With all this talk of Super Bowl commercials, I was reminded of a textbook example of a terrible commercial that aired during Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000.  Although I personally can’t remember it nor would have even noticed it at the mere age of 11 years old, I still find it amusing that this particular commercial for OurBeginning.com was so horrible.  The website now is some kind of day care center in Seattle, which I was very disappointed to see considering the fact that the airtime cost them a couple million dollars.  The site used to be a website that produced, of all things… wedding invitations.  I just can’t understand what made these entrepreneurs think that this was good targeting.  Perhaps I was too young during this Super Bowl and only recently have all commercials been geared toward beer, Coke, and Hyundai cars…

Yet another example of my nerdiness became apparent to me when I was the only one in the room that was astounded after watching the Google commercial.  One of my friends commented, “Now John is going to text all his cyber friends”. Sadly, I did…

After thinking about the horrible wedding invitation targeting incident, I started to think of the blunders Ryan, Rich and I have made with our targeting in the past.  One particular example I had in mind was some of our first Facebook campaigns that we started with in the education niche.  In fact, they were so bad we couldn’t even use most of the data in order to turn the campaign profitable so it just had to be scrapped.  Have you made any particularly stupid targeting mistakes in your career? Surely not as stupid as the wedding invitation blunder, right?

How’s it going, everyone?  I have been ghost lately on the blog but thankfully Ryan and Richard have been picking up the slack with quality posts.  I’m having trouble adapting to my new schedule here in school with 4 hours of straight class on Tuesday and Thursday.  Good thing they are all entrepreneur and marketing classes though!  Other than that I’ve been looking over some of the projects Ryan and I have been throwing together and trying to balance my life as best as possible without compromising too much.  I’ve been exposed to a lot of AWESOME entrepreneur articles and information in my classes that I am going to be sharing very soon.

I really debated talking about this next topic for fear of negative media attention but it’s so entertaining that I decided I might as well post it for everyone out there to see what their thoughts are on the whole mess.   As soon as I got to school, rush week started for all the incoming freshman of 2009.  As I said before, fraternities are huge at my school and I am also a member of one.  Hopefully you are a little familiar with what I’m talking about but on the last night of rush week we give a bid/invitation to the kids who we want.  The following night we then have what’s called “Kiss Night”…

Kiss Night described in two words… mass chaos.  Basically before the event every greek member who got a bid into a fraternity or sorority gets extremely drunk before the event and heads to a club where the object of the night is to kiss as many people as possible.  No shame, no holding back, all social rules are cut loose.  As a result, you have sloppy 18 and 19 year olds going around making out with 50-60 people, if not more.  As you may have guessed, authorities do not approve of this event very much due to underage drinking and etc. and this year it was cut short because all the ambulances in the area were in use due to the massive amount of ambulances in the area being used for alcohol poisoning.  Fortunately nobody on campus suffered any irreparable damage so we were lucky in that aspect.  The repercussions of the event have not been completely determined though so we are staying tuned.

So yeah, Kiss Night was my kick off to a new year two years in a row, maybe it will prove good luck this year too?  Definitely a unique experience that I will never forget for more reasons than one… (One reason that cost me 9 stitches, but we’ll save that for a rainy day!)   More relevant blog posts to affiliate marketing to come…

I hope the trip to Vegas was great if you went, I know that Ryan and Richard said they met up with a lot of readers and marketers so I was extremely pleased to see that we got a lot of good feedback even if I couldn’t meet you. I’ll be at the next one though and look forward to putting my face to my name as well.  I haven’t done a lot of work since school started mainly because we had fraternity rush week.  It was a pretty hectic first week of school but I’m ready to buckle back down and use some of the connections Ryan and Richard made for a profitable and busy 2010!

