Matt Marcin - Incentive Marketing

SocialMedia Tips!

I’ve had a lot of people asking how to use SocialMedia.com effectively since posting about it a few times. Like I had said before, it’s not the easiest media buying service available but it can provide a crazy amount of traffic quickly. I’ve seen some people say that they went through $300 in just 5 minutes. I personally have done $100/minute. That might seem like a lot, but if you are turning even a 20% ROI, it adds up! Today’s article is about using SocialMedia and not losing your shirt in the process.

Getting Approvals

New advertisers will need to get approval of every single ad they create before it will run on the network. I’ve seen this take up to 48 hours so you have to be patient. However, once you get approval on an ad, you can modify any part of it without getting approval again. Use this to your advantage when split testing your ad copy’s. Once you start spending $1000/day you can generally get in touch with someone easily to quicken the approval process.

SocialMedia has much less strict guidelines when it comes to ads compared to Facebook SocialAds. As long as the ad is not completely deceptive and it’s not a Crush cell phone offer, you’ll most likely be approved. It’s a great place to run offers that might not be suitable for Facebook SocialAds. I am not 100% certain if they allow ringtone offers though.

Controlling your Cash

Since SocialMedia gets so many impressions you can expect a crazy amount of clicks in a short period of time. With the speed that they will throw you visitors, it’s important to have a handle on your money so you don’t lose it all in 5 minutes.

The Daily Budget is the MOST important tool on SocialMedia. When you are testing a new ad copy, set that budget at $20-30 and see how it performs. You will be charged for all clicks up to the daily budget but any clicks that come after that are free. As you make adjustments, just increase your budget and the clicks will start pouring in within a few minutes.

Setting your Bids

Unlike AdWords and Facebook SocialAds, SocialMedia does not tell you what you need to bid. They let you guess and then wait around to see if it’s enough. The bid price you set is what you will pay per click. It is not the max bid. Keep this in mind!

Now, as a rule of thumb this is how I set my bids. I start with 0.15 clicks and get my initial 50 or so clicks from this. Now I know what my CTR is so I can price my bids to get traffic at the right price. Below is a little chart with approximate min bids depending on your CTR. Remember these are approximates. You may need to tweak them but this should be a good starting point.

• CTR: 0 to 0.15% | $0.30+ | Make a new ad…
• CTR: 0.16 to 0.20% | $0.25+
• CTR: 0.21 to 0.25% | $0.20+
• CTR: 0.26 to 0.30% | $0.16+
• CTR: 0.31 to 0.40% | $0.13+
• CTR: 0.41 to 0.55% | $0.11+
• CTR: 0.56%+ | $0.10

These ranges may change as time goes on. Bids are highest in the morning and then clicks get cheaper as more and more advertisers hit their daily budget. I’ve had ads with a 0.3% CTR getting a ton of clicks at 10 cents a piece an hour before midnight! You will need to play with your bids to get steady, affordable clicks on a consistent basis but once you get it right, you can get a huge number of clicks in a short period of time.

Text Ad Tips

I want to stress that you should avoid using words such as: CONTINUE, OKAY and GO as your Action Text on your ad copy. The majority of your clicks will be accidental. Unless you can convert accidental traffic, I wouldn’t use those on your ad copy. You will get cheap clicks though as your CTR will be around 1%. Other than that, just keep working on your text ads to squeeze the highest CTR you can.

Closing

SocialMedia is like a fire hose. You can drive huge quantities of traffic in a short period of time at a pretty cheap price. It may not be the best quality traffic out there but I’ve been able to get offer conversion rates of near 40% which as you can imagine, is big money! Now get out there and give it a shot :)

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 11 Comments »

Guest Posted on Nickycakes.com

Nickycakes asked if I would write up a guest post going into detail on how I did $1,000 in revenue in less than 24 hours. If you’re interested in more detail about Socialmedia and the tracking software I used check it out!

For those of you coming from Nickycakes, hopefully you liked the post and will keep on the lookout for more coming from me.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 5 Comments »

Xbox 360 from Nickycakes/Advaliant

Thanks again to both Nickycakes and Advaliant for hooking me up with the Xbox. I just got it in the mail yesterday and have been practicing my skills at COD4. Hit me up with your Gamertag if you want to play on Xbox Live.

In other news, Stan asked if I would do a post on making socialmedia.com work well. There are a lot of things that you need to know to make it work effectively so I will be doing a post about it this weekend.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment »

Co-Winning the Nickycakes.com Contest

The goal of the contest was to join Advaliant and be the first to earn $1,000 in commissions. Winner getting an Xbox 360.

