending or living in Austin, lets meetup. I will be in Austin starting today till the 16th. Now for some pictures at the airport!

Looking forward to seeing everyone at Affiliate Summit Central!

Video Interview: Are Networks Being Transparent with You?

Ian — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:56:22 +0000

The other day I did an interview with Murray Newlands for Perform Insider. I decided I want to share the interview with my readers as well, just incase you missed it. Here is the video interview with the transcription below as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Murray: Hello, I’m Murray Newlands. Welcome to another episode of Performance Marketing Insider. I’m here speaking to Ian Fernando. Ian and I, we’ve met each other at several conferences. He is one of the best known affiliate bloggers. He’s a super affiliate in his own right and his blog recounts his stories, information and tips about how you can optimize what you are doing in affiliate marketing, as well as really digging into what’s happening in the industry.

Now one of the challenges that he had was really understanding what was happening with his campaigns. He’s setup and created a new tool that really helps you as an affiliate. You can find out where your links are going to, so when you click on an affiliate link is that being broken from another network? And so can you go up those different network links and see who’s the top network and maybe who’s going to give you the top pound? And it will also monitor the landing pages of the offers that you’re running to make sure are there any changes, has that page gone down, has it been redirected, what’s happening to it?

If your like Ian, a super affiliate and you’re driving lots of traffic, or even if you’re just a small affiliate, this money matters to you. How are you going to optimize that? How are you going to look after that? Ian has created a great tool for you as an affiliate, to really make sure you’re getting the most return for your clicks. Ian tell us more about it and why you created it.

Ian: Yes, my tool is basically Offer Snitch. It’s basically snitching on the actual affiliate link from the affiliate network. The reason why I actually created it is because I’ve been having numerous problems with networks not telling me when the offer is actually going down or when the actual advertiser is changing something on the actual offer page. So for me being an affiliate, I actually want to know when the offer goes down. If the offer goes down, I need to know about it because I’m sending volume and that traffic costs me money.

Murray: Absolutely.

Ian: As well with the advertiser trying to split test their landing page with our affiliate traffic, which they shouldn’t be doing in the beginning anyways. I actually need to know about that because if I’m creating a landing page and my ad copy is relevant to the actual advertisers landing page and they decide to change it, then my ad copy and my landing page becomes non relevant to the offer page at all. So without those notifications, I created a software basically to help me find out what’s going on with my actual affiliate link and the advertiser’s landing page.

Murray: What problems have you had in the past with advertisers say changing their landing page and the clicks just being wasted?

Ian: Well, one great example was one of the bigger changes… is basically I was promoting a dating campaign and I put it through the network, I put traffic to it but then I kind of realized my income just dropped mid-day and I was trying to figure out why. So I was looking at it and then I realized that half my traffic was actually being redirected to several other internal offers through the network. That was really, really, pissing me off and I actually complained to the network. They started giving me some BS about it, so I was like here’s my report, here are my quality reports, here are the reports from my traffic source. I was being transparent with this specific network but they couldn’t even allow me to see their quality reports, see their server reports and that kind of ticked me off.

If I’m being transparent with the network, you know, why can’t you be transparent with me. So after that incident, I was basically like there has to be something out there that tracks all of these changes and honestly there wasn’t. So I created Offer Snitch to actually watch these links. So if anything happened to these links, if they’re actually redirecting to another offer than where it was intended to be, then it actually tells me what’s going on. The best part is if the network offer goes down, it actually tells me when it went down and I actually have proof of when the changes happen and I can actually show this to the network and they can’t really do anything about it but maybe even just credit my traffic.

I needed something where I could actually show the network here’s hard proof of the changes that happened to my affiliate offer I was promoting.

Murray: I found this really interesting, there is a lot of money going into monitoring affiliate fraud, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of that’s monitoring merchant and advertiser and network fraud. So Ian you are doing great service to the industry by providing this. Thank you.

