Ian Fernando » Interviews

Interview: What Runs Where on the Internet

Ian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:51:18 +0000

Please Introduce yourself and what you do for WhatRunsWhere?

My name is Max Teitelbaum and I’m one of the guys over at WhatRunsWhere.com. I’m the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer (COO and CMO) currently.

Have you done affiliate marketing prior to creating WhatRunsWhere? If so, what have you done in the past?

I’ve been in the industry for about 5 years, I was a independent affiliate for around four and a half years before I decided to start working on my own software products as well as investing into various other companies inthe space.

With Traffic, is Display the Best source for traffic and Why?

Display is one of the riskiest but best sources of traffic. It has the least restrictions and the most scale in terms of how quickly you can ramp up. I’ve been buying display traffic for most of my career online and have found it’s easier to do than search (no fear of google slapping you), and there’s a ton of niche sites/networks that can provide huge ROIs if you spend the time to test them. At the same time, it’s not too friendly to newcomers or people that don’t know what they’re doing, you can loose a lot of money quickly without the proper risk management techniques (like frequency capping / budget capping) so be aware before you start!

How did you come about in creating WhatRunsWhere?

Mike, the founder of WhatRunsWhere actually built all of the software. I just add another pretty face and actually take care of all the marketing and sales of the product as well as the vision for the company/product going forwards.

Why do you think a tool like your is important to our industry?

We offer insight into an previously “dark” space of the industry, one that had no clear way to easily see what was happening in it. We offer more data than anyone else on the display side, not just on banner ads but ontext networks like Adsonar and Pulse360 too.

How much data and what kind of data do you gather for your users?

We gather more data than any other similar service. We gather data on both banner and text ads including who’s running it, where it came from (what placement), how long it’s been running, all the traffic sources they used (we identify them for you), all the other domains the person owns and a bunch of other cool metrics too.

How does it compare to others? We are seeing more and more display spy tools out there now.

I obviously feel we’re the best at what we do, and I think our users agree. We provide a level of insight and scale that other have a hard time matching. We also listen to our users, are fast on support and are constantly improving/building new features into the product to make their lives easier and their marketing more profitable.

What do we expect to see in the near future for WhatRunsWhere?

More scale (more ad networks being classified, the number of sites we crawl being increased and the speed of our database significantly improving), and a bunch of new features (I can’t really say anything about them publically but they’re coming and are REALLY useful/cool). We have a lot of stuff “cooking” back in the lab, so keep your eyes peeled!

–> Check out What Runs Where and Spy on your Competitors.

Outsourcing Your Online Business and How to Start

Ian — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:10:47 +0000

Outsourcing, it is a necessary business move to increase your productivity. I have been outsourcing a lot of work from programming, site maintenance, content, copy, articles, graphics, etc – you name it I probably outsourced it. These tasks were worked on a per project basis, meaning I paid per the completion of the task.

Recently, I have hired 2 VAs from the Philippines to help with SEO work, which is very tedious on one person. When I hired 2 full time Filipinos, I was trying to find a new way to manage them and communicate with them. I wanted to make sure my VA’s were working diligently. While I was searching for content, I stumbled on Tyrone Shum’s blog.

His blog talked about outsourcing and how he is making money with outsourcing – giving his full business responsibilities to workers in the Philippines. I went through his blog and even his Mass Outsource course, there was a lot of information from utilizing a free video recording system to task management tools.

I decided to contact him and see if he would like to have a conversation with me about outsourcing. This would be a great way to get an experts perspective from a person starting to utilize full time outsourcers (me). Since I only outsourced work on a per project basis in the past, I didn’t really have to give rpeated tasks everyday or up keep with the VAs on a daily basis. Having a team that is full time, there is a lot ofmanaging and communication that needs to be done.

One aspect is the time difference from New Jersey to the Philippines. Tyrone and I talked about how to manage this time difference and how to work with both parties with ease. It was one of the troubling things I had because I didn’t know if my VAs had questions or if they were doing work.

Another discussion we dive right into is the big difference between Filipino workers and VAs from India. Personally, I have outsourced work in the past to India and I always never get good results. Everything had to be step by step and very descriptive, they can not think on their own. The most annoying part is they do not like asking questions if they are stuck and rush their work to get onto the next client.

So far with my Filipino workers, they ask questions when stuck and provide daily and weekly reports. They do not rush and take the time to learn and understand, the best part is they can think on their own and even suggests alternative strategies!

After the main conversation, I asked Tyrone to talk about his Mass Outsource, which I think is a great piece of material for beginners when starting to outsource their business. I watched every video and took some great tips along with it.

