Period.  Discuss.

As you might have read in one of my previous posts, I helped organize a meetup for Oklahoma affiliates.  I would first like to thank Revenue Ads, Ndustry Clix and NDemand for sponsoring a great weekend.  I won’t lie, I was a little butthurt because the Meetup202 guys wouldn’t endorse it because I wouldn’t hold it regularly every 4-6 weeks.

Day 1

You couldn’t ask for better weather on my trip to Revenue Ads‘ office in Oklahoma City.  I got there and got to meetup with Dylan Stout, my affiliate manager, Brandon, Edgar and Matt.  They had catered in Rib Crib for lunch and had all the pop and more importantly alcohol I could get my hands on.  And the most important thing was they had a television ready to rock so I could watch all the freaking March Madness games that were on.  I stayed glued to this tv while everybody showed up and got ready for lunch.  Sorry to everybody I didn’t chat with a bunch.  March Madness is serious business!  Lunch went well and I got to bullshit with a number of guys from around Oklahoma, including one that came up from the Dallas area.

After lunch Murray Newlands gave a pretty informative and broad overview about to get started in mailing.  He also let the attendees know how to setup campaigns and optimize.  If I was into mailing, it would’ve been a lot better for me.  I do believe it was a good overview into another aspect of affiliate marketing that most people aren’t involved in.

Next, my brother from another mother, Ian Fernando gave a great presentation on a few niche ideas on how to market an offer to different crowds using different traffic sources.  You can check out his presentation on Scribd.  If you’re stuck in a rut right now, he has a great couple of ideas you can check out.

Then, Revenue Ads, Ndustry Clix and NDemand all rented us a party bus so we could roll in style to go eat at Boulevard Steakhouse in Edmond.  The food there was nothing short of amazing!  Best steak I’ve had in a minute.  Finally we to Red Pin to get in on some bowling action.  It looked like everybody had a great time.  I say looked like because I was off in the corner glued to the television watching the final March Madness games of the day.  After bowling I called it a night and crashed at the Skirvin Hilton in OKC.  The King Suite is niiiice!  The Lakers blamed a lost to the OKC Thunder on the ghosts of the Skirvin, but I didn’t see any.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Day 2

Oh man, day 2.  This day started with me looking outside to a bunch of snow, which was a bummer.  But Mike Pacheco from Ndustry Clix cam and picked up me and Ian Fernando at the Skirvin and Kevin and James from XY7.  The plan was to go watch the 2nd round of the March Madness games at the Ford Center in a suite that Ndustry Clix got for us.  So we had to bullshit for a couple of hours between eating and 3:10pm, when they finally opened the doors to allow us in.  Doing this wasn’t an easy task because it was freezing and snowing outside.  We finally were able to get in and start drinking.  You have to be ready to get your drink on during this time.  The NCAA doesn’t allow for alcoholic beverages to be served or consumed while the game is being played.  The cops would literally come around and give you a 3-minute warning on your drinking time.  So before the games, during halftime and between games you better be ready to chug!

Check the empty cups!  Ian even had a sick freestyle.  I’m trying to score this video for all my readers.  I think he might be slated for a guest appearance with the Paper Clique!

The first game made the entire trip for me.  Kansas was upset by Northern Iowa and was the upset of the tournament, so far.  Kansas State held on to beat BYU by 10 or so.  I’ve included a handful of pictures I took from the games below.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

After the games Mike from Ndustry Clix took us to Crab-town.  Ian Fernando, Kevin, James and I murdered some seafood there.  They litterally throw a huge bucket of shrimp, crabs, potatoes, onions and who knows what else on the table and we devoured it like animals.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Conclusion

I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend from Revenue Ads, Ndustry Clix and NDemand.  Plus, I was able to do some great networking and even picked up a handful of tips that I have already been implementing into my campaigns.

Here’s a great summary video by Ian Fernando.

P.S. – Sorry guys for the lack of pictures.  Kevin from XY7 and Ian Fernando both have a lot more pictures than I do.  I even stole some of theirs.  Thanks guys!

Did you do a little bit of research to find out how Plenty of Fish displays their ads to users?  If not, look at this screenshot.

