Trev 3.0

**UPDATE** April 30, 2008 – Updated news on LinkValu **UPDATE**

The other day out of the blue I received a call from Debi Rabin over at LinkValu.  As soon as I heard the words "LinkValu" I was quite stunned to be honest.  What stunned me even more was that Debi started the conversation off by apologizing for how I was mistreated by my previous contact from LinkValu.  She went on to explain how LinkValu made some personnel adjustments and that a big part of the problem was misunderstandings and miscommunication.  Either way, Debi apologized repeatedly, and persuaded me into giving them another shot.  I haven’t had any time to personally test out any offers yet, but if you have any sort of traffic related to insurance/life insurance LinkValu definitely has some good offers you should test out. Debi went over a lot of their offers with me over the phone and was really happy to help me get a roll on things.

So if you read my initial post, and were biased towards hating linkvalu.  I urge you to give them a chance.  They may not be so bad after all.  As soon as I get some spare time I will certainly be giving a few of their offers a shot.

It takes more guts to call someone up and apologize for something, especially when it wasn’t you that caused the problem.  I would have to say Debi did a great job of contacting me politely and respectfully and doing whatever she could to help make up for the problem that had occurred.

** END OF UPDATE **

While I was in Vegas at Affiliate Summit West I ran across a lot of people and companies wanting me to come check out their networks or hoping I could get them traffic.  One of these companies was LinkValu.  When I got home I went to the network, signed up, waited for my call to confirm the account.  Note that I have never ever been denied from any network and I am in A LOT.

So I get a call a couple hours ago from a friend asking me if I have ever heard of LinkValu.  I said no other than the fact that I had just signed up a few days ago to check them out.  He was telling me how they called him up and just made no sense, treated him like shit, then denied him.  Ok…whatever….certainly not a good way to do business but that’s their choice, doesn’t mean they treat everyone that way.

I am not kidding you within 15 minutes of my friend telling me about this situation…I get a call from LinkValu.  I don’t remember who I was talking to but he starts off telling me he is from LinkValu.  Asks me how I plan on sending traffic.  I explained I would be sending almost all of my traffic through PPC.  He then starts explaining how they have these insurance offers and that they only make a couple sales a year…yada yada…..I mentioned that I already run a couple different insurance offers so I’m familiar with that sort of traffic.  I don’t think he even quit listening to his own voice to hear me say a word because I certainly wasn’t acknowledged.  Next he asks me how much I spend monthly informing me that they only deal with people who spend over $20,000 a month in ad costs.  I told the linkvalu loser that I did around $200 a day which was only $6000 a month.  He stuttered a bit then said "actually that doesn’t come out that high in my calculations".  Come on dude, $200 x 30 = $6000.  That is a very simple formula.  Now as if all of this wasn’t just stupid enough….the guy than says.  Well we don’t generally accept blogs either.  Are you serious?????  I JUST GOT DONE TELLING YOU I SEND ALL MY TRAFFIC THROUGH PPC! 

Anyways, I didn’t feel like wasting my time arguing with some network I had never heard anything about so I told him to please disregard my application because I no longer wanted to join their network and I hung up on him.

There are many things to be said here.  First of all, if they can’t treat the average person with a little bit of dignity, how do you think this network will treat you when you are their affiliate?  I guarantee the first time a problem arises you will be taking it in the ass…not them.  Second of all…..when are people going to figure out it isn’t about your ad costs.  I can either a) lie about what i spend a month or b) actually be effective at what I do being able to maximize profits while keeping my ad costs extremely low.  It just goes to show how little some of these networks really know.

Linkvalu is definitely voted the worst Affiliate network of 2008!  Congratulations guys!

Well I have been told I shouldn’t blog about this however I think its so simple and so basic if your not using this technique than you should be brought in on this easy method for these high PR backlinks even though I am not really to sure what exactly PR is good for?….other than bragging rights.

EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!!! GET YOUR SUPER EASY HIGH PR BACKLINKS RIGHT NOW!!!

1. First of all go to digg.com and do a quick search for posts related to your article or niche or whatever you are linking to.
2. Select the option where you can choose how old of articles to view.  Find any articles over 1 year old and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a ton of pages with very high PR.
3. Post a related comment (preferably with good content) on the digg page you just found with a backlink back to your site.