Anyways, I wanted to reach out to some fellow entrepreneurs/marketers out there for a little help reviving a charitable organization that gives scholarships to about 550 entrepreneurs across the country.  After the death of the founder of Monster.com and the McKelvey Foundation, Andy McKelvey, they have had trouble making ends meet.  I personally won a $40,000 scholarship from them in 2008 for my ZeroPriceTags, Inc. business plan.  I’m not necessarily asking for your help solely so I can get my money back but for the organization as a whole.  I know of at least 10 fellow scholars who aren’t able to attend college at all because of this organization having to take a step back.  I can’t imagine the frustration both parties are experiencing.  The many scholars thought that since they were awarded this scholarship they had struck a gold mine and would be set for 4 years… The foundation had foreseen many years of bringing education to entrepreneurs across the nation but the economic downturn and his death said otherwise unfortunately.

So here’s where your help can come in.   No emails, no cold calls, no donating, just a few clicks on Facebook.com.  Chase has agreed to give the charity with the most votes in their Facebook contest 1 million dollars!  Here’s how to do it:

1. Click on the following link: Chase Community Giving

2. Just click “Become a Fan”.

3. Vote for the McKelvey Foundation.

I greatly appreciate it and if you have any ideas to spread the word, please let me know!

As Vegas is coming around the corner it’s become built up more and more and I am becoming more and more depressed.  Unfortunately I can’t make it because of a number of reasons.  Mainly I can’t miss 5-6 classes since the semester just started and secondly I’m not 21 yet so kind of pointless from what I hear.   On the bright side, I will be making it next year since I will be 21 and after I hear how awesome it was from Richard and Ryan I won’t be able to resist I’m afraid.

If you are going, hopefully you’ll be spending more time learning and networking more than you do on the craps table but I can’t say I blame you if that’s the case.  Regardless of what you spend most of your time doing while there, I would definitely recommend attending the PPV Mastermind Group meeting that’s being held on Sunday for three whole hours.  Justin Dupre and Dave from PPVPlaybook will be conducting the group and after checking out what kind of information both of them have been spilling on their blogs and forums, it’s going to be a very valuable session.  We’ve done PPV marketing off and on for a couple of months now but we certainly have room to improve judging by the content/tips I’ve found especially on Dave’s membership site.  The cost for the group is $450 – $500 but, as you can see from the agenda posted on both of their blogs, the plan is to make that back very shortly and I would consider it a very wise investment.  The thing about these conferences, if you’ve never been to one before, I find that people are much more willing to give out more specific tips, secrets, and other information since you are face-to-face.  Maybe having alcohol in the equation helps loosen lips but I can tell you this type of meeting will be much more beneficial than just browsing and hitting up people randomly and asking questions through email/IM most of the time.

I know Richard and Ryan are going to try to make it to the PPV Mastermind meeting and I also know I speak for them when I say that they would love to meet any and all of our readers that attend Affiliate Summit so just hit us up and we will buy you a couple of drinks.

In October we purchased ad serving software from the third largest ad serving company in the world: Zedo. This is a solution for affiliate marketers that gives them the power to test/rotate banners and optimize their campaigns among many other things.  First off let me mention I wouldn’t recommend this software to beginners to media buying or whatever method you are planning on promoting simply because of the pricing. The pricing can get expensive depending on how much volume you are running but it’s a bare minimum $1,000 start up fee.  I’ve heard rumors you can waive this fee by signing a year contract, $1,000 minimum but I figure if you can’t afford the startup fee you won’t be able to front $12,000 either. We primarily use this software for our media buys and even though it is a bit pricey, it definitely has helped us out when optimizing our campaigns. Ryan is planning on doing an analysis of a couple of ad serving platforms so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