Can’t you tell how the ads are placed right alongside the pictures of actual users of the site?  If you’re wondering why your CTR’s are so high in comparison to Facebook it’s probably a mixture of these things, (1) less competition and (2) pictures right next to actual users.  If you’ve ever wondered why your conversion rates are so low on offers in comparison to Facebook, it’s probably due to accidental clicks on your ads.  If you’ve ever wondered why you’re traffic doesn’t back out for the advertiser, it’s probably because Plenty of Fish is free and the users are accustomed to a free site.  And since Plenty of Fish only permits dating sites that require paid subscriptions for users to interact, it probably doesn’t go over well for Plenty of Fish users.

These are just my opinions.  Do you agree with me?  If not, what are your thoughts on why Plenty of Fish gets affiliates blacklisted from dating offers?

After crashing my VPS from Liquid Web a few times where I sent 20,000+ clicks daily, I decided to finally bite the bullet and invest in a dedicated server.  After talking to the Sales and Technical Support Team over at Liquid Web we decided it would be best to go with their Professional Series.  The exact specs of my server are below.  I don’t think it’s a bad deal for  $299/month.

Processor: Dual Xeon E5504 Quad Core (Gainstown) (2.0GHz/core)
Memory: 2GB DDR RAM
Hd1: 250GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache
Hd2: 250GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache
OS: Linux – CentOS 5 (+64 Bit)
Bandwidth: 8000GB Monthly Transfer (4000 in + 4000 out)

The only thing that worries me is the 2 gigabytes of memory.  If I ever have problems with this server I will definitely double that at the least.

I wonder how many clicks it will take to crash this server?  Once I find out, I’ll let you all know!

Just so everybody knows, PPV isn’t the easiest thing in the world to master.  I recently read a thread on WickedFire that made me realize something.  If you bid on anything on TrafficVance your minimum bid is $10 CPM.  This is because the minimum bid is $0.01 x 1000 = $10.

I also tested out a number of campaigns and failed miserably and lost hundreds of dollars.  So if you’re worried about losign a few hundred testing, this is not something you should try.

What I’m giving away here was my first profitable campaign on PPV.  I’m going to let everybody know just how I did it.

First thing I did was sign up on TrafficVance.  When you first sign up you will need at least $1,000 to get started.  So if you’re not able to blow some money, don’t try out PPV.

Next, you will want to go and download Laser URL.  If you don’t know how to use this program go here for Laser URL Tutorial Videos.  You will want to search a very closely related term to your offer using Laser URL.  I always let it search 10 pages deep on all three search engines.  This gives me a number of URL’s to prune and use for testing purposes.  Once you get these URLs, export them to a spreadsheet and then I suggest researching each URL to see if they even relate to your offer.  If they relate, it’ll be one of your targets.

I ran the Mobile IQ Quiz – QuizYou over at EWA.  I used Laser URL to search for the term iq quiz.  I of course pruned my targets and threw the list into TrafficVance.

My first time through I made sure I was the highest bidder on all the URL’s I targetted because I wanted some good test data.  I let it run for a couple days and came back to optimize it.  Make sure you’re tracking where your traffic comes from using the %%$KEYWORD%% variable that TrafficVance uses.  This way you can see which targets are converting and what the EPC for that target is so you can adjust your bids according.

After some time I was able to drop all the low traffic and non-converting targets down to about 10 targets.  The only bad thing about this was that I had to monitor these things day and night because I would get into daily bidding wars on URL’s, especially my best converting URL.  This got tiresome, I finally just got fed up with it and was okay with being in the 3rd spot.  I noticed more and more competition coming in on my targets and I was eventually being out bid on all my target URL’s.  The headache to keep up with these bids eventually became so much that I quit running the offer because of the increased competition and higher bids led to a dismal ROI that was no longer worthy of my time.

I came back a couple months later and noticed all the bids were much lower than they once were so I turned the campaign on and let it run for a couple days.  For whatever reason the offer was no longer converting on these URL’s so I paused the offer and haven’t ran it since.

My gross revenue for this offer was $7,144.00 and my total spend for this campaign was $4,867.27.  That equates to a $2,277 profit and a 46.7% ROI.

P.S. – If you’re going to run a PPV campaign, I suggest that your Prosper202 install be on a dedicated server.  I always suggest LiquidWeb for any server you may need.