Brand News

Today we "fired" our largest client--the owner of an 1800 member affiliate program. One of my many duties was managing this program and while I much rather enjoy the Business Development and Advertising aspects of my job I felt as though we were really building a good program.

Now we're starting a new one for one of our other websites; totally from scratch. It's in the supplements market and that scares me. Everyone knows the supplements are a load of shit so our plan is to target lazy idiots. Solid business plan. That's why I could never be the CEO of a company--I give the end users too much credit.

My first month

My first month as Affiliate Advertising Business Director is over. All in all it worked out pretty well; we made about $300 dollars with PPC ads. Granted we spent about $1800 and made a little over $2000 so it's not like we're all going to get to retire or buy solid gold cars but still, it's something.

We did well at loan.com although the findlaw.com ad's worth is still debatable (at best). We had about 100 new affiliates sign up this month, no thanks to ShareASale since none of the people that signed up with them have even put a banner up. Then again I'm not sure why sites like 100-free-things-for-yourkid.us and get.nekkid-rightnow-and-p4rty.org would even sign up to try to push loans. I guess that's why I'm not rich and don't have my own office; I don't think outside the box.

We're currently trying to broker a deal with Wells Fargo and while I hadn't really stressed out about it for the most part, today I did. It dawned on me after crunching numbers for six hours that there is really about $8,000,000 riding on this. And here's me with no business training.

Growing up poor, going to college poor, going to grad school poor and freelancing poor, I really have no concept of one million dollars, let alone eight. From watching poker on TV I know it would probably be a full table stacked about 4 feet high with freshly packed, crisp $100 bills. Yikes. And to think, I have about $3,000 in savings right now.

I really shouldn't be in charge of anything.

Tumult

Do you know what would bring me joy this Christmas season? A website that paired advertisers with publishers that didn't charge a fee. Although at this point I'd be willing to pay a fee to see a bunch of publishers and how much money they wanted. Approaching companies, especially those without advertising policies in place, is a nightmare. The personality types are either "hey I can make a quick buck" or "I'll do anything you want"--there is no middle ground.

Yesterday we spoke with Mortgage 101. The call started with them trying to sell us leads. What they didn't realize is that leads aren't our problem. We have 8,000 ready-to-buy applicants that we can't help every month so the thought of buying more is laughable at best. Tim was nice and provided a lot of good information to me but the whole I couldn't help but thinking "What if We could sell You all OUR leftover leads and then you could mark up the price and sell them again?" I don't think that will work out of course but you never know.

White Boards

I spent at least four hours today in front of the White Board Of Doom. We're supposed to be in talks with MNBA and Washington Mutual and ING and HSBC so my job was to "stay by the phone". No calls. Not only did I get no calls I didn't get a single non-spam email from 11:00am-6:00pm. Weird.

We also had our second affiliate sign-up through shareasale. Things better pick up fast. I had our ads replaced at loan.com to steer more qualified traffic to us. But instead we wound up on some rotation. I won't be able to see the stats for credit.com until tomorrow so I guess I just have to be patient and hope that the traffic we're redirecting there is paying off. Right now we're running about $500 in the red for those ads so they better start performing. And fast.

3..2..1

Today we launched with Shareasale and we already had our first affilite sign up. It's not exactly what we're looking for--an ugly site in the middle of Jamaica but I'm not going to turn him down. Doesn't cost us anything to keep him.

I also unveiled my chain-strategy at an impromptu meeting this afternoon. I was told last Friday to "take 90 minutes a day and just think about 'the big idea'". So bam. There it is. I'd share the chain strategy but I don't want the 0 readers a day this blog gets to steal it.

Trust vs. .NET

In the red corner, a small but growing affiliate network. In the blue corner and master .NET programmer. The battle? Is the affiliate network going to track all our leads accurately.

Since we couldn't outrightly answer "yes" to that question, even though we trust Share a Sale completely, our master programmer decided she could put a backwards affiliate number onto our URLs to see if our tracking matched their tracking.

I wish I knew .net. Why did PHP have to be free when I was learning?