Listen to this podcast, it is an amazing piece of content. If you are thinking about outsourcing work, listen to the conversation me and Tyrone have. It gives a lot of perspective from how I started to where I am at now. This way you know where to start and how to start finding the best VAs to work for you and grow your business.

Eric Itzkowitz on SEO and Link Building

Ian — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:16:45 +0000

Since I have been doing some SEO, I thought it would be great to get someone that I see as a mentor to me when it came to SEO. I met this person at DK’s ThinkTank, a valuable and small tight group of entrepreneurs that get together to just network and have fun. Eric Itzkowitz, is the person I met that has been adding a lot of great insights to my SEO efforts.

Eric has been in the organic search for 10 years and works on the merchant side of the affiliate industry. He also manage affiliate programs and ppc campaigns for merchants looking to expand their presence online. Although his strengths is organic and I found that out at ThinkTank.

photo by Tim Ash

I believe our discussions started going when we both introduce each other to our business. Ofcourse we were total opposite because of the type of traffic and we both paid interests into how each other gets traffic.

I have been wanting to do more SEO, but I just find it time consuming and it was not until recently where I started heavily digging into it and actually doing it. Even though I am not doing it physically, I am giving a blueprint to my VAs and thy do the work that is, I think time consuming.

After ThinkTank we kept in touch, as I did with most of the attendee of ThinkTank. When I actually started learning, researching, and doing SEO – I gave Eric a call to get a foundation. Ever since I kept in contact and we exchange ideas and see how can help each other in our businesses.

One Eric told me is his tracking plugin for WordPress. Think about Prosper202 for WordPress, without the spy view. It is actually very useful, especially if you are using WordPress as your landing page or if you use WordPress as a mini site. If you think Prosper202 is too complicated, then grab PPC Keyword Tracker for WordPress – it’s Free and it is simple and easy to use.

Anyways, since jumping into SEO I always have questions about links, directories, automation, testing, etc.

So, I decided why not get on a call and have a conversation about SEO to share with my readers. I did just that and we had alengthy conversation, 45 minutes about SEO. Since I come from a paid traffic side, SEO is definitely brand new to me and so far there are a lot of people that has helped me understand how it works.

In today’s podcast we talk about…

Automation – the good and bad
Content Spinning – Why the Internet is all spun content
Gov, Edu, Org backlinks
Getting Backlinks and where and how
Google, Yahoo, or Bing
Longevity of Organic Search
… plus many more

The podcast is 45 minutes but has a lot of good information especially if you are new to SEO. So listen in and just let it play in the background. Enjoy!

Interview: AffExpert and the NEW POF Spy Tool

Ian — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:02:26 +0000

There are so many tools online to help with your affiliate business. One tool that I found really impressive lately is Affexpert. Besmir has recently launched a POF tool which allows you to spy on it’s competitors. Honestly this is one amazing tool to help you figure out what ads are on POF and which is converting better than others. It beats trial and error because you let others do the work for you!

So I decided to get Besmir to do an interview on my blog. He will talk about AffExpert and the new POF tool. I have been using AffExpert for quite sometime and it has definitely grown since it first came out.

There are many tools out there to help affiliates do their work easier and far better, but which one is the best. I personally use and buy a lot of tools from keyword research to scrapers. There is just a lot of tools to be used to help better your business. Besmir from AffExpert will explain his tools and what it can do to your business.

1. Besmir, can you introduce yourself to my readers and what you do in the online world?

I’m a 24 year old internet marketer that lives in Florence, Italy. I have been making a living online for the past 4 years. However , I’ve became much more serious the last two years doing affiliate marketing, after I realized that there was serious money to be made promoting cpa offers.

2. I have your tools which is AffExpert.com, can you explain what the website is about?

The website is a big collection of the tools that I use personally to create my campaigns. Basically each tool automates a task that has to be done by hand during campaign creation and generally takes away lots of time and is really boring (think of scraping 100 urls by hand then checking the Alexa rank of each one and so on )

3. Why do you think affiliates need these sets of tools to better their affiliate income?

I think affiliate marketing is a numbers game. In the end it’s all about collecting data , studying demographics, testing and automating repetitive tasks. Odds are that the one who has launched the most campaigns and tested the most will make more money than the rest. And since the time you can spend working on your campaigns is limited , the person that automates the most has much more chances of earning money.

Sure , you can do all these things manually and gather the same data, but you would lose days to launch just a single campaign while your competition would have launched 10 using these tools.

