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I’ve been working with Clickbooth on some stuff for the blog, and they just released a great new contest that I thought you guys should know about.  It’s an interesting contest - open to anyone to talk about as opposed to one blog like a lot of contests usually are.  Anyone that reaches a tier will be given the prize for that tier.

The lower tiers are really easy to get to - requiring only 500 conversions on some top health and beauty products.

july_contest_v10

If you want to earn some great prizes just click the banner and in the comments of your application input “Makeover” so they know you are there for the contest!  Check it out, you guys will love working with Clickbooth.

This week there’s been a lot of pressure on Facebook to fix the fraudulent clicks that have been occurring.  Tech Crunch has been reporting on it for the past week, and Facebook was supposed to finally take action.  In case you haven’t been paying much attention to the latest news on Facebook, I’ll summarize it for you.

For weeks affiliates have been complaining about clicks that were instantly bouncing off their pages, and some clicks that weren’t even occuring at all.  People were checking their server logs and seeing up to 50% less clicks actually coming in than Facebook was reporting.  It’s been an ever growing problem and some of the major forums like Wickedfire have seen a lot of posts about it.

Facebook finally admitted to the problem and has said that changes have been made and according to some the fraud is decreasing.  Another thing Facebook wanted to do was credit affiliates.  Well that has been happening, a lot of affiliates have started to receive credits on their accounts.  Although I personally haven’t received anything yet.

Everyone started to get their credits and a lot of people were happy, and then they got hit from left field.  After receiving their credits, a large amount of affiliates(at least that I have talked to) have started to get their accounts banned right after they received their credits.  So what is Facebook doing now?  Are they ever going to make affiliates happy?

As most of you know I’ve always been an advocate of Will’s program, PPC-Coach.  We just recently ran a contest here with his own network, Wotogepa.  It’s been a long time coming and he is releasing a new month 1 technique tomorrow, Friday June 26th.  Now is one of the best times for you to signup for PPC-Coach because you will have THREE month 1 techniques as soon as you join.

I joined PPC-Coach back in August of last year and it’s the site that helped bring me where I am today.  From his front page talking about how if you don’t have the money to spend, don’t join, to his ever relentless telling his members that it isn’t easy, and that you have to keep asking questions.

I’ve never really done a formal review on PPC-Coach and there just isn’t enough space for me to talk about everything I’ve learned from there.  I don’t know what the new month 1 technique is, and even if I did we can’t give out information that’s within the site.  I’m a moderator at PPC-Coach now so take this as a biased post if you want.

I’m not going to bore you by telling you over and over why you should join, it’s pretty simple, really.  PPC-Coach is the best site for a beginning affiliate to get into PPC.  There is no community better to help you along your way, all you have to do is TRY.  You have to ask questions constantly, no matter how stupid you may think they are.

You also have to test things on your own, you can’t base anything off what other forums, or even what the members at PPC-Coach say.  This game is all about testing it yourself because what doesn’t work for others might work for you and vice versa.  While you shouldn’t listen to what others say all the time, the PPC-Coach techniques and strategies do work, even if you have to put your own twist on them to make them work for you.

Overall I highly suggest the program, the cost is negligible for the tools, techniques and sense of community that you receive.  If you have any questions about the program, don’t hesitate to contact me and I will answer anything that I am allowed to answer.  Sign up for PPC-Coach here.

Like thousands of users right now, I’m also trying to update my iPhone to the new 3.0 software.  However I continue to receive a message saying that the activation server is down.  I know that plenty of people have updated so far today and the new update is getting lots of great reviews.  Apparently Apple is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it.

You may wonder why something like this is being posted by me, since this blog is about making money online.  I actually do have a reason for doing this, don’t fret!  Basically it brings me to the point of launches..and launches are definitely prevalent in our industry.

If your going to hype up a product like Apple has been with this new update, you need to make sure that your servers are going to be able to handle it.  Launching a product and having your website breakdown midway thru the day really doesn’t help your bottomline.  Apple is lucky in the fact that their product is already sold, this is just an update.  However it certainly isn’t helping their PR any.

As a lot of you know I’m planning a membership site launch soon, for a tool that affiliates will love.  I’ll be posting more information on that soon but this Apple collapse has really had me making sure that my servers WILL be ready to handle the traffic we’re getting on launch day and past that.

So as simple as a suggestion as this is to you guys - apparently even major companies don’t think hard enough about it.  It’s crucial to make sure that your websites are up and running at all times.  Theres several services I’ll be posting about soon that can help you make sure that happens by pinging your sites every so often etc.