Shows What I Know

Today I was really excited to find that our PPC ads at loan.com had been getting hammered. I had already put another plan in place to buy ads--another $500 worth. Our CTR was a whopping 14% and man, I was pumped. I shared the good news with our COO and CEO and although our CEO was less optimistic than I was he still signed off on another $500. Today he asked me for a report of our advertising statistics and I was shocked to see that out of the 200 clicks we'd gotten in the past two days ONE had successfully passed our application. Now, I don't have a degree in math but knowing we pay $15 for a qualified lead and that the clicks had cost $255 I knew I was in trouble.

It was about this time our CFO, who hates me, called. I tried to manipulate ours numbers a bit saying only that 5% off the applications had passed instead of 1/20. I wasn't lying--just spinning. That's why I make the big bucks. He was still pissed though and when he asked me for the exact number of passed applications I lied and said that he'd have to wait until Monday when our database programmer came back. Hopefully this white lie will give me (them) the weekend to pass a couple more applications before Monday when our database programmer (who also may hate me--she's really hard to read) will ask me why I didn't just go to the SQL analyzer and run the query myself.

Curses. This is what I get for coming in on Veteran's Day.

Terrorism (Update)

It appears one of our content-stealing sites is owned by a terrorist organization based in the UK--Al-Muhajiroun. This is some scary shit. I know President Bush has said to go about our normal business but let me get this straight--you want us to SUE their organization. Wow.

Don't get me wrong--I don't think we're going to get bombed or anything. It's just weird that terrorist organizations were right there this whole time. Stealing our unsecured loan content. Weird.

I know these things

Content is King. I don't care who you are and what your site is. Remember this.

Today we discovered a dozen sites that had lifted our content. In one case they didn't even change the name of our company to theirs. Within minutes our lawyers were on the phone licking their chops. And our CEO was pissed. A normally mellow guy he talked to a site owner before he called our lawyer and absolutely and utterly destroyed him.

Why steal someone elses content? As a former developer I can write a script that can pretty easily scrape your site for content. In a day's work I can rip of hundreds of thousands of pages and make them "my own". I would do this because I'm either extremely lazy or extremely bad at copywriting. Neither excuse is acceptable.

Ultimately, if you're scraping or infringing upon copyrights you're going to fuck yourself. If the original-content site (OCS) finds you, you'll be in court. When the search engines find you, you'll be blocked. The only othe rammification is that the OCS site is screwed too because now that site is being marked for duplicate content.

So for your spammers and sploggers out there eat shit and stop screwing the rest of us because we don't appreciate people exploiting our hard work.

Loan.com vs. Wall Street Journal

Yesterday we put our first ad up at loan.com. Chris M., their marketing director, totally knew how to close a sale. Their accounting department couldn't get the invoice to us but did that stop our ad from going up? Hell no it didn't. Thanks Chris. Your site is ugly as hell but your domain name is gold and you're a great guy.

In the past two days I've been closely monitoring the stats from loan.com. It seems they're doing as well as the Wall Street Journal. Both have brought in two completed applications the past two days. However, friends, at $1.50 a click I have a hunch that we're paying a helluva lot more for our Wall Street Journal ads. You would think as the Advertising Director I would know about these ads but I don't. I have no idea how long we've been running them, if they've been effective or how much we're paying for them. Hmmm...maybe instead of blogging I should go find out.

My big white whale

As times goes by I've learned that my job shouldn't be the Affiliates Director. It should be the Advertising Director. I've already changed the signature in my email to reflect this. The great thing about being the Advertising Director is that you have droves of people just lined up to be your friends. Sure, most of them want your advertising dollars but who cares? The problem is that the second you become in charge of advertising you have one enemy whose job it is to make your life a living hell.

The CFO.

If you're in charge of advertising you, in essence, have one job: Spend Money. If you're the CFO you, in essence, have one job: Don't Let People Spend Money. Just for kicks, I'll refer to our CFO as Ahab because his goal in life is to stop me from doing anything. Little does he realize that he needs me. If I'm not bringing in new loan applicants then he's not going to be able to pass over me for a raise in a few months.

Today I booked a trial-campgaign with Chris M. at loan.com. It cost us $255; nothing at all. Our CFO (who pointed them out to me off-handedly as a place to advertise) thought, stupidly, they would work straight on commission. Hah. Ahab is convinced I don't even attempt to make deals when I'm talking to the marketing people. In his peg-legged'd mind I would imagine the conversations to go something like this:

[Me]: Hello, we'd like to advertise on your site.
[Them]: Great, I'll put a proposal together for you.
[Me]: Could you put a couple together? I'd like to see how much money we could give you with as little result as humanly possible.
[Them]:That's the only way we do business, sir.
[Me]: Excellent.