Ian: Thank you no problem. I’m an affiliate and I’m spending money on my traffic, I need to make sure it’s visible and have some sort of control of my affiliate links.

Murray: Absolutely. This is just the first iteration, presumably. Does this integrate with automatically cutting off your ad span or redirecting your traffic? Can you set it up to do that?

Ian: Well right now it only alerts you of when the offer goes down or when the landing page changes or when a redirect happens to your links. But if you’re using a system like Prosper202 or another tracking platform, you can actually just go into your system, turn the link off or put in a brand new link and say: hey, that offer went down, I’m going to redirect it to another network’s offer. So it just gives you the alerts for now. To me I think that’s the most important part. Everybody has their own tracking so they can actually just change the track links whenever they need to be.

Murray: Excellent. Ian, thank you very much. If people want to find out more about this and actually try it out for themselves, how can they do that?

Ian: They can actually just go to OfferSnitch.com and it breaks it down to all the features… with screen captures… link hop counts and bulk uploads, so they can just go to that website, OfferSnitch.com and find out more.

Murray: Is there a free trial?

Ian: Yes, there is a free trial for it. Right now it’s going at 100 mb for unlimited links and you can actually track any of your affiliate links if need be, but you have 100 mb per month to use it.

Murray: Excellent. Ian thank you very much… always great to speak to you… look forward to seeing you soon. I’m Murray Newlands and you’ve been watching Performance Marketing Insider TV. Bye.

Are You Watching & Monitoring Your Affiliate Links?

Ian — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:21:02 +0000

OfferSnitch is out and it has gotten better and looks much better as well. I released this tool last year at ad-tech San Fran and it started getting some buzz. So I decided this is a tool that is needed in the industry and which is needed to help protect affiliates. The biggest problem and one that comes up multiple times is why networks don’t tell their affiliates of on page offer changes or offers going down or redirected to an offer wall.

I hate that I am not notified of these changes. I have spoke about these issues multiple times on my blog before. I was getting tired of this happening to me multiple times, that i figured other high volume affiliates are being affected as well. I even have an article written up in the FeedFront Magazine about theses issues.

Nothing out there was created to help monitor an affiliate link. So I decided to go ahead and get it developed for me. Then I soft launched it at ad-tech San Fran and saw people had interest. So I started to invite users to the program slowly and got a lot of great feedback.

Below is the 2nd revision of the backend, much cleaner that the previous design.

I am truly excited about this system since it has helped me multiple times with offers going down and even showing proof to a network that a change was made without being notified. I remember being in an argument with a network stating that my traffic was being redirected during different times of the day. What I did at the time without OfferSnitch was bitch and complain. I did take action by proving them my stats, the offer I was promoting, the landing page and traffic I was using. All I asked in return was quality reports to their logs. I wanted to see that they didn’t change the redirects themselves. They denied me access.

I was mad and basically just gave up at that point. Instead of fighting with the network, I went off and got OfferSnitch made. Now I have the exact time when an offer changes whether it be redirect links, IDs within the redirect links, landing page changes, offers going down, offers going to a offer wall, etc. I NOW have visibility and have control.

I essentially can stop my traffic or switch out a link, once I know the change has occurred. Every time an offer goes down, you essentially lose money. When a landing page has changed, you lose money – because you put your time and effort into your landing page to match and even adjust copy to match the advertisers LP. If the landing page changed, your strategy after the click is rendered useless – high bounce rate.

This is why I created this platform to help affiliates link myself be in control of their link. Prior, we didn’t have control. We only controlled our tracking link. We can switch out links from time to time and rotate, that is about the extent we as publishers have. With OfferSnitch being an affiliate link checker and the ability to detect web page changes, gives us more control.

Take a look at the video below, it gives a quick overview of Offer Snitch and what it can do.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that we have more control over our links and offers, we can go back to the network and ask them to credit our traffic if need be. OfferSnitch is a solid platform and if the network does not want to show you their reports, then suspicion will arise. I let OfferSnitch monitor all my affiliate links, assuring no one (network or advertiser) is using my traffic for their own benefit.

