Two years ago I was in awe when I purchased my first iPhone.  It had a full functional web browser, I was able to check my email quickly, and the applications were unmatched by any of the competition.  Today, I want to throw up just thinking about paying my monthly $200 bill from AT&T for my two business lines…  What started as a technological break though and ingenious company ended with a sour taste in my mouth that cannot be described.

August 2008 my long-term contract with US Cellular was up and I couldn’t wait to make the switch to AT&T.  In May I had experimented with their Internet Connect card but returned it as it didn’t work in the locations I needed to use it.  I figured the iPhone would be different.  The sales team assured to me that while 3G was not yet available in my hometown of Beckley, West Virginia, that it was being installed and I did not need to worry.  Two years later, 3g is still yet to be found in Beckley.

Last August John and I went to Affiliate Summit East in New York City only to find our phones will zero reception and consistently dropping calls.  Things only got worse when Richard and I returned in November to attend AdTech.  We had a very important meeting scheduled and found it hard to make important calls to meet up as their was absolutely no service at the Javits Convention Center.

While aggravated Richard and I just assumed New York City couldn’t handle all the network usage and tried to dismiss the problem.  When we arrived in Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West in February we found the exact same thing.  No signal with AT&T.  Important business meetings would have to be rescheduled via email with aggravated reps.  The final straw came when I took my vacation last month to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  As any of you self-business owners understand it is essential to have contact via telephone while you’re away.  With AT&T it was impossible.  No signal there either.

My two year contract finally ended on Sunday, August 8, 2010 and I made the switch to Verizon on Monday.  So far I’m very impressed with the speed of the network, the service coverage area, and the Android operating system.  If Apple knows what’s good for them they’ll work as hard as possible to dismiss their exclusive agreement with AT&T as soon as possible…

As a final note, Richard and John still remain very big fans of the new iPhone 4.  I asked Richard to switch and he said he simply could not get rid of ‘his favorite thing he owns.’  When we go to New York City this weekend I’m not going to let either one of them use my cool new phone to make calls while they’re left with zero reception!  AT&T SCREW YOU!

While on vacation I received a quite alarming email from Google. It read the following:

Subject: Final Warning: Your Google AdWords account has multiple violations

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account is at risk of being suspended due to multiple violations related to our Advertising Policies, including the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. Below is a list of example display URLs of the sites in violation of these policies. Please check the existing ads in your account to ensure that they comply with these policies. Please be aware that this is your final warning, and any additional violations of our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines will lead to immediate account suspension.

Customer ID: XXX-XXX-XXXX

superaffiliatetwins.com

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted poor quality landing pages that do not comply with our Advertising Policies, including the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines, we reserve the right to take account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted.  Further, advertisers are prohibited from promoting certain types of sites, which include, but are not limited to:
*  Data collection sites that imply delivery of free items, etc., in order to collect private information
*  Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
*  Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
*  ”Get-rich quick” sites that make unrealistic promises
*  Sites that are deceptive
*  Sites that distribute malware or spyware
*  Extremely misleading/unverifiable or inaccurate claims

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted multiple sites that merited poor landing page quality evaluations.  Advertisers that have a history of promoting poor quality landing pages are subject to account-level disabling.

Pausing or deleting an ad or ad group that advertises a site will not affect or improve the site’s landing page quality. The only way to improve poor landing page quality is to correct the site according to our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines; after you have done this, please contact Google AdWords support by replying to this email so that we can re-evaluate your site’s landing page quality. Once a site’s landing page quality has markedly improved based on these guidelines, ads associated with the site should also see an improvement in Quality Score as it relates to landing page quality.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs and http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675.

In addition, our FAQ about Disabled Accounts can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786.

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

Are you kidding me? Since we launched our Internet University we’ve been driving traffic with Google Adwords targeting keywords where people are searching about how to make money online.  No funny business, simple ads that promote the service we’re offering.  They also note this as our ‘final’ warning, but this is the first email they’ve sent. I replied to them six days ago but have yet to receive a response. To avoid compromising our Adwords account I went ahead and paused our ads.