4. Why are you creating these tools for affiliates and not using it on your own campaigns to be more profitable?

Well, I use these tools every day when launching my own campaigns, and making them available to the public does not affect in any way my campaigns , so why not? This way both me and the users benefit from the tools , it’s a win win situation.

5. You have contacted me about your tools and in the beginning it was a free access tool, why did you decide to make it free in the beginning?

It was free in the beginning because it was in beta , so I wouldn’t feel good selling tools that maybe had bugs and didn’t work as expected. After 6 months , after ironing all the bugs out and getting feedback from the users , I was sure I was launching a solid and tested set of tools , worth the price tag they have.

6. I noticed that your tools are not for PPV specifically but it also includes several other tools for several other traffic sources. Is AffExpert more of a one stop shop for affiliate tools? Or is it more concentrated in PPV?

Yes you are right. The site was started as a set of PPV tools. However, as I’ve said before , the tools were created for my own use at the beginning , and at the time I was doing mainly PPV. After some time I started mangling with PPC and social ads , and being the automation junkie that I am , I created specific tools for these platforms too. During this time AffExpert evolved into more like a one stop shop for affiliate tools. We offer PPV , PPC , Social ads and several other tools under one roof. Also, I am constantly adding new ones , and even encourage my users to suggest me what they need. Odds are that I can fulfill most of their requests in one week.

7. There are several other tool sites out there. how do your tools compare to the other ones out there.

To be honest , before creating my tools , I was using the services that other sites offered. However I always had the feeling that there were many important pieces missing there. So I just created everything from scratch the way I wanted the tools to be.

At the moment , I can just say that we have 23 different tools for PPV , PPC and Social Ads and more than half of them aren’t found in any other site I know. Just to make a few examples, no other site offers a self hosted weighted url rotator , a pof spy tool , a ppc spy tool , a similar domains finder , automatic keyword grouper and so on . So , in my opinion , the difference with the other similar sites is just huge.

8. AffExpert is a membership service, is any data being recorded per member as they do their research within AffExpert?

Absolutely not! I think of Affexpert as a real business and we are here to stay for a long long time. That would never be possible if we are not completely transparent with our users. Also , with the number of users on the site , it would be impossible to monitor the thousands of urls every user scrapes every day . I’ve got better things to do .

9. Do you think POF is the new Facebook?

Definitively! For affiliates POF is really a gift from heaven. They are affiliate friendly , they have tons of targeting options and if you ask why your ads were disapproved you will not get the usual automated response facebook gives you. They also have a presence in the industry forums and even a really valuable blog.

So yes , there is a lot of potential in POF right now.

10. I notice you have a POF tool. POF is getting popular lately, how effective is this specific tool and why is it important?

I think the best way to master a traffic source is to see what are others doing and improve on it. Attention , not copy , but get an idea and improve. Cloning a campaign will get you nowhere. But if you are smart enough to understand what’s working and build from there , you will make money. In POF for example , by using my tool , I discovered that niche dating offers do really well . So that gave me some good ideas of what I could do to get a profitable campaign. That’s what the tool does. It collects ads from different accounts and sorts them on the number of days seen. The more days you see an ad , more are the odds that the person that runs it is making money. Based on the data you now have , you can analyze the elements that make that ad successful and use these elements to your advantage.

11. Is understanding the POF demographics really important? Everyone on POF are single.

Yes, one of the main advantages of the POF platform is the variety of targeting options they offer. To benefit from these options you must really know the demographics you are trying to sell to. You can’t expect to throw a dating ad to all males 18+ and make money. So , to help with this , I’ve added a tool that shows you the demographics interested in the keywords you enter. These data are taken directly from POF , so you can bet they are pretty accurate.

12. AffExpert is growing, what can we expect in the near future for AffExpert?

Yes , Affexpert is always changing and you can expect the latest cutting edge tools. I always release new tools and fixes once or twice a month so the site is always fresh. For the future ( near future ) I have a few other tools on the works that will make your job much easier when promoting certain types of offers ( I can’t give much details , sorry ). Also , I am planning to add some SEO tools , so Affexpert will be the real one stop shop site for affiliate tools.

Closing…

I use AffExpert because it has some great tools! Now with the POF spy tool, it just keeps getting better and better.

Interview: Super Affiliate Twin – Ryan Gray

Ian — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:12:24 +0000

Busy week and pretty stressful one as well, but I don’t want to carry that on to you guys because I have an interview I did with Ryan one of the bloggers from the Super Affiliate Twins blog. It definitely has been a minute since I did a podcast on here and I thought it would be interesting to talk to Ryan about how he got in the business and where he thinks the affiliate industry is going.

