Are you an affiliate that has scaled out his campaigns to countries that speak a language other than the one you speak? If so, you’ve probably had to find a translator to get your ad copy and landing page translated.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably used Google Translate which, in my opinion, is utterly worthless now. I’ve used it a number of times and it provided me a great translation. However it has burned me to the tune of four figures once.  Awhile back, I was running one of the Be2 offers with Neverblue and used Google Translate to translate my ad copy. When I agreed to the terms and conditions of the offer, I didn’t really read them, I just skimmed them like most affiliates would. The advertiser happened to come across one of my ads, traced it back to me and refused to pay me.  They refused payment because the translation of the ad copy was grammatically incorrect and didn’t portray Be2 as they wanted to be portrayed.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t anything demeaning, just horrible grammar.  The terms of the offer are below.  So, I really had no ground to stand on.

Localization – Any translation of English text used in the promotion of Be2 and any Be2 services must be approved in advance by Neverblue. The use of any profanity or sexually suggestive or explicit wording is strictly prohibited. Neverblue reserves the right to immediately remove your account from the applicable campaign and reverse of any commissions you may have earned without giving prior notice to you if you violate any of these additional terms and conditions. All translations must be grammatically correct. If you are uncertain if your creative assets or promotional text and materials are within the brand guidelines, please contact your Neverblue Affiliate Manager. Govern yourself accordingly.

Ever since this day, I knew I had to obtain a better translation service.  I kept hearing Ryan Eagle and other affiliates talk about how good OneHourTranslation.com was, so I decided to give them a shot.  From the beginning, it has always been a pleasure dealing with OneHourTranslation and their layout is really intuitive.   You can either input text to a text box on their site or you can upload a .txt file or MS Word document for translation.  They also are pretty good at returning the translation back to you in the same format you supplied them with.  When you need something translated you can also choose to have it translated by an expert and I typically go this route.  I choose an expert in Marketing/Consumer/Media for translation.  This doubles the price from 7c per word to 14c per word, which I don’t mind paying for.  I’d rather have it done right the first time.  They have cheaper translation services, if you purchase credits in volume and they even accept PayPal.  As their name implies, they usually return your translated text within an hour.  They have a policy that if they can’t provide you with a translation in under 6 hours, it’s free or you get a credit, or something along those lines.  I wouldn’t know the deal exactly, because it hasn’t happened.

If you read the terms above for Be2, you’ll see that you should should clear your ad copy and any other translated text with your affiliate manager.  I reached out to my affiliate manager numerous times to clear ad copy that was done by OneHourTranslation and it always came back as approved.

So if you’re looking for a good translation service, look no further than OneHourTranslation.com!

I spent $550 and tried to split the amount between the male and female campaigns for Singlesnet.  I’ve included a copy of ad copy split testing results and the conversion breakdowns for both, males and females. For the campaign targeting males I spent a total of $300.89 for 26 conversions at $4.00, resulting in a loss of $196.89. When it came to females I spent $254.43 for 21 conversions at $4.00, which also resulted in a loss to the tune of $170.43. These kinds of losses can be expected when you do really broad targeting to a really broad dating offer. My goal here was to try and find certain target criteria that converted better than others and I did just that, which I’ll talk about shortly.

Here you will see the ad copy split testing results and conversion breakdown for criteria with more than 5 conversions for the male gender.

As you can see from these results, I will be using the, “Want a Girlfriend?” ad copy, paired with a number of images that did well for me on this campaign. I will also be targeting men who have a bachelor’s degree, average body type, income from $35,001 – $50,000, drink socially and are looking for a long term relationship.  I will build out separate campaigns for each of these 5 criteria.  The rest of the targeting will be exactly like it was in Phase 1, except that I will only be targeting 25-29 year olds and leaving out the 30-32 year olds. They didn’t convert nearly as well as the 25-29 year olds.

And below you will find the ad copy split testing results and conversion breakdown for criteria with more than 5 conversions for the female gender.

Again, we see that the ad copy that performed the best was, “Want a Boyfriend?”. There were no obvious criteria that performed better than the others, so I’m going to leave the female campaign alone and focus solely on the male campaigns since it had more useful data.

I will be building the aforementioned campaigns tonight. Once they blow through the $500 in the coming week, I will make a follow up post with the results.

Please note that I didn’t pause any ad copy on purpose. I only checked the stats once a day and any images with .09 %CTR or lower was paused. So that is probably what contributed to the large discrepancy in the number of clicks each ad copy received.

The girls over at AKMG put together a Meetup202 event for the Los Angeles area.  I have a real great working relationship with my affiliate manager, Eleah Portillo and Amber Paul.  Eleah had this great idea that I should speak at the Meetup202 gathering.  I’m terrified of public speaking, but I agreed to it anyways.  I was worried that I couldn’t find any good material, but I calmed down and decided I would speak on buying banner inventory on websites.  I rehashed the post where I lost $250 on my first media buy and went into more detailed information about what things you need to know before signing an insertion order.  I’ll make another, more detailed post about this in the coming week or two.

Friday

One of the things I always wanted to do was visit Los Angeles, but I have yet to do it.  I was so excited about the trip,  I didn’t get any sleep the night before and I flew out at 5am Friday morning without much hassle.  Once I got there and got my rental car I headed over to the AKMG office in Santa Monica.   Missed an exit or two and ended up East LA.  Oops!  But the trusty iPhone got me where I needed to be.  Once I got there I got to meet the whole AKMG crew and worked out of their offices for a few hours until I could go check into my room over in Marina Del Ray.

