Disclaimer: This is a crucial and often overlooked part of our business that I want to bring to other affiliates attention.  I also want to state that I do not believe that any foul play is being done by TrafficVance.

I recently started advertising with TrafficVance again.  I noticed you needed a new account to advertise internationally so upon signing up for a new account I took the time to read through TrafficVance’s Terms and Conditions for the first time.  If you haven’t read them, please take 5 minutes out of your day and read them, specifically Section 2.4.  I’ve included it below for your convenience.

2.4  License. Advertiser hereby grants to Trafficvance a non-exclusive, license fee-free and royalty-free, worldwide license to use, store, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display and digitally perform all of Advertiser’s Advertisements (including all Content) for purposes of performing its obligations under this Agreement and for related promotional and business purposes.

As I stated previously, I don’t believe that TrafficVance is doing anything shady in relation to this or there would have been numerous complaints and accusations by affiliates already.  I just felt like this was the perfect example to bring to light why we, as affiliates, should read the Terms and Conditions at any place we agree to do business with.  This especially includes, but isn’t limited to ad networks and affiliate networks.

If you’re an affiliate in the dating vertical, I have a couple questions for you.

• What have you done to protect yourself from possible lawsuits stemming from the unauthorized use of someone’s likeness in an advertisement?
• Have you ever had a creative disapproved for copyright reasons?
• Were you an affiliate on MyAds prior to their now banished requirement to provide proof the model in the creative was above the age of 18 and that you were allowed to use his/her image?

Sometimes you’ll even run across an advertiser who wants you to submit your creatives to them for approval prior to running them or risk the chance of having all your commissions reversed.  Sometimes they want to make sure you’re translation is correct on the creative and other times they want to make sure the models in the creatives are a good representation of their brand name.

A few months ago Singlesnet sent out a lawsuits notification to all their affiliates that were working directly with them.  When I got this email, my heart dropped. I just knew that I was getting sued, but luckily I wasn’t involved!

In the dating vertical you will see most everybody uses the same images which exponentially increases the likelihood of the person in the creative to be noticed.  Remember Justin Dupre’s image pack?  Those images are whored out.  Matter of fact, I even know of an image that I stole from a random girl off MySpace and used it in my creatives.  I then noticed this same image in his image pack.  Thanks Justin!  This same exact girl noticed her ads on Facebook and made a big bulletin on MySpace about how she was pissed off.  Luckily for us affiliates, she didn’t have the money to take it to court.

If you’re big into the dating vertical, like myself, what have you done to remedy any and/or all of the situations above?

I was laying down to sleep the other night and I had a great idea hit me.  Have you seen those creepy ass old dudes on Facebook and MySpace that are trying to be professional photographers.  They go around finding hot girls and asking them for a photoshoot and often times enticing them with money.

Luckily for me, I know one of these photographers personally and she also happens to be a girl.  I contacted her and asked her if she and her models would be interested in letting me use their likeness in some of my creatives.  She also tags the girls in her photo shoots so I went to their page, told the girl how I came about their pictures.  I explained to them exactly what I do so they know why I need them.  They were all for it.  All they wanted to know was how much they were getting paid.

Another girl specifically had came to mind that I know, who also happens to be smokin’ hot.  So I hit her up on Facebook, explained to her what I do and asked if she would be willing to let me use some of her pictures in my creatives, she too was all for it.  She just wants to know how much she is getting paid.

So as of right now, I’m waiting on my attorney to draft this letter of consent up for me.  This will alleviate any concerns I have for a lawsuit or unauthorized use of images.  I can provide this documentation to any advertiser and traffic source and inform them of my authorization to use these pictures.  For what it’s worth, most of my images can be rated PG at worst, so its not like I’m requesting to use some of the girls’ most scantily clad pictures.

So if you’re into the dating vertical and are also worried about the concerns I addressed in this post, try the method I described above.  Let me know how it works out for you!

Recently I was flown out to Los Angeles by AKMG and was selected to give a presentation at Meetup202 LA.  The topic I chose was how to get started with buying banner inventory on websites.  If you read my recap you’ll know the story about how I was really nervous about it.  Smaxor being present didn’t help my nerves because I knew if I had any slipups, he would know.  But after it was all said and done, I handled it pretty well.  A lot of people came up to me after wards and gave me great information and let me know they gained some good information, which is was my objective in the first place.  So I considered it a success.