I’ve always been VERY careful with Google. I’ve never cloaked anything, I’ve never ran a re-bill or an uncompliant offer on Adwords. I feel that it is essential to keep a good relationship with Google to be able to grow in the future. That is why I’ve been ‘overly’ compliant when submitting campaigns. Now that they don’t like Internet University completely baffles me. We don’t promise a ‘get rich quick’ program. We don’t hide any terms as far as the subscription goes. In my opinion we’re not violating ANY of their advertiser guidelines.

It seems to me as they’re classifying us as a typical ‘flog’ and not even reading our content. Sadly this is what happens when a company becomes so big they lose focus about there entire business model as well as keeping customers happy (I can’t even begin to tell you how many millions I’ve spent with Google). To make things worse it’s been six days and they can’t even write a simple reply with more details as to what they don’t like about our site!

What’s your thoughts on this? Is anyone from Google reading this?

Right before the beginning of the awesome weekend of July 4th, I typed up a blog post calling out the popular telephone verification company, TeleSign, for a poor personal experience that I had with one of my accounts involving customer service.   At about midnight that following day I received an email from the president of the company expressing his apology, promise for improvement in customer service relations, and a credit for $100 to my account to help remedy the situation.

To say the least, I was extremely surprised.  As an online business owner for the past 4 years, I realize how easy it is just to shrug off complaints and less-than-stellar reviews across the Internet on forum boards, much less give up a sizable amount of credit.    I don’t mean to “brown nose” TeleSign too much but such action is certainly a strong message to customers in two ways…

#1: It tells you that this doesn’t normally happen.  I mean flukes/mistakes happen and as I said in the previous blog post, it was right before the 4th of July weekend and I’m sure the customer service person was ready to just clock out and start chugging beers.   It’s especially easy for a company who outsources employees for this type of behavior to happen because usually consequences don’t happen to them if they work out-of-house.  (Not sure they specifically outsource or not but worth mentioning…)

#2: It shows quality in a company.  Early in my business career HostGator awarded a $50 credit to my account just because I had waited on hold for 15-20 minutes at about 1:00 AM one night with a server problem.  Luckily, I just set it on speaker phone and was playing Xbox Live at the time so I wasn’t mad or anything but I was really caught off guard and extremely impressed with HostGator’s generosity and sincerity and it’s one of the main reasons why I stuck with them for my older ventures rather than moving them to RackSpace.

Some may think companies who make things right by issuing credit or apologies are stupid and wasting money but the fact of the matter is with consumers like myself, it’s the little things that go a long way.  In the end, chances are that the $50 or $100 credit they issued is only a short term loss and could mean many, more dollars indirectly to the company.  For instance, I blogged about HostGator and commended them for their service many times.   I not only continued to pay my bill but also to recommend it to others and etc.

I hope I didn’t sound too much like I was sucking up after the $100 credit but I feel like this behavior should be noted and as I previously said in the aforementioned blog post, TeleSign was a great company to work alongside for the past two years.  I can honestly say if it weren’t for them, I may have very well lost thousands of dollars in profit due to the inability to prevent foreign users from mass-registering on my business.   Tip of the hat to Ryan at TeleSign for reaching out to me.

I was just wrapping up the tail-end of a sale of one of my business ventures when I encountered someone who evidently was very irked that I have the nerve to call in right before the long holiday and I have to say, such an experience totally changes my outlook on the company altogether.   Usually I would never have the nerve to call someone out on this but I think there’s a lesson to be learned and hopefully they will see this and try to correct it…

For the past 2 years or so I’ve used TeleSign as a phone verification method to prevent fraudulent sign-ups and leads for one of my ventures.  It’s always been a great experience with no problems after the integration of the software and I can just login online and make my payments every month with ease.   However, today I decided that I needed to change my password. Well, for some odd reason they don’t let you do that online so you have to call in between their open hours on the West Coast.   I figured that was fine, this was for my security after all, so I called them up and the conversation went like this:

Me: Hi there, I’d like to change my password on my account, please?

CS Person: Uh, what?

