Inside Affiliate

Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

1. I finally got to meet the legendary Andrew Wee.  Wee is my brother from an Asian mother.  One of my favorite moments from the show was in the elevator at the Palms.  It was me, Wee, and Boone, and some random dude gets into the elevator and starts screaming, “All I wanna know is, Who the F*** is Andrew Wee?!?”.  It was hilarious.

2. The parties were off the hook. From PPC.bz & Nickycakes Paper Clique Jump Off to CX’s Billionaire Party, there were some awesome shindigs at this conference.  There were affiliate nerd-core freestyle rap battles, a dance routine featuring a live python, and even some very tasty cheesecake desserts.

3. The check-in lines were super fast. Actually when Boone and I checked in there was no line.  That was a big improvement from last year’s hour long lines.

4. The Meet Market was packed. There were 2 rooms this year, and there were bodies from end to end with tables somewhere in the middle.  If you are a network or other exhibitor, the Meet Market is some of the best bang for your buck you can get.  It’s only 6 hours long, but there is serious networking to be done at this part of the event.

5. The high-caliber affiliates were out in force. I’m sure that there are always ballers at ASW, but the sheer amount of them and time I was able to spend chatting & networking with affiliates at this conference was way above average.  Definitely higher than at any of the shows I went to in 2009.

6. Time-wasters were at a bare minimum. With a couple of rare exceptions, the people that I talked to didn’t waste my time.  I’m not sure if I was just better at spotting them from a distance and avoiding them this time or what, but usually I have an entire stack of cards to put in the “Do Not Follow Up” file when I get home.  Not so this year.

7. Rooms were cheap and excellent this year. I paid way too much money for a really terrible crappy room for Ad-Tech NY last year, so my expectations were already pretty low.  However, we stayed at the Gold Coast and it was awesome.  Sure, the average age of the people in the casino was 55, and the place has not been a hot spot for years, but it was about $60 a night, and it was an ideal location because it is sandwiched right between the Rio (where the convention is) and the Palms (where most of the parties were at).  No taxis needed, everything was within walking distance.

8. I didn’t have to stand at a booth all day long. Having a booth can be worth it sometimes, but also it is a major pain.  You have to get up early, be at the convention all day for both days so your feet are killing you, and worst of all you have to talk to every single person that comes by your booth (i.e. time-wasters).  Not having a booth this year was nice, since I got to cruise around and network more freely.

9. Meetup202 was EPIC. It would have been worth flying out to Vegas just for the Meetup202 event alone.  It was that good.  The attendance was huge (several hundred people), Wes & the Bloosky guys put on a great presentation, and the tips at the end from the individual Meetup202 organizers from various cities were really good.  I am super proud of Wes, Steven, and the whole 202 gang for chasing their dreams and making them a reality, and super thankful for all of the hard work they have put into their software and the affiliate community as a whole.

10. The wrap-up post was easy to write. I usually avoid writing these posts after a show, but this one practically wrote itself.  Affiliate Summit West is officially my favorite show of the year, and you are cheating yourself out of growing your business and having a great time doing it if you don’t go in 2011.

Since HasOffers released their affiliate network tracking platform, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the company and the product.  Most of it has been stirred up either by DirectTrack competitors or people that use DirectTrack other platforms.  I thought I would pitch in my 2 cents worth since I have been using HasOffers everyday for about 4 months now.  This is not a paid post, and there are no affiliate links in this post.

Campaign Setup

A lot of a network’s time is spent setting up campaigns.  Besides checking Stats, it’s the one activity that I do on a very regular basis, often daily.  Since I’ve started using HasOffers they have updated the Campaign Setup a couple of times and added new features, but it is still very clean and to the point.  You put in the name, description, tracking link, set your prices, geo-targeting, etc. and you are good to go.  There are some unique features such as browser targeting (even including mobile browsers), Campaign Groups for geo-targeting multiple offers, and allowing campaigns to convert multiple times.  Most of the time I don’t use these features but it is nice to have the option.  Once you have it set up and hit submit, it takes you to the pixel where you can copy & paste it to send to the advertiser, or you can just click once and have it emailed to them automatically, which is very cool.  Also, it creates a test link for you which saves a lot of time.