Big Tracking Update – Bevo Media Exchange Released

Ian — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:15:00 +0000

Bevo Media has recently launch The Bevo Media Exchange, which is the latest version of their interface. Everything is updated and revamped from the technology to the design. Bevo Media has worked hard to become the most user friendly and most accurate tracking solution available to affiliates.

Bevo’s new platform introduces an array of new features and tools in the new version including the CPA Optimizer, Fingerprint tracking technology, and the ability to pull your actual affiliate link from your affiliate networks directly on your Bevo Media account.

Here’s a breakdown of a few of the new features:
The CPA Optimizer – Your tracking campaign is automatically optimized showing the best offers for any given impression to your campaign. It works for showing the best offers, showing the best landing pages, AND showing the best combination of both. This is super slick because it detects scrubbing and offers that go down in the middle of the night, which any serious affiliate knows has been a huge problem in the past.

Fingerprint Tracking Technology -Traditional tracking methods, such as cookie tracking, are hugely inaccurate, often times resulting in lost conversions up to 20% of the time. Bevo’s new Fingerprint tracking technology is much more accurate, and allows users to get much more conversion data from their tracking campaigns, even if an offer is scrubbing.

Viewing Stats, Offers, and Pulling Affiliate Links from Networks Directly on the Exchange- Bevo users are able to pull offer creatives and essentially run every single aspect of their campaign all from the Bevo interface. Users can actually APPLY to offers from their affiliate networks directly from the Bevo interface!

Bevo Labs – This is a sweet one. The new Bevo Exchange has a feature that breaks down the key points of a persons campaign and makes suggestions on what offers in the industry are performing better and other ways to improve your campaign! This is a great tool, especially for all the beginner affiliates out there.

Mobile Tracking – Bevo is one of the only trackers available to the affiliate community with built in mobile tracking support! Users have the ability to view the operating system, and carrier on every report within the platform.

There are many more features on the new version including a completely redesigned interface, sign up at BevoMedia.com.

Seattle Meetup: 10k Spend a Month, Campaign Exposed

Ian — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:06:16 +0000

A while back I stated I was heading to Seattle after the Ads4Dough Meetup in San Diego. I went ahead and hangout with my cousin and niece for the weekend. Prior to all this I setup a meetup in Seattle at the HasOffers office to do my own mini meetup. I posted the event on the Meetup202 Seattle group to see if any one was interested and I got a good response. So I decided instead of a regular meetup why not just talk about a campaign.

Even though it rained a decent amount of entrepreneurs came out to the meetup. Affiliates from Portland even came out such as by buddy Kris from Xrev Media and Logan Thompson. Other familiar faces were James Seligman, Nate Whitehill, Tanner Vaughn, Chris Guthrie and many others.

The topic I decided to talk about is basically segmenting data to achieve high CTRs. I prep a campaign I was currently running and showed everyone my data, even spend. I wanted to show segmenting and deciphering data is crucial to any performance marketing campaign. The excel sheet I showed everyone is a custom dynamic report I use to look at my data.

It automatically segments my data. Base on specific criteria, it will organize the data and outputs it into a visual format for me to view. Some snapshot of the meetup.

This discussion was all about how to look at data and how to manipulate it to find amazing opportunities. With this PPC campaign, I have broke every aspect of this campaign. My excel sheet, literally breaks down almost every aspect of this campaign. I simply just load the raw data and it quickly breaks and tells me my strong areas vs my weak areas.

If you do not know excel, I suggest you take time to learn it. It is such an amazing program to manipulate data. I have made multiple tools to help with my own internal research. I posted 3 excel video tutorials about…

Anyways, I created this dashboard to show me time of day, popular days, daily spend, total day spend, day spend, total hourly spend and I even broke it all by devices (tablets, mobile, PC). This is a lot of data to look at. Numbers can be annoying to look at from time to time, especially straining the eyes. So I also added some visuals to my excel sheet to show me where the peaks are and my down time are. This allowed me to see my whole campaign and analyse it in under 5 minutes by simply just looking at it.

