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.

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.

Wes Mahler came forward June 5, 2010 and made a huge announcement, Tracking202 Has Been Re-Acquired by Original Founders.  His post is below.

We have an important announcement to make today. I’m not entirely sure how to bring about this news so I am going to do my best and just come out with it. As many of you may know, Tracking202 was acquired by another company in our space known as Bloosky Interactive last November. However since then, many things have changed. A lot of things happened and as some of you may or may not know, I was no longer part of this company for the past few months. This has all changed now.

Today, I’m pleased to announced that the original founders of Tracking202 have undone the acquisition and Tracking202 is no longer a Bloosky Interactive company! As of earlier this week, we completed a deal with Bloosky to get Tracking202 back.  I and a few members of the original Tracking202 team will be heading up the direction of the company moving forward.

We hope to continue innovating in our industry which is in need of great change more than ever. A lot has happened recently both with Tracking202, the affiliate industry and performance marketing space as a whole. We hope to change all of that for the better. We’re bringing back the original Tracking202 culture that many of you have grown to know and fallen in love with.  We are going to do our best to make Tracking202 even better starting by redoing everything that Tracking202 is currently.

We are going to be making some fairly large changes to Tracking202, some of which we’ve already began doing. One of the first things we will be doing is discontinuing Tracking202 Pro soon because we feel there are better opportunities for our company to tackle. We will be posting more and more updates on what’s to come so please feel free to stop by our blog for further future updates.

We know we have a lot of work to do ahead of us and we look forward to making things happen for the community and the industry as a whole with these new changes. We do appreciate all of the support you guys have given us throughout the years and we look forward to working with you guys again.

Hello again,
Wes

I had been hearing rumors about this for the past month or so and wasn’t sure how I felt about the move.  My opinion was that he should re-acquire the company and continue to support it.  I felt it would be in his best interest to start a new product or service for our industry from the ground up to reestablish the support of his target market.

Once it was posted publicly, I originally came forward on WickedFire, with this post, saying that, “The 202 brand will never be what it once was.”  I wanted to come out and say that my post seemed kind of harsh and I didn’t support Wes Mahler in his decision.  I would like to publicly announce that I fully support Wes in whatever he chooses to do.  I just don’t think that the auro that surrounded the 202 Platform before he sold the company to Bloosky will be able to be achieved again.  I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying he has his work cut out for him if that’s what he wants to do.

I do hope that he continues to build the 202 Platform and expand its services to be everything it has the potential to be.  The consensus is that he tarnished his and 202′s reputation once he sold it.  I never blamed Wes’ decision, ever.  I’m sure his payday was nice and for that reason alone I don’t blame him.  I personally was hoping he would turn himself into a serial entrepreneur and build a new service for this industry or another and all us affiliates could once say we were there when he first hit the big time.

But, those are just my feelings about this move.  I’m excited for Wes and the rest of the 202 team.  They’re all stand up guys and it has always been a pleasure to interact with them from support to partying.

P.S. I’ll be upgrading my 202 install once they release their new version.

Here recently a buddy of mine hit me up on AIM and say hey man, I see that you’re running X offer on Y traffic source.  I asked him how he knew and he said he simply looked at the referral analytics on my tracking domain.  Even though the data was’t current, it was dead on about what I was running at one time and made it made me a pretty penny.  I’m glad that he and I are good friends and gave me the 411 so I could remedy the situation.

So if you go over to Quantcast.com, Compete.com or Alexa.com and throw in a tracking domain you can easily see where some of its traffic may be coming from.  There are a couple ways you can hide your information, but the way I prefer to do it is below.  I’m a newb and don’t use any other tools similar to this.  So if there are other tools, you may want to also hide your data on those sites too.  You should also post a comment listing similar sites so I can do the same.

One way is to sign up to Quantcast.com and choose which parameters are available for viewing to others.  On Compete.com your best bet is to email their support team and let them know you don’t want your domain’s data to be public information.  They might fight with you about this.  If they do, politely inform them that this is an ad serving and tracking domain and that you would very much appreciate it if they could unpublish the results for your domain when they release their data for the coming month.  Finally you have Alexa.com.  All you have to do is look at the Clickstream for that particular domain and all I’m gonna say is good luck getting them to remove your information.  I have yet to make this happen and they seem hell bent on not removing any data.  I’m to the point to where I will be talking to my attorney shortly to see if there’s anything I can possibly do.

Does anybody know any other domains that track referrers and display the information to the public?  Care to post it in the comments?

Better yet, do you know a way to get Alexa to hide your Clickstream?  Let a brother know!