Tracking

Tracking is probably the most important aspect of a network platform.  Does it track?  In a word, yes.  HasOffers is very accurate in tracking conversions.  The default pixel type is an iFrame pixel, which seems to work better than the Script pixels that most other platforms use.  It supports 3rd party pixels for Affiliates, and on my network I have it setup so that affiliates can place these themselves with automatic approval.  Also, you can choose whether you want HasOffers to track All Clicks that come through an affiliate link, or just Unique Clicks.  I have mine set to All, since affiliates always complain that their clicks aren’t tracking otherwise.

Creatives

The File Manager is where you upload creatives for your offers.  It runs on a CDN server, and they host all your creatives so you don’t need to have a gallery somewhere else.  It supports Image Banners, HTML Creatives, Flash Banners, and Offer Thumbnails (so that a picture appears next to the offer name in the interface, similar to LinkTrust).  I particularly like the Flash Banner setup, it is super simple.  All you need to do is upload your SWF file, tell it what the height and width are, and it does the rest.  I’ve used some other setups that are a royal pain for Flash.

Reporting

I really, really like the reporting in HasOffers.  First of all, it’s fast.  I can tell it exactly what information I want to see, and it displays it quickly.  Coming off of using DirectTrack, the difference is night and day.  I used to spend a good hour or two a day just waiting for DirectTrack to load reports.  I like it better than LinkTrust’s reporting as well, which I’ve always found a bit cumbersome to use.  On the affiliate side, the reporting allows them to pass a “source” variable (such as Google or Yahoo) as well as 5 separate sub id variables if they choose, and they actually work.  The #1 reason that affiliates login to a network is to check their stats, and this is one area that HasOffers really shines.

Affiliate Interface

HasOffers looks and feels very different than LinkTrust or DirectTrack.  Both of those systems have been around for a while, and they are starting to show their age.  On the contrary, HasOffers has a decidedly Web 2.0 feel to it, with soft edges and animated bar graphs for revenue and total leads generated right on the home page when affiliates log in.  It looks great right out of the box, but network owners can use their own custom CSS & logos to give it their own look.  Also, a new feature was added recently to select from a variety of different Themes to change up the look with one click.  I have received quite a few compliments from affiliates who are logging in for the first time, it just looks a lot fresher than the other platforms.

Last Word

I think that a lot of the venom that has been spewed at HasOffers is due to the fact that they are offering their entry-level product for free.  This means that the barrier of entry to creating a network has been lowered to almost nothing.  I think there is some truth to this as well as some exaggeration.  A network is based on trust and relationships above all else.  It doesn’t matter what software they are using.  Anybody who spends a lot of time and money promoting offers from an affiliate network that just popped up yesterday and has no reputation in the industry is just asking to get ripped off.  Do your homework, run with people that you trust and you will have much less risk of things going wrong.

You may have heard that HasOffers’ parent company, Adapp Solutions, is owned by the owners of Tatto Media affiliate network.  This is true.  Does it mean that Tatto is going to steal all of your data?  If you are using any 3rd party tracking platform at all, the security of your data is a concern, but the fact is that a large part of the networks in the industry are powered by them.  These service providers all put a lot of work into making sure that your data is secure, and HasOffers is no exception.

I have used both DirectTrack and LinkTrust extensively, and I like HasOffers better, hands down.

There’s been a lot of talk going on in the industry lately about Affiliate Jump, a “CPA Network” from eBook slinger Mike Filsaime.  It’s a bunch of garbage.  If you’ve read a good review, it was by a paid Joint Venture partner.  If you’ve read a bad review, it’s from someone who has either tried it or knows how ridiculous it is.

Do not pay to join Affiliate Jump or any other CPA Network.  CPA Networks PAY YOU, not the other way around.  Don’t believe the hype about the “automated website builder”.  If you’ve ever used an automated website builder for anything (think Angelfire, TriPod, or GeoCities), then you know how sub-par the results are.  Would you buy something from a GeoCities site?  Nobody else would either.

The eBook bonuses are not worth the price of admission.  There is plenty of advice for free on blogs and forums and by talking to your Affiliate Manager at a real network.  That’s right, real CPA Networks have Affiliate Managers, somebody who is personally vested in your success.  Someone that will give you payout increases and tips on marketing your offers.  Someone that you can call on a Saturday when something goes wrong.

Long story short, don’t be a sucker.  There is less opportunity for you to make money at Affiliate Jump then selling garage sale junk on eBay.  Try joining a real affiliate network.

If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5