Disa Johnson: HTML5 is Perfect for SEO and Affiliate Marketers

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2011-08-02

Ever wonder what the noise about some new Web programming language can mean for you? With HTML5 the possibilities seem endless. That’s because largely possibilities are endless. HTML5 is a technology that is expected to replace Flash. Ever wanted to build an iPhone app? What if you’ve invested a lot of time and energy optimizing SEO for Flash sites or you’ve counseled against using any Flash? What if you’re using Flash for rich media advertising or lead generation sites? Finally there is common ground with a simple new language platform that HTML5 provides.

From my perspective with search I’ve never been able to support Flash as a medium for publishing full-blown websites. There are some famous cases of Flash gone awry that SEO practitioners should be aware of. Long before SEO I used to make shockwave movies. That was before Google and earlier search engines were important. Flash is fun but don’t let a Flash designer’s glee sabotage your success with too much reliance on it. I’m writing consistently here that Flash is still 99% bad.

The role of Flash never played much of a useful role outside games and when Steve Jobs announced that Flash will not be supported on the iPhone it spelled the doom of Flash. Adobe has now answered the call with a new product called Edge . What Steve Jobs (Google and Microsoft too) have decided is to embrace HTML5. For Apple that means HTML5 enables Web designers to make apps that live outside its Appstore. They all adopted HTML5 regardless what it might mean individually for each company.

That is excellent news content producers and publishers like us. We have a promise of write once, run anywhere applications with powerful new features. My company created an app for mobile which analyzes page information and crawls websites using the technology. Apple has a directory of web apps that take on the look and feel of native apps. With HTML5, your content is search engine friendly and indexable. You can animate with HTML5 and like with Flash: Only the text gets indexed by search engines.

Use Edge or another editor to author pure HTML5 with CSS3 and Javascript animations and capabilities to save time and access Adobe code resources. Edge will export code that you can hack into once you know how to hack HTML5 and the rest. You’re lucky that unlike us you’re able to avoid writing routines that calculate scores for graphing things. You get to let Edge generate code for you. There’s still nothing like doing the work yourself though!

Reports of Flash becoming obsolete jumped the shark. Google Android and WebOS (HP TouchPad) supports Flash. Edge promotes Flash in its editor for specific tasks that are well suited for using Flash. You have to want to build for a specific system is all. For example, if you want to build an Android app that is location aware, you can use a Flash widget from Edge that grabs coordinates from a Google Maps API key and draws on the Android screen in reference to geo location. The possibilities are endless. Investigate how you can build apps, design forms, capture information and much more with HTML5.

Clickback Changes Guidelines Under FTC Pressure

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-08-02

59

This week ClickBank announced new guidelines that would significantly change the way that many affiliate marketers and “JV Partner” programs would be allowed to be promoted. While the new guidelines did not specifically address JV Programs that targeted affiliates, it had been known that there was a growing amount of consumer complaints and charge backs from the “make money” programs. According to an FTC insider, Clickbank had received some initial inquiries regarding specific products from the consumer protection agency.

The guidelines mainly specifically deal with Testimonials and Endorsements and could put a huge cramp in the marketing efforts of many of the “JV Partner” programs that are promoted over Clickbank, WarriorForum, Digital Point and many affiliate marketing websites.

The requirements that will have the biggest effect are:
– All videos must be preapproved before being put up on a website (script approval by Clickbank)
– All “limited amount”, “offer almost done” and “will be closing” type opportunity messages will be banned.
– Cannot promote that products were at a higher price, unless verified by Clickbank
– Upsells will be limited on initial orders and must include a way to immediately optout (and not have to watch more promotions)
– Will not allow products to be promoted as being easy to use, “one-button”
– As Seen on TV will be banned, unless there is documentation specifically to that product that it was seen on TV.

While most in the industry feel that these are positive requirements, many people point that they will delay launches of products significantly and not allow many JV Marketers to change their landing pages as necessary or provide new content and videos to customers frequently.

What do you think of the changes?

Home Warranty Leads: The Daniel Baldwin Lead Gen

By

Kevin Wallach

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2011-08-02

7

Quick, name a film starring Daniel Baldwin! Time’s up. Can’t do it? Don’t worry, neither can most people. Truth is, though he’s still more famous than the average lead generation guy he’s still “that” Baldwin brother.

Every family has the underdog I guess. For the family of warranty and extended service plans I’d say home warranty is the Daniel Baldwin. If you know what home warranty covers or can name some of the bigger companies in the industry then pat yourself on the back. Many Americans haven’t a clue what a home warranty is for or where to get one.

In the world of lead generation home warranty is a niche lead type but it has gained much more attention over the last two years than in previous ones. One obvious driver for an increase in interest in niche lead types would be the relative lack of competition for leads. From the consumer side interest might be growing due to an increase in home owners sitting on homes longer than they’d originally planned as well as other economic factors.

If your business is affiliate marketing or lead generation and you’ve never worked on a home warranty campaign then I can help you with some quick facts.

1. Home warranty covers many different things inside and outside a home and the coverage varies from company to company. Plans may cost as little as pennies per day or as much as several dollars per day depending on the plan provider and the depth of the list of covered items.

2. The heavy hitter in home warranty is American Home Shield. Over 40% of the consumers in the U.S. using home warranty are signed up with AHS.

3. Depending on your traffic sources, lead quality, volume of leads, return policy, and available list of fields you could expect to sell your leads for well into the $35 range. But keep in mind payouts are based on the lead buyer’s desired cost per acquisition and those tend to be all over the place. Some lead buyers won’t go near the top price.

4. Here’s a good example of the list of fields that are typical for home warranty lead generation offers.

If you have questions about this niche lead generation market I’ll be happy to help. I think there is still a great deal of growth potential in home warranty leads and there are too few high quality lead producers and affiliates. Since this is a product with fairly universal appeal (you only really need to be a home owner to qualify) it can work with many different types of email opt-in lists or other traffic channels.

Protected: The Secret PageRank 9 Website Link

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-08-01

28

Content Unlocking is a Growing Industry

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-07-30

18

As part of trying to expand our coverage of new parts of the industry, Performance Marketing Insider started a series of interviews with content unlocking companies. Please note, at first I questioned the entire Content Unlocking industry, but have begun to realize the benefits and that there are legit uses for the methods. This incentive based industry is one of the fastest growing segments, very similar to the social media currency, except that is generally not social based. The whole model is simple: sites want to provide something of value, but don’t want to provide it for free. Instead of asking a user to pay for it, they work with a content unlocking company to provide a gateway. In our industry, this means that if a user does something, fills out an offer, downloads a product, registers for a giveaway – or anything – they will be provided with the content for free.

Here is a list of the biggest companies in the industry and a little about them. As we do the interviews I will be linking them, and also providing more information. Hopefully this will become a growing resource about Content Unlocking companies, what they are doing and who to work with.

BLAMADS
BlamAds is owned by genius marketing superstar Ryan Eagle. For those who don’t know, he’s being probably half a dozen companies in the industry, funding new upstarts. BlamAds came out of nowhere recently and has taken the market by storm with their great branding efforts in almost every blog out there. They are definitely a Content Unlocking company to watch. Here’s an interview with Ryan Eagle.

ADSCEND MEDIA
Adscend Media is one of the established companies in the industry run by Content Unlocking King, Fehzan Ali. He’s proven to be one of the most vocal members of the industry, telling anyone who will listen to him that content unlocking is a legit part of the industry and can provide a lot of use.

CPALEAD
CPALead is the company to beat in the industry. While the exact amount of money they make is not known, they are considered one of the top sources of traffic for dozens of networks, providing more than one CPA network several million dollars a month in revenue. Their reach extend everywhere and I’ve been told that several download offers completely depend on them for the majority of their traffic.

LEADBOLT
LeadBolt, an Australian company has recently entered the market. Honestly, I do not know much about the company, but will be getting in touch with them to find more information soon. I did quickly learn that they have content unlocking for the mobile phone, which really seems exciting to me.. Read Our Interview with Dale Carr

Content Unlocking King: Fehzan Ali is Now Big Man on Campus

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-07-28

15

Fehzan Ali is one of the new breed of young entrepreneurs who are making a killing in the industry. He’s the owner of AdscendMedia, one of the top content unlocking companies in the world. He’s part of an industry that is starting to grow very fast, but is extremely misunderstood by much of the industry. I actual first met him when I criticized the entire content unlocking industry on another publication, and he quickly came to the defense of him and his competitors. He’s an interesting guy, vocal about what he believes in, which mainly is that his company is the dominant and best player in that side of the industry. Whether that’s true, time will tell but until then we have a lot to learn from this young upstart.

How long have you been in the industry?
I have been in affiliate marketing since I was 15, so late 2004! During that time, most of my focus has been on incentivized affiliate marketing. I started off with free gifts site where users were able to earn a free iPod (or similar gift) for referring 5 friends to try a product from an advertiser. It was great and we worked with major advertisers such as Netflix and Blockbuster. Adscend Media was conceptualized in August 2008 and launched in early 2009. The rest is history!

What can you tell us first about your business, what you do?
Adscend Media is a CPA affiliate network that specializes in incentivized marketing, however we also cater to a wide range of paid traffic, social, and display publishers to offer a complete monetization solution for our publishers. Within the incentivized realm, our primary focus is our cutting edge content locking tool that allows publishers to generate additional revenue from their premium content. We offer content locking tools that can be deployed and integrated within a matter of minutes or custom solutions for a tighter integration with the publishers website or project. We also work with a limited number of quality virtual currency partners.

What is content locking best used for?
A few ideas:
– conversion sites, such as doc to PDF conversion site
– indie bands/artists – musicians looking to lock their content
– ebooks
– instructional videos (e.g. guitar lessons)
– mobile application downloads and/or in-app monetization
– royalty free sound packs
– access to premium membership content
– software downloads
– software features, unlocking features for completion of a brief survey

Any movies, music, graphics, ebooks, etc. are fair game as long as the publishers own the rights to the copyrighted file or is the creator. We have many publishers who create their own content. I believe the true potential of content locking has still yet to be unlocked (ironic eh? Ha). There are many innovative uses for content locking that I have yet to be seen done.

How do you prevent offers from being placed in your system by third parties unauthorized?
We have a dedicated campaign manager who works to hand pick offers that can be displayed on our network. We have a fairly stringent guideline that we follow to minimize instances of offers that do not provide value to the end user.

Why do you think your company is better than your competitors? What do you offer that they can’t?
We offer a versatile proprietary platform that allows us to adapt to the need of each and every publisher. We place a strong emphasis on building relationships with all of our publishers AND advertisers, regardless of size. Given our extensive experience in incentivized marketing, we also understand the full flow of the business from the advertiser to the publisher. This insight is a competitive advantage that allows us to ensure inventory with unique advertiser offer that provide higher EPCs for our users and more value for the end user. We work to make sure the advertiser is happy, the publishers are happy, and the end users are happy. In a nut shell, higher EPCs, better offers, and happier end users as a result. Additionally, we also place a large focus on ethical marketing and compliance which allows us to gain additional advertisers.