To make matters worse he tells the my boss (the CEO) these fables (I suspect). I've got a great boss and my only complaint is that Ahab's got his little hook-hand right in my boss' back. He's trying to recruit him for the Pequod apparently.

I'm a normal-voiced, mellow guy. I never get really angry nor happy. That's how I am. Ahab seems to think because of my low demeanor I am incapable of standing up for the strength of our company. Aargh, untrue. First, my job is easy. I can take it or leave it whenever I want. There is no shortage of sites to advertise on and if someone is screwing me then I call it off. I don't yell at them I just say no. It's that simple. If you knew this perhaps you wouldn't make me approve every dollar that was ALREADY (by you, Patchy) approved for a second time when I wanted to spend it.

You'll never catch me Ahab. I'm tough.

Dear Affiliates

Dear Affiliates,

I know some of you are new to being an affiliate so let's get some things straight. Regardless of what a good number of idiots on message boards, forums and chats say: not all independent affiliate programs suck. We don't suck. We pay our affiliates. We've practically built web pages for you because you don't know how. I'm sick and tired of hearing and sentence that starts with, "I read on a message board...", "The people at my affiliate network told me...", "I could make more money if...". Bullshit. Bullshit. And Bullshit.

Look, maybe we don't want you as an affiliate. Do we want your link to us on your site? Sure. But at the same time if you're not bringing in revenue we don't want you. That's why we pay per lead. If you're going to complain about low conversion rates maybe you should become a Wal-Mart affiliate. We're a LOAN company. People don't just hop online and say, "Gee, I'd like a loan now that I saw this ad." Believe me, if they did I would be filthy rich by this point. Odds are that if you're a financial site you're doing really, really well with us. I'm not blowing smoke up your ass: some of our affiliates really make $2k a week by doing almost nothing. And you know what? We LIKE paying them $2k/week. Because (and yes I know this is blasphemy to say) we're making a hell of a lot when you're making that much. That's capitalism in action. If you're making $2k/week then we're probably making at least that. It's win-win. So for those of you weary about joining an indie affiliate program--we WANT to pay you because you're working for US.

Affiliate Dictionary

I came across an Affiliate Lingo dictionary and found it useful to me since I'm not quite hip to all the lingo yet. Yes I know this doesn't count as a real blog entry.

Affiliate Program
A mutually beneficial relationship between a website and a company. The company seeks to either generate more web traffic, sell more products, or seek out potential customers through leads. The website seeks to make a profit by selling ad revenue on the site. Affiliate programs come in many shapes and forms.

Affiliate Network
This is by far the quickest and easiest way to begin selling advertising on your website. A secondary company called an affiliate network acts as a liaison between the advertiser and your website. The affiliate network sells ad space on your site and then takes a cut of the profit generated from this advertising. This can be an especially good method for small sites or people just starting in the advertising market because it is extremely difficult to find individual advertisers on your own. In addition, the hardware and software needed to run and track an advertising campaign is all taken care of by the affiliate network.

Banner Ads
This is most common and tends to be the most effective method of selling advertising. Common sizes include 468x60 pixels, 120x60 pixels, and 88x31 pixels. Many affiliate programs tend to offer many different sizes and designs. The most effective tend to be animated, but a good static banner can be very effective. When designing and placing banner ads it is important to take file size into consideration as a large banner ad can quickly drag down the speed of your site.

Contextual Advertising
This is quickly becoming a hot form of advertising. In its most basic form an advertiser serves dynamic ads (usually text based) to your website that are targeted to the content on that specifc page.

Click Thru
This is a common reporting statistic showing how many clicks from unique viewers your ad has received.

CPA (Cost Per Action)
This term refers to pay per lead and pay per sale affiliate programs.

CPC (Cost Per Click)
The cost an advertiser pays per click. While less common than the CPM method of selling advertising it is still somewhat common.

CPL (Cost Per Lead)
The cost an advertiser pays per lead. This is a very common method of selling advertising. A lead can be anything from an e-mail address for a newsletter to a complete survey that needs to be completely filled out and verified in order to get credit. CPL prices can range greatly depending on the program.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)
The cost an advertiser pays per 1,000 impressions. This is one of the most common methods of selling advertising. General prices per thousand impressions can range anywhere from $3.00 - $25.00, depending on the ad campaign and site on which they are being displayed.

CPS (Cost Per Sale)
The cost an advertiser pays per sale. This is a very common method of selling advertising. You receive a credit for a sale when a web surfer clicks on one of the ads on your site and ends up buying something from your advertiser's site. A sale does not always occur directly after the click as most advertisers will have a certain time during which both the sale and click thru must occur in order to receive credit. This time period is often called the 'cookie duration'. The revenue you receive for CPS programs tends to be a fixed percentage of the overall sale. This is not always the case as many pay a fixed dollar amount per sale.

Creatives
This is a general marketing term used for the material used to generate leads and sell advertising. It can include banner ads, text links, interstitials (pop-ups), e-mail ads, and many other items.

CTR (Click Thru Rate)
This is the ratio (percentage) of click thrus to impressions. To calculate your CTR divide your total click thrus by the number of impressions. This statistic is a good way to judge the effectiveness of your ad campaign because it shows you what percentage of people seeing your ads are actually clicking them.

EPM (Earnings Per Thousand Impression)
This statistic is calculated by dividing your total number of impressions by 1,000 and then taking your total earnings and dividing it by this number. This statistic is a good way to judge how effective your ad campaign is.

EPC (Earnings Per Click)
This statistic is calculated by dividing your total number of clicks by your total earnings. This statistic is a good way to judge how effective your ad campaign is. It helps to show what percentage of clicks are actually converting into sales and leads.

IMPS (Impressions)
This statistic is the actual number of times your advertising has been viewed. At times this statistic is given in unique impressions or 'hits'.

Interstitials (Pop Ups)
While often being considered quite annoying, an interstitial or 'pop-up' is a highly effective method to generate ad revenue. Interstitials often receive much higher click thru rates. There are many options when dealing with interstitials including size, frequency, opening up initially on visiting the site, while leaving, or after a certain period of time. Use these ads sparingly as they can often turn off your visitors.

Lead
A lead can be anything from an e-mail address for a mailing list to a complete survey that needs to be completely filled out and verified in order to get credit. The requirements to be considered a bona fide lead can vary greatly from program to program. This is a very common method of selling advertising on your website.

Pay For Performance
This is a term that many affiliate networks use to classify themselves. It basically means that they offer pay per lead and pay per sale programs.

Pay Per Lead (PPL)
This is a type of affiliate program that pays on a per lead basis.

Pay Per Sale (PPS)
This is a type of affiliate program that pays on a per sale basis.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
This is a type of affiliate program that pays on a per click basis.

Pay Per Impression (PPI)
This is a type of affiliate program that pays on a per impression basis.

Return on Investment (ROI)
This is a a ratio or percentage of how much you invested versus how much you profited. It is used especially in pay per click marketing to determine the value of your marketing efforts.

Sale
You receive a credit for a sale when a web surfer clicks one of the ads on your site and ends up buying something from your advertiser's site. A sale does not always occur directly after the click as most advertisers will have certain time window during which both a sale and click thru must occur in order to receive credit. This time period is often called the 'cookie duration'.

Devious

Today we had a conference call with Marlene from LinkShare. It is my understanding they are the best and larger affiliate network with clients like Dell and Macy's. Honestly, everything sounded pretty good except we would have to disband our affiliate program; something, of course, we don't want to do.

With Linkshare you sign an exclusive year-long contract and pay them around $2k/mo plus a "share" of the fee you're paying the affiliate for the link (suddenly their name makes sense). What sucks is that you really can't do much when you work with them. And if their system sucks you're screwed until your contract is up. According to Marlene the average growth rate after joining Linkshare is 10% the first year then bewteen 20%-30% depending on how hard you work their program. Apparently that would be my job.

Right now we convert 2.3% affiliate leads into loans. That is piss-poor. Why is it so low? Normally people don't stumble onto a loan and say, "Wow. As it turns out I NEED a loan!". Unlike a new vest from J. Crew, loans are not the type of thing that you just happen to get--no matter how random your purchasing habits may be. Even my beloved girlfriend, who has bought thousands of dollars of random items online (an affiliate's dream) has never wound up with a $15k personal loan. Anyway, because of our low conversation rates it's my fear we won't be able to break even with LinkShare. Bummer.

