The presentation was really good from a speaking point of view. The speaker, CK was an amazing speaker and presenter. You can tell she has been doing this for a while, visit her blog here. The information was very informative but nothing new to my own experience since I have been doing mobile advertising for quite sometime.

You can vie the slide below:

I want to talk about QR codes. They are these 2d bar codes which holds information. These became popular, I assume with blackberry users. Scanning each others barcode for their pin to start BBM (black berry messenger). I started using barcode for the past couple months, infact my new business card will have a barcode on it.

If you were at Affiliate Summit West, you will have noticed multiple booths and vendors using and utilizing these barcodes. These bar codes hold information from your pone number, website, text, etc. The purpose of these barcodes it to give quick access to information. I have started using this on my other sites and it does increase engagement and even conversions.

Scan Me:

For example to the left is my personal QR barcode. To view what is behind this data you simple scan it with a mobile barcode scanner app. I have an iPhone so you can use apps such as the ATT Scanner or any barcode scanner application will work.

It will then provide you with a website, which then provides you with my contact information. It is a quick way to get all my information on your phone. This way you can contact me with just a point and click.

These little barcodes help with user engagement and conversions because it is a sense of completion. It takes time to take out your phone, opening your app, and scan a barcode. If there is a reward at the end they will then in turn follow through.

It is similar to doing landing pages with polls or quizzes. The end user wants to know what their score is or how their vote has any affect, so the end user will want to follow through all the way. “I did this much work already” symptom.

I have been using these QR codes for mobile marketing in a sense to engage users from website to their phone and obviously back online. I have it on a specific Fan Page for a niche vertical and I also have it on my health blog.

The best part is QR codes act like a link cloaker for affiliate links. Not essentially but if you have a branded URL shorting service the users will follow through to the site. The barcode above uses a service called JumpScan to provide users with my contact information. I am playing with it and find it to be very easy to use, I may change it to have it on my own server and maybe on a sub domain.

In any case, JumpScan provides you with a QR barcode and a page to your contact information. This provided very handy at the seminar the other day because I didn’t bring business cards. I pulled out my image of my QR code and the speaker and users scanned my barcode to get my contact information.

QR codes is not readily adoptive just yet, even though billions of users use mobile phones – not everyone is adoptive to these barcodes just yet. It does take time to open an app to scan. There has to be some type of incentive to actually get the user to act on the barcode, like a game or reward etc. I have been playing with these code with some campaigns and there isn’t big volume for it, there needs to be a purpose for a barcode.

Enjoy the slide!

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3. Couch Classroom Part 3: First Set Done!

This is why I am moving into the CPS side of things, cost per sale, because physical items rarely get removed from the merchant site. If it is discontinued, you can most likely still sell the item. Where with CPL/CPA offers die every week and you have to watch for that and look at your network emails to make sure your offer is still alive.

With the start of the New Year, my SEO efforts kinda paid off. I made roughly $100 dollars my first couple months. This is a combination of Clickbank Products, ShareaSale Merchants, LinkShare, and Amazon products. SO it is possible to make money with CPS but not in the huge amount of volume that I wanted. SEO is had and a pain. With paid traffic I can at least test quality of traffic, with SEO it is hard to test what works and what doesn’t because you don’t have the volume right away.

With paid traffic I can test demographics, keywords, time of day, position of ads, wording of copy, landing page, etc. SEO you really can’t test anything unless you have volume. The volume with SEO slowly grows, so testing can be a pain. I think the goal with search traffic is HUGE volume in any possible way.

Luckily, I have my own set of employees which I outsource the tasks to. My VA does the tedious tasks of SEO which is basically everything that you have to do with SEO. SEO is time consuming because it includes backlinking, content creation, keyword research, bookmarking, link building, etc. These tasks are boring and repetitive. So I hired a VA to help with this.

I also had the help of several people who taught me some tactics about SEO. One forum I want to thank is Clint and Chris Affiliit forum. I was able to get input on tools, programs, and tactics on how to do SEO the right way. I received feedback on the tools I mentioned and how to utilize bookmarking to my advantage.