If I was going to ask your affiliates what the best thing you offer them, what would they say?
High quality offers, higher EPCs, high quality support, and adaptability! This is what I’ve heard them tell me at least.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge in the entire incentivization industry?
Quality, quality, quality! I’ve noticed there is often a disconnect between advertisers and incent publishers. The publishers do not always understand what would constitute a profitable lead for the advertisers. To reduce this disconnect, we work to educate our publishers and advertisers about the full flow of traffic. When everyone is on the same page, many of the challenges with incentivized marketing disappear and we’re able to find a point where everyone is gaining value through incentivization.

In general, where do you think the affiliate marketing industry could use improvement?
I think we are heading in the right direction right now, especially with the inception of the Executive Council of Performance Marketing. The ECPM includes over 100 C-level executives from within the performance marketing industry that have a strong interest in moving the industry further towards legitimacy. I think a major improvement is needed in advertiser offers that are available within the industry. There needs to be a bigger movement towards advertisers that provide strong value to the end user.

Do you feel that brands could benefit from content unlocking? If you could pitch let’s say American Airlines, what would you do?
Absolutely! I think for brands especially, there is a strong synergy to introduce content locking into their business models. Big brands are already established with a customer base so the introduction of a tightly integrated content locking solution can generate additional revenue much easier. Hmm… American Airlines is not the most ideal company I would pitch to, however I’ll give it a shot. I would recommend that American Airlines look into offering an alternative payment solution on their in-flight Wi-Fi services. For example, in addition to offering GoGo Inflight, they could offer 10-15 minutes of Wi-Fi access for passengers who complete a quick survey. This is just off the top of my head however and may be flawed if it interferes with revenues from GoGo, however there are many implementation options to reduce chances of cannibalizing revenues and actually increasing them overall, even if only incrementally.

If you could make the perfect offer for content unlocking, what would it be?
There are so many different offers that could work well with content locking. We currently work with a wide range of advertisers who drive sign ups to their newsletters, services, or even customer leads for auto insurance. With our continued and increased focus on ensuring our advertisers are happy, we have been able to deliver quality leads. The perfect offer is one that can be adapted to the content locking model and we have helped many advertisers create profitable models for everyone involved.

Do you think there is a legitimate way to use content unlocking in social media?
No doubt in my mind! For example, if there is a publisher with a large game guides website and also has a fan page or group, he/she can release premium game guides to his/her fan base via a wall post that guides them to the website and proceeds to offer the end user access to the content. Or in the case of a musician, they can release new music and share with their fan base.

You are currently in college while running an enormously successful company, how does that work out?
I just finished my last class about 3 weeks ago actually. I’m glad to be out so I can place an even bigger focus on my career. Going to college and running a business at the same time was a great experience, it allowed me to learn about running a very effective business. I applied what I learned in class actively to my business. I didn’t sleep too much… but hey I don’t plan on sleeping too much now either. My family and friends are always wondering where I am in my head… well let’s just say I place most of my focus on my career. I was able to balance university and a business because I am very passionate about my career and what I do. I love it, it energizes me to work.

What is your dream car?
Ha! Great question considering I just purchased it this week. The Maserati Gran Turismo S is one of the most beautiful cars on the road in my opinion, I told myself in 2008 that I would work my ass off to buy it in late 2011 so here I am with the car! Well, now that I have it… my new dream car is the Audi R8, which I plan to add to my garage sometime in the next few years.

On that note, here’s a related story:

Is Your CPA Affiliate Network a Complete and Total Fraud?

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-07-28

20

It seems that everyone and anyone is making a CPA Network right now. As soon as you turn around, some affiliate has signed up to HasOffers, and has CPABizOffers, AffCPAFarts, YehawCPA or some other stupid name that they figured out. While I commend anyone who wants to get into business for them, the very fact that anyone can spend $10 to make a CPA network and then steal offers from other CPA networks is kind of disturbing.

In fact, I was just reading about some network that shut down this year after spending all their money on throwing parties in Vegas full of hookers and drugs. The owners of the company owe about every other CEO in the industry money, but what they did instead of paying it off was create an entire new network and start promoting it.

There were tons of people who pointed out that this was the same company, different name, but just as many people joined the network and are now probably going to get completely ripped off.

The reason this can happen is that there are at least a dozen networks out there that only business model is stealing offers, putting them up, and they work together to ensure that no one talks about them. Basically they tell everyone that they are all good, post on message boards recommending each other, when in fact, they are pretty much the same company, pulling the same scams.

Biggest Advice here: Don’t trust any company that just popped up, claiming to be the “biggest” in the industry.

What networks do you know that are doing this?

Would You Like Fries With That? – Effective use of cross-sales

By

Kevin Wallach

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2011-07-28

8

Marketers do it. Every marketer I’ve known does it. I’m referring to the never-ending sale. You’ve got your sale and then you have your up-sale but you can’t forget your cross-sale, down-sale, and…well you get it.

It’s not that I’m knocking the idea of maximizing customer value as quickly as possible. As long as everything is transparent between you and the consumers let the selling frenzy begin. Bless you for being a good marketer and anticipating the consumer’s needs.