More on topic with this in our own industry is networks.  We’ve been seeing a lot of networks go down for one reason or another lately, mainly on the Direct Track platform but some others have been hit as well.  You’d think that with the millions of dollars going thru these companies they would make SURE that they stayed up.

Just some food for thought for any of you planning to launch a service or product, just make sure it’s going to be there when they need it.

I received an email a few days ago with a link to take a survey about Facebooks Ad Quality.  I wanted to post about it then however the first set of links they set out were auto expiring after you took it.  Well they’ve sent out another email and now I can post.  Heres what our lovely purveyors at Facebook have sent us.

Dear Advertiser,
If you have already responded to this survey, thank you and please disregard this email. If not, please take approx. 5 mins to complete this survey regarding your experience with Account Management at Facebook. Also, please note that you will be receiving the Facebook bi-annual Advertiser Satisfaction Survey in the next 2-3 weeks. Please do take a few minutes to complete that survey when you receive it.

Please visit https://affiliates.questionpro.com to take our survey. As always, your information will be used for research purposes only. We will not share your personally identifiable information with anyone outside of Facebook as stated in our privacy policy: http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Your candid feedback is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

The Facebook Research Team

So you can see the link there to take this survey.  The reason that I want you to take it is so you can give them horrible scores on everything.  Maybe if we all tell them how bad they are on they survey they will realize whats going on.  First off, they are overcounting clicks anywhere from 10%-30%.  You’ll also notice a lot of bot clicks in your logs that are driving up CPCs with fake clicks.

Facebook is charging you for those clicks and stealing money from you, so go TELL them about it in their survey.  Also - wheres the tools to make Facebook Ad Manager easier that my reps been promising me for months?

So to review if you didn’t already know what to complain about.

  • Overpriced clicks due to fake clicks.
  • Over Reporting on the clicks you receive.
  • Bad Practices - No responses from reps about any of this.
  • Stealing your money.

Show Facebook who pays their bills.

I actually went into reviewing Campaign Sniper WANTING to like it. To be honest — let’s be real here! What warm, red-blooded, American male wouldn’t want to take something called the “Campaign Sniper” for an incredibly prolonged and wondrous spin? I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but I sure as heck did!

Right from the get-go, I found myself on the same page with the people who are behind the product. They eventually realized that instead of focusing on trying to bring affiliates and Internet marketers things that, you know, they might actually need, the affiliate product industry was instead much more content with bringing as mediocre a C average type product that they could muster.

And upon seeing this, I’m sure they saw just a mix of blood and dollar signs. Thusly, Campaign Sniper was born. Maybe!

In the interests of actually making this an actual review that is both helpful AND informative about things that DON’T have to do with the product’s name anymore, let’s delve into some of my favorite things about Campaign Sniper. Of which there were certainly a lot of!

For starters, I absolutely LOVE that they focused a lot on the content network because that was just a vast amount of land waiting to be conquered. Many of us may have tried to put together what we thought was a respectable list of placement URL’s for our content network campaigns before, but the kind of stuff that Campaign Sniper spits out? Let’s just put it this way: The product may very well change everything about the way that you used to look at content network campaigns.

Had enough yet? Of course not! Continuing onward…

Hands down, Campaign Sniper was made for the affiliates who earn their living on the tough streets of the PPC game. Their keyword intelligence feature is well built, finely crafted and an absolute dream of an asset. The people who made this tool GET IT. They get what’s wanted out of these products that are released and they’ve apparently even noticed what WASN’T being offered by a whole lot of product t providers — because the Campaign Sniper product as a whole is just stacked.

It’s just chalk full of useful, “makes sense” type stuff and has also got one of the coolest names out of any and all products spanning the entire long and crowded history of product name calling.

All in all, this product’s deserved an A if I’ve ever seen one — as well as successfully winning me over for the future with future products for sure. Very well done and highly recommended!

As you all know, I always do my best to hook it up for all of my loyal readers, and good ol’ Coop has come through YET AGAIN!! I’m proud to announce that anyone one of my blog readers will be given 5 free credits towards the purchase of Campaign Sniper.

Enjoy! I know I sure did!

And the gold rush begins.  For the last few days Facebook’s site has said the following up top:

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

You were able to claim trademarks before hand and most major companies did so.  Personally I just waited until midnight and grabbed my name.  I know a lot of people were grabbing names to squat on.  From what I can tell a lot of the common nouns go straight to the homepage and they aren’t able to be used.