From looking at the data, you have to then decide what time of day is best to run your traffic on what device on what day. This details are important, I even wrote a post about day parting a while back and explained its importance. But looking at the time of day isn’t just it, you have to also decide what day is the best. Is it better to run your day parted traffic on Sunday vs Tuesday? Then, specifically with this campaign – on what device?

As you can see there is a lot to go over and understand. Simply sending traffic to a landing page or offer without understanding traffic is just like walking in the dark. You are doing what you are suppose too but you still can’t see what you are doing. Traffic is a crucial part of performance marketing, what is even more important is how you are looking at the data.

Remember all traffic is not created equal and you have to put in the effort to understand that traffic. How users interact with the advertorials, simple looking at time of day sometimes may not be enough, seasonality also takes into effect. If you are not gathering data then you are lost, even worst if you are not gathering historical data, you can’t forecast.

My excel sheet, shows me 1 full year of data every time – if I run the offer that long – but in either case I keep the data, so I can see how each month differs. Spending money on traffic means you can easily lose your money. You want to be able to adjust the traffic to where it is beneficial to you.

Once you conquered the traffic, it automatically runs on auto pilot and you earn money on auto pilot. There are times you have to make minor adjustments, but you did all the analyzing upfront. With all the analytical and moving parts out of the way, you can easily generate income with ease, again with on going minute changes here and there.

I recommend you learn excel or have a program or software which can easily analyze your data. I like creating my own systems because I want to look at specific data, plus I know how my business operates. Utilizing other platforms is fine, but I also find something missing with what I need with my own campaigns.

Data manipulation is important and optimizing base on what the data gives you will increase your ROI, you just have to put in the time to analyze what the traffic gives you.

Negatives of Outsourcing: Interviews, Firing, and No Sleep

Ian — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:08:53 +0000

For the past couple days, maybe even weeks I have been growing a virtual team offshore. I officially came across some of the negatives of outsourcing and I want to list these for you. I have learned a lot about hiring, firing, and managing – the most painful of it all. I have went through a lot of applications and done a lot of interviews and my eyes hurt.

In the past I have done job per job outsourcing, meaning I find someone to do a task or a project and pay them a fix price. I now pay a virtual staff hourly and finding a really good one is a pain. Earlier last year I interviewed Tyrone Shum about how he outsource his business and we had a great discussion. We really didn’t discuss too much about the negatives of outsourcing, but more about why it is needed.

I am going to break down I think the 3 parts that I thought was painful and what I went through.

Interviewing is a PAIN
I talked about this before on another post about interviewing a virtual assistant. This is the most painful part because it isn’t about the interview process it is about the short days they worked for you and they stink! So you go ahead and interview another person and another and another. This becomes repetitive and is a pain, def a negative in my outsourcing book. Just imagine your first job, you made sure you said the right answers and you even comb your hair back to make sure you are presentable. With an interviewee overseas, they promise you their hard work and dedication. If they are not adapting to your business model then you have to let them go.
Managing is a full Negative
In the past, at a day job (yes I did have one) I have been responsible for a full staff of employees. I had to chase, cater, talk, and tell them what to do. I handled it well, I wasn’t bossy but more streamlined. With a virtual staff, you have to manage freelancers. This is one of the bigger negatives of outsourcing, I think anyways because it takes up a lot of my time. I thought I can tell them a task, give them a goal, and it will be completed. Then I realize they are workers and want a job and do not have that entrepreneurial mind set. So this causes me to manage some users more than others and it results in tired eyes.
Time Difference, Sorry Eyes
All of my workers are in the Philippines and I utilize oDesk to help manage them. The problem is some of them start at 9am their time, meaning 9pm in NJ. So I am sometimes up until 1am to 2am talking and discussing strategies with them. The reason I stay up late is because I am not able to talk to them at 9pm or even 11pm because I am working on my other campaigns or projects. So I end up staying up a bit later to just talk to them for maybe an hour or so. Since I am constantly interviewing better and new users, I am checking their work – that takes time because of corrections.

