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  • NegBox 10:23 am on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply  

    I QUIT MY DAY JOB 

    That’s right, I’ve quit my day job. Its been now six months of being a full-time affiliate marketer and I LOVE IT.

    Its easy to quit your day job when you’re 20-something and you are working retail jobs; or when you have your parents to fall back on; When you could live on government cheese, or when its just you with no family or kids.

    In my case quitting was a little more complicated. Its not so easy when you’re already in your 30s, you have your own family, mortgages, can’t go back to your parents, and you already have a six figure salary doing something a little more interesting than Starbucks barista.

    How did I do it? Luck x Effort

    By 2009 I had gotten an MBA to add to my technical degree and joined the marketing division at IBM. For the first year I had a blast, over time Sandy Carter, the vice president I was working for started slowly DRIVING ME FUCKING NUTS to the point I routinely fantasized how awesome it would be to get fired. One day in August 2009 she asked me to do some shit I can’t recall with grandmaster douchebag Jeremiah Owyang who was then at Forrester, that’s when I read this article. Before learning about internet marketing there I had been selling junk on eBay (circa 2007), and before that I tried a little startup of my own (2004-2005) on the side which flopped. All in all I’ve been trying to give my corporate overlords the boot for almost ten years.

    Of course I didn’t spend ten years locked in a basement trying to leave or working on affiliate marketing stuff. In those ten years I had two kids, got an MBA, changed jobs a couple of times, change wife too. The constant was simple: The writing was on the wall, I had to strike out on my own.

    Why? Because I planned for greatness, and found myself stuck in mediocrity. At one point in time I was on a great career path, then something happened – I don’t know what or how, still around 2003 or so I realized I was no longer on track to be a Fortune 500 CEO – so time to clock out.

    Fast-forward to 2009, that article from Jeremiah Owyang led me to John Chow. Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not endorsing John Chow in any way, hes so full of shit we could terraform Mars with it. Still… One thing led to another…

    I tried doing a blog like John Chow’s. I really did. I gave it all… It didn’t work. Along the way I started reading other blogs… PPC.bz among them. The first time I read it I was sure of two things: 1 – There is something good here. and 2 – I had no fucking clue what was going on. I also started reading some of the blogs on the blogroll and slowly piecing together a larger picture of affiliate marketing.

    Then every time I read a “Friday Affiliate Interview” story at JonathanVolk.com it felt like a slap in the balls: Here were people doing what I wanted to be doing, successful at what I wanted to do, and I was still sucking bottom. Jonathan Volk himself with his Christian fervor was also motivational, though not in the way he might have hoped for. I thought if someone so slow as to have invisible friends could be successful at internet marketing, that left me the one possibility that maybe, just maybe, all these folks were  smarter and generally better than me. This I refused to believe, yet it provided some serious proof that I was headed in the right direction and a boatload of motivation to prove myself – to myself.

    That was 2010… What did I do between 2010 and 2012? Everything.

    Top ten tips to quitting your day job with affiliate marketing, based directly on my recent experience:

    1 – Focus on ONE THING. One traffic source, one niche, one offer type. Sleep, eat, drink, be the offer, the customer, the traffic – One with the matrix.

    2 – The Lifecycle of an Internet Marketer from Adam Bunch and published by Mr. Green was an awesome post, so much so that I printed it out and keep it on my desk.

    3 – Your head has to accept the change. I exercised listening to songs about change – Especially awesome in every way is Butterflies and Hurricanes from Muse, that song steals the show for embracing and driving radical change. It says things like “change everything you are”, “Your number has been called” and “You’ve got to be the best”.

    4 – Affiliate Summit events. They are an investment, make it. I went to ASW 10, ASC 12 and ASW 13. The value I get from these events keeps GROWING tremendously. Its really not about the sessions for me – Its about the Meet Market and the social networking.

    5 – Transparency. The best business relationships I’ve made have come about and are nurtured daily by being completely transparent – about what I promote, where and how. If you think someone is going to steal your stuff, you need to work on your mindset – You are the creator, you have abundance, you make one good thing after another, fear of someone stealing your stuff makes you inefficient and ineffective. At the end of the day there are real human beings behind everything – if you are clean and transparent, people compete to do business with you – because the other folks who are playing “Batman” with cloak-and-dagger hush-hush games are just plain hard to deal with.

    6 – Push the envelope without breaking the rules. Forget black-hat shit. Personally, I grew up on TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview original edition from 1996 and packet analyzers. So all the black-hat tricks are within arm’s reach – they will however lead you absolutely nowhere. Sometimes I see very clever black-hat tricks and invariably think to myself how that person could be stacking 10x the cash by using all their knowledge the way its supposed to work.

    7 – Stop worrying about what others are doing and get busy. In the beginning I used to “protect” my landing pages, cloak, hide, log IPs and serve up dummy pages, read browser’s histories to see if you were an affiliate. Guess where that got me? Nowhere at all. It wasted a ton of time I could have used for building more campaigns or doing something else. Who’s really going to jack my campaign? Successful affiliates don’t need to jack your crappy landing page, and they will see it anyways sooner or later, because they’re watching the traffic like a cat stalks a mouse. The other folks that can jack your page are unsuccessful affiliates – and guess what they’re going to do with it? Exactly what they’ve been doing so far: Fail. …. Get busy and forget about the idiots.. When you’re too busy to pay close attention to one single campaign, when you’re too busy to work on silly cloaking, that’s when the magic happens.

    9 – Understand understanding. You will not understand what the fuck is going on during your first try, or your second, or your tenth. Stare at it. Read it again. And again. And again. Think about it. Think about it again. In time you will start getting valuable insights, these insights only come if you actually do shit and fail repeatedly – They don’t come if you throw up your arms and walk away.

    10 – Its all a mind game. Its you against you.

    Wrap-up

    If you’re willing to bust your balls, this can be very rewarding. I have only one word of warning I shared with my fellow blogging friend Mike Chiasson at ASW – I went from working a lot, to working A LOT MORE. Of course I now work for myself, and work twice as much, twice as hard, and my balls are on the line every day.

    This is clearly not for everyone – If somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind you secretly believe you’ll hit a home run and walk home a billionaire with strippers lining up at your door to do tricks on your overworked appendage, you’re sorely mistaken. This is hardball, and hardball isn’t for everyone. As for me… I AM FUCKING LOVING IT!

     

     

    • Jay 12:03 pm on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Great fucking post and congrats on quitting ! ;)
      This fake facebook comment box is hilarious too haha

    • Nikola Cvrtnjak 2:33 pm on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Interesting part about john chow lol :D
      Anyway, congrats! Now you are your own boss ;) .

    • Angry Russian 4:35 pm on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Great article. Couldn’t agree with you more especially point number 7 about mind your own business and stop worrying about everyone else. I know when I stopped trying to copy other peoples campaigns and jumping from one hot thing to another, along with of course the ultra paranoia that kept me from really scaling, I found success right away.

      Glad to hear it man keep it up.

    • Mikey 6:00 pm on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Step 8 is definitely the most important. Don’t forget the two most important things to be successful: 1. Never tell anyone everything you know.

      • NegBox 6:02 pm on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply

        Mike, well put on #2. For everyone else, remember its a mind game… Once you win the mind game, your brain will let you see Step 8 and Mike’s #2.

    • FrequentBird.com 11:51 pm on February 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Based on your use of language and nude images, I would never have guessed that you have a family and had a career at IBM!

      • NegBox 8:26 am on February 12, 2013 Permalink | Reply

        @frequentbird corporate America is much more human than you make it out to be. After a certain level people are awesome, and they hold nothing back – They will call shit shit and fuck fuck. I’d recommend the book Radical Honesty.

    • Mattias 5:21 am on February 12, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Yes! Great post and 10 great tips. Thanks. Inspired.

    • Artur 2:14 pm on February 12, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      There are few other feelings as exhilarating as leaving behind the slavery of employment.

    • RUss 5:40 am on February 13, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Negbox. Congrats. I hear it from the successful ones. Hard ball is the reality. In anything worth going after. Now I just have to adjust my focus.

    • Edgar 2:08 am on February 14, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Congrats man. This is where I aim to be in the next few months.

      It really does suck being a slave to work. Having to ask your boss for vacations, days off, etc…

      All the best to you and all your projects!

    • EP 7:19 am on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Amen! Nice blog post. I love when people give credit where credit is due, and everything in point 7 needs a retothetweet. Enough procrastinating for me, good luck!

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  • NegBox 4:01 pm on August 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Media Buying IQ Test: Find the Odd One Out 

    Question 1 of 2:
    Can you spot the odd one out from this group of banners that returned from a query on WhatRunsWhere?

     

    Question 2 of 2:
    Now that you passed Test #1, comes the hard part. Test #2. Can you find the odd one out of THIS screenshot:

     
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  • NegBox 3:40 pm on April 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    WAM! CPC Lapdance Network 

    I want my Wam! rep to do like the one in the picture – She looks like she is about to jump on my desk, shove my face in her tits and then turn XXX rated.

    My Wam rep about to grab my Wang rap

    My Wam rep about to grab my Wang rap

     

     
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  • NegBox 1:43 pm on April 12, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    FluxAds leaves DirectTrack for Cake 

    After suffering a week-long outage back in February, who wouldn’t?

    Seems like ClickBooth is also departing for Cake.

    The cake might be a lie, but it works really well for affiliate marketing.

    Their PR handling of the affair looks pretty non-existent I will add. When you fuck up like this, its fairly easy to get back on the right track – you have to have the balls to man-up and do it, though. It involves at least these three simple elements:

    1 – Putting a link on the homepage and making a public statement about the outage.

    2- Explaining CLEARLY what happened including an “It was us” statement – don’t shift blame.

    3- Explaining why this can’t ever-ever-ever ever happen again.

    Speaking of apologizing effectively, this is the way Dale Carnegie and several other describe it as a really effective way. Needless to say, this only works once.

     

     
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  • NegBox 6:06 am on March 9, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Apache, C API, GeoIP, How-To, MaxMind,   

    GeoLocation How To: Install MaxMind mod_GeoIP2 on Apache in 15 Hair-Raising Steps 

    Here are the exact 15 steps I take every single time I install this thing.

    Assumptions:

    • Apache 2.x
    • Cpanel
    • You have shell access as root

    Instructions:

    Specifically:

    http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/c/

    Specifically:

     http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/mod_geoip2/
    • Step 3 – Upload both to server as root, login via SSH as root, go to where you put these files and gunzip both, then “tar -xvf” both.
    • Step 4 – Go into directory where you just uncompressed the C API to, and execute this (pay attention to leading dot):
     ./configure; make; make install
    • Step 5 – Go into the directory for the Apache module and execute this:
    apxs -i -a -L/usr/local/lib -I/usr/local/include -lGeoIP -c mod_geoip.c
    • Step 6 – Take a look, there is now a line that talks about mod_geoip
     cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more
    • Step 7 – Update distiller with the changes the intaller just made to the Apache configuration (note there is a double-dash “–” before “update”)
    /usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update
    • Step 8 – Rebuild the config file
    /usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf
    • Step 9 – Make sure the changes stuck around and didn’t get wiped
    cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more
    • Step 10 – Make a backup of httpd.conf
    cp /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd-RestoreThisOneIdiot.conf.bkp
    • Step 11 – Add this to your httpd.conf – Note that these are my preferences for settings
    <IfModule mod_geoip.c>
  GeoIPEnable On
  GeoIPDBFile /usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat IndexCache
  GeoIPScanProxyHeaders On
  </IfModule>
    • Step 12 – Rebuild the config file (again)
    /usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update
     /usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf
    • Step 13 – Make sure the changes stuck around and didn’t get wiped (again)
     cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more
    • Step 14 – Enter the following commands to get the latest City-level database in the right place
    cd /usr/local/share/GeoIP/
 wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
 gunzip -f -c GeoLiteCity.dat.gz > GeoLiteCity.dat
    • Step 15 – Go into Cpanel and restart Apache
    • Bonus Step – Drink Martini. Make note to invite me one at ASC 2012 or ASW 2013!

     

     

    • dean 6:05 pm on August 3, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      hey,
      how do I know if my host is using Apache?

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  • NegBox 4:14 pm on January 6, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: targeting   

    The Sum of All Choices 

    When you’re trying to find your customer to pitch them something – whatever it is – think WHAT WERE THEY DOING BEFORE THEY GOT TO YOU? What about right before that? What about before that?

    Your customers, your leads (and of course you) are the sum of their lifetime choices, and even the choices of their parents and ancestors – Can’t underestimate the power of cumulative advantages; yet that’s besides the point so we’ll leave the ‘cumulative advantages’ chat for another day.

