Make Money Online with Uber

AffChat at Uberaffiliate

by UberAffiliate on February 16, 2010 in Just Making Money with 16 Comments

Long story made short with no explanation : I’ve just created a chatroom here at Uberaffiliate, you can click here to connect to it.

Now for the explanation. If you’re anything like me, some days you’re at your house chugging away at campaigns and you just get bored. Maybe most of your friends on IM are working and can’t talk, you don’t want to wait for people to reply to your forum posts, and you just want to take a break. That’s why I set up a small chat room attached to UberAffiliate. I plan on just popping it up in a new window and letting it chill in the corner of one of my monitors. I used to hang around the Cakes chat room, but the past few times I’ve gone in there hasn’t really been anybody on.

This is also a way I think I’ll be able to connect with you guys (the readers) better. A lot of you send me IMs during the day and I’m either not paying attention to Adium, or by the time I get back to the computer to respond you’re already gone.

So if you just want a place to hang out and chat/shoot the breeze with other marketers, just head to the chat room.

Nothing big, maybe I’ll see you there maybe not! Oh if you have your own IRC program that you’re more used to, the channel is #affchat.

Popularity: 9% [?]

A Note to Affiliate Networks…

by UberAffiliate on February 9, 2010 in Affiliate Networks with 24 Comments

Hey guys and girls. I just want to write a little message, and I want other affiliates to comment on this issue as well. This is kind of aimed towards affiliate networks.

This post is coming because of something that has happened to me many times. If it’s once or twice at one or two networks, okay maybe those are legit. But when it’s happened at almost every network I’ve been at, some have to be true. This actual post is because I’m planning on running smorgasbord of offers with 1 network. They gave me the heads up that 1 of the offers I requested was no good to run. So my response was basically what the rest of this post says, and a ‘thank you’ to that network.

How many times have you asked “So what are your top converting offers to run for Vertical X?” and got a list back, ran those offers, only to find out that it’s converting worse than what you’re running now?

This has happened to me quite a few times. I’ll get a list of the top offers, and then I’ll ask my AM what the offer is converting at for most affiliates. They usually say very nice things, like “It’s converting at 13% for affiliates with a $5-6 EPC”. Now I’ll be getting like a $3.50-4 EPC now so this sounds amazing, almost double my revenue. So I run the offer and guess what, it’s a $2 EPC and I’m now almost losing money. It’s just happened too many times for them all to be my fault (I know my traffic is good because I’ve run it fine on other offers that look exactly the same).

For an affiliate like me, who doesn’t even want to talk to networks anymore unless they’re going to be honest, I propose this :

Instead of telling me what offers “your affiliates are running great right now”, give me some REAL numbers I can look at. If you have 1 affiliate running at a $6 EPC and 10 affiliates running it at a $2 EPC…tell me the offer has a $2.50 EPC. If that doesn’t beat what I’m running now, that’s just the way it works and I won’t run the offer. But if you’re honest about it and you get an offer in a month that has a $3.50 EPC overall, when you come to me I’ll actually run the offer. It’s annoying to run the offer, not see the $6 EPC, and lose money half the time just to find out that it’s a bad offer.

There was 1 vertical where I literally ran at least 20 different offers where every time I was told were the best offers at the time with great EPCs, only to find out that they all sucked. Lost at least $10,000 just to learn that anything an AM tells me about this offer is going to be a lie, and I should just call it quits.

Anyone with me?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Nickycakes Gains GURU Status w/ LPLockdown (/sarcasm)

by UberAffiliate on February 4, 2010 in Tools with 67 Comments

So Nickycakes has come out with his first affiliate industry product he calls LPLockdown. It’s a service that provides cloaking for your landing pages so other affiliates can’t see or steal them.

LPLockdown : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good

We’ll start off with the good here. The things it does for your pages are nice, if you’re not currently doing something like this with your pages, you should look into it. LPLockdown will :

1) Cloak your pages from other affiliates. Cakes has a database of affiliate IPs he’s collected, so when they hit your landing page they’re redirected somewhere else.

2) Steal their traffic if they steal yours. if someone rips your page 100% and leaves your javascript, you can redirect traffic from their page to your page/offer.

3) Uptime/downtime monitor so if your landing page goes down you get a notification.

The Bad

While there are positives to using this service to protect your page, there are cons to this.

1) It’s not self-hosted. And seeing as Nickycakes himself said it’s “by affiliates for affiliates”, do you want to give Nicky (an affiliate) potential access to all of your landing pages?