I think, so far these are the negatives of outsourcing. I know that this has annoyed me but I have to make sure I have an ultimate team to get stuff done. As I am growing as an entrepreneur, I want to assure myself that items will get done. I like to work fast and I like to make sure things get done. Even though these are just some of the negatives of outsourcing, I think that takes a big toll on me, I want to let you know there is a lot of positive to having a well driven team to get your goals accomplished.

Not only will my team get things done, they are dedicated and are willing to learn and they learn fast! I am excited to having a team of people who sees the same vision as me.

EngageBDR – Self Serving Convenience in RTB

Ian — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:48:12 +0000

One of the most exciting recent trends in advertising is the advent of self serve models. These models allow firms absolute control in creating their own ad campaigns. As this model has continued gaining popularity, advertising has already shown as significant jump in quality. And that’s precisely what prompted Engage:BDRto recently release its new RTB Self Serve Platform.

What self serve offers above any other model is control. Self serving advertising platforms allow users to create and manage their own campaigns. This gives them absolute control over the targeted demographic, sources of web traffic, and the advertisements themselves.

There’s no waiting for tech support teams to take content live. Companies are in complete control of their campaigns.

Other self serve advertising like Facebook, MySpace, and Plenty of Fish have utilized targeted advertising for quite some time. However, each of those respective sites limits advertisers in some way. Whether its user/network limitations or ad restrictions, there is less control under their models.

Fortunately, platforms like the Engage:BDRRTB system take this model to an even more advanced level. It streamlines the advertising process across multiple avenues, all within a single platform for ease of use. As mobile and online advertising continue converging, it’s important for advertisers to adopt strategies conducive to success on both sides.

Self service platforms like Engage:BDRstart off fairly simple. Companies sort through the Engage:BDRchannel to determine the best advertising methods. From there, users are given access to multiple sources of traffic, both domestic and international. If necessary, the platform also offers direct response representatives for additional advertising guidance.

Engage:BDR – What They Offer

Taking a look at the Engage:BDRRTB Self Serve Platform in detail, here’s what the system offers:

Types of Inventory:

Online Format
Mobile Format
Video Format (coming soon – expected launch Q2)

3 Tier Traffic Quality

Tier 1: Premium traffic directly through the Engage:BDRchannel – all publisher direct, above-the-fold, 1^st impression traffic.
Tier 2: Mid-Level traffic, above-the-fold, 3^rd-5^th impression.
Tier 3: Remnant/Exchange traffic.

Platform-Specific Tools

Absolute campaign control at all levels, from creative to release
Specific demographic targeting, including age, race, income, gender, etc.
Specific mobile targeting, including device, carrier, model, OS platform, etc.
Mobile ad creator and landing page construction tool.
Direct programming interface with Engage:BDRfor creating and implementing company-specific features.
iPhone app for on-the-go campaign management

Again, the critical component EngageBDR offers its customers above any competitor is absolute control With anAPIfor customization, how much more control could a company have? Engage:BDRFirst Impression is a platform with the end-user in mind. As advertising continues refining itself, it’s important to stay on the cutting edge. The Engage:BDRRTB Self Serve Platform helps keep advertising both progressive and convenient.

One Month of my SEO and my Results

Ian — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:09:19 +0000

Well, technically not me persay but my SEO person who does all the hard work. After the Ads4Dough Meetup, I headed over to Seattle to host a small meetup. I met up with friends in the industry, one particular, Logan Thompson. He does SEO and he loves it for some apparent reason, me on the other hand – I have no patience for it. I showed him some of my rankings for several keywords and he seems to be impressed with what my SEO person has done within a month.