    If your site visitors are going to make the poor choice of the buying the Google Money kit, or take out your Payday loan, they have likely been making poor choices all along in the same vein – So what kind of choices are your potential customers making right now, the day before they head to your highly competitive URL? Or type in that expensive keyword? Find them one day sooner and save a bundle on traffic.

    This thinking is similar to trying to create “Personas” – just more direct.

     
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  • NegBox 5:05 pm on October 31, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Anik Singal, Bullshit   

    Bizarro World Leaks Affiliate Marketing Bollywood Film Starring Anik Singal 

    I just can’t stop laughing. The amateurs pose as strippers for ClickBank products, the felons do sweat lodges and the pros do Bollywood films to promote shit…  I’m not even sure what he is promoting, whatever it is I bet it ain’t free and it ain’t funny what it does to your finances. I’m sorry Anik, I’m sure you are a nice guy full of shit.

    You just HAVE to watch this video. Here’s the source page too.

    Gotta love the call to action: “Start your lethal agent training.”

    So I go… “Who the fuck is Anik Singal and why would he do such a movie?”…  I visit his site and the first thing I see is the motto “When Life Pushes You… Stand Straigh, Smile & Push Back” – I like it, reminds me of Cave Johnson’s ‘lemmons’ bit… When life gives you lemmons, burn life’s house down! Fast-forward to 1:00 minute on this next video – it is a funny part of Portal 2.

    So I dig a little deeper by visiting someone with a nose fine-tuned to the smell of bullshit and a keen disdain for just about anything: PPC.BZ,  best useless affiliate news source out there, and discover Anik actually swore off bullshitting people two years ago. Check it out, its kind of amazing what he admits on the video there, especially since he never stopped doing it.

    Here’s the “People buy my lies and expect the magic that I duped them into believing, to actually happen” video. I’m not sure what is more amazing, that he actually did this video or believing your BS to this level. I guess the latter – I wish I could take the blue pill like he does.

    Strangely enough, Anik seems to be only a tiny blip on The Salty Droid’s radar.

    Now personally it doesn’t matter to me if he is out to scam the planet, the way I see it he keeps the idiots busy. This whole secret agent theme and movie gig is just hilarious, though – Had to share.

     

    • Ryan Eagle 1:49 pm on November 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Interesting movie so far. Thanks

      • NegBox 2:42 pm on November 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Seems I’m not worthy of the real one so I’ve been getting “Cheap Outsourced Link-Building Ryan Eagle” for the past two posts. … Ryan doesn’t say “Marketing research is important” or “Great epoch-defining film from the Hindu galactic empire who will own you American pigs” … ROTFL.

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  • NegBox 4:15 pm on October 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: htaccess   

    Test your popups on the cheap and easy with a tiny .htacess trick 

    This post is for the less technically inclined using PPV. While you can see  your pop-ups on a contextual network by browsing the site/keywords you are bidding on with whatever “web experience enhancer” causes them to pop installed, this has a few drawbacks:

    • If your bids are high, you’re kinda wasting money and messing your stats.
    • If you browse a low-bid/low-activity URL and interact with your pop-up, you end up screwing up your CTR stats.
    • If you remember to add a low-traffic unrelated URL to the campaign, you have to contend with two problems: 1- The ad network will sometimes not approve it, for example they might not approve a diet pill pop-up on a seemingly harmless nursing mother website. 2- You have to come up with different URLs that actually exist each time or you’ll really mess up.

    Solution for dumb people like myself: A simple .htaccess file that invisibly rewrites ALL requests for anything inside a folder to a simple “TEST” page.

    The HTACCESS snippet:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	Options +FollowSymlinks
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ test.html [L]
</IfModule>

     

    The Dummy HTML file:

    <html>
<body>
This is a test page
</body>
</html>

    How to use:

    • Hopefully your server runs Apache like most of the web. If you have no clue what your web server runs, give up now before the gurus take all your money.
    • Save the HTACCESS snippet to a file named “.htaccess” (lowecase letters, please, and don’t forget the leading period)
    • Upload your new .htaccess to a new empty subdirectory, for example “/testingpop” so you can access that directory as “http://mydomain.com/testingpop&#8221;
    • Save the Dummy HTML file snippet to a file named “test.html”
    • Upload test.html to the same directory where you put the new .htaccess file
    • When you add targets to a campaign, simply add as a target this subdirectory and append the name of your campaign without any spaces. For example, if you were selling self-confidence courses you might add a url like “http://mydomain.com/testingpop/USA-Grow-your-dick-03&#8243;

    When you access that target you added to your campaigns on the last step, it will always work, it will always get approved because it just says “This is a test”, it will always have the minimum bid and will always be unique because you used the campaign name, its easy to remember, contains no sodium or CFCs and was never tested on animals although I did kick the dog at random intervals while writing this post just to remind him who the alpha male is around here.

    If you had ADD, this is what you’d get from this post:

    Man Kicking Dog

    I kick the dog at random intervals just to remind him who the alpha male is around here

     

    • Mike Chiasson 5:23 am on October 29, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      You would be better off just posting a tiny js box above for people to input their pop pages and choose which traffic source to preview as (ie: sizez). Similiar to affportal’s tool.

      Thanks for the boobs though.

      • NegBox 4:50 am on October 31, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Mike, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of the pops behaving very different “in the wild” as opposed to simulated – particularly the TrafficVance pops – The window won’t resize on a second page no matter what you do, and sometimes you think you are opening a new window when in practice you stay stuck on the small pop-up. Some jQuery libraries dealing with input forms, auto-tabbing and focus can stop working in different networks – you really have to see it to make sure its all working as supposed – Heck recently I built a little “pop-up accelerator” that would show a snapshot of the lander from a CDN while the real lander would load in the background and then get invisibly replaced (triggered by the onLoad event).. It worked wonderful in testing, it worked like shit in practice and I STILL can’t figure out what went wrong.

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  • NegBox 7:59 pm on September 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Affiliate Mistake #1 – Using Your Common Sense 

    Your are not your customer

    You are not MY customer either.

    So stop trying to act like YOU know what THEY want and GO FIND OUT.

    It never fails. Every time I tell someone what I do with affiliate marketing, sometimes even other marketers, I get this look of “You are so dumb, that will never work – you are doomed“.

    The typical assumptions I find folks make when discussing online marketing:

    • “I am normal, most people are normal, so most people act like I do”
    • “I would not do X, therefore most people will not do X, therefore your idea is stupid, forget the $50,000 you made off of it, you are crazy”
    • “Everyone on the entire planet speaks English, and uses the same sites I do yet somehow I’m the only one who knows there is porn on the net.”
    • “We all know the same things. We all want the same things. We all have the same problems.”

    Usually I get told I am targeting too narrowly and need to come up with something EVERYONE wants… Like a better Facebook than Facebook – Because we all know the little jew made out like a bandit and we all know we need another networking site. Next time this happens, I’m going to slap my forehead and shout “Of course! Jesus, I gotta get coding now! See ya!”.

    This is childish. Every little boy and girl out there doesn’t stop to think that other people have a different set of knowledge and beliefs until they develop a “Theory of mind“. Clearly some adults have a hard time acknowledging world views that are radically different from their own… If this is you, go visit around the world and make an effort to meet the locals you would normally not meet.

    The best part of all this is we routinely ignore the subtle cues that tell us we are in the minority – Evidence that you/me/they are not EVERYONE. Here is an example from this morning… I decided to search on Google “Why does time appear to slow down at the speed of light?” from my iPhone. Take a look at the suggested popular queries that start with “Why does…” that I got:

    Google suggests Oedipus complex

    Now if you really were just like your customers, then you would have the hots for your mom, an itchy ass, graying hair, a cat that licks you, a dog that eats your shit, a rotten belly button, a habit of shitting in large bodies of water and a raging urinary infection. Whatever you do, just skip the handshake next time we meet.

     

    • Mike Chiasson 12:19 am on September 10, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I don’t know what sort of stuff you are into but when I did the same search ‘Eye Twitch’ was my first result…granted my third was “why doesn’t HE like me” lol. http://i55.tinypic.com/5b8tph.png

      • NegBox 7:51 am on September 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        I’m really going to use this iPhone parlor trick next time… I’m going to borrow *their* iPhone for extra giggles.

    • Neema F 4:32 am on October 12, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      So then the next logical question is… how then DO you get inside your customers’ head? How do you figure out what your prospect/audience desires to then target that desire and grab their attention?

      • NegBox 1:32 pm on October 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Ask them. Seriously. There is no substitute for marketing research – Quantitative, qualitative, whatever you want to do as long as you don’t do it all inside your head.

    • Ryan Eagle 7:28 pm on October 20, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks for the information. Marketing research is so important. Thank you!

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  • NegBox 6:56 pm on June 21, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , FTC,   

    FTC Complaint on AdWords Ban – Yes, I’m still banned 

    Google’s final response to the San Jose BBB case was this:

    We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we are unable to provide any additional information. Google reserves the right to disable any ads when deemed necessary per the AdWords Terms and Conditions: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder. Again, we apologize for any frustration. Your AdWords account will remain suspended unless you have the ability to edit the content of the sites for which you were previously advertising.

    The whole thing is pretty insulting.

    Over the past few days there were some really great comments on the original post – with some really good ideas.

    Since the BBB channel got nowhere, I decided to file a complaint with the FTC – Federal Trade Commission. The FTC doesn’t attempt to resolve individual complaints – at the same time the FTC can do a lot to solve everyone’s complaints about something like AdWords and their practices – especially as Google gets as big as it is now. The only way for that to happen, though, would be for them to get a bunch of complaints, not just two. I’ll put in my grain of sand and wait for the avalanche. Maybe the FTC will get a hundred complaints over three years and act like they got them all last Tuesday – playing the same time-distortion games Google plays with everyone else.

    In case you’re interested, and it helps you file your complaint, here is the full text of the complaint I filed.

    Google AdWords service is using misleading and deceptive language, policies and practices with regards to suspending accounts. Furthermore they offer as a way of resolving AdWords service problems a course of action that is either impossible (modify sites you dont own) or would involve committing a crime. They offer no real recourse. They bar you from their advertising program as an individual, for life, and mark accounts that may be associated to your person. This does make me a less valuable professional in real life. If this was the corner coffee shop, that would not be a problem. The problem arises when Google uses these policies that provide no realistic recourse, and at the same time controls the great majority of search traffic worldwide.

    I filed a case with Google’s local BBB (the San Jose BBB, case #<withheld>) and received Google’s final reply of  “Your AdWords account will remain suspended unless you have the ability to edit the content of the sites for which you were previously advertising.”  These sites they are referring to are sites I dont own and Im not trying to advertise at all – It has been over two years since I advertised those sites. Google is knowingly acting in a devilishly deceptive manner, while ruining my good name and barring me from their system with no recourse.

    Google AdWords is taking permanent and continued action starting June 2011, based on events that took place at least a year ago, which merited a warning in 2010. Google unilaterally escalated the perceived severity of past actions and provides as a possible way of resolution an avenue which Google fully understand is impossible to execute. While Google’s explanations seem rational (‘fix the website’), and it may fully fit within the processes Google has defined, that doesn’t take away nor satisfactorily explain nor resolve the material facts that Google has permanently suspended me personally based solely on activity that took place a year ago, which they reviewed in due time a year ago, and provide no viable course of action to resolve the dispute amicably. “Fixing” a website I don’t own is not a viable course of action and Google insists that is their only acceptable means of resolution, and puts the onus on me. Google is knowingly asking to perform an impossible task, so Google can bar me from their system with the deceptive claim that I am unwilling to fulfill their requirements for compliance.

    Google continually cites they “Reserve the right to disable any ads…” That is not an issue here. The issue is that they are barring me for life with no recourse; that is not the same as reserving the right to disable non-compliant ads.

    Please give me a call if you have further questions.

    To file a complaint with the FTC, just go here and click the big “FTC Complaint Assistant” graphic.

    You’ll need a bit of Google’s business details, which they kindly provided via the BBB, and are these:

    Google, Inc.
    1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
    Mountain View, CA 94043-1351
    Phone: (650) 330-0100

    Have fun!

    6/22/11 update: Don’t forget to also file your complaint with your state’s Attorney General. You can find your states attorney general webpage (and their online complaint form) right here in the National Association of Attorneys General directory or just Slash it with blekko.

     

    • Luke 12:47 am on June 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I just found your post while searching online. The same thing happened to me, but the ads they banned me for were 7 years old.

      I wrote up the whole ordeal here: http://www.everstatus.com/03/29/google-bans-11-year-old-adwords-account-over-deleted-ads/

      I would suggest possibly filing a complaint with your state Attorney General. They have been instrumental in banding together to lobby the FTC to take action.

      Google has an amazing amount of hubris at the moment and it will probably take regulatory action to bring any sort of change.