Once checked in, I took a desperately needed nap.  The girls with AKMG all had their plans that night and that was fine by me because I had a rental car and I won tickets on Twitter to a Crooked I concert in Pasadena.  I’m a huge fan of Crooked I and he just happened to live in Tulsa for a few years.  I was able to talk to him when he came to Tulsa back in November with his group, Slaughterhouse.  Anyways, after the show was over I got up on stage and was able to chop it up with him for a few years.  This night set the whole weekend off for me.  I knew it was going to be great.  You can see a some footage of the show below.  Too see my cameo, skip to 6:21 in the video.

Saturday

I finally was able to get around Saturday and start getting prepared for Meetup202 LA.  I had to live it up while I was out there so you know I had to eat at In-N-Out Burger.  That’s my favorite place to eat on the west coast.  So, I knew my presentation was drawing near and I was starting to get nervous.  Finally after eating Eleah Portillo came and picked a brother up and took me to Meetup202 LA.  Thank god there was a little bit of alcohol there to calm my nerves.  Good ol’ Lennisse Ambriz,  Amber Paul and Eva knew I was nervous so they had a great idea for all us to take a shot and Lennisse was a little hesitant until Amber gave her a little whisper.  Well, it came time to take a shot and I requested to trade cups with Lennisse and of course she wouldn’t.  Guess who had water and who had liquor.  I politefully informed them that, “You can’t play a player!“  Silly AKMG girls!

I was the first speaker and I spoke on how to buy banner inventory on websites.  I’m not going to get into much detail here because I’ll dedicate a whole blog post to this.  Even though I was fairly nervous, I settled in rather quickly.  After I was done, I had great feedback from a number of guys, which really made me feel like I had accomplished something. I hope everyone that was there was able to take something away from it.

Next up was Jason Akatiff aka Smaxor, the network owner of Ads4Dough and Nana Gilbert from Tracking202.  They were put up there without much notice for a Q&A session.   There were a number of good questions that both were able to answer and some very specific questions that wouldn’t be answered.  For everybody that was there, take a hint!  There’s probably some gold somewhere around those questions.  You just have to figure out the answer!

After Meetup202 we all went out to some restaurant/bar in Venice.  I think it was Hal’s.  There was probably a good 15 of us or so crammed into a corner.  It was a good time to relax and have a couple drinks after the event.  As far as I know, business was on the back burner and we were all out to have fun.  I, personally, was still tired from the night before and was ready to head home, which I did after we finished eating.  Most everybody else went to another bar in Venice called The Brig, I think.  I chunked the deuce and headed home with Eva and Amber.

Sunday

Today was my day to go have fun and go sightseeing.  To start it off I ate at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles.  Everybody was hating on my picture on Facebook because the fried chicken was smothered in gravy.  Who doesn’t like gravy on their chicken anyways?  Weirdos.  Once I was done eating Eleah Portillo came and picked me up from the hotel and unfortunately for her, she got to drive me all over Southern California. To start out I had her drive me down Wilmington Avenue which is right in the middle of Compton, California.  We proceeded to hit the 710 Freeway down to Long Beach.  We took Ocean Boulevard, which was beautiful, to the Eastside of Long Beach and drove through the heart of it.  Then I had her take me to Inglewood where we drove down Crenshaw and finally hit Slauson and Crenshaw.  After we were tired of seeing all the ghetto parts we decided to liven up the drive and hit Rodeo Drive and took Wilshire over to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed north to Malibu.  We ate at  Dukes, got a table outside and was able to watch the sunset on the Pacific.  We were even lucky enough to watch some dolphins swim by.  Then it was time to head home and crash!

Monday

Monday I was able to get up and head over to the AKMG office for a few hours before my departure.  In those few hours, I was able to get a lot more work than I thought done.  Maybe I need to get a office here in Tulsa, who knows.  Before I knew it, it was time to head home and was ready for it.

Thanks to Steven, the AKMG Girls, Kim, Amber, Eleah and Lennisse for all letting me come out to beautiful Los Angeles, California.  I had a blast!

Any of you guys attending the Meetup202 event this Saturday in SoCal?

Plenty of Fish has recently implemented conversion tracking into their ad platform.  This will show you the exact characteristics of your converting users.  You can use these reports to take a non-profitable campaign and turn it into something that will help you regain the money you lost testing and ultimately turn a profit.

This case study will take a real general dating offer and advertise it to the masses.  I will take the data from their conversion tracking report and break it into ultra-targeted campaigns.  I decided to go with the Singlesnet 25+ offer on C2M.  I’ll be using some pretty generic ad copy that has been proven to work and will give them away below.  The images I’m going to be using were gathered by me personally and I have a feeling that they will do quite well on POF so I won’t be outing those, sorry fellas.  The frequency cap will be set to 3 and my bids will start out at $0.46 using Mr. Green’s 1 Penny Tip.

Targeting Criteria

1. Single, widowed, divorced or separated Males that live in the United States and are between the ages of 25 and 32.
2. Single, widowed, divorced or separated Females that live in the United States and are between the ages of 25 and 32.

Male Ad Copy

1. Single Available Women!
   Are you looking for more single women in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find them tonight!
2. Single Women!
   Are you looking for a single woman in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find her tonight!
3. Want a Girlfriend?
   Sign up now and find a girl in {state:your state} tonight!

Female Ad Copy

1. Single Available Men!
   Are you looking for more single men in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find them tonight!
2. Single Men!
   Are you looking for a single man in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find him tonight!
3. Want a Boyfriend?
   Sign up now and find a man in {state:your state} tonight!

If you advertise on POF and aren’t aware, Mr. Green has released a POF Ad Uploader that is effin awesome!  It will save you tremendous amounts of time uploading ads and split testing campaigns.  It comes with free lifetime updates and is well worth the money.  Here’s a link to my walk through video.