2) I have a friend who programs and said he programmed the exact same thing for himself in 2 days. Do you want to pay $50/month for something you can pay a programmer a few hundred bucks and have forever?

3) This is interesting…reverse IP lplockdown.com. You’ll find the site 11i.us. Check the WHOIS on that info. It’s Nicky’s actual info. Do you trust a product who was created by someone that can’t privacy protect their own self?

4) It looks like I designed that site the first week I learned Photoshop. The WordArt in the video gives it a nice ’95 touch.

The Ugly

Everyone is pretty aware that this is NickyCakes’ product. I’ve gotten the chance to meet him and chat at events and he’s a nice guy. Like with all arguing on the internet I think once everyone comes together we realize how lucky we are and the pansy e-fighting that happens doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Be that as it may, Nicky’s online persona has always been ripping others in the industry to shreds. He rips on the big Gurus like Shoemoney and Chow, and also has torn apart myself (the Goober) and Ubercamp.

So the question is : if he really made this product to “contribute” to the industry, why does he have to charge for it (more so $50/month…maybe $5-10/month would be more legit)? Especially when it’s not anything advanced, it’s like making a blog post about how to track keywords with PHP. Again I’m not a programmer and haven’t seen the backend of LPLockdown, but after talking to friends it doesn’t seem all that hard to just do this on your own (or pay someone to program it for you). I’d use LPLockdown as a fresh reminder that you should be doing your best to hide and protect your pages.

Nickycakes having financial trouble perhaps? Gotta pay those taxes.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Affiliate Marketing in 2010

by UberAffiliate on January 19, 2010 in Philosophy with 26 Comments

This isn’t meant to be a long and planned out post with my 2010 predictions, just getting some thoughts out.

Here’s what’s been happening with me and my product launch. My plan has been to set up a continuity offer with a product but have it be legitimate at the same time. Believe it or not I think there are ways to attract customers without offering them a Free* Trial. I’ve now been rejected by 2 or 3 merchants and am awaiting the reply on another. Because of all the scamming that went down in 2009, Visa/Mastercard are tightening their grip on things…especially domestically. And since I don’t have any real processing history, domestic is the route I have to go. So even though my offer is completely legitimate and actually charges them up-front for a sale, the banks are saying no just because there is continuity involved (I don’t want to get into the specifics, but my charges monthly would be under $20, not $110.33). This sucks pretty bad because now I may be forced to abandon that business model and try and make this work by just straight selling it. I’ve put too much time into it to scrap, but now I have to make huge changes. I have to now build a full website and come out with a mini product line so I can offer combo packages and things like that to incent customers.

That’s how 2009 impacted me, where will the affiliate industry be in 2010? While working on all of this product mumbo jumbo, I kind of “left” the affiliate industry for a while. Didn’t talk to my AMs much, didn’t browse offers, didn’t keep up too much on the news. Now that I’ve been looking to get some campaigns and other projects running again (with the product delay I have to make money somehow), things seem to be changing. Rebill offers that made up a lot of business for affiliate networks are dropping. There are still ones that exist and offers running well so it’s not like they’re completely dying, but things will change.

I think many affiliates will realize that before rebills came along everybody was still making money. Not millions every month, but there was plenty of money to be made and there still is.

I’ll keep you guys posted on what happens with my projects and how everything is influencing them.

Popularity: 7% [?]

ShoeMoney System, Cool Beans

by UberAffiliate on December 28, 2009 in UberCamp with 26 Comments

Just wanted to say congrats to Jeremy on rolling out The ShoeMoney Sytem. As much hate as he gets (which the hate has died down tremendously because a) people realized that fat jokes are only funny for so long and b) plenty of legitimate trolls have entered the industry that are actually worth the negative attention), the man knows how to launch and run a successful web-based business.

Can you believe all the self-hype about it? I’m sure many people read “how to make money step by step” and are a bit skeptical, after all that’s what every shittyscammy bizopp promises. Will it lead you step by step to making money? Probably, if you actually digest the information properly. You can check out one of the free videos to kind of get a feel for it (I just watched about half of one of them). You can also read about it on his blog. If you’re just getting started into the industry or have some O.K. businesses running online, Shoe is a guy that’s worth listening too. If you’re just a shady aff raking it in on rebills trying to stay cloaked, you’ll probably find this boring.

I don’t want to plug it too hard because I don’t know the full system and I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but it looks like Shoemoney put a lot of work into this and so far it looks like he did a pretty good job. So, nice one dude.

P.S. This isn’t a paid review.

P.P.S. Like the category I put this in whoop whoop :p

Popularity: 6% [?]