      • NegBox 6:11 pm on June 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        @Luke, great post on your blog – Thank you. I’ve just finished filing a complaint with my state’s Attorney General. I think I have a contact into his office too – Yummy! I knew I was forgetting something.

        Google is controlling a monopolistic-level share of something extremely valuable to citizens: The index to the internet. You either self-regulate and keep complaints low, or get doggy-banged by the government. It isn’t rocket science, the same deal has played out dozens of times before, yet it seems it takes more than a thousand PhDs to figure out.

    • Bil Smith 8:21 pm on June 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I’ve lost a handful of Adwords accounts over the years but it never really bothered me to be honest, but what they’re doing now is ridiculous. I lost accounts because I was doing things I shouldn’t have been doing – knowingly, no less – not because of something that I promoted half a decade ago that changed without any input from me. Google is the 600 pound gorilla in the room and they’ve relied on that to pull this kind of crap. Hopefully if enough people complain to the right people, something will finally be done.

      • NegBox 8:47 pm on June 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Bil, that’s exactly the issue. You get banned for being sly… Fine. Move on or try again. You can’t complain. You get banned for nothing, and suddenly you’re on a crusade to avenge the wrong, embodied in the monstrous Googlezilla. Human nature at its best. What makes it most fun to watch is Google’s uncompromising out-of-this-planet idea of customer service and public opinion, which goes along the lines of “What customers?” – Behaving as if the world were static and timeless, or that an impenetrable shell can be created is, in one word: Solipsistic.

    • Matt 12:59 pm on August 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      any update on this post? curious if the gov-types made any mention of receiving your info.

      • NegBox 11:06 pm on August 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        @matt, they did – I got two letters from my state’s Attorney General. I really don’t expect much. If anything the whole experience is quite liberating. Now instead of trying my best to be a good AdWords advertiser, I try my best to be the sneakiest AdWords outlaw as possible – Way less stressful.

    • Hay 3:30 pm on October 24, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I too just found out that I am permanently suspended from my adwords account because of two failed campaigns I ran for about a month two years ago. I simply took two campaigns from an affiliate network that I am part of and tried some adwords ads. Guess who lost money? So, I stopped the campaigns and never gave it any more thought. Lo and behold, a few weeks ago i visited my adwords account and found myself PERMANENTLY SUSPENDED!! I emailed the great Internet god and found that I may as well talk to a brick. Certainly I could easily find more common sense talking to a brick. Couldn’t reason at all with them.

      Google insisted that the only way to be re-established was to make changes to the websites (which I NEVER DID OWN, NOR DID I EVER HAVE ACCESS TO THEM). Google is completely, totally, unreasonable and uncaring. They own the internet and set all the rules to suit their own profitability.

      Have you ever noticed that google’s attitude toward anyone trying to make money on the Internet is like you are pond scum (while they scoop in billions after obscene billions). Interesting, eh?

      Google is an INTERNET BULLY of the highest magnitude and the sooner someone legislates them the better. How can the governments of the world stand by and let this monster become even more monstrous?

      • NegBox 3:00 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Hey Hay – A giant chunk of the responsibility for the way Google is today falls on us. And by ‘us’ I mean people directly related to technology – I can’t take all the credit, otherwise I’d say “me”.
        We used Google instead of Altavista, Dogpile, or Yahoo – MSN was out of the question since they were the Evil Galactic Empire ruled by Darth Gates. We switched everyone’s default engine from Yahoo to Google. We told everyone about Google. We made Google grow into what it is today. Why? First, they gave us the same shitty results as everyone else, except they had a very clean homepage – while everyone else had shit out the wazoo on their search page – Who wants to load a 1 Megabyte page on a 56K modem? Let alone set it as a default page…. Then Google started giving really good results – Took them YEARS to put out more relevant results than the other engines – Nobody gives a shit about the quality o the results if it takes forever to get them, though – so we all used Google then for its speed and un-cluttered-ness and gave them the chance to get better. Then they added ads to their listings and over time literally fucked us all in the ass and will continue to do so for quite some time… So better go get some K-Y.

    • Gyuri 8:36 am on December 12, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Hey,

      How is your case coming with the FTC? Would love to have some updates.

      • Gyuri 7:43 am on December 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Just raised my FTC complaint. I focused on the fact that Google Adwords is a monopoly for online advertisement, and them banning you for life seriously impairs your prospects to enter the online market which is a necessity for survival. :)

        If there would be 4-5 players with 20% market share their ban would not matter, but this way it does. For an FTC complaint you need to focus on monopolistic nature of Google, and why they should not be allowed to ban an advertiser for life.

        • NegBox 10:41 pm on December 20, 2011 Permalink | Reply

          Really “my case” is lob the grenade and run. Not gonna chase the FTC. Now does anyone really believe that because Google doesn’t want me to use their systems, I won’t if I need to? If I had a choice, then I would respect that – When I don’t have a choice, well then I just don’t have a choice.

      • Gyuri 11:43 am on December 16, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        One more thing I wanted to mention that the Adwords team could simply block questionable URLs in campaigns instead of banning people. This treatment is totally rude. In the US Justice system not even murderers get a permanent ban for life.

    • Gyuri 7:34 am on December 25, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      One more addition: If you are living in the EU the new data protection scheme will allow individuals the “right to be forgotten” , meaning someone can request the deletion of all personal data, such as IP email etc. This way they wont be able to ban you for life. Screw you Google, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8388033/Online-right-to-be-forgotten-confirmed-by-EU.html.
      I will be one of hte first person to request this for my Adwords account.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 9:36 pm on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Obama Email Submit Exposed in Pictures 

    Shady email submit using Obama’s face, exposed for all to see page-by-page – Because I’m a dick, and I hate it when I don’t think of scammy stuff before someone else does.

    I was just browsing a website when this window appeared. Mr. President wants to talk to me!

    Obama just wanted some input on his campaign

    He asked me about Donald Trump

    ... and Sarah Palin

    ... and Ron Paul. I was sure he would put this information to good use.

    Obama kept his word and let me select my prize. My three very valuable minutes were turned into a $500+ electronic gadget. Gotta love the stimulus.

    I chose the iPhone! So excited to get my prize!

    Obama wanted to know my e-mail address. How else is he going to ship my goodies? By e-mail, of course!

    After I gave him my e-mail, I was surprised he STILL had more questions for me.

    He started getting really personal with the questions. I guess he might want to invite me for dinner. Or maybe an extra-special prize! Or a mortgage rebate!

    Maybe he was going to offer me a job... Or sucker me into a payday loan?

     

     

     

    I thought he would give me a scholarship!

    Or a new checking account!

    Then he asked me about my credit score. I've got no clue, maybe he can send it to me.

    Jesus Christ how many question does the president have?

    Finally I get to the last question, again... I can't wait for my iPhone! I know Obama won't let me down - He's the president of the USA!

     

     

     

    What the hell, mofo!? Now he says I need to complete two "offers" to get my gift. What kind of gift is this? I don't understand why it says on the top right that I selected the Dell computer instead of the iPhone - whatever, I also need a new computer!

    I thought ok, I just buy two crappy things and get my prize, so I got some teeth whiteners and Dr. Seuss books for the kids. Couldn't wait to get my stuff. Then this son of a bitch tells me I need to complete NINE more offers. Fine, I'll buy myself nine more useless things...

    Ah! finally, after I bought eleven pieces of shit, I get some bonus offers right before my prize. I'm just gonna skip these bonuses and head for my prize... So I'll click the bottom link...

    What the fuck now? Where is my prize? This lady is talking to me about credit cards. Lady, tell me about my prize, not credit cards god dammit!

    Maybe Obama is just going to send me an e-mail asking me for my shipping address for the prize... Lets check my inbox. ... Strange, I don't remember signing up for financial aid, scholarships, government grants, credit reports or auction places. Oh well.. I'll just wait, maybe Obama is going to call me!

    Shady email submit using Obama’s face, exposed for all to see page-by-page.
     
    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 6:45 pm on June 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Ban   

    How Google Banned Me – And The Simple Way to Save Your Ass 

    I wish someone had told me this two years ago: Google associates your AdWords account to the domains that you advertise. Worse yet, they associate it to the domains and then refuse to break that association. Just to be clear: Its not the domain you have on the display URL or your tracking domain if its in the middle – its the domain -and the page- where the user lands. They keep track of where you are sending the users and the quality of your account becomes forever linked to the quality of experience those pages give the user.

    It doesn’t matter if you delete the ads by over-writing them with blanks like I did. It doesn’t matter if you delete the ads, then the ad groups, then the campaigns and all the campaigns in your account and don’t do much of anything for a year. You might as well be advertising child porn to soccer moms during Christmas.

    So now you know how to avoid getting banned. Simply put: Never, ever, ever, use AdWords to take users to a page you don’t control. They insinuate they let you get ‘unbanned’ if you correct the pages – which you obviously can’t do if you don’t own them.

    Curious to know exactly what happened to my account? Here are the details. If you’re interested in more background, here’s a post with images from the first time they sent me a warning. Note that since about a month before the time of that warning, I haven’t ran a single impression, ad, click, or unpaused any campaigns – all I did was delete my campaigns several months ago and now enter new billing info in the form of a coupon they sent me.

    The low-down

    I used Google AdWords to advertise fatloss4idiots.com and (another site). Several months after I stopped all my advertising to those sites, on July 8th 2010 I received an e-mail from LPQ-Support@google.com letting me know those two sites violate the landing page guidelines. I had not advertised those sites for several months. They asked me to make changes to the sites. Which I can’t do – fatloss4idiots.com is not my property, so I agree to never advertise them again and delete those campaigns. I have not advertised anything on AdWords since July 2010. All my campaigns have been deleted for several months now. On May 18th I receive an e-mail from Google Adwords (adwords-noreply@google.com) with a $100 coupon, saying “Here’s $100 to come back to AdWords” it seems to be a coupon for people that have not advertised in some time. So I log in to my AdWords account and put the code. The code works fine – $100 is added to my account – and I don’t touch anything else on my account. On June 8th I receive an e-mail that states my AdWords account has been suspended forever. I call their support line and after describing the problem, then I get e-mail saying their decision is final, to not to ask them why or call again. I called them again on Thursday and on Friday I get the same “our decision is final” email with no information or recourse.

    Adwords Support Sucks Flaming Ass

    Reality check:

    To keep the post at the “reality” level, lets keep in mind that all the Google policies and procedures are optional, they can be over-ridden by management, they can be applied selectively, they are defined in one meeting on Monday and changed around on Thursday. Just because someone tells you something is their process, it doesn’t mean it is a law of nature – It means the people you are talking to don’t know or don’t want to help you – it doesn’t mean things can’t be changed. Corollary: Everything changes, its up to you to find out how to make it change the way you want it.

    What next?

    Not sure. I’m not sure my time or money would be well spent getting this overturned. I haven’t used AdWords for anything for a year now. This is a problem I might have to solve when the need arises. Without an active income stream from them, its hard to justify spending time and resources on this when there are better things to do – I can see it having some strategic value, and it pisses me off ‘to infinity and beyond’ – yet it doesn’t seem to make much business sense to do something with it right now. So… Not sure.

    http://negbox.com/fuck-you-google-an-illustrated-love-story

    Update 6/15/2011:

    After posting on the blog I decided to cut and paste a chunk of this post and send it to Google via the BBB as a complaint. As Mike pointed out, the BBB is useless and powerless. Google had this to say today:

    We write in response to {witheld}. We understand that your AdWords account was recently suspended. Paused ads for disabled sites are still subject to review by our team. Please keep in mind that pausing or deleting ads related to the disabled sites will not automatically re-enable the ads nor remove the violation history. Our team has confirmed that this suspension was correct. And the account will remain suspended unless the violating sites are brought into compliance according to our Site and Quality guidelines. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but unfortunately we cannot provide any further assistance in this matter. Google’s primary objective is to provide safe, relevant experiences for our users. The decision to suspend your account was made after careful review of your account and the low quality landing page experiences promoted through your ads. We do apologize that this issue came to our attention shortly after you received a promotional offer. Our Terms and Conditions, to which you agreed to when you signed up for AdWords, state that Google reserves the right to disable any ads when deemed necessary. You can review these Terms and Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
    Initial Response Summary
    We have reviewed the AdWords account and confirmed that the suspension was correct.

    This is a standard mind-fuck response. In case you’re wondering what’s going on here: Its a set-up. They’ve pulled a process out of their ass that makes sure you can’t fix your situation, yet it sounds reasonable and they offer no alternatives. In other words, they do whatever they please – Like that was news.