Of course this can be extremely abused so please don’t go do that.  It won’t get you anywhere and the search engines will just find a way to punish you in the long run.  So to prevent yourself from trouble in the future, make sure to not go at this from a spammy side.  You have got to post somewhat of a content and not just straight up post your backlinks.

I had people asking me for SIMPLE seo tricks so there you go!

I spent a lot of my day setting up campaigns in a couple different contextual networks.  I have found that it is very very simple to setup a campaign in the networks I have used.  All I have to do is copy and paste my keywords over then give my link.  ANYONE can do this sort of stuff.  Makes me wonder why it isn’t being exploited harder if this traffic source is really this easy…

Unlike most of the PPC engines however, you won’t start seeing traffic instantly.  I am waiting for a call back from Media Traffic to confirm my account.  Since I was in the mood to actually get some traffic flowing, I went over to Adonnetwork and started an account there.  I was auto accepted, however all of my campaigns are waiting to be authorized.  Once authorized they will go live and I will be able to see if all the hype on adware traffic is really valid or if it’s just hype.

I was hoping to get you all a post with some sort of information on the quality of the traffic from this source, but instead looks like you will have to wait another day or two.  While your waiting for the next post on my road to contextual traffic, why not comment here with any decent networks you may use already…

I have for a long time now used Keyword Discovery’s free search tool for most of my keyword research.  I took a decent break there for awhile and hadn’t thrown up any campaigns for awhile.  The other day though when I went to search for some certain keyword phrases I found the tool displaying this on many of the terms I was searching for: Search error: This search function requires a KeywordDiscovery subscription.

I didn’t really dig in depth to find out what all triggered that message instead of search results to be displayed, but I did find that if you search for anything .com it will display it.  I have started looking around for my new #1 free keyword research tool.  I know there are tons out there but so many are just junk that are more inaccurate than accurate.

If anyone has any suggestions on what to use please pass along your expertise.  Who knows maybe I will have to belly up for Keyword Discovery’s $70 a month charges to test out their actual pay service.  If its worth it and will help me increase my revenue, I will gladly pay that monthly fee.

I have been seeing a lot of information on adware traffic lately from friends, super affiliates, gurus, and more recently, a few booths at Affiliate Summit. 

I was always under the understanding that this was just a phase or something over hyped.  I think I am finally realizing however, this this may be completely opposite.  I think this may be one of those opportunities for extremely easy-to-get cheap targeted traffic…much like PPC was back in the day.

I have been going over as much material as I can find on this over the weekend and will be pumping out some tests here this week.  It looks as if this will run very similar to PPC so will be very easy to switch over any profitable campaigns.  One nice thing is that there are no actual ads to be written, so it should take much less time to actually put up campaigns.  I can basically just take most of my converting keywords from my PPC campaigns, expand them a bit, and be ready to start firing traffic away.

Some of the networks I have heard decent reviews from are Zango.com, MediaTraffic.com, and Adonnetwork.com so I am probably going to start off testing these networks.  I have heard that zango is a bit pricier, but as I have found many times before, that isn’t always a bad thing.  I stopped by Media Traffic’s booth out at Affiliate Summit West and had a decent talk with one of the representatives.  They certainly helped answer a few of the questions I had so I figure I might as well make sure to give them a shot.  Adonnetwork is supposed to have some of the cheapest bids around so I also thought I should make sure to put these guys to the test.  Hopefully I will be able to report back amazing results to all of you.

I think this source of traffic is very powerful right now and will be one of the things that turns my days into 5 figure ones   Stay tuned this next week to read about all of my tests results.  This should be some good stuff.  If any of you have any experience with this type of traffic, please comment and let me know your experience with it so far.

Well I thought I wasn’t going to be able to make it out to Affiliate Summit in Vegas but plans have changed and I just booked my flight!!!  I leave in a few hours and can’t wait its going to be great.  I really hope to meet up with some great people and hopefully make some connections I didn’t have before!