I got my URL - shoot me a freind request at http://www.facebook.com/jeremiahcooper.  Heading to bed now, I’ve been working a lot on my new membership site thats going to be a huge help to a lot of you guys.  It’s not a coaching site but rather a tool that should really come in handy for every affiliate.  Stay tuned, more information will be released soon.

I know we’ve talked before about how learning as much as you can about a select group of programing languages would benefit you a TON, but I felt it was a good time to do talk about it again in the hopes of hopefully informing some new people. I’ve actually seen a TON of web design/code related questions in the last few days and it reminded me that so many people just freeze and don’t even think to try and figure it out for themselves.

The best thing you can do if you’ve never done anything with HTML and CSS is to dive into some Wordpress theme files on your FTP and just have a look around. The stuff ain’t rocket science that’s for sure!

The way you should be looking at it is that you should be looking at HTML, CSS and PHP throughout each day just to remain fluent with it. You don’t have to learn it and you don’t have to go searching for any tutorials online if you don’t want to. Although, tutorials certainly couldn’t HURT could they?

Anyway, basically what you should be doing iis when you come to a road block on your site and you discover you need to play with some code to fix iit, your first stop should be Google. Asap. What you’re going to do is type your coding problem into Google and throw in HTML, CSS and/or PHP depending on which you need to be working with and hit enter. Bam! A list of websites with answers to your coding question!

Go through them and read and learn. Make sure you don’t copy/paste anything unless it’s too long and instead type it out. Not only will you develop more of a feel for the design language but you’ll also actually be forced to do some frigging work for a change. Wah-wahhhhh….

That’s pretty much all there is to it. HTML and CSS are about the LEAST scary languages possible so don’t even get flustered if you have something you’re fiddling with with them. PHP on the other hand can be an entirely different animal — but still try it yourself before you go begging on Internet Forums or chat rooms asking for someone to basically stop what they’re doing, teach you a piece of code you could have taught yourself with effective Google searching, and then not getting paid a damn red cent for it. Good times!

Learn by doing, kids. It’s the way to go with everything. ESPECIALLY while trying to get the hang of HTML, CSS and PHP.

Good luck!

According to Jon on Wicked Fire, 4-5 subpoenas were served today to Illinois based affiliates that promoted the acai berry weight loss products.  There’s a lot of speculation as to how those affiliates were found and why they are going after them now.

According to some updates that Jon has posted, the affiliates are all Illinois based and were using Oprah in their ads.  They were running on Facebook, which means that any of the information gathered could have been done so by a subpoena of Facebook.  The Illinois attorney general subpoena has requests for financial information, campaign information, tracking information, networks and advertisers tied to the campaigns, etc.

Normally in a case like this they go after the bigger parts first, i.e. advertisers and networks.  So I’m not sure if they are simply going after these affiliates for information to use against their larger counterparts or what the deal is.

Other states have said that they are interested in this case and doing followup or joint cases with the Illinois AG.  It seems like one of the largest motivators of this is Harpo, the production company behind Oprah’s show.  Apparently they are seeking out anyone using her name or likeness in a promotional affair.

Harpo is sending all of the information they gather against these websites to the Illinois AG and pushing hard for something to be done.  This is the first time I’ve seen anyone go directly at affiliates so it’s definitely an important thing to keep an eye on.

I’m going to be watching this as much as possible and trying to keep you updated with it in coming posts.  If anyone has any more information than I have posted or that is on my source - a post by Jon at Wickedfire then please let me know.

It’s been an age old debate in the Internet Marketing world and while there is no right or wrong answer to the question, people tend to have their own opinions on each. The most important thing to remember is that both PPC and SEO based campaigns can make you money, there’s just different pros and cons to each one.

PPC is very popular since it’s easy to set up and you can make money very quickly with it. The one big downside though is that you can lose a lot of money just as quickly and depending on what type of campaigns or products you’re trying to run, it can get quite pricey and if you aren’t getting conversions, it can get frustrating and expensive very fast.

SEO on the other hand is usually completely free (at least compared to SEO) and the only real downside to it is that it can take a lot longer, sometimes even months before you begin to see any results from it. But then again, it’s pretty much free more or less so you really have to weight the pros with the cons. Are you beginning to see why this is such a heated debate?

I tend to completely disagree with the people who decide to take on definitive side on the matter. If you’re interested in making money online and willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, than you’re going to have multiple PPC campaigns AND multiple SEO campaigns. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Sure, it’s great to have your own opinions on which one is better and why but in the end, you’re going to want to be utilizing different projects for both of them to just monetize your ass off.

Just go ahead and pull out all the stops! It’s a no brainer not to!