    So I wrote them a little response, really for the principle because I don’t want the BBB to say “Yay! Successfully resolved the case!” when what happened was nothing. My rebuttal:

    The explanation about the internal processes of Google does not satisfactorily resolve the material facts: Google has taken permanent and continued action starting June 2011, based on events that took place at least a year ago, which merited a warning in 2010. Google has unilaterally escalated the perceived severity of past actions and provides as a possible way of resolution an avenue which Google fully understand is impossible to execute. While Google’s explanation seems rational, and it may fully fit within the processes Google has defined, that doesn’t take away nor satisfactorily explain nor resolve the material facts that Google has permanently suspended this account based solely on activity that took place a year ago.

    So, next up should be where Google says “Lalalalalala I’m not listening! You are gone!” and case closed. Stay tuned.

     

    • Earl Grey 9:54 pm on June 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Unsuprisingly with my background and complete lack of interest in following any rule i lose tons of Adwords accounts.
      No real cossitency of reason and i can lose one account and do exactly the same in another account but keep it.
      Seems sometimes there is a crazy jobsworth just comes and denys or bans.

      • NegBox 3:29 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        @Earl grey – Then there’s that black hat route you bring up. Sorta “If you brand me an outlaw, I’ll get off the nice mouse wheel and truly become your nightmare” approach – which I have to agree is as valid as any approach. Everything flows thru the path of least resistance. If it’s significantly easier for me to bypass the rules than play by the rules and the payoff is comparable, you can fully expect me to go dark. By eliminating the payoff for good behavior, and a mechanism of redemption, Google creates a nightmare scenario around this service – pretty short-sighted. A sign of a B-player somewhere in leadership there. You gotta give the little people things to play with that you can see and are relatively harmless… It’s like a religion here: If you couldn’t ask for forgiveness and salvation by doing something, you’d have no disincentive to try to wreck the machine.

    • Mike Chiasson 10:55 pm on June 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      When you get adwords banned do they ban your analytics/gmail accounts as well?

      I had some other questions but forgot by the time I scrolled by the ladies.

      • NegBox 2:21 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        It just shows a message as a regular alert inside the AdWords interface. You can still browse around. Other stuff like analytics, etc, remains unaffected as far as I can tell.

    • Earl Grey 2:22 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      No its just adwords.
      Dont ever just download an upload your campaigns to unbanned accounts.
      they have some kind of hashing and can tell.
      Start new campaigns based on what you have learned.
      Some accounts can give me a $5 return for every $1 spent and then when i put it in a new account i can get $8 for $1.
      Country you set your account up in makes a dramatic difference.
      UK starts slow and gets better.
      Switzerland starts well and declines.
      I have no reasonable explanation to explain any of this.

      • NegBox 3:31 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        @earl grey: Good tip, man. Looks like I’ll have to read your blog some more and add you to the blogroll.

      • Dan p 11:14 pm on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Earl – How about US?
        Do you usually create accounts with UK?

    • Ryan Eagle 9:13 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Yea i’ve heard and experienced a lot of sketchy stuff with Google Adwords.

    • greg 6:34 pm on June 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Hi NegBox,

      I received the same mail on 9th July 2011. Permanently banned from AdWords for advertising fatloss4idiots.com – AND NOW LISTEN: 4 YEARS AGO. Yes, that’s right right: I ran a a month long campaign in June 2007 and the paused it. I haven’t even used my AdWords account in the last 2 years.

      And by the way: Google hasn’t ever sent me any final warning.

      Can you believe this? They banned me for advertising something 4 years ago WITHOUT ANY – NOT EVEN FINAL – WARNING!!

      Google is evil.

      Greg

      • NegBox 2:54 pm on June 21, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        @Greg Sorry your comment got flagged as spam, just fished it out. I thought scanning “paused” campaigns for compliance was unreasonable, yet I chalked it up to “whatever”. Now taking into account deleted stuff and even going back years, pretending like the time dimension doesn’t exist, or expecting people to ignore it when attributing consequences to events is not just ridiculous – it won’t hold up to scrutiny. You brain’s evolution connects events that take place close in time according to your short human time scale. If you call your girlfriend “bitch” and she stabs you with a fork, it’s ‘a domestic dispute’. If you call your girlfriend “bitch” and she tracks you down five years later and stabs you with a fork, its ‘attempted homicide’. Unfortunately for Google, time matters for humans.

    • Patrick 5:31 am on June 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Yep, nearly exact thing happened to me. They banned me for an old deleted campaign that I hadn’t run in 3 years, domains were all parked when they banned me:
      http://www.pjkdirect.com/2011/03/adwords-account-banned-clear-mistake

      It is worth the fight to get back in. There is still a gold mine their if you know how to use it…

      • NegBox 3:11 pm on June 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Well.. Honestly now, it isn’t worth my time or the frustration to play the support-phone-tag anymore. The worst possible scenario is one where they reinstate my account, I go on the have a good income stream from them, and then they decide to cancel it again for what happened five years ago, and I have no clue how to work around them. That scenario will not play out. When the time comes, I’ll either find (aka: Social engineer) a contact high enough in Google to straighten it out for good, or (perhaps in parallel) just open an account as an advertiser from one of the countries I do business in and either outsource it or use my VPN and VMs to access that account and segregate billing and domains.

        • me me me 2:59 pm on June 16, 2011 Permalink | Reply

          Segregate billing? How is it possible to have multiple adwords accounts when I need adwords invoice to deduct expenses for tax reasons? Are adwords aware of the credit card or paypal account, or whatever, the name the money is coming from? Perhaps slightly mispelt names? You say you get past this because you’ve set up LLCs in various countries, I’d appreciate something lighter since doing so usually means tax ambiguity, you can be charged taxes both in that country and your home country…

    • Patrick 5:35 am on June 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Additionally, the whole “set your own landing page” doesn’t always work. They will ban you for bridge pages in a second, or anything close. Direct linking can still work great on the content network. It is a sacrifice for sure. Bridge pages will get you killed in a day though…

    • didi 6:38 am on June 16, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      NegBox, was the ban because you ran ads on the search network?

      @Patrick Direct linking is allowed on Google content network??? This is the 1st I’ve heard of that, which verticals or offers work on content network? I have a feeling if I try an email submit on the content network the banhammer will come.

      • NegBox 3:59 pm on June 16, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        @didi: This is a case of Customer Relationship Management left to engineers. Many businesses have customers that cause the business a loss, once the segments are identified, you try to get rid of them. Everyone does this, from ATT to Best Buy to your local Zoo — You calculate things like the Lifetime Value of each particular customer and provide them service and offers to match. You use price points, service hours, service levels, you send offers to only certain customers, you do or do not offer the customer a bonus for not defecting to a competitor, you ignore or include them on your market research, etc, etc. That’s how you get rid of the bad customers. You CANNOT however stop them at the door of the Best Buy and tell them they are barred forever from Best Buy because your predictive engine tells you they are just going to buy the loss leader and there is a 50% chance they will return it, causing a loss instead of a profit – and to not think of wearing a mask because your super-duper technology will recognize them and boot them. See the problem? In some ways this reminds me of that movie “Minority Report”.

        @didi: The ban is completely unrelated to where I ran ads.

        @me me me: Too many questions man. I don’t have all your answers.

    • me me me 11:43 pm on June 17, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      well then u can lick me scottish balls laddy

      • NegBox 5:45 am on June 18, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Scottish salty balls!

    • fm1234 12:31 pm on June 21, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      That may be the greatest picture ever posted on the Internet. No, not the tits; they’re nice and all, but I’m referring to the demotivator. Is that a cap from ‘Brazil?’ I’ve never before thought about it, but associating Google’s support with the universe in which that movie takes place actually makes Google support seem a lot more sensible.

      Frank

    • fm1234 6:38 am on June 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I’d also nominate a pic of the interrogation chair; captioned “Advertiser Review: Confess quickly, or you’ll ruin your credit.”

    • kt 11:56 am on August 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Their rules can be very stupid the way they apply it to all cases as a blanket. For example their bridge page rule can be a good thing or completely idiotic. Here is my response to them for being accused of a bridge page but of course they are not going to budge from their dumb position so I will just have to find alternative advertisers:
      —————————————-
      Wow, your requirements are pretty strict. So in essence you don’t allow resellers of any kind even though some offer great services such as in my case having the same low price for registration of domains and renewal. Just for your information here are a few sites that google adwords are running on and have been running for a while that are exactly the same:

      *****Here I included 4 pages that were doing exact same thing as my ad from the first two pages of adwords listings of a keyword search*****

      And this was just a quick search. I have seen many more!

      BTW, I believe it should also be noted that I am not simply sending visitors to somebody else’s page. That particular page is my reseller page with my
      own custom settings and prices. That is why you see the huge title “DomainOfferer.com”. So it is not exactly the same as me redirecting people
      to a completely separate site. It is basically my site that is hosted on another domain. I certainly pay for it so it should be mine.
      Regards,
      —————————————————-
      Google is a good company but many that work for it have a special arrogance that deserve to be slapped around a bit.

    • Dean 5:45 am on October 29, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Ok bro,when I got suspended I was shocked and all fucked up, thinking I did something really bad… well I found the phone number to call them directly and the arrogant prick actually laughed as he pulled up the offer that caused the suspension that I really had no clue as to what the fuck. It was an email submit from peerfly, free ipod scam bullshit that I had already deleted before I was suspended so I was like ” well fuck dude I deleted it and I know it was bullshit”
      anyway.. I called peerfly and he told me to abandon that account and start a new one in another sir name.. using my first name and not my middle as I did.. and a different address and a new email.. and that worked. Now I know better than to promote lead gens direct links. You must only promote from your own site,so like Negbox says, so you can control the shit google doesn’t like.. They are such bullies.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 6:47 am on June 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: culture, excel,   

    International Marketing – Giant Spreadsheet of Cultural Differences 

    Need a leg up on international campaigns? Use this giant interactive Excel to compare cultures, create ads that connect and avoid pissing money away.

    Inspired by Finch’s hilarious “How not to crack an international market” post, I decided to share this juicy spreadsheet. I got it during my MBA, probably from one of the professors – I had never seen it before, and have never seen it posted since. The spreadsheet form comes from Neil Sandford who got permission from the original researcher, Professor Geert Hofstede.

    Geert Hofstede excel data

    What’s in it an how it was made

    (Original simple article in Chinese)

    These ideas were first based on a large research project into national culture differences across subsidiaries of a multinational corporation (IBM) in 64 countries. Subsequent studies by others covered students in 23 countries, elites in 19 countries, commercial airline pilots in 23 countries, up-market consumers in 15 countries, and civil service managers in 14 countries. These studies together identified and validated five independent dimensions of national culture differences:

    Power distance, that is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society’s level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society and anybody with some international experience will be aware that ‘all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others’.

    Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, that is the degree to which individuals are inte-grated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word ‘collectivism’ in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world.

    Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women’s values differ less among societies than men’s values; (b) men’s values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women’s values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women’s values on the other. The assertive pole has been called ‘masculine’ and the modest, caring pole ‘feminine’. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men’s values and women’s values.

    Uncertainty avoidance deals with a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; it ultimately refers to man’s search for Truth. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth; ‘there can only be one Truth and we have it’. People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions.

    Long-term versus short-term orientation: this fifth dimension was found in a study among students in 23 countries around the world, using a questionnaire designed by Chinese scholars It can be said to deal with Virtue regardless of Truth. Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one’s ‘face’. Both the positively and the negatively rated values of this dimension are found in the teachings of Confucius, the most influential Chinese philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.; however, the dimension also applies to countries without a Confucian heritage.

    Scores on the first four dimensions were obtained for 50 countries and 3 regions on the basis of the IBM study, and on the fifth dimension for 23 countries on the basis of student data collected by Bond. Power distance scores are high for Latin, Asian and African countries and smaller for Germanic countries. Individualism prevails in developed and Western countries, while Collectivism prevails in less developed and Eastern countries; Japan takes a middle position on this dimension. Masculinity is high in Japan, in some European countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and moderately high in Anglo countries; it is low in Nordic countries and in the Netherlands and moderately low in some Latin and Asian countries like France, Spain and Thailand. Uncertainty avoidance scores are higher in Latin countries, in Japan, and in German speaking countries, lower in Anglo, Nordic, and Chinese culture countries. A Long Term Orientation is mostly found in East Asian countries, in particular in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

    The grouping of country scores points to some of the roots of cultural differences. These should be sought in the common history of similarly scoring countries. All Latin countries, for example, score relatively high on both power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Latin countries (those today speaking a Romance language i.e. Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian) have inherited at least part of their civilization from the Roman empire. The Roman empire in its days was characterized by the existence of a central authority in Rome, and a system of law applicable to citizens anywhere. This established in its citizens’ minds the value complex which we still recognize today: centralization fostered large power distance and a stress on laws fostered strong uncertainty avoidance. The Chinese empire also knew centralization, but it lacked a fixed system of laws: it was governed by men rather than by laws. In the present-day countries once under Chinese rule, the mindset fostered by the empire is reflected in large power distance but medium to weak uncertainty avoidance. The Germanic part of Europe, including Great Britain, never succeeded in establishing an enduring common central authority and countries which inherited its civilizations show smaller power distance. Assumptions about historical roots of cultural differences always remain speculative but in the given examples they are quite plausible. In other cases they remain hidden in the course of history.