They definitely gave me some good feedback as well as the community. Another amazing community is “The Church of SEO” this is a closed group within Facebook that share thoughts and feedback on SEO as well. Really amazing guys within the community and great feedback on noobie questions from me especially.

As I start my journey in SEO, I am going to be doing these videos. I have done it in the past with my PPC and paid traffic, so why not SEO. Make sure to subscribe to my RSS and stay updated on my journey into the SEO and CPS space.

Here is a quick video of what I basically just said.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See everyone at Affiliate Summit West in a couple Days!

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Hey guys,

First I just want to thank Ian for allowing me to guest post on his blog.

So, what I want to cover today is something that has helped me make some great headway in my marketing endeavors over the past year. Originally I was all about AdWords and Facebook, and for a while I was spending anywhere from $30K to $35K per month on AdWords alone. This is an awesome way to have all your eggs in one basket, and an unstable basket at that.

Well, probably like many reading this I had a couple AdWords accounts banned and my revenue slowed considerably. I’ve been fortunate to have tried and succeeded with a few different traffic sources since then, but the one that has consistently generated my best ROI since then has been direct to site banner buys. I started out with smaller flat rate buys then eventually graduated to larger CPM buys with higher minimums.

In today’s post, I want to talk about the process I use when finding and negotiating small flat rate buys. These have a really low barrier of entry for anyone interested in eventually getting into display buying.

So no, this post might not be as exciting to those expecting to spend 5 figures per day direct to site, but you got to start somewhere.

Before getting into the process here are just a few of the advantages I find to going direct to site especially on smaller buys:

• We’ll be buying on a flat rate. Great if you want to minimize risk.
• You can get most for under $500/mth and often under $300 per month.
• Although overall revenue might be low on these, ROI for me is typically 100%-300%.
• Most small time webmasters have no clue how to monetize their sites, take advantage of this.
• It takes some digging and research, but there are an unlimited number of sites to go after.
• Far fewer restrictions than most self serve networks.
• Everything is negotiable.
• Full transparency
• Since I like to attack specific market segments, I go after sites that match my market demographic and sometimes (but not always) interests.

So let’s look at how to get going with these smaller buys, step by step:

Step 1: Know Your Market

So basic stuff here, or at least it should be basic. Too often people start with just an offer and build their business around that, I made that mistake early on. Now I focus on my market. Who are they? Where do they hang out?

Don’t think just literally here. Think in terms of demographics. So for example, could you market a fat loss product on a gardening site? Do the demographics match? Would the gardening site owner be as savvy as a fat loss site owner? It’s not always necessary to match interests.

Basically going this route, you’re finding demographic matching traffic sources, then plugging offers and monetization schemes into it.

Step 2: Finding Sites

For small direct to site buys, what I like to do is find about 20 – 30 potential target sites that fit our market demographics. You can go for less but the biggest negative about this method is that a lot of small site owners won’t get back to you. So I try to go for volume.

I look for sites getting less than 20K to 30K uniques per day if possible. Even smaller can work. One of my best small buys in terms of ROI had only 2,500 US uniques per day.

When I’m looking for larger sites to buy on, finding the sites is a similar process but with different volume requirements of course.

Here’s a few of the methods I use to find some potential target sites:

Method 1: Google Search

• Simply go to one of the Big 3 engines, preferably Google, and search for very targeted terms to your vertical. Take a look at the sites in the organic search results. This method works best if you have previous converting keywords from a search campaign.
• At this point I cross reference between Google Ad Planner, Compete.com, and Quantcast.com to find rough estimates on volume. I’ll confirm demographics on Google Ad Planner and Quantcast at this point to make sure we’re close.
• This method requires us to be targeted in terms of keywords and demographics.

Method 2: Google Ad Planner & Quantcast Planner

• I prefer Google Ad Planner over Quantcast Planner for this as it seems to give me deeper and more varied results. In Google Ad planner I’ll also search by categories for deeper results still, and I prefer to sort by “Best Composition”, which will give me lower volume sites that closer match my audience.
• Again, I’ll cross reference traffic levels in Compete.com, and Quantcast.com.
• In both Google Ad Planner, I’ll also scroll down the page of a websites profile and look at the “Audience Also Likes” section. This is audience affinity and basically the higher affinity means the visitor to one site is more likely to visit another site than the average internet user. This gives me even more site options now.