The purpose of this post is to let everybody know that my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory is now public information.  There’s a link in the menubar above, so you might have seen it before.  I just had it set to password protected to tease everybody for awhile.  I had a number of people contact me on AIM asking for the password so they could check it out.

I did let a handful of people check out the guide in rough fashion so they could check it out and provide feedback.  They pointed out a few things I’ve added to the guide, but for the most part it’s pretty much a direct copy of the presentation I made at Meetup202 LA.  A few of the people that have already seen it have used the tips I’ve given away to get some campaigns up and running.

For what it’s worth, I consulted with a few affiliates who I trust to get their feedback on whether I should turn this into an eBook and make some money, because this guide definitely gives out some great information that you can use to fatten your bank account.  However, I didn’t want to be labeled a guru or an eBook marketer so I decided to go the Nickycakes route and release it as a guide on my blog.

I’m sure there are some small parts I’ve missed, but I believe that I have covered pretty much what you need to know when it comes to buying banner inventory.  If you guys see anything that I should change in the guide, just make a comment on those pages and I’ll add it if necessary.

Without further ado, just click the link above in the menubar or click here for my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory.

A couple weeks ago the campaigns I was running all happened to die out on me, were paused or whatever.  Regardless of what happened, all my daily income was wiped out and I wasn’t too excited about it.  So I went to Azoogle looking for some niche dating offers because I’ve had success doing this in the past.  What I stumbled onto was an absolute gem and a few extra hundred dollars in the bank for very little work.

I came across a campaign called EligibleGreeks.com.  It was a dating offer aimed at singles in Cyprus and the payout was a measly $1.45. So I went over to Facebook to check out the size of the demo.  Unfortunately there are only 15,100 men who are 18 and older, are single and are interested in women.  The highest suggested CPM bid was only 12c and that’s what I bid.  I thought to myself, if this demo converts it’ll be golden, so I threw up a few ads.

Due to the demo being so small, I setup two campaigns.  One targeting men who were 18-24 and only spoke English.  Within this campaign I only setup 3 ads because the demo was now down to 10,100.  The other campaign targeted men who were 18-24 and spoke Greek. I need some ad copy translated so I headed over to OneHourTranslation.com and had two ad copies translated.  This campaign only had a demo of 3,900, but I still setup 6 ads total with 3 images for each ad copy.

After the first day of testing, the English campaign had a CTR of 0.482% and the Greek campaign had a CTR 0.825% with 1 image having a 1.046% CTR and the worst image having a CTR of 0.749%.  Between the two campaigns I had an overall conversion ratio of 29.33%.  So I immediately scaled out the campaigns to the rest of the males and tried out the females aged 18-24.

I just let these existing ads ride out for a few of days.  I didn’t rotate in any new images or ad copy.  Since this campaign required no maintenance and I needed income, I moved on to getting some other campaigns up.  I let this campaign run for only 5 days because my offers came back live and I needed to concentrate on those as they were providing a much larger income for me.

There was a newer affiliate I had been chatting with every once in awhile lately and I knew he was really trying to get some stuff going.  I knew he was making a few bucks, but nothing to write home about so I decided to give him this campaign.  I took screenshots of my ads to show him the exact targeting for the campaign, including the ad copy.  Since he wasn’t already an affiliate at Azoogle, I told him to sign up under me so I could make a couple bucks off his revenue and told him to use his own images.  I knew he was into dating so I figured he had a few of his own that were good.

Since you’re all wondering how the campaign turned out, I spent a total of $55.29 and the revenue was $469.80, equating to a 749.70% return on my investment.  Not bad, eh?  The overall conversion ratio was 19.43% and the EPC was 29c.  I let the affiliate I turned the campaign over to let me know when he was done running the offer because I was going to make the post you’re currently reading, and out the campaign.  He also netted a couple hundred bucks off the campaign as well.

Unfortunately, the offer has been drastically changed in the past few days.  I think they changed lander, but I’m not 100% sure of this, they will only credit you for individuals of Greek heritage now and the payout was nearly cut in half to 75c.

