Matt Marcin - Incentive Marketing

Zip Codes for Marketing

So I was reading through some of John Volks past posts and saw one about a free zip code database. I thought to myself that it would be useful when building keyword lists and to help out with goofy stuff like form auto completion.

Apparently it’s not totally free now but if you make a blog post about it you can get it for price of free.

So how can zip codes help? I could see it being useful if you wanted to build some keyword lists for dating offers. Could also be useful to make sure the user isn’t using bogus information when he signs up for your site. You can compare zip to their entered city and slap them around a bit for lying.

I figured it would be good to have regardless and I’m sure I can find a use for it.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 3 Comments »

ASE was a blast!

I’m glad I got myself to attend ASE because it was an amazing few days of meeting people, having fun and eating great meals. I wanted to thank Advaliant, Azoogle and CPAStorm for taking me at out for dinner and Advaliant again for the awesome fishing trip!

On the Saturday before the show Advaliant had me come along on their fishing trip with about 50 other people. Having never met anyone in this industry face to face it was a great experience to finally get to put faces to the names. After the fishing we went and ate at the Merrimack Grille north of Boston.

Sunday was the Meet Market. I saw some familiar faces from the fishing trip and got to meet some people that I’ve talk to alot online like Wes from Prosper202. The Meet Market was really crowded and noisy and I don’t feel like I got all that much accomplished there besides hearing 50, 15 second pitches. For dinner I went out with my Azoogle AM, Adam, the Azoogle crew and Jonathan Volk to Stella in downtown Boston. I’ve never eaten so well haha.

Monday was the actual exhibit and was actually a lot of fun. I got to meet up with a bunch of of affiliate managers and people that I had been doing things with for nearly a year. Hung out there for a few hours and then had dinner at Grille 23 with Rick and Nicholas from CPAStorm and the owners of a large incentive site network. Ate real well and it was great to talk to another guy doing incentives.

Since I live only 45 minutes from Boston and had gotten everything I needed done I decided to not go on Tuesday. In hindsight, I wish I had but I had some other things to do that day.

Thanks again to everyone that took me out to dinner! Overall ASE was a blast and I can’t wait till the one in Vegas.

As for incentive marketing, I’ve got a blog post coming with a bunch of tips and tricks and how users behave that should be going up within a week or so. It might be delayed though because I’m moving into my new apartment on Wednesday.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments »

ASE in a few days!

So this summer I took an extended break from the internet work world and am now back. Over the past couple of months I’ve just been relaxing and exploring new potential ideas I could work on when I went back to school in the fall and I’m delighted to say that I’ve got some nifty stuff to share.

Aside from that, who else is going to ASE? I just got everything in order for it and am excited to be there next week to meet the people that I’ve been working with for 6 months. If you’re headed to ASE and want to meet up and chat let me know. I’ll also be going on the Advaliant Fishing trip and I hope to see some of you there as-well.

Easiest way to get in touch with me would be twitter. See you guys in a few days!

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment »

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 | 18 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 | 6 Comments »

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 | 1 Comment »

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 | 4 Comments »

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 | 3 Comments »