Me: I’d like to change my password on my account, please.

CS Person: What’s the email on the account?

Me: I believe it’s **** but I’m not 100% sure.

CS Person: Nope.   Do you work with the company or what?

Me: I’m the owner, my name is John Kirkpatrick.

CS Person: Oh, okay.  What would you like the password changed to?

Me: Change it to ****, please.

CS Person: Okay, done.  Can’t you do this on the website?

Me:  No, it specifically states I have to contact a representative.  Can you hold while I make sure it’s successful?

*CS Person hangs up*

I’m usually someone that understands that people who aren’t happy with their job at McDonald’s or whatever will not be polite with you no matter how polite you are but I just felt like this was something different on so many levels and it’s especially surprising because I viewed TeleSign as such a quality company previously.   Secondly, I thought it was extremely discomforting that he didn’t verify any type of information to make sure it was me.  Hell, I bet I could get my mom to call back and claim to be someone else from the same number and get it changed.  All TeleSign needs is some kind of address or last four digits of a MasterCard to confirm and I’d be satisfied…

Moral of the “story”: Customer service can turn your business image sour.  It certainly turned my impression of TeleSign sour and maybe that’s because they chose to outsource cheaply or something but it just didn’t seem in line with the company image they were going for.   At the very least, TeleSign, please for the sake of your customers get some kind of identity verification!  To all those out there who have their own customer service departments for their products, don’t drop the ball in this area.  Great customer service is not an area you should cut costs on.

While I’ve been in the industry a little over ten years now, I’ve been able to experience the best-of-the-best and the worst-of-the-worst affiliate networks. From companies that don’t pay to companies that pay weekly (even some daily) I’ve seen it all. Today, in somewhat of a rant, I want to talk about what I like to see in a network as an affiliate.

To obtain an affiliate?
- This is one of the hardest things for some networks. How do you convince an affiliate to join your network over the next? Are you offering a prize or a contest? Do you have a rewards program? What separates your network with the others. Below are some of the things I like to see.

* First, the most important thing each network should do is treat every affiliate like they’re a ‘super’ or ‘high volume’ affiliate. I’ve personally known guys go from $5 or less one month to nearly a million the next. Just because an affiliate is not pushing traffic to your network doesn’t mean they don’t have traffic or the potential to drive serious volume.

* Don’t annoy the affiliate to try to get business. Approach them as a friend, make a personal connection. Don’t block your number or call during dinner hour (you seriously would not BELIEVE what some people will do). To get business, the best way is to send email updates. Keep your affiliates in the loop of what’s hot and what’s not, and if something catches their eye, they’re going to contact you. I personally don’t have the entire day to devote to just affiliate marketing (I own other businesses too) so I can’t always respond to an instant message or chat on the phone. Send an email with hot offers, be down to earth, and business will come.

* Take advantage of Affiliate Summit, Ad Tech, and other conferences. This one is big. If you know an affiliate that you want on your network is going to be attending a conference make it a point to speak with them. I cannot tell you how many networks just stand behind the booth and wait for business to come to them. Find out who’s going to be there and personally go up to them. How bad do you want that affiliate’s traffic? If you want business bad enough you can get it. It just depends how hard you work for it.

* Don’t make promises you can’t keep. If you can’t make it for drinks don’t say you will. If you can’t provide a certain offer, don’t say that you can. I can’t tell you how many times my plans have been thrown off because I scheduled to meet up with a network for them to ‘forget’ to call. I’ve also spent HOURS creating landing pages for campaigns only to have the network say they ‘don’t have that offer anymore.’ Ugh?

To keep an affiliate?
- Once you get an affiliate’s business it is essential that you take necessary actions to keep that affiliate. This industry is cut-throat, and at the end of the day, business comes first.

* Customer service must be priority. Many networks use Link Trust to track commissions. While this is OK software, you can only place one pixel per offer. This is the most aggravating thing in the world to me! I seriously will run offers with networks that use Direct Track before Link Trust, just because I like to add/edit/delete my tracking pixels on my own time. I don’t want to email anyone. With that said, if you do use Link Trust, you MUST have an affiliate manager available 24/7/365 to place pixels. There is no substitute, affiliate don’t like to wait.