Method 3: Forums

• If I need even more site choices I’ll check out Big-Boards.com and find forums dedicated to my specific market. Keep in mind, forum traffic can be leveraged in ways other than just banners, such as sponsored forum sticky posts and member message blasts. Honestly though this is my least favorite method as it requires more rotation of creatives to keep them fresh for the forum audience.

Method 4: Previous Google Display Network Data

• If you’ve had successful campaigns on GDN and have the Prosper202 or tracking data to confirm referrers, then it’s a pretty easy play to contact these converting sites and negotiate a better deal.

Step 3: Contacting the Sites

So contacting these smaller sites can often be a challenge. They don’t have the advertising firms that larger sites have that you can deal with.

The first obvious step is just to look at the navigation or scroll down and see if there’s an “advertise” link. If there isn’t, check if there’s a contact link.

If there’s neither of these, I’ll either move on, or I’ll perform a whois look up if I really want to get on that site.

For forums, if none of the above work and you really want to get on there, post in the forum on how to get a hold of an admin or the site owner. I’ve had to do this before for a forum in GCN that was converting great for me and I wanted to cut out Google.

At that point I just send them a message, for the smaller sites it tends to sound much less “pro” than the larger sites:

———————————

“Hi there (if there is no contact name)

I was wondering if I could get some info for banner advertising on your site __________.com

I’d like to do a test buy as soon as possible.

Thanks very much,

Chad Hamzeh

———————————

This is a template I pretty much copy and paste since we are contacting so many sites. Sometimes I don’t even put their URL in the e-mail. This is a numbers game. You could even outsource this if the person knows how to select good targets. With smaller sites I usually use this more casual and personal approach.

Step 4: Deciding What to Pay

So here’s the thing. Maybe 10%-15% of these sites will actually get back to you. Sometimes more but usually the number is low, and if they do contact you they want you to name a price. At this point I confirm with them how many impressions my ad will see for the month, and I tell them that I need to buy the entire ad slot for the month or there’s no deal. This is really important, you don’t want to be rotated with other advertisers on these small deals, the impression count is lower as it is. And again, I’ll take the number they give me and cross reference it with the total page views number in Google Ad Planner, if it’s available.

Also, keep in mind the geography of the traffic, this is very important. If you’re using an ad server like AdShuffle for your tracking, then you can restrict countries, but always keep geo in mind especially if your offers are restricted to one or 2 countries.

If we have previously targeted this URL on GDN, or we decide to do so now, we can get an idea of what to pay to maintain profitability. The following was a response I got from a previously successful site on GDN:

“I normally don’t offer banner advertising outside of Adsense because I don’t want to deal with the maintenance and upkeep of client accounts, billing, and all that.

That being said, I am willing to replace the

Adsense ads on 50% of the page views, with your banner ads, for $400 a

month.

Currently I receive 130,000 unique visitors a month and over

225,000 pageviews. I will rotate a couple banners if you wish. I can cloak

the links if you want, can link to you with whatever URLs you want, and

will include tracking code if you wish….”

So, on Google Display Network this site was very profitable for me, but at a certain CPM.

So first thing I do is calculate a proposed CPM. This might be a bit of overkill for most people but it’s how I do it anyway:

Campaign Cost/page views x 1000 = CPM

$400/112500 x 1000 = CPM (112500 is 50% of his pageviews)

$3.55 = CPM

http://www.clickz.com/cpm_calculator

Then, I’m going to calculate my Max CPM based on my previous campaign data:

Payout x 1000 x CTR x Conv. Rate = Max CPM

$40 x 1000 x 0.004 x .01 = Max CPM

$40 x 1000 x 0.004 x .01 = $1.60 CPM

Finally based on that data, I’m going to calculate my Max Cost for this buy:

Max CPM/1000 x Impressions = Max Cost

$1.60/1000 x 112500 = $180

So you could see in this case, $3.55 CPM /$400 flat rate was too much based on my previous data in this case. Sometimes you can take the risk but it’s not advisable. I did it once because I let my emotions get in the way and lost about $1k on a buy. Don’t do it.