    The country scores on the five dimensions are statistically correlated with a multitude of other data about the countries. For example, power distance is correlated with the use of violence in domestic politics and with income inequality in a country. Individualism is correlated with national wealth (Per Capita Gross National Product) and with mobility between social classes from one generation to the next. Masculinity is correlated negatively with the share of their Gross National Product that governments of the wealthy countries spend on development assistance to the Third World. Uncertainty avoidance is associated with Roman Catholicism and with the legal obligation in developed countries for citizens to carry identity cards. Long Term Orientation is correlated with national economic growth during the past 25 years, showing that what led to the economic success of the East Asian economies in this period is their populations’ cultural stress on the future-oriented values of thrift and perseverance.

    Enjoy. If you are using Excel 2010 or higher, you’ll have to allow editing to be able to interact with the charts. Here’s the spreadsheet:

     

    Geert Hofstede data in Excel Interactive Format
    Geert Hofstede data in Excel Interactive Format

     

    Prof. Geert Hofstede conducted perhaps the most comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture.

    Geert Hofstede analyzed a large data base of employee values scores collected by IBM between 1967 and 1973 covering more than 70 countries, from which he first used the 40 largest only and afterwards extended the analysis to 50 countries and 3 regions. In the editions of GH’s work since 2001, scores are listed for 74 countries and regions, partly based on replications and extensions of the IBM study on different international populations.

     

    Subsequent studies validating the earlier results have included commercial airline pilots and students in 23 countries, civil service managers in 14 counties, ‘up-market’ consumers in 15 countries and ‘elites’ in 19 countries.

     

    From the initial results, and later additions, Hofstede developed a model that identifies four primary Dimensions to assist in differentiating cultures: Power Distance – PDI, Individualism – IDV, Masculinity – MAS, and Uncertainty Avoidance – UAI.

     

    Geert Hofstede added a fifth Dimension after conducting an additional international study with a survey instrument developed with Chinese employees and managers.

     

    That Dimension, based on Confucian dynamism, is Long-Term Orientation – LTO and was applied to 23 countries.

     

    These five Hofstede Dimensions can also be found to correlate with other country, cultural, and religious paradigms

     

     

     

    • joy sanders 2:52 am on October 19, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks heaps, especially for the finishing eye candy made all that reading worth while…. appreciations!

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 8:41 pm on May 27, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: integrate   

    Integrate – Network for Ballin’ Outta Control 

    Imagine you were the only marketer out there promoting something hot. Imagine you found something to sell where you have NO COMPETITION.

    Creamed your pants yet?

    Quintippio Ad

    That’s what Integrate does for me. They are the wide open field of affiliate networks and marketing. Instead of fighting for table scraps with three thousand other hungry affiliate dogs, you get to go hunt your own prey in the whole wide world.

    The catch, and some background:

    A few weeks back a great affiliate manager introduced me to Integrate.com – First I have to say “THANK YOU” that quite literally rocked!

    Now here’s the catch -  I honestly wasn’t sure they would let me in to the platform since they are clearly geared towards high-end businesses – So don’t get your hopes flying high as a kite here, you might bounce like a rubber ball on this one.Quintippio Photo I can’t stress enough how much weight human relationships and your connections will have here – and everywhere that matters, really. How you handle human relationships is what separates momma’s pimple-ladden garage-dwellers from the men – The men know this, the boys are in denial, and the men know the boys are in denial. Enough cheap bullshit… Here is where that affiliate manager friend made all the difference in the world.

    Here’s what sets Integrate on a whole ‘nother level:

    • You can chat/email with the people who own the offer you are promoting
    • You can negotiate a payout increase directly with the offer owner based on your lead quality and your marketing expenses – You can create a win-win!
    • You now see and negotiate your “cap” for each offer. You can have a set allocation (in number of leads or conversions) per day and per month of each offer – This is part of the initial and ongoing negotiation with the owner of the offer. This helps control cashflow immensely.
    • You can ask the owner of the offers for permission to run in some traffic source or promotion method they didn’t even dream of
    • You can ask for other countries, other demographics, other ANYTHING
    • You have TWO people helping you get balling – a product specialist to help you find deals that work for you and even negotiate terms, and an account support person for the daily activities.

    The offers Integrate has fall into one of four main categories:

    • CPA (Cost per Action): You get paid when the user completes and action on the offer website. This is the bread-and-butter of just about every other affiliate network out there.
    • CPL (Cost per Lead): This is sometimes called “Host and Post”. You own the webpage that captures the information and then send that information over the Integrate platform to the offer owner.
    • CPIC (Cost per Inbound Call): You get paid when you get someone to call a pre-set phone number.
    • CPLT (Cost per Live Transfer): If you have a call center, you can transfer hot leads to the offer’s call center and get paid when the caller stays on the line X number of seconds.
    • CPFCLD (Cost per Full Contact Lap Dance): You wish.

    The variety and ways of promoting all these just boggles the mind – and the Intgrate platform has a checkbox and offers for pretty much anything you can think of.

    Advertising networks feel cramped with retards and brand advertisers when you try to promote something and the costs are out of this world. Then you go to the 2nd tier ad networks and you can’t target shit because the traffic volume is so low you don’t even know if its working, that’s if they have any decent targeting controls.

    Now imagine having the medium’s minimum cost and the ultimate in flexibility.  This is what happens when YOU set the rules of the game. Co-reg? No problem. Incent? Sure thing. Want to roll your own content lock? Go ahead. Promote in Swahili to Tanzania? Just ask!

    There is only one downside to Integrate – It can take you a couple of days to negotiate with some offers – you get your own terms, your own pages, your own cap, etc – at the expense of some planning before hand; So sometimes you can’t just decide to go live spur-of-the-moment, throw some traffic and see what happens. In this system you also have a reputation to keep track of, and you can view the reputation of people putting in offers too!

    Which brings me to the brilliance of Integrate… The trust system.

    A key to dominating a market is to own a trust system, ideally the first one, like eBay. Inside of Integrate you can actually see the different companies putting offers, their descriptions, their volume, their volume of leads and the volume of returned leads per each and every single campaign they put up. Conversely, they can see YOU – they can see how many leads you are driving per month, they can see how many leads you sent that were returned to you for bad quality, heck they can even see the average of how long it takes you between the time you agree to run a campaign and when you start sending it live traffic.

    ADHD summary:

    • Integrate is not a CPA network, its a unique platform.
    • It rocks.

    Update 6/1/2011:

    I see some folks took me up on this network -  Leave me a comment with your impressions if you get approved!

    Sometimes its hard to visualize the possibilities without an example. So here’s one, without factoring in negotiating anything – just taking stock offers:

    Grab a campaign that promotes a Dell or Hewlett Packard webinar (there are tons) promote it on Facebook to people working in IT. You create the landing page where you capture the user’s information, use Google website optimizer to optimize the heck out of it. When the user submits the information – where do they go while you send their data out? They go to a page that thanks them for the webinar submission, confirm their data just in case they typed it wrong, and asks them if they are interested in furthering their education with a Master’s or PhD. As they fill that out or confirm your pre-fill, you can ask them if they are also interested in the ITNews (I made this one up) newsletter that takes co-reg – since you have all the data, all you have to do is provide them with a little checkbox. You could do this last co-reg bit up-front too.

     

    Disclosure: I don’t do paid posts, nor do I whore my blog. If the review here was valuable, you may use my links as a thank you. If it wasn’t valuable, you got the wrong blog – keep staring at the titties and ignore the text.

     

    • john 9:15 pm on May 27, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      just signed up with them as well as blam ads, nice eyecandy

    • Mike Chiasson 12:25 am on May 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Damn this looks slick as hell. How can I get in on promoting that 95 blade razor?!?

    • Ryan Eagle 4:11 am on May 31, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      ^ ^ ^
      Integrate sounds good..So does Blamads

    • DH 10:29 pm on June 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I’m in! Thanks for the post. You rock.

      • NegBox 2:53 pm on June 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        You’re welcome bud. I just had to post my review after one Friday evening when I got a phone call from my Integrate product manager letting me know a host-and-post campaign I had on my file was setting a pause date – Wanting to let me know so I don’t spend time working on pages and stuff. I was already drafting a review because of the platform, that was a major confirmation I had to share this good stuff with folks.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 2:46 pm on April 25, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , newbie, tip   

    How to Get Into Any Affiliate Network 

    In two words how to get into pretty much any affiliate network:

    Jack Nicholson A Few Good Men You can't Handle the Truth

    Brutal Honesty

    Its that simple, really. Plain old honesty.

    Most of the time folks asking about getting approved into CPA/CPS networks are afraid they won’t get accepted since they have very little experience. The formula that has worked perfectly for me is just being completely honest.

    If you have zero experience, just say it.

    Think about what will happen if you manage to convince your interviewer that you have more experience than you really do, or that you can crap smoking hot leads out of your ass.  What next? Three likely scenarios:

    1. Nobody will notice or care
    2. Your affiliate manager will notice you’re a tool and don’t fit the network – At best you’ll get shit treatment.
    3. You’ll get booted out, never to be let back in.

    What would happen if you are brutally honest and tell them: “I was just reading this blog with naked chicks and….”. Two likely scenarios:

    1. They’ll approve you.
    2. They’ll tell you to come back with some battle scars and you can re-apply some time down the road.

    Brutal honesty in this case means that:

    • If you have only done SEO with Clickbank and nothing ever worked – and hope the network CPA offers work better – Say so.
    • If you just want to add the same offer from multiple networks to a rotation, say it.
    • If you just read a blog and have no clue where your ass is, say it.

    You can’t lose with the truth on this one. Worst case, you’ll come back some other time. Best case, they’ll help you learn what you need.

    And the truth shall get you dough…

    PS: If you do things even half right, as the affiliate managers you work with start moving around networks and companies, they’ll hit you up to see if you’re interested in working with them at their new place – This can open some pretty interesting doors for you.

     

    • Ryan Eagle 2:04 am on May 9, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      One word – exactly.

    • Isaac 1:54 am on May 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      That’s exactly what I told blam ads ryan, that i can’t sell shit and want to try content locking and I still got denied. =\

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  • NegBox 4:19 am on March 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: AdSense, Blackhat   

    Crazy CTR With One Wicked Idea from AdSense Outlaws 

    Take a really good look at this page. Yes, the ads are indeed Google ads.

    Wicked way to enhance AdSense text units

    Click to Enlarge: Wicked way to enhance AdSense text units

    My initial reaction was

    “Wow, I didn’t know Google allowed explicit ads like that“…

    As my mind started reeling at the possibilities I noticed something…

    “Wait, those look like Facebook ads because of the images… and Google ads because of the text – New ad Format?” ..

    So I clicked one – yup, it was a legit Google ad and all, leading to something like Estee Lauder –

    “Estee Lauder wouldn’t put up an image of a naked chick on an ad. WTF is going on? Are they over-laying the Google ad with something?“… Close…

    They are standard vertical AdSense units, and the website is just placing the little square images on the left side of where each little ad sub-unit would fall.

    I remember from a long time ago something on the AdSense Terms of Service about making sure ads didn’t look like part of the site content – However I don’t remember anything about making part of the content look like an ad and slapping it next to a real ad! The content layout on this site makes it very clear the stuff at the top is “just ads”, and the content is below, so the ads aren’t blending into the content and causing spurious clicks. The ads are getting a little enhancement from their placement.

    Fucking brilliant for epic CTR – I do imagine this is not kosher with Google and very likely to get your AdCents account banned – TOS or no TOS.

    PS: If you pay close attention to the actual ads, you’ll notice this browser is being re-targeted quite a bit… PPC management and hosting offers on a Tattoo site? I’m surprised the Bald Storm on Demand Dude didn’t make a nude appearance here too.

     

    • Kyle Irwin 4:39 am on March 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      They’re taking it a bit far by using porn, but aligning images with Adsense text ads is pretty old school. It was abused to death when “adsense arbitrage” was hot and has been explicitly banned in their TOS since then.

      • NegBox 3:34 pm on March 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Harness the crowd by letting AdSense publishers submit images that go with the site theme on the publisher end, and letting AdWords advertisers choose to display (or not ) site-specific images next to their text ads. Two forces, driving to similar goals, all they need is a slight alignment for better results for everyone.

    • Mike Chiasson 3:00 pm on March 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Haha that must convert for crazy clicks!!!!!

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 4:31 pm on March 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Amish Shah, , Magic Bullet System,   

    Microsoft Sues Magic Bullet System and Amish Shah Along With Jay Styles 

    Microsoft is suing Amish Shah, Jay Styles and two companies (the creators of the Magic Bullet System guru product) for using Microsoft trademarks and cybersquatting on Microsoft trademarks. And for contributory infringement.

    This should send an epic shockwave through the “guru” ranks – The lawsuit talks about contributory trademark infringement and contributory cybersquatting. That means helping or motivating SOMEONE ELSE to do trademark infringement or cybersquatting. Microsoft is saying that not only did these guys do the dirty, they encouraged other people to do it too.

    The Wall Street Journal Law Blog posted court documents relating to Washington at Seattle case C10-0653 RSM. This suit has been going on for a while – If you look at the title of the court document, it says “Denying Defendant Amended Motion to Dismiss”. PDF File for your enjoyment here:

    Snapshot first page of MSFT lawsuit with MBS - Cropped

    Click for PDF: Microsoft vs Magic Bullet System

     

    AFAIK civil cases are public records in the US, so this should be a fun read for quite some time to come.

    You can find all the dirty online if you know where to look.

    Quote:

    Defendants allegedly providing instructions and their alleged sales
    of a method known as the “Magic Bullet System,” which is meant to teach buyers how to use Microsoft marks in order to sell the emoticon-related software

    I had seen this idea in one of the intro videos to the Magic Bullet System. I actually thought the trick was clever – Though not my style.

    Their system or idea was this:
    Get a domain name that has some allusion to MSN Messenger in it, like “world-favorite-msn-messenger.info” or some such shit. Then they would use their “magic bullet” or WordPress, can’t remember, to create a Google and seo-likeable website (you know, Privacy policy, Terms of service, farticles).
    On that website they would offer the MSN Messenger for download and soft-bundle it with a smilies toolbar. The smilies were a CPA offer pulled from some network. I think the pitch was to tell people “Now that you got the toolbar, here are the Super-Mega-Dopey Similies” or something like Step 1- Get Messenger, Step 2- Get Smilies.

    Now you have the idea… You could do this with something that isn’t trademarked, or at least be a little more careful about your pick of domain names and such so you’re not next in line.

    Who Framed Roger Rabbit Crazy Eyes ADHD

    ADHD Summary (idea shamelessly stolen from Mr. Green):

    1 – Hide yo launches, MSFT be suing everybody out here

    2 – Don’t fuck with Microsoft

    3 – Guru shit will get you fucked by Microsoft

     

    This should send an epic shockwave through the “guru” ranks – The MSFT lawsuit talks about contributory trademark infringement and contributory cybersquatting. That means helping or motivating SOMEONE ELSE to do trademark infringement or cybersquatting.
     

    • Mike Chiasson 6:32 pm on March 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Hide you kidzzzzz!

    • Monty 7:43 am on March 12, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Man, it’s crazy. I remember those videos. They claimed to make like $400/day profit with that campaign. Didn’t seem big of a deal to sue because of such shit like that…

      And the idea was to order a domain like:

      download-msn-messenger.org

      and then pretened that people are downloading the messenger cuz they’re looking for it. Except they were taken to a smiley page and had to install that one thinking they get messenger too, but nope.

      It is shady, but when you think about farticles, flogs, these generate way more money and are still ok to run.

    • Matt 2:52 am on March 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I thought it was sketchy too, but “contributory”? C’mon – we’re all adults here. The courts treat us like children and we sink to the level of expectation.

    • NegBox 1:08 pm on March 31, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Matt, in most cases I’d agree – contributory infringement is the bullshit lawyers use to pad lawsuits.

      In this case I think Microsoft may have a valid point. When anyone shows a campaign online, there are invariably two hundred newbies who will try to cut and paste it – and then pout wondering why it doesn’t work straight up. I wouldn’t be surprised if their little video had actually caused a few dozen copycat sites, especially considering how much traffic these guys drive to their launches. What would be nice is having the burden of proof squarely on MS – to come up with several samples of sites actually “contributing” if you will.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 5:16 am on January 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: asw11   

    ASW 11 Here I Cum! 

    Heading out to ASW11 in a few hours – Hit me up on Twitter if you’d like to meet-up!

     

    • Mike Chiasson 3:07 pm on January 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Haha I’m sure you will have your own niche of people hitting you up on twitter after this post. Enjoy buddy.

    • DmnEPC 8:54 pm on January 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      This is the best frickin Affiliate Marketing site on the net. You take 2 things that are hard to do together Learning about marketing and looking at porn and put them all on 1 page I couldnt ask for much more. Maybe upgrading to an Xtube video feed for the Gratuitous Eye Candy

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 8:52 pm on January 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    One Weird Resolution for 2011 

    I have a single goal for 2011: To smoothly transition into affiliate marketing full-time.

    Not so weird. And not a resolution. I don’t do “resolutions” – as if my willpower was lacking and it could be improved by merely “willing it” or “really, seriously, positively deciding”. That only works in the fantasy wonderland where most for self-help retard gurus live.

    Its a goal I’ve been working my balls off towards achieving for a while now – and it isn’t going to get any easier.

    Every single word of my goal is important. I need to move in controlled fashion – There are a lot of people depending on me and I have to make sure I don’t drop any balls along the way or as I make the jump.

    My guesstimate here is that I will be able to pull this off around August-September 2011 – So that’s what I’m shooting for.

    I’m not a young kid in my mom’s garage anymore, so it takes planning and foresight – This whole transition feels like preparing for a samurai duel on a tightrope: There is no margin of error, there is no dodging, there is no out, there is only pure focus on execution.

    So, I’m going to kick off my 2011 main goal by going to ASW 11 in Las Vegas on Saturday and getting completely shit-faced! … Oh, yeah… and networking with folks!

     

    • Damnepc 8:32 pm on January 6, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Just say Fuckit and do it. Otherwise August turns into
      January and January turns into 2013 and your still making someone
      else rich working for the man. The bottom line is this You either
      have the money or you dont. If you have some money saved and you
      know you can make more than you do at your job then jump off the
      cliff

      • Slave Rat 10:21 pm on January 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        August is an estimate. Believe me, if I could do it tomorrow, I would… I’m trying to keep an eye on myself too — I can easily sabotage my own work and literally force the situation – hoping it doesn’t happen that way… Though I confess there is a not-so-little part of me that believes a leap of faith is the best way to do this.

    • Tom Wozniak 10:49 pm on January 6, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Have a great time in Vegas and good luck on your goal for
      2011! Making the jump to doing affiliate marketing full-time is a
      big challenge. Most people who get into affiliate marketers never
      reach the point of making it their career. It is a major milestone
      when you go full-time!

      • Slave Rat 10:23 pm on January 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Thanks Tom – If anyone can do it, it’s me, I’m absolutely certain.

    • Clay 7:11 pm on January 14, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      We covered the shit faced part like true champions.
      Good Times.

      • Slave Rat 8:04 pm on January 17, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        That, my friend, we did… Apparently there was a whole lot more people at that party that we never saw – probably because I couldn’t see more than two feet ahead; and that’s all I really needed. The open bar was a massive stellar hit from Ads4Dough.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 7:20 pm on December 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: bevomedia, ppvspy   

    PPVSpy Purchased and Reviewed – The Sky Isn’t Falling 

    I bought a PPVspy “perpetual” license from BevoMedia on Friday morning five minutes after Mike Chiasson sent me a text message about it. Interested in an unbiased no-affiliate-links capsule review? Read on.

    And no, I’m not biased in trying to justify to myself my purchase – Lets get that out of the way.

    The way I make decisions is: Fast, once and over – This was no different – And part of choosing the $999 one-time payment option boils down to not wasting time re-evaluating the tool constantly. Once and done.

    So the first thing I saw when I accessed the tool was… Ho-hum.

    I have a box that runs some of these pop-up toolbars so I already peek at what folks are doing out there – Is this tool better than my own research?

    A bit of background – Before getting into PPV, I was doing PPC with Google, Yahoo and Bing and using a tool called PPCBully. PPCBully is really a top-notch tool, yet it stopped being useful to me – never mind the “warning” I got from Google, the real problems with PPCBully were somewhere else – and they happen to PPVSpy too.

    PPVSpy will give you a nice sorted listing of what pop-ups it has seen the most. Slight problem – Not just the most popular pops, the entire majority of them, are from two sources I don’t want: 1 – Advertisers going direct to the PPV network  and 2 – direct-linking noobs. So this nice sorted list, instead of telling you what works, just tells you where people are spending money.

    1 – Sit back and think about that last point for a second – it is the fatal flaw I found on PPCBully too. Its the cashflow model. If you are a lead brokerage firm, and have an offer on an affiliate network where you pay idiots like me $5 per e-mail and address, you have a ton more margin (plus less middlemen) and a ton of leverage to get a massive discount at the PPV network. The spread between what you as a direct advertiser can afford versus what an affiliate marketer can, is very wide… Sometimes you find an offer has an exclusive deal when you try to advertise it and the network tells you it can’t accept your ads because they have an exclusive agreement – pretty upfront and not much sleuthing there. Either way, if your funnel or cashflow model doesn’t match what you’re “spying” on, then it isn’t really useful.

    2 – Direct-linkers. It can be hard to tell at first sight someone who is direct-linking apart from the owner of the offer, yet not impossible – just look how they’re getting to the offer (direct or via network) and what if any affiliate ID they use. Judging by this, there is a deluge of direct-linkers. This is actually easy to see when you have the toolbar installed – Direct-linking is everywhere. These are usually new PPV users and are losing money – Wanna know which URLs they’re losing money on? Go right ahead. If you’re making bank direct linking, good for you – it never works for me.

    In this area of finding profitable stuff PPVSpy (just like PPCBully) gets a ton of “noise” and very little “signal” simply because “signal” to me is someone who matches my business model for a particular niche and is being successful. Everything else is noise… And there is an awful lot of noise that literally drowns out the signal. In niches you’re familiar with, or for targets you know, you can -with some effort- extract some signal from the noise.

    PPVSpy will also give you a nice breakdown of offers and niches… So I thought – “Awesome, lets see if I can jump on a niche I know very little about, like dating…”

    So I open the Dating niche pop-up thumbnails and see… Well, I have no fucking clue what I’m seeing… And therein lies the problem… I can’t tell apart what is a direct-linked/advertiser offer from an affiliate landing page, let alone figure out which one is working. – The reason is simple, I haven’t been spending the past two weeks looking at dating offers and their landing pages on different networks, and know didly about them. The same goes for practically every niche I haven’t been researching already. This makes the task of getting some “signal” (ie: info on popups that work) from that “noise” (everything else) impossible – you can’t tell it apart until you go do your normal research.

    So does it have any good points? Yes, of course… I’m learning a ton from different niches on how offers are run. … This tool is great for breaking out of “Pop-up block” and seeing things a bit differently.

    Is some of what I see something I can “copy, paste and bank“? No. I can’t just decide I’m going into a niche without doing the real research – its a guaranteed epic fail. There may be something I can use in niches I’m already researching or new ideas I can port from other niches – This tool is excellent for that. … This isn’t exactly push-button marketing.

    What does it really do for me? It accelerates and augments my research.

    Do I still have to do the same research? Less so – The difference is I can feel more confident of my conclusions faster and get to market faster – that’s my bottom line.

    Is it worth $1k ?Absolutely – Where else can you learn from the market itself and keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in so many niches at once while in your pajamas?

    Will it pay for itself? Don’t be silly, of course not. You have to do real work to recover the money.

    Enough talk, more action!

     

    • Mike Chiasson 1:32 am on December 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      I think a case study from newb to campaign is needed here!

    • Gamekeeper 11:27 am on December 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Excellent clean review, thanks. Just what i needed.

      PPV traffic can be used for arbitraging monetization of sites beyond just cpa offers too.

      • Slave Rat 12:47 pm on December 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Thanks. Its a very flexible traffic source.

    • Sam 6:53 am on December 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Great post, and I would say that for me, direct linking has
      worked much better than building landers because I specifically
      pick offers that fit in a pop, instead of having the call to action
      outside of the fold.

    • Sans Juan 12:15 am on June 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Most people don’t know it but you can use PPV and Banners to generate “likes” and “friends” to your facebook page. Check out the article at (www)(dot)hotbusinessdeals(dot)info.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 7:58 pm on December 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: holidays   

    Avoid Getting Swindled This Holiday Season 

    If you haven’t read Robert Cialdini’s masterpiece: “Influence”, you’re a tool. I can even tell you what tool you would be… You’d be a plunger, ready to dive into a toilet full of shit – My shit to be specific.

    In this little story below there is a tale of how massive amounts of people get screwed, along with an opportunity for you.

    Quote straight from Robert Cialdini’s “Influence” book:

    So the toy manufacturers are faced with a dilemma: how to keep sales high during the peak season and, at the same time, retain a healthy demand for toys in the immediately following months. Their difficulty certainly doesn’t lie in motivating kids to want more toys after Christmas. The problem lies in motivating postholiday spent-out parents to buy another plaything for their already toy-glutted children. What could the toy companies possibly do to produce that unlikely behavior? Some have tried greatly increased advertising campaigns, others have reduced prices during the slack period, but neither of those standard sales devices has proved successful. Both tactics are costly, and have been ineffective in increasing sales to desired levels. Parents are simply not in a toy-buying mood, and the influences of advertising or reduced expense are not enough to shake that stony resistance.

    Certain large toy manufacturers, however, think they have found a solution. It’s an ingenious one, involving no more than a normal advertising expense and an un-derstanding of the powerful pull of the need for consistency. My first hint of the way the toy companies’ strategy worked came after I fell for it and then, in true patsy form, fell for it again.It was January, and I was in the town’s largest toy store. After purchasing all too many gifts there for my son a month before, I had sworn not to enter that store or any like it for a long, long time. Yet there I was, not only in the diabolic place but also in the process of buying my son another expensive toy—a big, electric road-race set. In front of the road-race display I happened to meet a former neighbor who was buying his son the same toy. The odd thing was that we almost never saw each other anymore. In fact, the last time had been a year earlier in the same store when we were both buying our sons an expensive post-Christmas gift—that time a robot that walked, talked, and laid waste. We laughed about our strange pattern of seeing each other only once a year at the same time, in the same place, while doing the same thing. Later that day, I mentioned the coincidence to a friend who, it turned out, had once worked in the toy business.

    “No coincidence,” he said knowingly.

    “What do you mean, ‘No coincidence’?”

    “Look,” he said, “let me ask you a couple of questions about the road-race set you bought this year. First, did you promise your son that he’d get one for Christmas?”

    “Well, yes I did. Christopher had seen a bunch of ads for them on the Saturday morning cartoon shows and said that was what he wanted for Christmas. I saw a couple of ads myself and it looked like fun; so I said OK.”

    “Strike one,” he announced. “Now for my second question. When you went to buy one, did you find all the stores sold out?”

    “That’s right, I did! The stores said they’d ordered some but didn’t know when they’d get any more in. So I had to buy Christopher some other toys to make up for the road-race set. But how did you know?”

    “Strike two,” he said. “Just let me ask one more question. Didn’t this same sort of thing happen the year before with the robot toy?” Wait a minute … you’re right. That’s just what happened. This is incredible. How did you know?” No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those toys sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.”

    “Where,” I said, beginning to seethe now, “they meet other parents they haven’t seen for a year, falling for the same trick, right?”

    “Right. Uh, where are you going?”

    “I’m going to take the road-race set right back to the store.” I was so angry I was nearly shouting.

    “Wait. Think for a minute first. Why did you buy it this morning?”

    “Because I didn’t want to let Christopher down and because I wanted to teach him that promises are to be lived up to.”

    “Well, has any of that changed? Look, if you take his toy away now, he won’t understand why. He’ll just know that his father broke a promise to him. Is that what you want?”

    “No,” I said, sighing, “I guess not. So, you’re telling me that the toy companies doubled their profits on me for the past two years, and I never even knew it; and now that I do, I’m still trapped—by my own words. So, what you’re really telling me is, ‘Strike three.’ ” He nodded, “And you’re out.”

    In the years since, I have observed a variety of parental toy-buying sprees similar to the one I experienced during that particular holiday season—for Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, Furbies, etc. But, historically, the one that best fits the pattern is that of the Cabbage Patch Kids, $25 dolls that were promoted heavily during mid-1980s Christmas seasons but were woefully undersupplied to stores. Some of the consequences were a government false advertising charge against the Kids’ maker for continuing to advertise dolls that were not available; frenzied groups of adults battling at toy outlets or paying up to $700 apiece at auction for dolls they had promised their children; and an annual $150 million in sales that extended well beyond the Christmas months. During the 1998 holiday season, the least available toy that everyone wanted was the Furby, created by a division of toy giant Hasbro. When asked what frustrated, Furby-less parents should tell their kids, a Hasbro spokeswoman advised the kind of promise that has profited toy manufacturers for decades, “I’ll try, but if I can’t get it for you now, I’ll get it for you later” (Tooher, 1998).

    There are a couple of things you can do with this info, other than not promising toys that will be in short supply. One of those things would be to figure out what toys will be in short supply, get there first and bank on eBay. Another would be to catch these parents looking for these toys during the holiday season and offer an alternative. Another would be to re-target these parents AFTER the holiday seasons with, say.. An Amazon affiliate link – I can already see the landing page “Remember the toy you promised? Its available NOW”…

    Jesus saves, everybody else uses MasterCard.

     

    • Mike 7:25 pm on December 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Wicked site man, mixes my 2 favorite things together, porn and internet marketing! Great content too

      • Slave Rat 3:57 pm on December 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Thanks! I read your blog post about CPV. I haven’t been able to see a DirectCPV pop yet (I installed some video thing that didn’t work) – I’ll have to try babelfish. Thanks for the tip.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 5:22 pm on December 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Video Boss Shitstorm and The Salty Droid 

    This is one of those posts I know I will regret within minutes…

    A while back I started reading The Salty Droid’s blog.

    Honestly, I don’t get it. The guy behind The Salty Droid is funny and brilliant – I laughed my ass off with his videos.

    What I don’t get is how “The Syndicate” are totally evil scumbags.

    I just listened to 90 minutes out of two hours of a Syndicate conference call The Salty Droid posted on his blog. I was really hoping to find some really juicy stuff – You know, killing kittens and human sacrifices to Cthulhu. All I found was a couple of guys trying to figure out how to do their product launch to get the most money – Their products may be good, or they may be shit – They’re probably shit, yet that’s not for me to judge. What I can make a judgment call on is the tone of the conversation and their intentions.

    Yes, they sell an overpriced dream. And they use many of science’s best marketing tactics available. And they are fairly well organized, to the point they can surround you with the message. Almost like a true cult… So? Life is chock-full of friends, and also brimming with people trying to fuck you over. What else is news? They belong to the “People trying to fuck you over” category – If we lived in the world of “The Invention of Lying”, then I would be shocked, as it is, these guys are kiddie candy thiefs – Why so much hate?

    I was hoping to hear how they were going to fuck people over by having them hand over their retirement funds in exchange for the philosopher’s stone – or something like Enron, or like Jim Jones and “The People’s Temple”, and really all they talk about is how to structure the launch so it sells more. I was hoping to hear how they were going to take the money and run to Bermuda. Or how they were going to escape the FBI. Or how they were going to embezzle ClickBank. Jeez, at the very least I was hoping to hear them talk about their customers in a condescending tone! Not even. WTF. Where is the video of Sekhmet drinking the blood of Syndicate  adepts?

    Cthulhu
     

    • Matthias 1:45 pm on December 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Why should you regret this post? I also discovered the Salty Droid some while ago and thought it was funny and useful to get some background information about some of the supposedly “big gurus” in the internet marketing business. Interesting to see how much money you can still pull with this stuff. By the way, who started this “I Make Money Online By Telling People How I Make Money Online” thing, it wasn’t John Chow was it? :-D

      • Slave Rat 5:03 pm on December 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        You’ll see – it never fails. It is indeed amazing what they do – at the same time these cronies are just ants crawling around the mouth of the shithole – a shithole that every time I thought I had seen the very bottom, I was wrong. I dare you to even peek under the hood of the cesspool of astrology.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 8:14 pm on December 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Storm on Demand   

    Retargeting is the newest craze. You visit a site, then that advertiser can target you wherever you go across some advertising networks – like Google.

    It starts to get very creepy and ridiculous after a while, though. The bald dude from Storm on Demand has been following me around the net for over a week – I see him several times a day. I’m already a customer – this isn’t making me interested in buying more or inviting the dude for drinks or something.

    If you’re about to do a retargeting campaign, please think long and hard about your creatives.

    I for one wouldn’t mind if the ones chasing me around the net were Playboy bunnies – I’d be delighted. Then again I wouldn’t want hosting from dumb blondes.


     

    • Davey 1:28 pm on December 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      This fricking pedophile has been following me for a bout a month now. He is only chasing my in Opera so I had to go back to Firefox just to stop lookin at this asshole.

      Imagine my disapointment when I starting to get quite excited as I am scrolling down your blog I see a nice little piece of Gratuitous Eye Candy and then this fucker is back in my life.

      I was gonna go over to my Fav “TUBE” sites and bang done gone thanks a lot. Can you write some more shit to get this jerkoff off the front page of your site :)

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 3:17 pm on November 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Excuses,   

    That’s My Story, and I’m Sticking to It 

    Thats my story and im sticking to it!

    That right there is a powerful agent of positive change. The power lies in SAYING that phrase and seeing how silly your stories sound.

    “That’s My Story, and I’m Sticking to It”

    That’s the phrase I began chirping every single time I said – or heard someone tell me- something that sounded even a tiny bit like a whim, hidden excuse or faulty reasoning. I decided to start doing this after reading “All Marketers Are Liars” for the fourth time and thinking about our everyday stories for a long time.

    I thought this would be a good way of explaining the stories of marketing, by making folks notice their everyday actions and how they put stories around it – even stories that made no sense at all.

    It worked wonders. My entire family laughed – and laughs. They all now chirp it back to me and make everyone conscious of why we do what we do.

    In action it looks like this:

    Wife: “If it was warmer, we’d be out jogging”
    Me: “Yep, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”

    Me: “I’m gonna get a Wii for Christmas… It has really nice games *FOR THE KIDS*… and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it”

    Kids: “I love Cheerios, they’re good for your heart”
    Me:” That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”

    Wife: “I really need these boots for the winter so my feet don’t freeze… That’s my story and I’m sticking to it…” (while rearranging 50 other pairs of boots in the closet)

    Its really nice to see a whole new level of consciousness in everyday living – lifting the veil of the little stories we tell ourselves to justify doing what we’re doing.

    It separates reality from the story and makes YOU accountable for doing whatever you are doing – it takes the story out of the picture, as an optional mental masturbation, and puts you back in control.

    I firmly believe everything is optional – there is not one single thing you have to do. Sure, there are risks, consequences, rewards, whatever… Yet nothing is mandatory. These little stories we hear on TV or from other people and then we tell ourselves give us quick ways to deceive ourselves. We live out the lies we tell ourselves. Kill the lie. Then dissect it and take a look at its guts.

    If you’re a marketer, you then take that dead, dissected lie, you stitch it back up, and you sling it out into the world as a marketing piece:

    “Newsflash: In Winter, consumers stop going to the Gym and turn to Acai Berry Detox to combat Holiday Weight Gain”

    “Get a Wii for the Kids for $25? Only at Bidiot.com!”

    “Free Heart-healthy Cheerio Samples. Enter your e-mail (and entire medical history)”

    “You’ve won free UGG Boots! Just claim your prize in the next two minutes by entering your cell phone number in the next screen!”

    Word.

     
    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 5:46 am on November 18, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Spot Where I Fucked Up 

    Lets see who can spot where I fucked up, changed the landing page and went to bed ASS-uming everything was just fine.

     

     

     
    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 3:19 am on November 18, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , WYSIWYG   

    Decent Landers in Two Minutes Flat – WYSIWYG Website Builder 

    Its fucking retarded that DreamWeaver, Adobe’s top-of-the-line ($$$) web design package can’t just work graphically kinda like PowerPoint and then figure out what it needs to do to display your doodle as a working web page.

    Maybe there’s tons of wizards out there that know how to do just that with DreamWeaver. As far as I’m concerned – you can’t. I’m no dummy yet I couldn’t for the life of me find that functionality even poring over some Lynda.com trainings.

    Fuck you very much, Adobe.

    Enter WYSIWYG Web Builder.

    You really have to see this shit in action to appreciate it – Its a dream come true. You just plop down the graphics and move them wherever you want, plop down a flash control and put it wherever, bring up the properties of something and tweak the HTML, JS and PHP to your heart’s content.

    Make the image a link, overlay some text on it, put it on a layer, add an effect of it sliding in and attach a little button on the top that makes the layer “close” – bam, you’ve got a pop-up slider with a close button with your e-mail submit form in it… Wanna add a Captcha? Drag-and-drop, baby. Wanna create a long form with on-the-fly validation? Enter the Form wizard or plop the form pieces down yourself. You done? Preview locally with a built-in PHP interpreter or click publish to have it FTP the files wherever.

    It figures out what to turn into a GIF, what into a JPEG, what into a PNG, add the PNG fixes, sends it all out… Beautiful.

    Oh.. Yeah, want to stop Traffic Vance from showing Text Links on your landing page? Tick “Render as an image” in the properties of your text boxes and voila!

    This is really a very-very complete package for website design. No, you’re not going to create the next FaceBook with it, and no, you’re not going to win a Webbie award or some other shit for it – You’re going to use it to build unique and interesting landing pages faster than ever. Price: 30 day trial,  then $45 for the license. This tool is a no-brainer – gotta have it.

    Check it out: WYSIWYG Web Builder. (PS: No, I don’t get any sort of kickback other than a warm and fuzzy feeling)

    Update 11/22/10: Their forums are really good too. Look at this index of WYSIWYG Web Editor Extensions. Really impressive.

     

    • ctrtard 12:18 pm on November 30, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      I remember Netobjects Fusion used to do this back in the day. You could drag and drop stuff, and basically just draw on a blank page and build pages in a few seconds. It used tables and single pixel gifs to accomplish its magicalness. Granted, the html source was horrendous and impossible to edit later, but the shit worked!

      I will have to check this out. As a side note, if you ever get around to compiling all this code in your background, you just might win a webbie in 2011!

      • Slave Rat 2:03 pm on December 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        YES! I remember NetObjects Fusion. It rocked. I still have a simple site or two I built using that thing backed up – I think my online resume was put together using that. You owe it to yourself to try out this editor – Its really super-easy and with a bit of tinkering to figure out how, you can pretty much insert your PHP wherever you want and modify the bejesus out of the HTML it produces – as long as you do it inside the editor, it will keep things sane for you.
        BTW, the code in the background is actually a snippet of Motorola 6502 assembler code – the first chip I learned how to program.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 7:19 pm on November 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Banners, BannerSnack, Landers, SnackTools   

    Easy Flash Banners – SnackTools 

    Awesome tool I started using last week: BannerSnack from Snacktools.

    Its not as fancy as Wix. Unlike Wix, it creates small files needed for banners, uses the clickTag attribute and most importantly it lets you download your creation free and clear – so you can use it without having to bleed money to them.

    I was trying to create some elements for a simple landing page and ended up creating the whole thing in flash with this. Then I proceeded to create a few banners… Put them online and blam-o… Instant magic.

    Anyway, for their unlimited $24 a month they also give you access to all the other “Snacktools” – I was really only wanting to sign up to BannerSnack, don’t see much use for the rest – they do make a nice bundle, though and it was a nice surprise to find out I got them for the price I was expecting to pay for just one.

    For those $24 a month you get unlimited downloads and a shit-ton of traffic served from Amazon CloudFront should you choose to just embed your banners and stuff (like I’m doing in this post). All in all you get access to:

    • BannerSnack – Allows you to create banners, buttons, widgets and even minisites
    • PhotoSnack – Creates snazzy photo Galleries
    • PodSnack – To create playlists – Heck you can even use this to add sound to landing pages since they have a really small player with different interfaces, many suitable for landing pages.
    • TubeSnack – Lets you make playlists out of whatever YouTube Videos you fancy.
    • QuizSnack – You can create surveys and polls and has a nice back-end for reporting.

    BannerSnack has all the super-cheesy effects you need for effective landers, and it lets you combine to your heart’s content. Check out their sample gallery.

    So I decided to try out their PodSnack too and fed it my favorite “Music for Marketing”. Whenever I’m having a hard time finding inspiration for marketing, I plug this playlist from my iPhone and it gets me into the mood for marketing in no time.

     

    • shawns 8:03 am on November 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      amazing find, thanks! def affordable too

      • Slave Rat 6:00 pm on November 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Yeah, I’ve been on the hunt for something like this for a while – Someone mentioned it among tools they were looking into over at ppvplaybook.com – as they say, the rest is history.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 5:39 pm on November 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    What About Guru Products? 

    Nothing is ever black and white – so here’s the skinny.

    You keep getting bombarded by “Product Launches”. What to do? Are they good? Bad? Evil?

    They are not all bad, and they are not all good. The major difference between a good product and a bad product is YOU. Yes, you. Not the product, YOU.

    Quick example: If it is a guru product on PPC, then it will only be good for you if you haven’t done PPC and haven’t had any other training on PPC.

    The bottom line is: It is not the guru product that will lead you to success; it is busting your ass trying to make it work.

    The guru product is like reading a book on exercise techniques – you’re not going to get any fitter while reading it – You might learn of good gyms, equipment, supplements and related stuff – but THE BOOK WONT MAKE YOU SWEAT ONE DROP.

    There’s another deeper problem with these “products” – They can’t give you a ‘road to riches’ – because that road keeps changing each and every single day. What you could do today on MySpace ads, you can’t do tomorrow – and if you can still do it, now there are a couple hundred more people doing it. You’re going to find that the “product” is either so generic you can’t apply it directly, or if it is specific enough, that it just doesn’t work out for you because the environment has changed. And it isn’t a matter of getting a “fresh” product – things change so incredibly fast that yesterday’s news is pretty much OBSOLETE. As the saying goes: “If it’s news, you lose!”

    Here are some practical tips – shit I actually did, shit I failed at and shit I still do:

    1)      Budget spend:

    What is your budget? Write it down, whether you’re coming in with $2,000 of play money or $200 a month, write that down.

    Take 1/3rd of the budget and put that towards learning. No matter if that is guru products, forum subscriptions or books – you cannot go over that amount even if the Pope gives you a ring and pitches his Tax-Sheltered Holy Bling Profit System. If you set it aside per month, then it’s a per-month limit. If you set aside a chunk of money, then that’s all you have and that’s it – no more, no less. I did exactly this.

    2)      Whatever you sign up to, you do it. Make sure you’re not signing up for a 3-year course. You want it all and you want it now – Fuck the “drip-feed” where they give you a pinch of content every week – run like hell.

    3)      You read the books, watch the videos, you do the exercises, you follow along like your life depends on it. You read the material three times. You think about it while you’re peeing, you think about it while you’re shitting, you think about it while you’re fucking… And when you’re done peeing, shitting and fucking around, you DO *SOMETHING*.  You carry a notepad and jot down ideas, and then sit down and do them sequentially.

    4)      After you’ve assimilated a couple of these, being books, video courses or whatever, you STOP. Yes, you STOP. You now know everything the guru courses can teach you – now you need to talk to people wherever they may be. At this point, guru shit is likely to be a giant waste of time.

    5)      An EXCELLENT source of information, training and tips are the little “marketing guides” blogs put up to entice you to sign-up to their mailing lists – Some blogs put up these guides without the mailing list sign-up – these are usually even more valuable. If it’s a list that goes out every week or more often than that, you can bet your ass that person is trying to cash in on you – IGNORE. If it’s a list that goes out every time there is a blue moon, chances are high whatever it is they’re sending is worth at least reading the e-mail. Don’t know where to start? Start here on my post about Uber-Affiliate’s Marketing Guide updated for 2010 and its links.

    6)      Do not fall for the idea that its ok for a blogger or guru to monetize their time on the blog or “marketing guide” by plaguing it with paid plugs and affiliate links. It creates a three-way conflict of interest where you –the reader- is the only possible loser – just move on, there are plenty of other sources of the same information out there. And no, just because everybody does it, doesn’t make it any less risky for you to trust “incentivized” opinions.

    7)      Skip guru blogs for the most part and head for the real people. Take a peek at their posts – These are the blogs that will give you the best tips, most useful tools and best pointers. Who are these bloggers and blogs? Look at my list of recommended affiliate marketing blogs – Those bloggers will give you the scoop. Others will scoop you up and wring you dry.

    Recap for Alzheimer’s and ADHD: Stop buying guru shit, read the blogs on my recommended list and the guides I linked from my post on Uber-Affiliate’s Marketing Guide updated for 2010. The rest is blood, sweat and tears.

    Now go sweat, bleed and cry!

     

    • Dude 12:06 pm on November 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks, that pretty well clears it up for me. This is more than most IM’s will say. Most of them just say that all guru products are crap and don’t get any further into the explanation.

      I think I’m starting to get it though. Nobody can really tell you what to start a business in. This you have to think for yourself. Same with IM.

      • Slave Rat 7:48 pm on November 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        You’re welcome – Its not all bad and not all good. If you wade into my posts you’ll see I went into the ShoeMoney System which was a total waste – I also got my hands on List Control 2 that was useful… I went through a lot of the trainings offered by PPCBully in their videos and VIP videos, even went through the videos from Zero Friction Marketing (bleah), the books for AffiloBlueprint… Don’t think for a minute that I dropped $2K for list control or such sums; I’m not that nice or naive. That post pretty much sums it up, though. It all depends on where you start, and regardless of where you start, after a very base competence level none of it will be worth your time.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

  • NegBox 6:34 pm on November 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Screwed   

    How to Avoid Getting Screwed by Internet Marketing Douchebags 

    Practical checklist to spotting internet scammers trying to fleece internet marketers.

    The only thing you need is a bit of an ability to read your own emotions and this handy list. Don’t surf without it!

    You know you are about to get scammed when:

    • You feel you’re going to lose out if you don’t do something now.
    • You are told how much the “free stuff” you get is “really” worth.
    • The offer is for a really short limited time (less than two weeks) and it is stated up-front.
    • The product is “closed” and there is a waitlist.
    • E-mails from the person contain your first name even though you’ve never met them.
    • You can’t believe the amount of good stuff you’re going to get for such a low price.
    • The price ends with the number “7″, for example: $37, $77, $197, $297.
    • As you’re making the purchase, you are offered something additional you didn’t even know was available when you started the purchase process – Sometimes free on trial basis.
    • There is a flashy video on the website – it has really cool animations that look like a Hollywood movie.
    • You are told how many of the product, seats, or promotions are available.
    • There was an error (doesn’t matter of what or whom) and now as ‘compensation’ or ‘grandfathering’ you’re entitled to something – like a discount or a bonus product.
    • The website has the look and feel of a Squeeze Page (RUN!)
    • The product website has more than four or five pages of information to scroll down and read.
    • The website has any sort of anxiety questions like “How would you feel if your neighbor became rich with this and you didn’t?”
    • There is a photograph of a product box or a bounded book, meanwhile the product is a book in PDF format, a piece of software, or access to a website with videos.
    • The ‘lessons’ will take place over time, even though they are not really live.
    • The Salty Droid talked about it.
    • You’ve won something, even though you made no effort to win it (pushing a button does not constitute effort).
    • You’ve found the answer to all your problems.
    • The product allows you to get big rewards with very little effort.

    Now, now… Many legit products will show up with one or two from this list of shame. Simply put, if you hear good things from your friends, then it doesn’t matter what the site looks like. If you don’t hear anything other than hype, hope and expectation – close your wallet, make a note and come back to the site in a month – if you still want it a month later, get it… Or search… Whatever floats your boat.


    # You’ve won something, even though you made no effort to win it.

    1. You’ve found the answer to all your problems.

     

    • Dude 4:28 pm on November 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      So if 95% or whatever of the “gurus” are selling bullshit. Then maybe someone can come out and do real reviews to point out the 5% which are legit and actually helpful. I can’t say I have seen anyone do that. Of course, you can’t find a bad review on anything selling through Clickbank via a Google search. Hell, that would be revolutionary.

      • Slave Rat 5:42 pm on November 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Dude, love your comment about Google – It makes them a farce, really – You are right you can’t find a single normal non-paid review of ANY ClickBank product. … BTW, your comment spurred the next blog post – there you have it. Thank you!

    • Paul 1:36 am on November 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Excellent post. I always struggle with the negative comments about how “Program X isn’t worth $297″ or “stay away from Program Y; it’s all useless information.” Sure, there are crap programs out there that were designed and built to do nothing but pad someone’s pockets. I get it. But to blame the program when magically your bank account didn’t grow…not so much.

      The other thing that’s typically missed is that not every program is right for every person at that point. They’ll buy it because they’re squeezed into it but can’t spare 30 minutes a day for the next month to even get it running. So in 30 days they look back and say “that was worthless, the program sucks”. Not really – if they would have devoted some time to it maybe they’d have gotten something. Right product…wrong time.

      • Slave Rat 6:42 am on November 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        One interesting bit of info from “Guru” Frank Kern in his List Control was that something ridiculously small like less than 10% of people make it to the last “modules” of the trainings – usually they stop 1/3rd of the way through and then they show up at his in-person gathering.
        Its also hard for people to stay away from these programs when they are pitched so hard… I mean, come on, you really think making a good video is going to save your sorry ass if you have nothing else going? Of course not – there’s nobody on this planet you can stop cold on the street, ask them that question and they’ll say yes – NOBODY. The way these prospects get literally ‘marinated’ in the hype spun out is pretty bad. Then again, perhaps the biggest lesson to the IM-Guru-product buyer is: Do as I do, not as I say.

    • Gratuitous Eye Candy

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