* Pay on time every time. No matter WHAT you must see that your affiliates are paid (as long as they are in compliance with your TOS) and paid on time. If an affiliate earns commissions you have to pay them. If the advertiser shorts you, that’s the risk you have to take. If there is a bank holiday on the day you send out wires, be sure to notify the affiliate that their payment is going to be early or delayed.

* Don’t focus on one niche. I don’t have to tell anyone that this business changes daily. Campaigns are going to come and go but not affiliates. Bring on multiple offers in multiple niches and keep several backups. If one offer goes down, you better have another one ready to back it up. If not, you are likely to lose that affiliate to another network. Don’t just focus on re-bills and/or lead generation. Have a mixture of all the top campaigns in various niches.

* Maintain open communication. It is always VERY important to keep affiliates in the loop. If you’re going to be re-directing an offer let affiliates know as soon as you can. I personally like to have 12 hours notice, but I realize sometimes that’s impossible. The absolute worst thing you can do though is redirect an offer without notice.

So who do I recommend?
I couldn’t end this post without mentioning some of my favorite affiliate networks. While no network is perfect, in my experience, these are the best!

* Eagle Web Assets

* Convert 2 Media

* Azoogle Ads

* COPEAC

* CX Digital

In conclusion, you can have the best rewards program or the sickest parties in the world, but if the above items aren’t fulfilled it’s likely your going to have a hard time getting or keeping business. I’m not writing this post with any particular affiliate network in mind nor am I ‘calling anyone out’. I’m fairly happy with every network we currently work with and have been very impressed with some of the newer networks that have came on. I felt that this post would be an interesting post to share with other affiliates what we like to see with affiliate networks.

Happy Presidents Day everyone! Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and a day that many affiliate marketers made a lot of money. Over the year’s I’ve known affiliates that plan all of their campaigns on certain Holidays, tax season, etc. They spend months analyzing data, preparing landing pages, and come into ‘attack’ once the Holiday hits. Some of my pay-per-click friends come in and make $1,000+ an hour on the day before and the day of Valentine’s Day promoting flowers!

While the ideas for Holiday/special occasion campaigns are limitless, I’m personally glad to see this one go. Over the year’s we’ve promoted some of these campaigns, however I’m personally not a huge fan. While the money can certainly be rewarding, it really frustrates me to see it disappear a day later. I would much rather spend my time and energy promoting several smaller-scale campaigns that make a few hundred each day consistently rather than promoting a handful of campaigns that have a very short lifespan. Also while media buying, companies such as Pro Flowers, come in and suck up a lot of our impressions (they had a huge campaign running this year)!

If you’ve followed our blog, you probably know, I’m a huge fan of optimization. I like to test several different variations of landing pages, creatives, etc to find the winning pair. It’s a challenge to me to up the conversion rate just a few percent. I get a rush out of it! With campaigns such as Valentine’s Day you really don’t have much time to optimize. You have to come in strong, base your data on your experience, and cash in while the time allows. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very doable, but with a short lifespan.

With that said, I hope you all had an excellent Valentine’s Day and spent it with someone special. I surprised my girlfriend with a cruise to Mexico for next month:). Now it’s time to get back to making money!

Well yet another stupid mistake cost us twins $1,026.47 (60% of the price of my new MacBook I just ordered). Let me explain what happened. About two weeks ago I loaded up four new campaigns on Google’s Content Network. These campaigns were all niches we were already in, but we were doing some advanced geo-targeting to try to explore some new areas to expand. Using a combination of image and text ads, I had thousands of keywords and the campaigns setup just the way I wanted them.

Right off the bat three of the four campaigns started getting impressions/clicks. I let things ride and the very next morning I woke up to the famous ?Google Slap.? I really wasn’t expecting it this time, as all of the sites had established page ranks as well as tons of unique content. But that’s Google for you; a slap for no logical reason at all. I went ahead and paused those three campaigns and decided to ?clean up the mess? after I finished another list of projects. However, I forgot about one thing. The FOURTH campaign? I assumed it was slapped from the beginning as it just continued to get a $2 – $5 trickle everyday from the beginning. Rather than pausing it, I decided to let it run to see if it would ever garner traffic.