I started the contest about a week late so I had to catch up and once I got rolling was able to hit $1k on a campaign in under 24hours. Apparently it came down to two of us so Nickycakes has declared that we both won. I thought I’d take a post and talk a bit about what I did to win the contest in around 12 hours.

How I made $1,000 in revenue in 24 hours
After looking through Advaliant’s offers, I picked out a couple that I knew might perform well on social networks like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. As much as I’d love to tell you how to pick out a good offer for social networks… that will be for another time!

Traffic Sources

There are a bunch of ways to get traffic on social networks besides just Facebook SocialAds.

Facebook SocialAds is a no brainer. They are strict but the quality is high.

My personal favorite is SocialMedia.com. I got the majority of my traffic from them when winning this contest. They have banner ads on nearly 80% of all the Facebook apps aswell as placement on Bebo and MySpace.

There is also a bunch of other small ad networks on Facebook. Some of the top ones are Zohark Ads and AdChap. Zohark is the best of the smaller networks on facebook because they’ll actually talk to you on the phone or IM.

Testing Offers

Once I have a few offers, I test them just like any other good affiliate marketer. I personally use tracking202.com for doing all PPC stat tracking. It’s a system that they host that lets you track all your activity and its really high quality. Since it is hosted by them, I know many people worry that they watch your stats. I know this is not btrue but if you are really scared about that you can build your own system.

So, to test them I usually create 3-4 text ads for each offer and throw them up via direct linking. This will probably not make me any money of but I can get an idea if an offer has any potential very quickly.

Once I find an offer with promise, I make up a Landing Page to basically presell the potential customer and get him ready for what is coming. Basically, if they hit your landing page and click through, they should convert because they know what is coming and are ready to do the required action.

Once I had a profitable campaign, I scaled it up and did the $1,000 in commissions I needed to win. I am actually still running the main campaign that I used in this contest because it is quite profitable!

Thanks again to Nickycakes and Advaliant for making this contest a success and thanks for the Xbox 360 :) Thanks also goes out to Amin for competing neck and neck with me until the end! I’ll post a pic when it arrives and then you guys can see my ugly face haha.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 9 Comments »

Reducing Fraud on Incentive Sites

Fraud is the number one killer of incentive publishers! Really though, if you get frauded not only will you be out a lot of money but your affiliate networks will never want to work with you again. There are however, ways to minimize the risk.

• Get all the user’s contact info
  • Name, Address, E-Mail, Phone Number
  • Verify their e-mail address.
  • Record their IP and use cookies to track duplicate accounts too
  • Verify their phone number with a service like onverify.com or TeleSign
• Don’t pay out before you get paid by your affiliate networks!
  • Cash incent sites rely on this as their competitive advantage, don’t.
  • You will get scammed and be left holding an empty bag.
  • Reports on reversed leads will come back to haunt you!
• Payout Methods
  • If you use PayPal, make sure they are using a Verified account.
    • If you pay to unverified users and then don’t get paid for their leads, you have no way to get your money back.
  • If by check, don’t allow PO Boxes.
• Double check sketchy activity
  • 2-3 accounts from 1 IP? Investigate.
    • Like I mentioned, use cookies to track individual computers when you can.
    • E-Mail them and ask for an explanation.

As the incentives market matures, more and more scammers are coming in so we, as incentive publishers need to be proactive in reducing fraud. If you have less reversals than other incentive publishers your affiliate networks will love you and help you out even more. It’s worth getting your fraud prevention in place and working effectively because without it you will be hit and have trouble getting back into the market.

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Posted in Incentive Marketing | No Comments »

Interviewed at CantGetRich.com

Geoff over at CantGetRich.com interviewed me about affiliate marketing and other related things. I highly recommend you check it out and also take a look at his blog. Despite the name, he does have some great insights into finding niches and his analysis of over saturated markets are quite good!

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Posted in Webpreneurship | 1 Comment »

Importance of Tracking Incentive Sites

Let’s face it, you can’t give users free stuff without making sure they did their end of the deal by completing some offers! When setting up an incentive site, it’s very very important to get some really solid tracking or you are going to get many complaints from users and lose a ton of cash.

We want to track every single offer and the user that completed it. Depending on the type of site, we often have to do this in real time. There are a few ways to do this and all have varying levels of programming skill involved unless you hire someone!

How do we track offers?

The main thing we need to do is track SubIDs. These are a unique identifier that you usually append to the end of an affiliate URL. (ex: http://affiliateoffer.com/231/{SUBID}). Normally you would put the user’s ID number from your database as the SubID for any offer they attempt. This information is saved by your affiliate network so that you can retrieve it and properly credit the user!