In that example I had the luxury of knowing my previous placement data from Google Display Network. If I don’t have that data and I really want to take it this far, I’ll calculate a theoretical Max CPM based on page view data, a lower CTR of 0.25%, and a conversion rate from the click of 0.5-1%. But theoretical data is just that, theoretical.

As a guideline I’m usually looking to pay what would equate to be under $1 CPM and usually under 50 cents CPM.

And finally sometimes I’ll just throw out a low ball figure of $50-100 and see the web masters reaction

Step 5…. and beyond.

I’m not going to go into banner creation and rotating/tracking right now because I think I’ve already eaten up too much of Ian’s real estate on his site. Maybe he can let me come back and continue this but for myself I started out using Prosper202 even for small direct to site buys, but rotating banners was a bit of a pain, and now I use an ad server even for small buys. Overkill, yes, but I like the control it gives me.

So that’s it for now. I hope you guys enjoyed the post and will make an attempt at this. It’s a great way to build up a portfolio of proven demographic winners that you can later take confidently to larger buys and possibly networks down the road (that’s a whole other game)

Thanks!

Chad Hamzeh

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The game is Texas Holdem and it is $100 to buy in. This is going to be a game to remember and I will be visiting the tables, right after my IANteract Dinner. I was given the name “Jersey Card Shark” and DK well is just DK. So if you are a high roller, baller, pimp stacks, etc – then sign up for the poker tourney that is happening the first night of Affiliate Summit West!

Watch the video below:

BTW, I really don’t gamble. Keywords is the game I play!

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First night was the buy.at party, a black and white event. It was cool meeting up with old friends and talking to them about business. The interesting part was they were serving some type of Oreo martini.

IANteract Dinner, this is my dinner and it was sponsored by Kitara Media. The dinner went well, had a hassle in the beginning but it turned out to be a solid networking event with some top guys and close friends. It is much easier to eat and talk about business without the music pounding against your chest.

Elite Clicks Media Private Invite was just an invitation to their suite where we just talked in a calm environment but also had all the alcohol you can drink. It was crazy, so crazy Cashtactics “taught everyone in that room everything he knows” – inside joke.

ShareaSale Party Under the Stars was hella packed and crowded. So crowded I couldn’t move. It was good that they opened up the other side of the balcony which gave room for more people to enter the party. It was still crowded though. The event was good, just because we had the outside balcony and was able to talk to everyone. Great meeting up with Dr. Ngo and Benny!

Morgan’s Affiliate Dinner Gathering was an amazing event. Good food and drinks and it was a great way for affiliates and networks to be in the same room and just BS about stuff outside the industry. Great job Morgan!

Neverblue Party started out dead, no open bar, and techno music… not really the event for me. By the time it was 10:30 it started to fill up and the DJ started to play some hip hop music. I didn’t do much but have like 2 drinks and relaxed. I just talked to some of my readers and chilled with Rohail and Kris throughout the time we were at the Neverblue Party.

Clickbooth and Pulse 360 Party did have open bar and we headed there right after the Neverblue party. I think me and Rohail were seeing how much we can drink and I apparently had a little too much that I took over the dance floor heavy. Then Eric from Clickbooth says I was up in some girl in a private room – which I really do not remember. Good times though.

There was another party upstairs with Google, but we never made it to that instead we ended up meeting a bunch of affiliates and networks at a strip club. Fun times and always looking forward to the next one.

See everyone in the West!

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This year at Affiliate Summit East in NY, I am holding another IANteract Dinner. The dinner consists of close friends and people I want get to know more within the internet space. I have had an IANteract Dinner at every Affiliate Summit, except my first. So far this dinner has proved to be beneficial to me, the people I invite, and the sponsors.

This IANteract East sponsor is Kitara Media.