Busy with all the new projects we have coming up (some exciting stuff btw), I honestly forgot about that one campaign. Of course, I logged into my Adwords account daily, but it was always that $2 – $5 trickle. Yesterday, it was about 50 degrees here, so I decided to take a quick one-hour break and wash my car. When I got back home I noticed traffic FLOODING into our tracking system. Honestly, we have a lot of stuff going on, so it took me a few minutes to discover the culprit. Once I logged into our Adwords account my heart SUNK. Since I wrote that campaign off, I had removed that landing page from our server. So we had thousands of clicks going nowhere.

This made for a very frustrating day due to a stupid mistake on my end. One simple click on ‘pause’ would have saved us this money. I’m not going to continue to cry over spilled milk, but I did want to type this post to let you know, amateur, professional, or newbie, we’re all human and we make mistakes. We must learn from this and move forward even stronger!

One of my BIGGEST pet peeves about working online is people think it?s a quick way to instant millions. I know Richard has touched on this in many of his posts, but recently, I received a Facebook message I decided to share with everyone. Before I begin with my rant here is the message:

OK so here?s what got her attention. When I purchased my new Mercedes Benz CLS550 I posted some pictures on my Facebook. I?m not the type of person that likes to brag about things, but like most people, I have family spread out across the United States. They all wanted to see my new car, so the easiest way was to upload a few pictures to Facebook (since then I?ve removed them). I knew that it was very likely I was going to receive a message like this.

The girl that sent this message is a pretty nice person. I knew her back in high school, but haven?t talked to her a day since I graduated (in 2002). Seven years later she emerges on Facebook to try and ?pick my brain.? I?m sure many of you reading this that currently work online have been asked this a million times! People hear work + Internet/Online and think automatic, easy millions. This couldn?t be further from the truth.

If you?re currently sitting behind your computer reading this and are not yet making money online, don?t let me discourage you. It is VERY possible to begin making LOTS of money online. But it?s not going to come without hard work. Working online is no different than starting a ?bricks & mortar? business. While you need to be prepared for several long days, you also need to have a clear plan, set goals, have money to invest, and be willing to take risks. Success often does not come without failure. Before I became a successful affiliate, I failed. I built HUNDREDS of campaigns that all tanked. But I was willing to work hard, invest money, and I wouldn?t accept failure. I cannot tell you the many nights I went to sleep discouraged with Richard yelling at me about how much money I burned through on Google Adwords.

Just like any other business, you get out of it what you are willing to put into it. This young lady that messaged me wants me to give her a shortcut to quit her secular 9-5 job to ?work online? and ?travel?. I really wish I knew what she meant by ?travel?. Sure, I get to go on business trips as well as trips with networks, but when I get back in the office I cannot tell you how behind I am. I wish I could lounge around a 5-star beach resort every week and check my email once or twice a day, but it simply does not work like that. While some of our campaigns do go on a certain ?autopilot? mode, that doesn?t mean that we?re not working hard everyday looking for the next successful campaign. And guess what? We still fail on some campaigns even to this day.

I?m going to close this with one more example. Two years ago I was laying out at the local resort pool near my home. A neighbor of mine said ?you work online full-time?!?? I answered politely ?yes, I have for several years.? She said ?make me a website; I have a great idea, blah, blah, blah.? I kind of laughed it off, only to get back to my computer to see her husband had sent me a message on MySpace explaining to me how good he was with his computer and Photoshop. Richard was even asked once, ?So does this website make enough money to live on??

Successful people did not become successful instantly. They did not become successful without failure. Besides being able to work out of your bedroom in your boxers, working online is no different than opening a ?bricks and mortar? business. Work hard; don?t accept failure, and when you think you can?t work any harder, work harder. Don?t be influenced by people who don?t want to see you prevail. You CAN do this, you CAN build a successful business, and you CAN become a multi-millionaire. Now, how bad do you want it?