The main reasoning behind purchasing this kind of software is because we were tired of dealing with DART.  We have never used DART for our own ads but some of the sources we were buying inventory from had chosen to use it and it was a real headache.  First off, it doesn’t load on Mac computer even with a Chrome browser, which makes no sense to me personally since DART and Chrome are from the same company…  Secondly, maintenance and slow update times made it very frustrating.  Zedo solves both of these problems while putting a lot more control in our hands for our campaigns.  It updates frequently and even has a live impression count on banners. Unfortunately the CTR/clicks is usually off by a lot so it doesn’t help too much other than to check whether your banners are live or not.  The great part about Zedo is you can add/remove banners whenever you’d like instead of having to wait for the party that owns the media to take them down.  This got frustrating on the weekends when we couldn’t test a banner on Friday – Sunday because of the inability to take it down.   We started to really believe in the old belief “if you want something done you have to do it yourself” after a while…

Whenever you buy the software you automatically have to pay for the first training call.  I can’t say this was a very enjoyable experience to be honest. We were placed on the phone with three Zedo support representatives and although they were very nice and attempted to be helpful it was a little confusing. The three people were all located in three different countries: USA, somewhere in Europe, and Sri Lanka.  The lady that did the most talking and the walkthrough was from Sri Lanka and the language barrier between our questions and her answers was pretty substantial.  So if you do plan to buy this software, don’t be surprised if you have to teach yourself the ropes.  They do give you a visual walkthrough while you are on the phone though so if you are technically savvy you can figure it out with some practice.  I was just a little nervous figuring out while we were spending $3,000 a day on a campaign; talk about playing with fire!  Despite the training call the support has been good though.  They have a live chat feature and usually their outsourced help can be pretty informative.

The features of the software are definitely helpful in optimizing campaigns.  With a variety of graphs and reports that you can generate, not to mention breakdown of your CTR, clicks, and conversions from your banners, you definitely have more power to optimize and make your campaigns more profitable.  The only downside to the tracking is that there is almost always a discrepancy between the impressions you are actually billed and the impressions that this kind of software records.  I have heard the industry average is 10% but we’ve seen as much as 20% on our end.  Again, the software will show 10-20% less impressions that what you were actually served.  As long as this number is closer to 10% and you are dealing with a sizable amount of volume, this usually isn’t a big deal because you can still figure out which ad/banner is performing the best.

Overall, the price tag of the Zedo software can only be worth it if it’s worth it to you in terms of convenience.  The way we reasoned paying $X,XXX a month was that we believed that the convenience of being able to edit/add/remove banners anytime of the day/week would allow us to increase our profits exponentially.  If you have some of the same grievances we’ve had with DART and/or you aren’t harnessing all the powers available to optimize your campaigns, Zedo is definitely a tool that you should explore.

A quick heads up to all our readers out there, big time affiliate marketer and friend of ours Jonathan Volk posted our interview this morning with some pretty extensive questions for all of us.  If you want to learn more about us, the faces behind SuperAffiliateTwins.com, check it out!

As some of you may know I’m big on reading books in my spare time and one of my favorite things to do is apply the concepts to affiliate marketing.  It’s a unique thought process because affiliate marketing is usually very different than what the author is relating to in his book.  The authors of the books I read usually have brick and mortar business experience and as affiliate marketers we know that the two lifestyles are definitely contrasting so it’s sometimes hard to apply the guidelines and principles they recommend.

The next book that I picked up after Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris was How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.  I hate recommending this to friends outside of affiliate marketing/business  because I feel like the title is kind of cheesy.  They usually snidely remark about how they don’t need a book to make friends, they are already good at that.  The idea of the book is not to teach losers how to make friends because they don’t have any but rather to teach businesspeople how to handle people.

So why should you read this on your plane ride over to Affiliate Summit West?  Well for one, Sky Mall is only entertaining for so long.  Two, you can apply the principles that Carnegie talks about and have amazing results in a business setting.  The information will be fresh in your mind and chances are it will open doors that you wouldn’t have been able to open unless you are already practicing some of the good-natured habits.  For example, Carnegie dedicates a section on the following theme:

You must have a good time meeting people if you can expect them to have a good time meeting you.