Finding these untapped micro-niches can pay off so go find one!

Last weekend saw the final phase of my case study using POF’s conversion tracking to help turn a campaign profitable. Unfortunately, Phase 1 provided some skewed results because I tried to split $500 in testing between men and women and I only was able to spend $250 testing each gender. Simply put, that wasn’t enough and I realized it after analyzing the results. But, I took what data I had and went with it. Since I learned that $250 wasn’t enough testing, I decided to test the results of only the male gender because they provided the most statistically significant results. The campaigns didn’t lose as much money as the first round and none of the campaigns were profitable, but I’ll explain why it was my fault and what you can try to turn a similar campaign profitable.

Targeting Criteria: Body Type – Average

Analysis: On my previous case study an average body type showed a conversion rate of 5.56% which was higher than average for the entire campaign in the testing phase. On this final phase these numbers held true and the conversion ratio even increased a bit. This campaign had the second most amount of traffic. The CTR was the highest of any of the other campaigns. If you were going to start a campaign, I would definitely include this targeting criteria in your campaign.

Targeting Criteria: Drinking Habits – Socially

Analysis: When I did my original test campaign, this criteria converted right at the same percentage as the overall campaign.  In this second go round, it didn’t fare so well and performed well under what I expected to.  This target criteria by far had the most amount of traffic available.

Targeting Criteria: Education Level – Bachelors Degree

Analysis: This target criteria performed the best in the initial testing stage converting at 7.61%, but it only had 7 conversions.  I had high hopes for this campaign and a little bit of worry because I wasn’t sure if the conversion ratio was a fluke.  And as you can the conversion ratio didn’t perform as well as I had hoped.  After the testing, it converted just under the average ratio for the campaign.  I’m also pretty sure the target demographic for this criteria is pretty small, hence the CTR dying out on all my images really quickly and most images not even being clicked on after a few thousand impressions.

Targeting Criteria: Income – $35,001 – $50,000

Analysis: This is another target criteria that was pretty risky.  In my initial tests it only had 7 conversions, but it converted at 5.22%, well above the campaign average.  After sending a fair amount of traffic to it, it converted even better than in my initial tests.  The only thing holding this campaign back from being profitable was the CTR.  I struggled with CTR in this campaign for a reason unknown to me.  I used what I thought were some of my best images at this campaign without any luck.  So if you know you have some images with really good CTR, this is something you might want to build into your next campaign.

Targeting Criteria: Search Type – Long-term

Analysis: This criteria converted right at the campaign average and I wanted a fifth criteria to test so I threw it in there.  Unfortunately, the campaign didn’t convert nearly as well as it did in my initial tests, which could be contributed to it only having 6 conversions.  These users seemed to be pretty click happy as it had the second best CTR of all the campaigns, they just didn’t convert nearly well enough.

Final Thoughts

The day after the campaign I received an email from Convert2Media that informed me the payout for Singlesnet 25+ was raised to 4.50. So you can take all the revenue figures here and increase them by 12.5%. It still doesn’t make any campaign profitable, but it definitely helps out quite a bit.

It would really help if Plenty of Fish could include the estimated number of people in our target demographics to give us an idea of how long we can expect our images to last before the users succumb to banner blindness.

One of my biggest problems with these final campaigns was choosing the correct images.  When I was running these campaigns I had numerous other campaigns I was working on so it was tough to keep an eye on these campaigns, even while using Mr. Green‘s POF Tool to upload new images throughout the campaign’s livelihood.  If you can keep your CTR up on your campaigns you will be way closer to profitability than I was.  I also have to fault myself for not split testing images.  I rarely ever do this and is one thing I need to severely address.  I’ve done this a few other times and I do know that images to play a role in the conversion rates.

There are a number of things you can take away from this case study.  By looking at the numbers above you can clearly see two targeting criteria that convert better than others, so try building those into your campaigns.  Maybe you can even combine the criteria and see how they perform together, but that will limit the amount of traffic you can get it.  Or you can do it the other way and exclude poor performing criteria from your campaigns.

If you use any of the tips I mentioned here and don’t mind sharing in the comments below how it turned out for you, please do!