OK my last post was pretty harsh on a network. I do hope many networks will see that and learn from those mistakes. One network that has made an excellent first impression on us is COPEAC. While working on some summer campaigns with John (several months ago), my affiliate manager from COPEAC called out of the blue during the exact day we were looking for a certain offer. I told him what we were looking for and he immediately made several suggestions and said they?d beat any network?s payout. At the time, we didn?t take him up on the offer. Unlike 99.999% of affiliate managers he didn?t bomb me with IM?s every morning. Instead he had the Marketing Manager for COPEAC, Stephen, message me. Stephen took a different approach than an affiliate manager. He made it seem to me that I was ?so important? that I had two people assigned to my account; an affiliate manager and the marketing manager for the entire company. This was an excellent first impression.

One day an offer we were running went down unexpectedly. John and I both agreed that we should swap it out with COPEAC until it came back up. Within 5 minutes the offer was back up but we did see 1 conversion while running COPEAC. Later that afternoon I missed a call from New York. I listened to my voicemail and it was Stephen along with our affiliate manager congratulating us on our first sell. This was the relationship we were looking for. These guys didn?t know we were ?super affiliates? or that we had a blog. All they knew is we made ONE sale on their network. Towards the end of August we were one of the top affiliates promoting offers on COPEAC.

Monday, Richard and I have been invited by Stephen and our affiliate manager, to meet up in New York City and then go to Atlantic City for a few days of enjoyment. Unfortunately, John cannot make this trip, but I know it?s KILLING him he?s going to miss it! Without further ado here is our trip itinerary:

* Monday, September 28, 2009

- Richard and I will land at JFK airport in New York City. From there, a limousine will take us to the London in downtown Manhattan to a two Bedroom, 1 King, 1 Queen bed, with Living Room suite. I?m sure we?ll be meeting up with several people from the company.

* Tuesday, September 29, 2009

- On Tuesday at 12:00 p.m. we?ll be taking the following luxury limousine to Atlantic City, New Jersey:

Richard and I will spend two nights at the Borgata Hotel Casino in the Fiore Suite. Stephen and our affiliate manager will also be joining us for the trip! It’s going to be one crazy, helluva a time! I can’t wait! Stay tuned to our blog all next week as we’ll be posting some videos/pictures of the trip!

COPEAC is awesome and every network out there should be envious of them. They know how to treat their affiliates and this is what is going to keep them in business for years to come!

?First impressions last.? This is what they pounded in our heads during business school in college. First impressions? What is so valuable about this and business?

Operating online businesses for almost ten years I?ve learned that one of the key aspects in any business is to have strong interpersonal relationships with the companies you do business with. This is especially the case in affiliate marketing. If you notice almost every affiliate network has the same offers, the payouts are relatively close, and most of them use the same tracking software (ie: Direct Track, Link Trust, etc.). What really separate them are their interpersonal relationships with affiliates. Some networks have tried to utilize special features such as a prize system, a cool contest, etc. but without the interpersonal relationship it?s all useless.

Most recently there was a network we decided not to work with. Let me explain. John and I were researching for some higher paying offers and ran across a network that seemed to be pretty legit. We signed up and waited. Two weeks later still nothing. So I called them and asked why we hadn?t been approved? They said it would be taken care of shortly. When I checked my email I noticed that had approved us, but they required us to take a QUALIFICATION TEST before we could join their network. OK that?s the dumbest thing I?ve EVER heard of. The email informed me that if I didn?t score 80% or above I would be unable to join their network. The last part of the email contained about a 20 minute ?training seminar.? So you?re telling me I have to go through all of this just to be part of your network? Just for the heck of it I took the test (without studying) and scored an 84%. I was accepted, but told John I no longer felt like running them period. Their first impression SUCKED!

Even though this network was recently ranked in INC Magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, if they continue to treat people like that, they will fall as quick as they rose. Very shortly, I?m going to make another post showing what a good affiliate network is like. Trust me, you WON?T want to miss it!