That's not to say we won't work with them but not only is there a reasonable chance we wouldn't be able to cover the expenses by working with them but to give up our 1500 person internal affiliate program would be the death of decent Search Engine Rankings.

If it ain't (a) broke(r)

We're a loan company. When people apply for loans we get them the best rate and then charge them. None of our affiliates are allowed to do the same thing. See, we do the most business of any online broker and other brokers will steal from us (apparently).

We originally weren't going to work with Revenue Worx for this reason. The gut feeling around the office was bad but lo and behold our CEO got it done. What does that mean? Probably another $750 a week for the company; $0 of which I will see despite my crucial role as Business Developer.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to work out a deal with the Young Entrepreneurs. I like their site and if I could remember the name of the guy I spoke to I'd like him too.

Basic Economics

I am 26 years old. My last business-related class was in 1995, when I was a junior in high school. It was an economics class and I got a C-.

Today my job title changed dramatically. I didn't get a promotion--in fact when it changed the boss was pacing the building on his cell phone. One minute I am the mild-mannered Advertising & Affiliates Director; the next I'm the Advertising and Business Development Director. What's the difference? As the Advertising & Affiliates Director I spend money. I'm given a monthly allowance and I do research, talk on the phone a lot and spend it.

What started as a harmless change in my email signature to make a potential emailer feel like he was talking to someone more important ended with me on the end of a Board of Directors phone call across the country discussing about $70 million dollars in loans. Also take into consideration I'm on day 11 of my new job.

Amazingly, I pulled it off. Thanks in part to a random hang-up in their system that allowed me to run across the office for information-reinforcements they want to do business with us.

So for everyone out there that's in HR--don't hire the resume; hire the person. I can assure you that my girlfriend's MBA sister couldn't have handled it more smoothly than I did...even with my C- in high school econ.

Happy Budgetween

Not only did my girlfriend and I win 1st place for couples costume for our pregnant-Britney/Kevin Federline Halloween costumes I was finally given a budget today. It's meager. Really meager, but the plan is for it to double every month in the hopes that it pays for itself. It's $2500 plus any affiliate programs we decide we want to join.

So what exactly can you get with $2500 a month? Not much. We've already invested $325 with Aaron B. at FindLaw.com. So now we're down to $2175. Next on the list is the ever-irritating CC from Entreprenuer's Place. With a Page Rank of a lowly 3/10 and a high-pressure Become OUR affiliate sales pitch I can all but cross them off the list. Next on the list is Andy from Smallbusinessfranchise.com. Since our budget is so low there's no way we can do the $3900/mo lead-capture program but for about $1100 we can get front-page, hard-coded links. Their traffic is a little low and their Page Rank is only 5 but I like dealing with Andy so it's a possibility.

Up next is Dennis from Bizbuysell.com. Again for $1100 we can get a little more traffic and a PR of 6. I think Dennis is offering us a good deal and I like his take-it-or-leave-it attitude more and more as I deal with people practically begging for what limited money we have. Our last contestant of the day is Gary from Franchise-Update.com. Gary, like Dennis, is a straight shooter who has nothing bad to say about the competition. For about $1500/mo we could get that done pretty easily.

We'll see. The plan is to be playing with the big fish around the 2nd quarter of 2006.

You bitch

Yesterday I complained about this woman from Businesses For Sale (.com). Today she has the audacity to call me back and again attempt to guilt me into not buying her advertising. Apparently "I had to get my manager's approval for this deal" is on par with "Our main office with 60 people no longer exists because it was in the direct path of Hurricane Wilma". Their office is in London so maybe they just hate Americans. Anyway, I've had no choice but to move them from my Blacklist Affiliates to my Double-Blacklist Affiliates. You bitch.

Ignoring the fact I had a tire blow out on a major road on the way to meet with one of my web development clients, the rest of the day was pretty good. I had a great chat with Aaron B. of Findlaw. Now there's the type of guy I expect to deal with. Serious but not overbearing and capable of brokering a deal that's fair to both parties without any of this "manager's approval" bullshit. Even though our product doesn't exactly match their target demographic Aaron was great and we were able to get done in a couple of hours what has taken days with other sites.