I’ve struggled with using cross-sales effectively though. As a lead generator I have one very critical caution to keep in mind when adding cross-sales to my sites. If I sell too much before my lead buyer speaks with the consumer then it could affect that consumers ability to buy from my client. If my lead buyer does not make a normal number of sales that is a big problem for me. So how much is too much when you are generating leads for your clients and not sales? Or is too much the same regardless of the action you as the marketer get paid for by your primary advertiser? In my case leads are normally called on in no more than an hour or two but even then the potential to damage sales with overly aggressive cross selling is very real.

My other big problem is that a lot of cross-sale offers wind up just being background noise to the consumers as they pass through my lead generation forms. I don’t have the skills at this point to optimize the ads so I wind up wasting traffic and cluttering up my exit pages. I finally decided that it’s time I asked someone for help with optimized exit offers. My friend Sal Cacciato at Web Direct Media gave me a solution. His proprietary system intelligently serves optimized advertisements and there’s no need for the consumer to leave my websites. This means I can still satisfy my lead generation clients’ needs for customized confirmation page content while trying to make the most of the time I have with the consumer. I can also have a say in the types of ads served up so it’s not like I lose the ability to protect lead quality. I probably could have found other similar solutions. It’s not that Sal’s doing something nobody else is doing but his system is pretty cutting edge as I understand it and best of all I know the guy behind it. I can trust that I’m not just throwing traffic out there with the hope that I might get paid for it eventually.

Once I have results to share I will be including them in future posts here. Also I’ll be happy to talk about what happens when I start using this system to monetize my exit traffic if anyone wants to reach out.

For now if you would like to know more about Sal’s company or his system you can reach him via email at sal@webdirectmedia.com or (516) 442-2766.

I am NOT promoting Sal’s company for commission and this is not a paid advertisement just so it’s clear. I would be very happy though if he started some new conversations after being mentioned here.

George Avery Gets it With GetAds

By

Pesach Lattin

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2011-07-28

6

George Avery used to be the right-hand man at Affiliate.com (the network formerly known as CPAEMPIRE) until a few years ago. Not soon after Affiliate’s parent company MediaBreakaway was hit, and then subsequently lost a multi-million dollar lawsuit from Myspace, he left the company along with half-a-dozen other employees to start GetAds, a direct competitor. Avery’s company took its own path, broke away from the “spamking” labels that could have followed them and became a major player in the industry seemingly overnight. He’s one of those guys that everyone likes, his way of doing business down to earth and because of that has earned the trust of his clients and affiliates. Also, as an ex-hockey player and hockey fanatic, he’s always willing to get down and dirty to protect his clients best interests. In the Denver area, when people ask about affiliate marketing, GetAds and George have become synonymous with the growing industry. He provides some real insight in this interview to compliance issues, how to run a company and how to do business in general.

GetAds has managed to stay out of trouble with no major lawsuits, no compliance actions. What are you doing to keep your company clean that other companies may not be doing?
At GetAds we have a very proactive approach to compliance. We monitor our traffic constantly to make sure that if a rogue affiliate is doing something against the Terms & Conditions of the offer, we are the ones to catch them first. You can’t rely on the Advertiser to monitor things, by the time it is flagged by them it is too late. Each of our Affiliate Managers is trained on what to look for and how to deal with fraud & illegitimate traffic. They are the front lines of our defense. It’s really just about staying educated about what is going on in the industry and keeping ahead of the frauders.

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the industry? What can you pass on to others in the industry from this lesson?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that networks live and die by their relationships. It doesn’t matter how great your offers are if nobody likes you. With so many competitors in the industry, affiliates can choose to run with whoever they like. That’s how we get them in the door, and then we keep them there with our offers & service.

What do you feel that GetAds provides to advertisers that other networks do not provide?
We are constantly telling advertisers how they can improve their offers. Whether it is landing page tweaks, little details in the path, or even suggesting a new traffic type, we tell them what they need to know to make more money. We have advertisers coming in to our office, meeting with us at shows for strategy sessions, and doing calls on a regular basis to make sure the entire process is flowing smoothly. When you work with us, you aren’t just setting the offer live on our network and leaving it there, you are getting the full package.

What do you feel that GetAds provides to publishers that other networks do not provide?
For publishers, we really get to know them. We want to have an intimate knowledge of their business and how they market offers. That allows us to bring in better offers and make better suggestions to them on how to increase their profits month after month. We are always talking to our publishers to find out what they want, what we are doing right, and what we need improvement on. It really boils down to the relationship. The stronger your relationship is with your network, the more money you will make in the long run.

What lessons have you learned from Hockey that you can apply to managing affiliates?
The number one thing is that it takes a team. Hockey is not an individual game, and neither is managing affiliates. You need people that are each good at one aspect of the business, and when you put them all together you get the full effect. You also need to be ready for anything and look at the game from all angles. You never know where the game winning shot is going to come from.

What do you look for in affiliates that helps you know they might be a good choice to approve?
We look for affiliates that are serious about their business, and are willing to be transparent in how they market. I’m not saying we need to know your landing pages, keywords, campaigns, etc., just that we need to know how offers are being marketed. We want affiliates that know the difference between Incent traffic and Non-Incent traffic. Basically, we want to work with anybody as long as they are serious about making money and they are willing to follow the rules.

I know you are familiar with DirectTrack, but what made you choose LinkTrust?
We worked with DirectTrack for years at CPA Empire (affiliate.com), but when we started GetAds we decided to go with LinkTrust. The number one reason is tracking. We just have less issues with tracking discrepancies on LinkTrust. Plus, they are a smaller company, like us. I like that I can call the CEO on the phone if we have issues and he will get them taken care of ASAP.

