Inside Affiliate

Posts Tagged ‘Amp’

During the last few months, there has been a rash of blog posts cropping up left and right about local affiliate marketing.  There have been good ones and bad ones and then all the guest posts by Dennis Yu.  All of that aside, if you are an affiliate blogger then you owe it to yourself to write one of these bad boys.  Here’s how it is done…

1. Tell your readers how there is a whole new world of affiliate marketing right in their backyard, where they can be their own boss and not have to worry about the big bad networks and advertisers scrubbing all of their leads.

2. Make sure to mention that Dentists, Lawyers, Massage Therapists, Insurance & Real Estate Agents and anyone else who commonly works off of referrals are the best worst possible candidates because they understand the value of a good lead.

3. Explain to them that this is going to take some good old fashioned salesmanship on their part, because they most likely have not harnessed the power of the internet yet. If that doesn’t scare them away, then mention that there will always be squabbles over what counts as a lead at the end of the month.

4. Bring up the fact that Google Voice is amazing and that you have been using it for local lead gen forever, even though 99% of your readers can’t get an invite.

5. Throw some massive numbers around, like how the keyword “San Francisco DUI Attorney” is going for over $20 per click on the search engines.  If you have the stones, substitute in your own keyword or niche to scare them away from competing with you.

6. ???

7. Profit!  Enjoy shooting fish in a barrel until the next wave of young pups learns what you have been up to and spoils all the ROI for you.

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.

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

Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT.  Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202.  Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time.  Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.

The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202.  With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy.  Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.

The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it”’’s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools.  What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network.  By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202.  When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:

yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=

You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”.   You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.

First, download John Hasson”’’s JAH Simple PPC tool.  It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:

It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs.  Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC.  Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations.  Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.

With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form.  Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form.  Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form.  The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name.  Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).

Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go!  If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form.  Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.

Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5