Since we were already on a tight budget (less than $3k/mo) for me to spend the hurricane knocking it down ($500/mo) makes my job even more laughable for most Page Rank 8 & 9 affiliates. They don't want a pay per click and they sure as hell don't want a commission. They don't need it. From a small-business advertiser's perspective, though, it's hard for me to shell out money for CPM's. It is. And that sucks. It's more gambling than advertising and quite frankly it's a stupid idea that must have been formulated by the Big Guys with monthly budgets approaching six-figures. I just don't know how we're going to compete with NexTag or AmericanExpress for online real estate when they can offer $28/CPM and we can offer a 15% commission on funded leads.

I've now been in Affiliate Marketing for two weeks. In my time here I've added about 30 affiliates, spent a couple thousand dollars in advertising and raised our bottom line 0%. We need a new plan but my input is rejected since, well, I've been doing this for two weeks.

My first bad day

I knew this was going to happen. Things had been going way too smoothly. First of all, it is freezing cold in our office. It's not supposed to be this cold in Florida--especially in October. Within five miuntes of sitting down my "Account Executive" from businessesforsale.com calls. Somehow last afternoon's "I'm going to reject your offer unless you can bring it down a couple grand a month" was heard as "If you go make up some bullshit "deal" with "manager's" approval I'll happily sign over our company's soul to you without even asking". The woman was in London so maybe it was just our connection.

After narrowly escaping that conversation I had settled in to checking my email only to find AT&T has me listed as a spammer. Do I send out 100 emails a day? Yes. Do I write them myself? Yes. Ok, some of the content is the same from email to email but only about 1/3 of it. How about you start blocking all these Glass Dildo and Give-me-your-Chase-account-information emails instead of going after me?

By the time I was just starting to cool down from the email problem an affiliate calls. A problem affiliate. An affiliate who is SO hot on selling your stuff that I can feel his immigrant-enthusiasm 400 miles away from his "office" in Maryland. "No" I say, "you don't need a website but..." I'm interrupted by bizzare concepts of fliers and telemarketing. Knowing that there are 4 affiliates out of the 1800 in our system that really generate anything doesn't ease my mind. And knowing our affiliate conversation rate is 2.23% doesn't make recruiting any easier. We're doing something wrong but since I've been doing this for eight days I'm not sure what is just yet. But what I do know is that these are not the type of people we need to generate the types of leads we need.

After lunch I got an email from Cynthia B. at EmploymentGuide.com. I really like Cynthia and if your program is better than ours I'd get in touch with her because she's the type of person you want to deal with. She and I had brokered a trial period of commission-based ads versus the $500/wk they wanted. In two days the banner had produced 12 hits and 0 leads. It was coming down. I can't say I blame her. I can get over the fact that my first successful negociation was a huge failure though. She was really nice about it and hopefully once I talk the boss-boss into at least a little bit of CPM'ing then I'd really like to go back to her.

The Overview

Today is day 8 of the next stage of my life. A few weeks ago I was comfortably working out of my house designing some pretty nice looking websites for people either too busy or too dumb to do it themselves. I mean that in the nicest way of course--I couldn't run a law firm and they don't know <pre> from a picture of Imelda Marcos so I guess we'll call it even. I worked entirely alone and had a pretty good reputation around town for small, low-cost/high-quality sites. At the center of my making-ends-meet universe was a cranky, 78 year old man whose Traumatic Brain Injury made working for him a nightmare. When he wanted to cut my $3000/month fee to $1500 I knew it was time to look fora new job. At the same time this was happening a friend of mine referred me for the Affiliate Director position at his job.

I got it. I have a Masters Degree in Music Composition and have never taken a business course in my life. I got a C- in my economics class in high school. And that, friends, is who you're talking to on the phone trying to sell ad space to. Now, I'm not a complete moron. I do know my way around the internet even if I stumble with all of your acronyms. ROI...CPM...CPC. Whatever. I'm sure you're wondering why I was hired and quite frankly I think it's because they needed a bad guy. Someone who will not be timid in asking dumb questions and won't hesitate to tell someone to go hell. I'm nice but momma didn't raise no sucker.

So with hundreds of thousands of people online making money with varying degrees of skill and success this is going to chronicle my adventures in the world of Affiliate Advertising.