What changes do you expect in the next year for Performance / Affiliate Marketing?
It’s only going to get bigger. The projections for 2011 are something around $28 billion for the online ad industry, and affiliate marketing is going to be a large piece of that. I think we are going to see more networks shutting down and consolidating, much like we saw in 2010. Margins are slimmer, and a lot of people are being pushed out.

What products do you think would benefit from Performance Based marketing, and how would you bring them into the industry?
I think that any product in the world would benefit from performance based marketing. They key in bringing them into the industry is to make sure that the advertiser understands exactly what their goals are. They need to know exactly what a lead or sale is worth to them. They also have to have their back-end conversion funnel optimized so that they are ready for the traffic. Once they have those things in place, and if they have solid cash flow, we can bring their product to market.

What technology do you want to see created for the industry?
Anything that will help us prevent fraud and lower advertiser scrub rates as well as stopping other networks from scrubbing. Affiliates need to get paid for the work that they do in promoting offers. Nobody wins when there is fraud or scrubbing in the picture.

GetAds can be found here.

Charlie Sheen Gave Me His Gmail Address – A Lead Validation Story

By

Kevin Wallach

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2011-07-27

4

In my experience lead generation on the Internet can be summed up in one word, that word being garbage. Now before my meaning is mistaken let me be clear. Without validation in place on either the producer or the recipient’s side online leads tend to include way too much fake or incorrect information. Though it might seem unfair to apply such a label as “garbage” consider the amount of fraud activity these days and the sheer number of bogus responses an online lead form generates even without the bad guys trying to scam a lead generation advertiser.

I worked in sales for other lead generation companies before trying my hand at running my company so I’ve seen more than one side of the bad lead problem. The lead buyers’ concerns are pretty obvious. They just don’t want to pay for bogus leads or waste their sales team’s time with chasing after leads that seem real but have obvious shortcomings. The conversion on leads statistics rarely lie. Meanwhile though the publishers have legitimate concerns of their own and without them a small lead generation company is unlikely to grow its business. If publishers feel that they will not be treated fairly then there’s no chance of ever getting them to commit their valuable traffic to a lead generation site.

I’ve seen some pretty great examples of what a lead generation site untethered from lead validation can do. I’m proud to say that without lead validation and its stuffy air of corporate America many famous people visited my sites and took the time to express interest in a variety of services and products. Why even Charlie Sheen took the time to give me his home number (I’m guessing Maryland is where he has his hideaway home) and Gmail address. Obvious sarcasm aside, I learned the hard way two years ago that without real-time validation my leads were time bombs just waiting to destroy my fragile and valuable lead buyer relationships.

If you work in lead generation and are considering ways to validate your leads in real-time I would strongly recommend you talk with Service Objects. Though I now use in-house validation my early validation needs were more than satisfied by Service Objects and the company took very good care of me without regard to how small a client I was at that time. Depending on the volume of leads you process each month your cost to validate each time someone submits one of your lead forms might be a bit steep but it still could prove to be much, much cheaper than losing your clients.

One Good Man: The Far Reaching Consquences of an Ethical Decision

By

Kevin Wallach

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2011-07-26

4

I recently read about an incident during the American Revolution involving a British Captain, Patrick Ferguson and our most revered General and first President, George Washington.

Ferguson, the inventor of the breech loading rifle, had in his sights General Washington, alone except for one other horseman, but chose not to fire on him when he was spotted and Washington turned to ride off. The ripple effects of that instant are no doubt alive and at work even now, over two hundred years later. Though Ferguson did not know whom he had a chance to kill that day I doubt that his decision not to fire would have changed had he known. History tells that the Captain could not bring himself to shoot an unarmed enemy in the back. The ethics of the man dictated his decision even when the cloudy morals of war would almost certainly have made him a hero to his nation and his king.

History can teach us so much. This story is an example of just how great an impact one person can have on the future of so many others, even with just a simple choice between two courses of action. I doubt that many will have the impact that Captain Ferguson had on future centuries but even small ripples and their potential effects should give us all pause at times. We live in such complex times and have so many opportunities to choose to do things which are by modern interpretation acceptable. These accepted things often result in consequences that the instigator never sees. It’s those unseen effects though that should oftentimes be given greater consideration.

This may all seem a bit preachy and of course it is but maybe these days we could all use some preaching. The so-called grey areas in our world are expanding every day. Right and wrong are being made more malleable and being bent and contorted to suit all of our wants and whims. Business and personal ethics may be perceived quite differently in terms of their complexities but only when we go back to the simplest approaches to making ethical decisions can we hope to make the right ones for the greater good in my opinion.

What Google Doesn’t Want you to Know About Panda

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2011-07-26

26

Despite all the conversations about what Google is looking for when indexing pages, there is still one thing that they are completely focusing on: incoming links from other sites. In fact, from what I’ve seen in my own personal SEO studies, incoming links is still one of the main factors that determine the rank for any site – but not like it used to be. I believe that the Panda Update that everyone has been talking about still, was only a revamp of this strategy.

Not all links are the same and here are some thought and ideas that I have about what works, and what does not. A lot of this has been through testing, but also conversations with Gail Gardner of Growmap.

Relevancy Matters

While this has been pointed out many times before, there seems to be a substantial change to Google’s algorithm. The entire link building strategies that include anchor texting on random sites doesn’t have much effect anymore especially faced against links from relevant content.

What does this mean exactly? If a site is about a topic, let’s says Cats and Dogs, and has a lot of pages about Cats and Dogs, the entire ranking of any link coming from that site is worth more than let’s say a page about Cats and Dogs on a site about Cars.

