If you have been following this here blog for a while, perhaps you already know what a great time I had last year at Affiliate Summit West ‘09. I intend to do the same at the next one in January. In fact, I intend to have an even greater time, if you can believe that.

Wanna come? This year, because I’m so awesome, I have a full pass. Pretty sweet. But the fact of the matter is you don’t really need access to all of the educational sessions and all that jazz. Sure, you can learn a lot in those sessions, but an upgraded (aka more expensive) pass is required to get in. However, what makes Affiliate Summit truly great (and anyone who has been will tell you) is the networking opportunities that are nothing short of abundant. Especially if it is your first Aff Summit, all you really need is a silver pass. A silver pass gives you access to the exhibit hall (where network owners will swoon you). The exhibit hall is where the (daytime) action is. It is your duty to find out where the dang parties are each night (and I might just be able to help you with that)!

Let me go ahead and detail what a silver pass gives you access to:

• - Affiliate Meet Market & Exhibit Hall
• - Keynotes
• - Affiliate Summit Social Network

How much does this silver pass cost, you ask!? Well, if you had registered super early (before Oct 19th) it would have been $79. From now until the event, a 2010 ASW Silver Pass can be snagged for $149. And if you somehow forget to register altogether and show up like some sort of vagabond affiliate with no registration, you can get a silver pass on-site for $249.

Or….

If you’re one of the first 5 people to register using the following code: ASW10JACK (that’s my name, silly), you can get a Silver Pass for FREE! Register here at once.

Wahoo!

I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas. I’ll be the one getting his stomach pumped by a showgirl and simultaneously TwitPic-ing it.

It’s about time. My favorite registrar (as well as the favorite of anyone with any sense!) is finally offering an affiliate program. Sign up here.

The reason Namecheap is such a favorite among webmasters (in my opinion) has to do with the following:

-Free WhoIsGuard with every new domain registration

-They don’t spam the shit out of you (like a different registrar that rhymes with BlowCaddy)

-They’re cheap, as the name implies.

One thing that sort of sucks, though, is you won’t be credited for sales generated using a promo code. Also, the tracking cookie lasts for 30 days, but you’ll only receive a commission for the first sale generated by each customer (15% of it).

Speaking of coupon codes, “SNOWNEEDLE” is the one you want to use for the month of December to get the discount on new domain registrations.

That is all.

EDIT (2/22/10): Instead of reading all that crap below, why not just watch this handy dandy video about creating white label sites with Dating Gold?:

Okay so I’ll try to make this brief. This is basically a very simple (and cheap) way to get a white label dating site up and running and earning you a few bucks on the side. I’ve got a couple set up that bring in about $50-$60 a month each that I’ve been meaning to promote off-line…just haven’t got around to it. Another $60 a month won’t make you rich, but it might cover your phone bill, you ungrateful bastard. And of course it’s very scalable. Check it out…

If you are unfamiliar with how white labels work, basically you set up a site that instead of directing to affiliate offers actually facilitates the sale of a product or service. It can help increase conversions dramatically since you aren’t bouncing your visitors all over the dang internet.

Dating Gold makes this process painless. If you’re not familiar with their network, they are the ones behind Amateur Match. Using their white label system, all you have to do is register a domain, point the nameservers to the ones Dating Gold provides you with, enter Title/Description/Keyword info, upload a logo, and boom, the site is live.

Once you’ve got it up and running, you will be paid based on a 50% rev share system. Every time someone new signs up, you get 50% (currently about $15). Even better, you get 50% for the lifetime of that new member. So each month that person renews their membership, you get another $15. Of course, some cancel in the first month, but then some stick around for a year or more.

Currently, there are two types of white labels available. The first is the standard geo-targeted local dating site, and the second is a cam site. There are a few theme options available and you can also customize the color scheme. Here is an example of one:

Getting Traffic
Originally, my plan with my sites were to do a bunch of off-line promotion and see how it does. The domains I used are somewhat “local” themselves. However, after being up for just a few months, they started getting traffic. The downside is, there is currently no way to track traffic stats. I can only assume the traffic is from organic search since I haven’t promoted the site anywhere and only dropped a handful of links to them. For whatever reason, some search engines seem to like these geo-targeted white label sites.

Obviously, the title and keywords you use will have a great impact on whether or not your white label sites pull any organic traffic. I’m not going to divulge what keywords I used, but they were somewhat broad dating terms that have a reasonable (but not super high) amount of competition.

Off-Line Promotion
Considering I haven’t even conducted this test yet, I can’t really encourage you to try it, but it’s something I’m definitely planning on getting around to. Flyer drops at sex shops/strip clubs, ads in the back of shady magazines, etc. Hopefully I’ll actually get to this in Jan/Feb when dating is hot and have some interesting data to share with all of you.

Goddammit, I was supposed to keep this brief!!!

Well, finally some good news from the Ebay Partner Network. I don’t want to even talk about the upcoming shift to “Quality Click Pricing” because it’s just going to upset me. Perhaps I’ll have a future post all about optimizing your phpBay sites for the new system, but first I’m going to have to figure that out for myself!

In any event, EPN recently introduced four new programs: Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany.

Why is Germany in bold!? Well, because Germany is Ebay’s second largest market after of course the United States. This means that all sorts of untapped niches and microniches can potentially be exploited over in good old Deutschland.