This year dinner will be held at Capital Grill in NY, it is literally 2 block away fro the Hilton. I will be arriving in NY Saturday, the 14th as I have some meetings, dinners, and parties to attend pre Affiliate Summit. So I hope to see everyone there.

This dinner is going to be a smaller dinner, usually I have about 15-20 people join my dinner and we interact about business and talk about what we are up to. The industry changes so fast it is only best to see what others are up to and share insights about what others are doing and learn from what they do.

This dinner focuses on social interaction and it brings and builds stronger relationship. That is what I want. You can’t build a relationship in  club. It isn’t intimate enough to pull information or share insights, it is only good to share a business card – that is it. I started this dinner on my 2nd Affiliate Summit because I wanted to leverage others expertise and vice versa.

Everyone that comes to my dinner makes money online, it is how they do it which I want to know. I share my insights and arguments and we exchange ideas and even probably do business together later on. I am just one person doing my own methods of making money online, everyone else has their own ways and ideas.

This is a private dinner and I hope to see everyone that has RSVPed so far.

Past IANteract Dinners:

• Popping Bottles of Dom all Night
• A Massive Dinner for the Masses
• Reserved the Whole Restaurant
• My First Baller IANteract Dinner

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3. IANteract Dinner Sponsored by Paradigm Visions, Inc

Here are the videos on Youtube, there are 2 parts. I honestly didn’t know we talked for this long. It was an informative interview I can say that much. In the end Eric decided to throw in a slider and give you guys a discount. You will have to get the discount here.

So watch below it is a pretty lengthy interview, again didn’t know I was talking that long. Eric should have told me to shut my yap but instead he let me chatter away some quality information on Facebook ads.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2 below…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think I need to get a new web cam as well. Recommendations?

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I am going to breakdown their network, helping you decide if you want to run with them. I had my fair share of networks that I participated in, so I will break down this network by offers and tracking. This network is also having a network contest, which is giving up their company’s earnings for the month of July.

Read on…

First you will notice Executive Fortunes uses HasOffers as their tracking platform. I personally never had any issues with a network that ran a HasOffers platform. Looking around it seems they have about 120ish offers, more so in the diet and biz opp area. They have categories that are empty that I was looking forward to see what kind offers they had. I think that should be adjusted or just removed.

Talking to Tyler he seems like a cool dude, I personally never met him but maybe will see hm at Affiliate Summit East. One thing his networks says is a 24 hour support, which is very necessary. Personally, I always usually have my AM number and I can call them anytime.

I remember I had an issue at 1am and I called my affiliate manager to resolve the issue and followed up with me the next day. This is great because you get to tell your affiliate manager the issue and the possibility to resolve it on the spot. Most of the time most affiliate managers won’t work with you on a 24 hour basis unless you do the volume that is needed or have a strong relationship with that specific AM.

So the way this works is each publisher is assigned 2 AMs, one for the normal business hours and one for after hours. This is cool, I personally know a whole network that I can communicate with anyone and they are all able to help me. Being in a smaller network means more of a close tight relationship.

Executive Fortunes wants to make sure they have your trust and will give you the 24 hour support you deserve, not too sure how many AMs Executive Fortunes has that are participating in the 24 hour support. But having 2 AMs means you are being taken care of.

Their referral program is real interesting, it is also like being an affiliate manager but not really working for the network. Their referral program works by giving you the full profit margin earned by the publisher. They are doing this for a full year. This is a first!

…but the publisher you referred have to earn $2,000 each month to gain that full profit margin.

Executive Fortunes Contest

With the support they are having, they are also having a contest that started 2 days ago. They are raffling off the company’s July earnings to 3 publishers. That means Executive Fortunes won’t profit for the month of July, I think that is pretty cool. So they are giving away the company’s earnings to 3 publishers at random.

Executive Fortunes will also be attending Affiliate Summit East in August as well as Ad:Tech in November. So I look forward to meeting the team.

Visit Executive Fortunes

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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

Related posts:

1. FIRST! … at the NEW Clickbooth Campus
2. Sneak Peak of the Clickbooth Office: Old and New
3. Super Support at ClickBooth

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.

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