Google’s algorithm somehow ranks an entire site’s relevancy and provides that links from that site to something similarly relevant has more juice than any random link. I’ve tested this with link building, finding that about 200 random links are worth about one link from a similar relevant PR4 site. That seems crazy, but it also means that if you only get a few people linking to you from really good sites with good keywords, you’ll do a lot better than let’s say the guy who paid some offshore guy to spam blog comments.

First Unique Content Goes First.

I believe that this is probably the least understood part of the entire system. There was so much talk about article sites that were losing SEPRS because they had so much content. It makes more sense that they lost their rankings because their content wasn’t just not unique, but wasn’t the first mention of the content. Duplicate content isn’t the issue here. I think all those people saying “Don’t allow someone to copy your content” are lost, because you can’t prevent people from stealing, mentioning, content. Then you could hurt other people’s SERPS by copying it everywhere.

There is a crazy theory that perhaps the first instance of content actually gains rankings based on the other versions of the content, even when not linked!

I know this doesn’t particularly make sense, but I did several tests of this myself. I put some content on a friend’s very small blog, and then two weeks later duplicated that same exact content on one of the top technology sites in the world. At first the content showed up in that site on the first page of a search, but then it dropped off and the original content on the small blog turned up at a higher ranking than the bigger sites original ranking. This site was originally only page 4 on the ranking, and suddenly went to page 1 with no links in.

Also I tested this several other times with similar content, duplicating it on other major sites that I have access to and found the same results. In every instance, the original content gained ranking eventually but only when duplicate content was placed on a secondary very high ranked page.

It is my belief that the engineers Google realize that a lot of content is copied from a variety of places, often without permission, or as part of a feed, news service. Penalizing the original source because of duplication makes no sense whatsoever! Why would it?

In theory, getting links from that duplicate content should enhance your listings too – something which I am going to test more and more in the coming months.

Age of Site & Links is Utmost Importance.

Google has gone nuts with the whole refreshing of content– often showing new content with new links on the first page of searches and having them quickly drop off within a week to page 3 or 4. I believe that this is part of Google new strategy to change things up a bit, to allow new content to get a “day in the sun” but also to emphasize that the age of a site brings more relevancy to the table.

I’m pretty sure that they’ve created a system that a site must be around for a certain amount of time to get any juice –and combined with the fact that older sites generally have more content about a certain topic, their age of site has become a significant factor.

Basically, if you have links coming from an older site that has been around for longer time, to your site that has been around for a longer time, you will see immediate jumps in keyword rankings over younger site links of any type. New links aren’t as powerful as old links.

It seems to me that even newer content on older sites has less value than older content. It causes a temporary jump, but long term unless it consistently builds in links to it from other sites, it’s not as valuable.

If I could find a term for this, it would be a “gravitas” scale of some sort. Basically, Google wants reference, fact sites to have a higher ranking than those sites that are opinion, news or promotional sites. The proof of a sites authenticity or gravitas would be in people consistently linking to it over a period of time. People who link to a site or article only over a small period of time are usually just linking to an interesting news story, a fad, or link building.

Links over a long time show that a site is a valuable “resource.”

That’s why Wikipedia scores so high in so many factors (including PR) because its s stable resource that people link to all the time when making references.

Here’s the basic formula, for those who don’t want to read my entire article:

First + Relevant Content + Age + Links

About Pace Lattin

Epic Accused of Stealing: Says Accusation is Bogus

By

Pesach Lattin

-

2011-07-25

2

ADOTAS – Considered a major privacy violation since a University of California, San Diego study publicized the practice last year, history sniffing or stealing refers to computer code embedded in tracking beacons that reads links on a page to get clues into browser history. You know the drill: pink means you’ve visited before, blue means you haven’t.

I think sniffing is a better term because stealing connotes actually hijacking a user’s history folder. But like most things in online behavioral advertising, it’s painted several thick shades of gray — and anti-tracking advocates are likely to use the more damning term to plead their case.

You can imagine that Epic Marketplace was nonplussed when Jonathan Mayer of the Stanford Security Lab (SSL) within the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society claimed he caught Epic history stealing (his phrase) on websites Flixster and Charter.net.

The SSL was testing the JavaScript instrumentation in its new web measurement platform when it found the violations. The crew reverse-engineered the history-sniffing script and reported the following features:

The script is fast. Thousands of links are tested per second.
Links are added in an invisible iframe; there is no apparent effect on the page layout.
The script dynamically loads lists of URLs and associated interest segments using JSONP.
Progress is stored in a cookie so the script can resume where it left off.
The script sets a cookie indicating when it was last run; it will not history steal more than once every twenty-four hours.
If history stealing is still in progress when the window is closed (e.g. the user navigates to another page) the script sends its findings before ending execution.
The script slows down if a URL list takes over two seconds to process.
To prevent multiple history stealing attempts in parallel, the script uses a mutex cookie.
The script does not directly report the URLs that it detects the user has visited; it sends a deduplicated list of the interest segments associated with the visited URLs.

Epic has fired back:

The practice described in the blog, better labeled as “segment verification” (indeed, as admitted in the blog, no URLs or URL history is actually collected) provides companies with a way to measure the accuracy of the data that a company purchases from data vendors without compromising consumer privacy. NO data obtained from segment verification is personally identifiable information (PII), nor is that data ever merged with other data points that are, or may be, personally identifiable.