For example, the screenshot below is a month worth of organic rankings:

So in the beginning our internal SEO person started very strong. We did a bit of ‘dancing’ for a day or two but spiked up to page one for a key term and ranked on the second page. As you can see we were stable for the rest of the month. I told my SEO person to go ahead and make me number one, he said not until the next month.

He has a strong strategy and he does not rush the building of the links because then Google will see these backlinks in such a short amount of time which then I can be penalized. Being penalized in Google’s eye isn’t good because your site can get banned or you drop in rankings. Since I am on the second page, I am satisfied so far and I am looking at how my next month will be for this particular keyword.

As far as income, it only generated $100 of affiliate income. Not too pretty being that I am still on the second page for this keyword. I wonder if 1st page truly does make a difference and if number 1 also does increase in huge sales.

For example, this blog by itself ranks pretty naturally for a lot of key terms and I do make affiliate income from these products I discuss and review. I am all about SEO, the only part is it did take a long time. Maybe Google sees this blog as an augmentative blog among others and ranks me higher, maybe the age of the blog, content surrounding the ranked content maybe? I am not sure, as I am not an expert in this organic stuff.

What I do know it does bring traffic and it does generate income. It just takes time. While my internal SEO person is doing the SEO rankings, I can concentrate on my other projects and campaigns.

In the end I am trying to get this specific blog to be making at least $1000. I also have about 25 other sites he is working on as well and I want them to be making $1000 a month as well. Right now, making $100 a month isn’t too bad. I def want to get these sites to do bigger volume and generate bigger income.

The goal is to turn these small sites into authoritative sites. If I can start benefiting off the SEO and then generating leads, then producing my own products for them, adding contextual ads, private banner buys, etc. Then this means that $1000 a month can be more over time and that is what I am looking for. I want to create something I can have for years to come, this is the reason why I am now all about having and owning something that is mine.

Ads4Dough Meetup 2012 in San Diego

Ian — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:04:57 +0000

This past weekend I went to the West to visit my buddy Smax, Jason Akatiff, from Ads4Dough. He hosted a meetup in San Diego and it included some top affiliates within our industry. Smax had one last year in which I was unable to attend, so this year I wanted to make sure I mad it to this one in 2012.

The A4D meetup is a full day of training and sessions of tactics taught by actual affiliates and most underground affiliates at that. It started at 9am and NickyCakes was first to discuss his strategies on how he builds a campaign. Several strategies were discussed and even showed us some sites he monetizes and how he would go a bout doing so.

There were also other great speakers who talked about their specialities. One sessions I enjoyed was taking and growing your affiliate business and turning or growing into a bigger business with employees. Stefan from Zeetomax explained how he expanded from a 2 man shop into a 55 employee company. Very impressive.

The best part about this meetup is everyone at this meetup was an affiliate and a person that has done substantial amount in the industry. Ads4Dough meetup is totally different from the traditional adTech and Affiliate Summits. These shows are great but this meetup has a concentration of affiliates; no networks, vendors, agencies, etc. Everyone was an affiliate who has made a good amount within the affiliate industry.

Lots of topics were discussed from FTC cases to media buying strategies. There was a lot of great information, if you missed out this year I recommend going to the next one. I missed last year’s and I made sure I attend this years meetup. There was definitely a full house of affiliates ready to share information on how they make money with affiliate marketing or in some way within this industry.

There was a lot of discussion around testing, mobile, media buying, and conversions. I definitely took a lot away from this meetup and I def want to thank Jason for having such a meetup for affiliates to help us expand our ideas and putting us together once a year.

The best part is most of the speakers are heavy hitting affiliates or were affiliates and have branched off into their own property such as a network or a new business within the performance industry space. Each one of these speakers spoke with high strategy and I appreciate each and everyone of their talks.

Here are pictures from yesterday’s Ads4Dough Meetup:

I want to thank Jason again for having such a meetup. I talk about how having meetups and hangouts with your peers is very important because it helps you grow as a person and helps you grow your own business. Jason did a great job of getting top affiliates and putting them in one room to basically help expand their current affiliate business. Thanks again!