We also go into discussion about his new service, Internet Marketing University. There are so many new get help forums in the make money space, more so in the Affiliate space that I thought it would be a good idea to talk how his differentiates among the rest.

Not only do we really dive into what the twins are doing and their history, they have input about the industry and how to run a business online. We discussed about the Acai offers that made people greedy and why we need to adapt to change.

More about Ryan and the Super Affiliate Twins

Clickbooth Catches Me on Camera

Ian — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:30:42 +0000

In January I went and visited the Clickbooth campus. It was a great time hanging out with Eric and my Brittany. Besides taking my acting skills to a whole new level, Eric pulled me aside and we had a great conversation about out industry.

Another great part while I was in Sarasota, FL was the nice scenery. Eric took me out to lunch that day and I got to see some great places and beaches. One of the best part was seeing the night life… If you watch the video to the end you will see that Clickbooth got me on camera without me knowing…

…but I cleared the floor… literally… watch below

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other IANterviews on the IANternet…

MediaTrust – I tell it how it is…
“both sides of the tracks” – PPV and Outsourcing
I haz great acting skills – Clickbooth New Office

FIRST! … at the NEW Clickbooth Campus

Ian — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:11:29 +0000

When I visited Eric at the Clickbooth office, I was invited to get a sneak peak of the brand new campus. It was a crazy day of just having fun an a brand new building. It had that new building smell to it. The unique part is the fact they have two big buildings. It was a nice day in Sarasota that we decided to do a Youtube Hollywood clip.

Below is the video we did at the new building. It took months to prep up for this part and a lot of acting practice. But I think I held it down and I did my thing. I am hoping to appear at the Grammy’s next year for “Best Affiliate Actor”.

Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Interview: Wes Mahler and the New Vision of 202

Ian — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:25:40 +0000

The past couple days I was hanging out with Wes Mahler, Tracking202 team, and BlooSky. As you know BlooSky acquired tracking202. The ideas between Wes and Bloosky owners are some great visions which I do want to see in affect. Expect some big changes in the prosper202 platform and how meetup202 are being organized. The vision they see are very powerful and Bloosky took advantage of what Wes has already done within the affiliate industry.

Well why all this change? Wes and his Tracking202 team has done a great job at creating such a platform, that I bet a good amount of affiliates has or is using Tracking202/Prosper202. So I had a chance to grab Wes and talk about the merge and the branding behind tracking202 with Bloosky.

We go in-depth about a couple things but also kept it pretty general. Watch the video below…

Click here to view the embedded video.

So congrats to Wes Mahler and his Tracking202 team, they definitely came a long way in 2 years since the development of his tracking platform. Congrats again brother!

Interview with Glenn from Unique Leads

Ian — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:18:15 +0000

Its been while since I did a podcast, so I decided to do one.

…I just got off the phone with the VP of Unique Leads, Glenn Pagan. We discuss the after affect of ad tech and as well as their network and how they differentiate themselves from others. We discuss international traffic and how lucrative the market is overseas versus domestic.

All in all it was a great interview… If you do not know Glenn you should I interviewed him a while back about the changes our industry is having. Now with more information and a love for our industry he comes back with more information.

Unique Leads is currently having a contest where they are going to fly out an affiliate to the Affiliate Convention in LA. Now I have been to LA and LA is super nice! I personally havent been to the Affiliate Convention but I did hear a lot of good news about it from its first one in Denver.

You can easily win a trip to the Affiliate Convention, find out more about this contest.

Listen to our call and let us know what you think.

MediaTrust: All About the FTC and More…

Ian — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:49:43 +0000

This is the last of the video series that I have been posting up in the past few days. This one is a pretty lengthy one and a really good video I think in my opinion. I got a chance to talk to Lauren from MediaTrust about the issues that has been going around the affiliate marketing industry about the blog style designs, using celebrity images, ftc laws, and all that good stuff.

I think I asked too many questions about the FTC to Lauren that she started turning red as the video progresses, but she held her own. The video is 10 minutes long, so I hope you are able to watch it that long, it does have a lot of good info. Lauren definitely gave a lot of information and was willing to share the information with me and my readers.

Again, I want to thank Peter and the whole MediaTrust team for having me at their office and hope to come visit once more!

That is it with the video series that I have been posting in the past couple days and I hope they were all informative. If you missed any, you can check the rest via my YoutTube Channel.