The company also suggested that the student’s (Mayer is a graduate student, something accentuated to show naivety toward tracking practices) phrasing and tone belies an extreme belief that collecting any non-personally identifiable browser data is theft, or at least a privacy violation. In addition, the company argues that its practices are completely consistent with National Advertising Initiative policies and mentions that its in-house compliance team chock full of notable attorneys and led by former FBI agent and cyber crime expert E.J. Hibbert.

Mayer and his Stanford Security Lab team are building a platform for measuring dynamic web content, which also may serve as an automated enforcement tool for the Do Not Trackuniversal web tracking opt-out app that detects third-party tracking via methods such as cookies and fingerprinting.

Last week the team caused a stir in the behavioral targeting world — testing out this platform, the Stanford researchers identified beacons for 64 of the 75 companies signed up for the Network Advertising Initiative’s self-regulated online behavioral advertising program. After loading content featuring the beacon, the researchers opted out of OBA tracking via the NAI website and reloaded the content. Then they enabled the Do Not Track app and reloaded the content again. The team discovered that half of the NAI companies left their tracking cookies in place while 10 companies deleted their cookies.

But the industry responded that Mayer and his crew were seriously missing the nuance of the situation — not all tracking cookies are for behavioral targeting. Networks like Vibrant Media and Undertone argued that their practices were in line with NAI guidelines, which allow cookies to remain for collection of non-OBA data used in frequency capping and other practices unrelated to behavioral targeting.

NAI Executive Director Chuck Curran echoed these claims and while arguing that the Stanford study was unfairly blurring the lines between industry self-regulatory behavioral targeting initiatives and across-the-board tracking roadblocks:

[It’s] important to draw a fair distinction between existing industry self regulatory commitments to limit ad targeting based on user interests, and the views of proponents of newly emerging “Do Not Track” technologies who argue that advertising companies should be stopped from collecting any data. We’ve been following with interest the recent introduction by browser manufacturers of “Do Not Track” features that promise in various degrees to limit browser data collection. A robust debate is going on about how these browser features might be integrated with the existing industry self-regulatory programs, but for now there is no universally agreed upon definition of what “Do Not Track” means.

These two incidents certainly suggest that Do Not Track initiatives and industry self-regulatory efforts are at loggerheads, and an already muddy issue is getting increasingly messier. Consider in addition that people have recently noticedthat websites are under no obligation to respect Firefox’s Do Not Track feature — it’s not really in publishers’ interest regarding their own data collection.

Is a compromise between DNT and industry opt-out realistic? Or should we start taking bets on which side will win? I.e., better sweet-talk government regulators and legislators.

Work Hard, Play Hard With Affillion CEO Jared Esguerra

By

Amy Capomaccio

-

2011-07-25

7

Affillion is a major private affiliate network. They feature an industry-leading content locking platform, high quality email submits, and offers that are hotter than the sweaty city they are based out of – Miami, Florida. If you’ve ever visited their super slick website , then you know these cats don’t mess around. You think you’ve got what it takes to be #1? You don’t have a clue until you’ve spoken with CEO of Affillion, Jared Esguerra.

Check out my interview with Jared to find out what offers are hot right now, and he’ll tell you straight up which elements of a campaign will make you money. Oh, and if you’re wondering exactly how Affillion lives up to their slogan, “Money never sleeps and neither do we,” Jared will let you in on this not-so-dirty little secret.

But, as far as I’m concerned sleeping is for second place finishers or what most people like to call losers, so watch out CPA networks because while your sleeping, Affillion is climbing their way to the tippity top.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? How did you first get involved in affiliate marketing? I was born and raised in Miami, Florida and I am half Colombian and half American. I love living and working in Miami as it’s the most diverse and ethnically mixed cities in the US and there is never a dull moment. It also provides us a great opportunity to fly affiliates down and show them a great time since there is so much to do in this city. I have been involved in affiliate marketing for over 5 years now and like most people I got involved in the industry by speaking to a friend who was making a ton of easy money at the time. Once I learned what he was doing and how he was doing it, the rest was history. In my spare time I enjoy going to the gym, practicing mixed martial arts, partying and watching movies!

Why should someone choose Affillion as their CPA network? What makes you better than the rest? At the end of the day the majority of CPA networks all have similar offers and payouts; what really sets us apart is the relationships we develop with our affiliates. If you want to be part of a CPA network that treats their publishers like family, and takes the time to really get to know you and your needs then Affillion is where you need to be. We personally test the majority of our offers in house and use that knowledge to then take publishers campaigns to the next level.

Reputation is the most important element in the CPA world, and we live and die by ours. We have never missed a payment and strive to pay our affiliates on a weekly basis given the offers they are pushing.

Another main difference is that we are very picky on who we allow to be accepted into our network and as a result of being a smaller “boutique” CPA network, we can dedicate a huge amount of resources and time to each individual publisher and as mentioned before really build a great mutually beneficial relationship.

Affillion also now has a community and social element to it were affiliates can communicate with each other and affiliate managers via live chat and forums every day to really develop that family feel and help each other out. We also host weekly webinars on various media outlets such as PPV, POF, and Media Buying etc.

There are a lot of mentions about your content locking platform. How does this benefit affiliates? We launched our content locker in beta a short while back and affiliates went crazy over it, the amount of features we added and functionality blew away the competition. We switched tracking platforms and as a result had to rework our content locking platform but it will be back stronger then ever very soon. Once its live again affiliates will be able to monetize their original website content and make money from it regardless of which country they are in.

What traffic sources prove to be most effective for your affiliates? Social media and facebook are the most effective for our affiliates at the moment. Emailing and mobile traffic come in second. Mobile traffic is exploding and affiliates need to take advantage of it before it becomes to saturated.

At the end of 2010 both Google and Bing confirmed that Twitter and Facebook signals influence search rankings. Do you think Social Media is the new SEO? I do believe that social media is impacting SEO. However I will be the first to say that SEO has never been my forte but I do believe that back linking will always have a huge impact on SERPS and social media might be a smaller part of the algorithm.

With the recent crackdown by the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) on Internet-based false and deceptive advertising, do you think enough has been done to weed out the bad guys from the good guys? How does Affillion prevent and deal with fraud? I think the impact the FTC is having is just affecting the actual marketing strategies of the big time affiliates who were making a killing back in the Acai crazes. I do not think its actually having any effect on the amount of fraud in the industry.

Every affiliate who applies to Affillion must undergo an extensive phone interview and supply a home or cell phone number, no skypes or google voices. We generally are not accepting publishers from high fraud areas, with a few exceptions here and there. Once an affiliate finishes the phone interview, we then analyze their application based on a few fraud metrics that our tracking platform provides. If approved since they are new, there traffic is monitored extensively through more fraud tools that we have. Between all those steps, we have greatly reduced the amount of fraudulent affiliates that sign up with us.

What are the most important elements of running a profitable campaign? The most important elements are making sure you are catering to the right demographics, you can lose so much money by having the wrong targeting so make sure you do a lot of research as to who your ad should be catered to. You can get very creative here and do niche targeting as well, the more niche you go the cheaper your bid prices will go and higher CTR and conversion rates. Another extremely important element is testing, split test every thing from titles, ad copies, landing pages and pictures.

Online ad spending is said to hit $50 billion through 2015. Can you give us some insight on your business strategy for the upcoming years? We plan to just keep growing Affillion as fast and as large as we can. We will be expanding our incentive and content locking side of the business as that sector is growing in popularity as well. We will also be working to bring in more exclusive offers that will be unique to Affillion. We have some amazing plans in the works for some future projects however I cant discuss them publicly yet at the moment.

Which offers are performing well on your network? Email submits are doing great and is definitely what is hottest. Daily deal type offers are doing awesome.

What advice would you give someone first starting out in affiliate marketing? Where are the best places for newbies to learn about the industry? I always repeat my self when this question is asked because I cannot stress it enough. Spend more time DOING and not so much time READING. Obviously some basic knowledge and preparation is good but what new affiliates need to understand is that they will learn infinitely more by actually just getting their hands dirty and running some campaigns even if its at a loss. There are countless places and methods to get free advertising vouchers for Adwords, Facebook and others, so sign up for those and use them to test. Chances are you will lose the money however what you gain from the experience is priceless.

If I had to choose one source, I would def say Mrgreen’s blog. He has some great posts and on top of that he actually posts case studies and tips you can apply to your campaigns. So if you want to do a small bit of research before you start take a look at the case studies and put your own twist on them. Remember copying campaigns will only get you so far, the publishers that really bring in the big bucks are the ones that are on the cutting edge of the trends and constantly thinking out of the box, so be creative.

So you’re website says, ‘Money never sleeps and neither do we.’ That’s clear with the success you’ve had in the past year. What’s your trick? Coffee? Red Bull? Are your employees chained to their chairs? I guess we need to keep the chains tighter to the chair if word got out about that already LOL. On a serious note, I could not ask for a better team, everyone is 100% dedicated to taking Affillion to the next level and helping affiliates scale. My business partner Kenneth Metral is the best out their at bringing in new advertisers, going offer hunting when affiliates need offers, and over all affiliate management. Our approvals team is top notch and is the main reason why we have eliminated so much fraud recently. We also have one of the best Affiliate managers in the industry, Brottany Dawkins. To this day I have not met anyone that works as hard as he does to make sure publishers have everything they need to be successful. He is literally on 24/7 helping affiliates.

We want to make Affillion the #1 private network in the industry and we will not sleep until it becomes a reality.

When you’re not busy kicking ass in the affiliate marketing industry, how do you spend your time? Give us a glimpse into what your typical day looks like. A typical day mon-fri basically starts in the AM waking up, responding to emails, checking stats, chatting with affiliates and basically doing everything that goes into running a network! To fast forward through all that boring stuff I am huge into fitness and mixed martial arts so around 4 pm I will head to my local crossfit gym for my first work out of the day, then around 8 pm head to my mixed martial’s arts gym for another hour or 2 of jiu jitsu and boxing. In between those sessions is just more work and after as well. So its Affillion and Gym for me Mon- Fri! Weekends are spent enjoying Miami’s restaurant scene and nightlife.

What’s on your ipod’s playlist right now? Well you caught me at a bad time because normally I am a House head and enjoy Axwell, Kaskade and Steve angello However right now my gym playlist is on my ipod with music that would probably make you think im crazy like System of a down, breaking Benjamin, three days grace, Deftones and my favorite, the soundtrack from the new TRON movie!

UrbanObserver

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Is Your CPA Affiliate Network a Complete and Total Fraud?

Would You Like Fries With That? – Effective use of cross-sales

George Avery Gets it With GetAds

Charlie Sheen Gave Me His Gmail Address – A Lead Validation Story

One Good Man: The Far Reaching Consquences of an Ethical Decision

What Google Doesn’t Want you to Know About Panda

Epic Accused of Stealing: Says Accusation is Bogus

Work Hard, Play Hard With Affillion CEO Jared Esguerra

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Did Your Company Receive a Letter From the FTC? FTC Warning Letters and Notices of Penalty Offense

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