It’s so true.  At these affiliate shows some people limit themselves and are too nervous to do more than just go to the affiliate meet market and make small talk.  Have drinks, lunch, etc., be outgoing and other people will be outgoing with you.  We’ve struck a lot of deals at ASW and most recently it scored us a nice little bottle of Cristal for Christmas, among thousands of dollars of profits.

If you don’t have a chance to pick up the book or you just plain don’t read, please just listen to this piece of advice if nothing else:

Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language

You might say, “Well I have their business card, so I’ll have there name later…”.  That’s stupid, remember it immediately and use it frequently and it will strengthen your relationship with that person.  You might make another excuse like, “There’s so damn people there that I might I’d never be able to remember all those names…”.  Well, Carnegie talks about Napoleon the Great and President Roosevelt remembering names and their techniques so I don’t see why you couldn’t, alcohol permitting of course.  If you don’t think remembering names is important than you might as well shoot yourself in the foot and carry around a Poken for all your networking needs.

I’ll let you find out more of the principles when you buy the book but I couldn’t recommend this book more, it’s about 275 pages long and has a ton of examples of the principles he preaches in real life business settings.  I know for a fact you can grab this book at the New York Times book store in most airports so check there if you have a minute.  I’ve read it twice and have practiced the principles many times with a lot of success!

Last night around 7:00 PM EST we were hacked by an unknown party that tried to implement a virus to all visiting user computers. Thankfully we had a 24/7/365 security team that works with Ryan look at it so we were able to cover all our bases and get things back up fairly quickly without losing any data.  Our security team tells us they were able to breach our server through FTP and we think this has something to do with the “upgrade automatically” feature of some of the plugins we are using since you do have to type in your FTP information.  Perhaps a particular plugin might have stored our FTP password in a log or something so we will be more careful with that and suggest you do the same if you run a WordPress blog.

While we are down I had the chance to read through the PPV Playbook that’s being offered by a fellow blog on AffBuzz.  PPV seems to be the latest rage on the Internet marketing scene after re-bills are starting to tank in popularity and this guide comes at the perfect time.  The book is about 25 pages and covers a lot of ground which include network reviews, HTML code to enhance conversation rates, general basics of PPV campaigns and rules of thumb from the owner, David, as well as niche/promotion ideas for a handful of campaigns to get started.  All in all it took me about 30 minutes to read the guide and even I felt like I learned some stuff.  The HTML coding that he gives is pretty basic but it is definitely nice to have if you ever need it.  I don’t think many beginners would have access to that very quickly without this guide.

The PPV Playbook retails at $47.00 with an affiliate program that pays out $20 per sale.  Instead of us earning $20 per sale we arranged a special deal that foregoes our chance to make money and passes the savings to you.  If you click any of the PPV Playbook links on our page it will automatically take you to a page where the price is $10 off.  If you are serious about learning PPV and you need a crash course, I would say this guide is worth every penny.  A lot of the tips he provides are tips you could learn the hard way but chances are you are going to pay more than $37.00.

Again, if you click any of the links on our page you can score the PPV Playbook for $10 off the retail price of $47.00.  I would recommend capitalizing on this deal as soon as possible, it won’t last too long especially at over 20% discount.  Additionally,PPV Playbook did not request a review nor pay us to do one.

A couple days ago one of our readers, Alysia, asked a pretty common question amongst beginner media buyers. The question is as follows:

How do you try to figure out if what the site is asking for is a decent rate and if you will make a profit? For example, someone just told me for 110,000+ impressions, I’ll pay $300 on a particular site for a 728×90 banner at the top. This is site wide, but excludes the home page. If you could do a part 3 posting on determining if the asking rates are fair in different situations, I’d certainly appreciate it.

This is one of the questions you really have to ask yourself before you buy a media buy placement based on your CPM, payout cost, expected CTR.  I know you are asking mainly about the rate but before you even look at the rate you have to ask yourself about demographics.  In Ryan’s second post of the “Media Buying 101″ series, he provides a number of tools to use whenever looking for a potential successful media buy placement.  Basically, you have to start testing and finding a site that works your particular offer.  Then once you have it, you then ask yourself how it works by looking at the particular demographics.  This is certainly no foolproof way but your demographic is very important in order to putting together a successful formula. If you can match the original demographic to the second one, that’s one way you can increase your chances of being successful.  You can use Quantcast for comparing and obtaining demographic information.  If you are advertising an education offer aimed at dads, then of course you are going to want a majority male audience that have kids.  The very first step if you are starting completely from scratch is to say, “What is my target audience?”.

After you’ve done your homework demographic wise, you now want to consider the actual rate.  If you have a pretty good connection between the audience of the site and your offer, you can obviously afford to pay more.  In your specific case, let’s calculate the CPM first: (110,000 impressions / 1000) / $300 = about $2.73 CPM.  This is fairly low but it totally depends on the quality/response rate of the traffic to your ad.  Without knowing the amount you are paid per action, it’s a little hard to weigh the CPM and the action payout but you should be able to do this on your own.  Can you afford to pay that much per 1,000 views?  You won’t truly know until you test but estimating and calculating risk can be done.

Additionally, it sounds like this is not the traditional kind of media buying advertising with an insertion order so the opportunity of out-clause looks out of the question.  If you are able and you are billed by the CPM rather than a large upfront amount, then definitely exercise that ability as it’s always a good idea.  Also, test a couple of banners in this instance with different styles to ensure you get a good CTR.

Overall the answer to your question can be found by…. testing. It’s impossible to take a quick look at something and determine if it will cost without using previously obtained data like demographics and experience.  Calculate your risk using demographics, set up tracking and test.  Collect the data that will help you replicate this campaign if it’s successful and if it’s not successful hopefully you can figure out what went wrong and learn from your mistake.

The combination of being easily amused and somewhat geeky has me tickled to death about the free Internet that can be found in airports across the country sponsored by Google.  Maybe it’s the many frustrating attempts to find wireless in various airports before and the refusal to pay for wifi makes me appreciate Google’s holiday gift more than the average person.  As I read the sign above I literally smiled and thought of how my wasted time in concourse C was going to be that much more enjoyable as I monitored campaigns, browsed on AffBuzz, and etc.

A couple of ideas popped into my head as I saw this sign though.  How much was Google actually spending for this type of gift and for what purpose? This kind of thing is exactly why Google’s brand is loved by so many people.  They are providing something that wouldn’t normally be free and they are spending mega bucks letting people know about it.  There was one of the pictured displays above every 200 feet in the Jacksonville airport and same with the Charlotte airport along with other various sizes of signs.  Instead of advertising on websites, Google spends their marketing dollars less frequently but I’m assuming more expensive ways.   I can spot a lot of people using their laptops out right now and I could guess I’m one of the many that consider this complimentary Internet a great luxury.

The part that doesn’t make sense to me is that after you accept the Google agreement to not do illegal stuff with their connection is that you are redirected to a page about their photo contest.   My twin brother, Robert, asked why wouldn’t they just plug Google Chrome or some advertisement for the Android. Hell, if they said that I had to install and use Google Chrome for free wifi, I would definitely do it and I bet the majority of people in here would do it too.  That type of requirement would allow users to find another browser that probably would be a lot faster than their current one.  I know Chrome is faster on my Macbook Pro but only cause I read nerdy comments on Digg about browser arguments; most people have no idea what it is nor that Google is connected to it.

After checking out the site that they provide, I’m a little late since they’ve been offering this since November 10th but it’s interesting how the biggest company in the world goes about a lot of their business.  It’s starting to make sense why all these Google books and news articles are being published with the “What Would Google Do?” philosophy.  The only thing that I still find looming over me as I browse the Internet is what kind of information is Google collecting and what are they doing with it…?

(Taken from the website):

Q. What kind of information are you collecting about users with the networks?

The network operators collect the information they need to run the network. Google will have access to some aggregate, non-personally identifiable information.