If anyone sees this and is going to be out in Vegas over the 24th-28th get ahold of me,  I’ll be staying at Planet Hollywood.  If you don’t know my number, just pop me an email or send me a message through my contact form and I will get back to you asap.

In case I am to busy to make my daily posts I’m sorry…but I will make it up to you all later!

A while back, I had a friend read over an important email I had written.  He came back at me suggesting something I had surprisingly never heard of.  He explained the reasoning behind why I should do it and it made complete sense to me.  After trying this secret trick out, I noticed a MUCH better response rate to my emails…

Now that was quite some time back, but I ran across this exact information again from a gentleman named Robert Cialdini and wanted to pass it on since I think it is valuable information:

Principle 4 : Consistency
Commitment and consistency.
In restaurants, they have problems with people that make a reservation then don’t show up.

Solution :
Change
"Please call if you have to cancel your reservation"
TO
"Will you please call if you have to cancel your reservation ?"
–> You are now asking for commitment

Public commitment is strong < written commitement is even stronger.

Do you have any super secret simple techniques you use to persuade the mind?  Leave a comment, lets get some input flowing!

Less than 12 hours ago I posted a simple review on Affspy.com because I thought this was a very useful little tool.

Stephen, the CEO and Founder of Affspy ran across my post and emailed me a free press preview account.  I have now gotten to dig in and check this out a bit and I would like to say IT IS NICE!

This is a tool I will definitely be using regularly when working with any CPA offers.  I have been aware since the beginning that different networks have different payouts.  I have always done a great job of checking all of that out before putting an offer up.  However, I already found three offers I have up which I am not getting the highest payout thanks to my new account at Affspy.

When Stephen emailed me, he also informed me of a couple of things I wasn’t aware of, and would like to pass this on to everyone reading this.

First of all, AffSpy plans to keep its core services free for affiliates. This is not just limited to beta testers as I had previously heard and posted about in my last post.

Second, Stephen started creating AffSpy and at the time there were no other similar tools. Affspy was not intended to be a copycat of any existing service (like Affiliate Radar’s offer vault). As of right now it is the best tool available of its kind and has many unique features you can’t find anywhere else.

You can check out Affspy’s press release at affspy.com/blog for any new information.

Well my last post brought up how you could use Affiliate Radar to get the Yahoo import feature enabled on your account without spending the required monthly amounts.  One of the only things that I would actually use at Affiliate Radar is the offer vault that they have.  The offer vault basically goes through all of the affiliate networks and finds the highest payout for whatever offer you are looking for.  This is a GREAT help since most of the networks have quite a bit different payout rates.  The only downfall to this is that Affiliate Radar is a fairly spendy service and I certainly don’t want to pay whatever monthly fee they charge for something I can take an extra couple of minutes to accomplish myself.

Here is where Affspy.com comes to save the day.  They have started a service that does exactly what offer vault from Affiliate Radar does, except that is what Affspy’s main focus is….finding the best offer out of all the networks.  The best thing is that right now if you sign up for the beta testing its free.  I don’t know the owners of this site and am not promoting it in any way, I just think it is a very useful little free tool.

If you know of any other sites or programs that can do this leave a comment and share the love.

Here is a simple little tip that will probably come in handy for a lot of you.

Not to long ago I posted about how Yahoo had disabled the use of question marks in their ads.  I had tested using the question marks in FireFox and in Internet explorer and the same thing happened in both browsers, the question mark simply disappears right after you enter it.

Welllll after discussing this with a good friend of mine we discovered that you actually CAN still use question marks in your ad, but ONLY if you import your campaigns.  I believe to have the import feature in your YSM account you have to spend over $300 a month for 3 consecutive months.  I also heard that this $300 amount may have risen to $500 more recently. 

This may be a problem for anyone just starting out.

I do know of a "loophole" to this if you are really desperate to get the import feature on your yahoo account.  If you sign up to Affiliate Radar they have worked out a deal with Yahoo to enable the import feature of your account, since it is needed to use Affiliate Radar properly.

I don’t know what it costs a month probably at least $50 bucks, but maybe you could signup, get the import feature from Yahoo, then either use your account if you like it, or just cancel it if it really doesn’t suit your needs.