Passing the SubID is the easy part… The tough part to manage is getting that data back from the affiliate network. Most networks nowadays have a feature called a Postback. This means that when a lead comes through, the affiliate network is going to automatically access a page on your site that can accept the data. The page the network is accessing is called your Postback URL and is usually different for each affiliate network. (ex: http://myincentsite.com/postback/cpastorm.php?offerid={offerid}&subid={subid}). Essentially they are telling you which offer a specific user did so that you can give them credit!

This process completes the loop and is the most important software that you need to have in place. Without it, you just can’t operate an incentives site. Putting this kind of tracking together is going to require some programming knowledge. If you need help, you can always use elance.com and find someone to work for you.

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Posted in Incentive Marketing | 1 Comment »

Broke the $1000/day barrier finally!

So I finally did it, I broke the $1000/day barrier. I started a campaign around 5PM and by 12PM I had made $1251.60. I’m excited to see how this campaign performs today (April 9th)

I did this using just one offer and doing a media buy on a few banner ad networks. Once the offer dies I may write up a little case study for it!

I’ve been using CXDigital (IncentaClick) lately and they have been really good about helping me out.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 5 Comments »

Which incentives to give?

Deciding which kind of incentive you want to offer to your users is a huge decision when starting an incentives site. There are pros and cons to each and I wanted to give you a run down of my experience.Cash IncentivesI started with creating Cash Incentive sites because it’s easy to attract users. People love the prospect of actual cash and are more likely to join because of it. Of course, there are many issues with offering cash incentives.The Cons with Cash Incentives

• Fraud: Once your site becomes known it will be targeted by people trying to defraud your offers for a quick buck. This comes in many shapes and forms from something as simple as signing up with fake information to using stolen credit cards and identities.
• Complaints: People are much more likely to complain about an offer not converting where there is an actual cash value tied to it. People participating in these sites are often penny pinchers and will send you many e-mail asking to see whats up with their pending earnings.
• Lack of Offers: Less and less advertisers are willing to accept traffic from Cash Incentive sites unless the owner can prove that traffic quality is high. As a new incentive marketer it was very difficult to gain this trust and can often take a year or more to make any ground.

The Pros to Cash Incentives

• User Attraction: Cash is king and most users prefer cash over a prize. This makes it easier to get new users.

Suggested Affiliate Networks for Cash Incentives

InstantDollarz
CPALead
CPAStorm

Yes, there really is only one Pro to Cash Incentives. Managing a site like this is tough and not for the faint of heart. Now we’ll look at Point Incentives. The idea is that users get “Points” for doing offers which can be redeemed for “Prizes”.Point IncentivesThe prizes that can be given out for Points is basically anything that isn’t cash. You can give away gift certificates, music downloads, an iPod, etc. As long as it isn’t actual cash in hand then it’s fine as far as your advertisers care.The Cons to Point Incentives

• Competition: There is a lot of competition in both cash and point incentives but it’s a lot harder to attract users when you only offer prizes.
• Keeping User Interest: Points are not something that people can find value in easily. You would need to find some way to remind people of the value of these wonderful points they are accumulating.

The Pros to Point Incentives

• Less Complaints: People are less attached to Points than Cash so you get less upset people.
• More Offers: Advertisers prefer Points over Cash incentives. You’ll get access to far more offers than you probably actually need.
• Much Less Fraud: Fraud sucks a lot because it hurts our bottom line. You will get much less fraud when giving away gift certificates and other prizes because potential fraudsters don’t think its worth the work for an Amazon gift certificate. Plus as a bonus they are scared by the fact that they could be tracked back.

Suggested Affiliate Networks for Point Incentives

InstantDollarz
MaxBounty
CPAStorm

Which is best?To be honest, it all depends on what you want to do. You need to look at what you want to personally work on. If you choose Cash Incentives be prepared to run a tight ship to combat fraud and deal with customer support. If you opt for Points, you need to work hard to gain users and provide a fun experience. If you are new to incentives I would try working on a Points based system because you will have a much easier time getting approved with affiliate networks.

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First Affiliate Sale

Today I made my first Affiliate Sale for $24.79. I’ve always done my business by selling products that I actually have on hand so this is new for me. I’ve been reading a few different blogs about Affiliate Marketing and decided to just go ahead and throw some offers out on Facebook. Lo and behold, a day later and $15 spent on advertising I made a sale!

What I did is I went through ClickBank.com and found some decent looking offers that I could write some ads for. Then just plopped them on Facebook and waited. The one offer that is converting right now I am getting a 1:30 conversion on without doing any work so that is pretty interesting. I’m sure that if I put effort into optimizing it I could improve my conversion.

Though this is a short post, I do plan on talking more about Affiliate Marketing down the line. Right now this is more of a hobby for me. While you have some time I would highly suggest reading UberAffiliate.com. It’s a great blog about affiliate marketing and it is where I learnt a lot of what I am using now.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments »