More Work On eMinneapolis
I've been adding more content to my
City Of Minneapolis site. In particular i'm redoing the
Minneapolis Convention Center page and creating sub pages for the major events like the
Twin Cities Food And Wine Show
LinkShare Drama Act 2
So this is what I got from LinkShare in response to my inquiry about why they disabled my account. Not very helpful i'm afraid. Lucky for me the FordDirect asked LinkShare to open my account again but warned me that they take invalid leads very seriously. Now as I stated before, I didn't enter any leads myself so if they are finding leads that aren't valid they should simply discard them not have LinkShare cancel my entire account. As a result of this I had newspaper ads that ran yesterday to which people could visit a web site WITH NO ADS! Thanks LinkShare oh yea I also had over $100 in PPC charges for clicks that went to my page WITH NO ADS. The response from FordDirect? We'll be deciding Monday which affiliates we want to keep in our program. I'm still waiting to find out why on 7/22 despite 381 clicks through their banner I was credited with 0 leads. EVERY day has had 7-11% conversions so 0 cannot be the number for that day. They've said I can resume running their ads but it will be cold day in hell before I but ANY advertising dollars to drive traffic their way.
From: invalid@linkshare.com [mailto:invalid@linkshare.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2005 7:52 AM
To: John Gall
Subject: Re: Fw: Affiliate Notification
Dear John,
Under the terms of your Affiliate Membership Agreement, LinkShare has the right to terminate your participation in the Network in its sole discretion, with or without cause. As a general matter, we have a policy not to disclose the reasons that lead to a decision to terminate an account.
If you want to appeal this decision, you can send an email to us providing detailed information about you, your business, and, specifically, a description of any online channels and/or activities you undertake to promote your Network Merchant partners (including any links to online sites) that would allow us to evaluate how you are generating referral traffic.
Thank you,
LinkShare corporation
LinkShare Drama Act 2
So this is what I got from LinkShare in response to my inquiry about why they disabled my account. Not very helpful i'm afraid. Lucky for me the FordDirect asked LinkShare to open my account again but warned me that they take invalid leads very seriously. Now as I stated before, I didn't enter any leads myself so if they are finding leads that aren't valid they should simply discard them not have LinkShare cancel my entire account. As a result of this I had newspaper ads that ran yesterday to which people could visit a web site WITH NO ADS! Thanks LinkShare oh yea I also had over $100 in PPC charges for clicks that went to my page WITH NO ADS. The response from FordDirect? We'll be deciding Monday which affiliates we want to keep in our program. I'm still waiting to find out why on 7/22 despite 381 clicks through their banner I was credited with 0 leads. EVERY day has had 7-11% conversions so 0 cannot be the number for that day. They've said I can resume running their ads but it will be cold day in hell before I but ANY advertising dollars to drive traffic their way.
From: invalid@linkshare.com [mailto:invalid@linkshare.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2005 7:52 AM
To: John Gall
Subject: Re: Fw: Affiliate Notification
Dear John,
Under the terms of your Affiliate Membership Agreement, LinkShare has the right to terminate your participation in the Network in its sole discretion, with or without cause. As a general matter, we have a policy not to disclose the reasons that lead to a decision to terminate an account.
If you want to appeal this decision, you can send an email to us providing detailed information about you, your business, and, specifically, a description of any online channels and/or activities you undertake to promote your Network Merchant partners (including any links to online sites) that would allow us to evaluate how you are generating referral traffic.
Thank you,
LinkShare corporation
Screwed by LinkShare and FordDirect.Com?
So my secret project has been as an affiliate for FordDirect.Com through LinkShare. They setup a neat tiered compensation structure where you get more per lead once you reach 100, 250,500,600 leads. I spent alot of money on Google and Overture PPC ads as wel as local classified ads to drive traffic to Ford Price Quotes and thus FordDirect.Com. Imagine my horror when at 5:00pm today I receive this e-mail.
{T}Napa Valley Pictures:
Your affiliate account in the LinkShare Network has been terminated pursuant to the terms of LinkShare's Terms and Conditions. Access to your account has been suspended, and all LinkShare links on your site will no longer function effective immediately. If you have any questions, please contact us at invalid@linkshare.com.
Best regards,
The LinkShare Team
http://www.linkshare.com
Username: beer234
#38#
Oddly this was just after my inquiry about why I received no comission on 7/22/05 when every other day had conversions between 7%-11%
As you can see from the e-mail no information was given. I did e-mail them back but am still waiting to hear.
Lucky for me I had left a voice mail a few days ago inquiring about my missing comission and still had the return phone number for the affiliate rep. I called and left a voice mail and was happy to receive a return call. I was told that my own name had shown up on the list of leads an my LinkShare account was cancelled for fraud. I assured her I did not add my own name as I actually have no interest in Fords and really why would I do that for 4$ when I have over $1000 in advertising and several $$$ in comission at stake. She was nice enough to pass along the inquiry so now i'm in limbo waiting to see if my account at LinkShare is reinstated and if I'll receive the $2400 in comission i'm owed. This is chilling for those affiliate marketers who put thier own money out there for advertising assuming they will be paid if their campaign is successful. The sad thing too is that all my newspaper ads hit today and I had to put adsense on the page just to get some revenue from the traffic from the ads. Wish me luck I'm not sure if LinkShare will be a stand up company or what.
Le Meridien Hotel Now Named Graves 601
The
Le Meridien Hotel in Minneapolis changed its name to
Graves 601 which is going to be part of a large chain of ultra upscale hotels in key travel cities thorughout the US. Some updating to my
City Of Minneapolis site was required to accomodate this new change.
A Friends Design Website
I just found out that a friend of mine has gone out on his own doing Graphic Design. Here's a link to
Richard Ketelsen Designer
Payday Signs Arrived
So a few months back when I got all excited to do Affiliate Marketing to promote
Paycheck Today I bought these signs on eBay for a cheap price. Six weeks later they finally arrived. It will be interesting to see of placement of these Payday Loan signs will make revenue jump.
Can Old Media Help Affiliate Marketing?
Next week I have classified ads appearing in several local weekly papers. These ads will direct readers to my AM web site where I have a lead based program running. This is my second attempt to use classified advertising to drive revenue. The first was an offer for
Payday Loans and I can't say I recouped my $13.00 investment. This one will likley be more successful as it targets a broad audience and is located in a section specific to its service vs the "services" section of the classifieds where the payday ad ran.
Turning failures into success
So using PPC advertising on Google and Overture in July netted me a $200.00 loss on my affiliate program for
PayCheck Today. In June I think I had a small profit but I got what I needed to know. Normally I toss an affiliate program that isn't working with PPC but because my Payday Loan site has been around a bit I do get a small amount of natural traffic from Yahoo and MSN. Guess what, a few natural leads have come my way so that got me jazzed and I added a few more articles to the site. I figure If I was spending $100.00 to make $40 profit in a day why not spend more effort in link building and content building and get the traffic for free. In addition to the content I have another strategy I can't disclose for now but i'll let you know if it works and lay it out when the time is right.
Affiliate Marketing Lesson 3
Two things, Google will Fuck you..... First if you are an adsense publisher you'll get smartpriced. That means while you made the decision to hire someone to create content because you were getting .10-.50 a click you now get .02-.05 per click and oh yea, the Bourbon update trashed your site so you need to start over.
Then going the affilate route you bid on a sucessful keyword only to have Google put it on hold or disable it because their computations say it won't get the CTR it should. This in spite of being your best keyword and getting a 20% CTR when .05 is their minimum.
That being said. Here's todays lesson. If you are doing a PPC campaign for a place that pays per lead, keep in mind that they may report the clicks but not the leads until they determine that the leads are genuine. This means don't cancel your campaign when you see 100 clicks and 0 leads because its likley you have 10-50 leads that have not been verified and will late in the afternoon. Thus is the nature of Affilate Marketing for leads.
Affiliate Marketing Lesson 2
Pretty much the only success i've had in Affiliate Marketing has been in lead generation. Sure i've sold Turbotax via Amazon.Com during Tax season but beyond that i've had hardly any luck with Affiliate Marketing where the customer has to click through and purchase something. On pages where i'm covering a hotel + Adsense I get reservations here and there using Lodging.Com but I use them more as a afterthought than building the page for AM. An angle i'm recently pursuing is to use a AM program that pays on a per lead basis but with a tiered performance plan. This should let me bid high almost to a break even point to get to the top tier as fast as possible. Then when my comission has doubled I can taper back the per bid cost and concentrate on keywords I know convert vs the shotgun approach i'm using now just to get to the top tier quickly.
Affiliate Marketing Lesson1
I've been trying to get off the Google Adsense Tit for 12 months and in the last two made progress. My latest has taught me that as affilate marketers or probably anyone in marketing you are a victim of time. You set up something brilliant and then you must wait, its very tough. Even if you are sure of success you must wait and see and then access your data. Funny that the nice thing about affiliate marketing is that your setup works for you when you sleep, vacation etc. Yet while you actively work you are tortured in that you must wait for data in the way of reports to see if your attempts were successful.
Stupid Brown Dog
I don't even know if this will work but i've embedded a video of a dog that appears possesed into this web page. I called it
Stupid Brown Dog as I can't imageing what is going through the head of this dog.
Additonal Seattle content added
I finally got a chance to work on the rawseattle site. I added very necessary pages about
Pike Place Market and
Pacific Place Mall and got the
Hotel Monaco page done.
Minneapolis Light Rail Article
I commissioned this article on
Minneapolis Light Rail for my
Minneapolis Information web site. I think it will be a great addition to the site. Considering my writer is not from here he did a great job pulling together the information that tells a well rounded story about light rail.
New California Car Dealer Site
I've moved my
California Car Dealers site into its own web site, this is more of the work i'm doing in the direction of removing the many subsites I had before the Google Bourbon update buried all my content. I'm using 301 redirects from the old site to the exact pages at the new web site. I've had success with this on my
Chicago Malls page, didn't get ranked high in Google yet but MSN and Yahoo loved that I created the new site.
Seattle Pictures and Shopping
I just got back from Seattle Washington where I've started two sites one will feature
Seattle Hotels Restaurants & Shopping while the other focuses strictly on
Washington Malls.