Pic (sorta) related:

It also opens up some domaining opportunities if you’re thinking about registering .de domains. Although there is definitely competition in the .de domaining game, it’s nowhere near that of the .com industry. However, keep in mind that .de is the second most popular TLD in the world with an estimated six million .de domains already registered.

If you’re interested in searching for a good .de domain in any particular niche, here is what I recommend you do:

1. Determine the main keyword related to your niche
2. Use Google Language Tools to translate that word into German
3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check out how many searches that keyword and related keywords are pulling in [use exact match]
4. Snag a .de domain

Unfortunately, my most favorite registrar, Namecheap, does not offer .de registration at this time. Here are some alternatives (prices/currency conversions obviously reflect the time of this writing, don’t expect me to update this shit all the time!):

1. GoDaddy* – $17.99/yr (PayPal accepted)
2. iWantMyName.com* – $29.00/yr
3. EuroDNS* - apprx. $26.23/year (€16/yr plus €2 setup fee)
4. iDotz**- $19.95/yr
5. DomainDiscount24.com – $10.39 (€7.14)/yr
6. Joker.com – $9.16/yr
7. Europe Registry – $13.11 (€9)/yr

But I Heard You Have to Live in Germany to Register a .DE domain!?

Not the case, not the case. That myth is derived from the fact that the administrative contact on each .de domain registered must be located in Germany. Some registrars offer to act as the administrative contact on your behalf, thus circumventing this little bump in the road. However, some registrars will charge an additional fee for this (and some may not offer this service at all).

The registrars with the * listed above are the ones that include an administrative contact in Germany with your registration.

**Idotz.net will provide a German administrative contact for an additional fee.

The others either don’t offer this service or charge an additional fee (you’ll have to do your own research you bastard). Or you could just use your long lost cousin that lives in Germany as your administrative contact.

Only one I’ve used myself is GoDaddy (I know, I know). They might not be my favorite registrar but when it comes to international domains, I’d rather deal with their spammy site/terrible support and hopefully not have any further problems. Coincidentally, they’re also the only registrar listed above that I have an active affiliate relationship with. Weird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you plan on building and optimizing sites for German traffic, it’s imperative that you have the site(s) HOSTED over there. Having your international sites hosted on IPs in the countries they are targeting helps a ton for ranking on search engines specific to that country. As far as which host to use, do your dang homework. As of now I use a UK host called Nativespace for all my European e-pillaging. That’s pretty close to Germany, right!?

It has now been several months since the first wave of Ebay Partner Network slaps. Since then I’ve heard many stories of accounts being disabled, both from strangers as well as from friends of mine. Those of us who still have accounts in good standing can’t help but feel a little bit paranoid, especially with the new terms.

If you aren’t up to speed with the new changes to the EPN program, some adjustments have been made that further restrict the types of promotion allowed. One major change is that it is no longer acceptable to drop your EPN links on ANY site that you do not own and have complete control over. This includes social networking sites like Twitter as well as free blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.com. The only exception is if you obtain permission in writing from Ebay Partner Network prior to using these promotional methods.

As a precaution I’ve spent some time the past couple days disabling old links (the ones that I can) that were dropped on sites like those listed above. It’s a bit unnerving to think that although maybe only a handful of clicks are coming from these now illegitimate sites, it is still technically enough for EPN to show me the door. However…

The Bright Side

I’m not sure how exactly this works out, or if it just mere coincidence, but Google traffic on my PhpBay sites is way up. Like 110% up. Of course this is just the past week, so I’m not exactly counting on this being consistent. But I’ve talked to other phpbay site admins and I’m not the only one experiencing this phenomenon.

I’m only speculating, of course, but could it be that the high (and getting higher) barrier for entry to the EPN program as well as the harsh promotion restrictions has caused Google to attribute a little more credibility to phpbay/BANS type sites? It would make sense, since autoblogs and black hat type sites monetized via EPN are now few and far between.

After all, Steve Hartman and the folks at EPN have made it very clear that they are shifting their business model away from quantity and now trying to focus on quality. Wouldn’t it make sense that Google would make a slight algorithm tweak in response to these recent changes?

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But…maybe not.

Wisdom Nugget

Also, I’ve gotten some questions from folks asking about how I set up my phpbay sites in order to get a favorable Google ranking. That is a whole different post in itself, but I will say that I’ve seen a ton of them making the same mistake: A ton of phpbay results on the homepage.

When I first started building them, I wanted to of course get as many EPN clicks as possible, so it made sense that I should put clickable auction results on the home page to minimize the time visistors spent on my site and get them clicking through to Ebay as soon as possible.

I learned pretty quickly that that is a very short-sighted mentality, and in the long run you will do much better to have unique content on a pleasant looking site with user-friendly navigation. There is a lot you can do with phpbay to narrow down categories and provide a lot of value to your visitors. I know it sounds corny, but my EPN dashboard makes me feel a lot better about it.

So, keep the results off the front page. Yes, that is a protip.

As the internet marketing world evolves, so do the different tools and services we have at our disposal. While the vast majority are steaming piles of poo, there are a few that actually come in handy and can help you increase your bottom line (that’s your monies, noob).

All good things supposedly come in threes, so here are three that I recommend. Please note that these are NOT paid reviews, and I am not using any sort of affiliate links here. These are all products that I have used myself.

KBlinker – Link Management Utility

KBlinker is a great tool to better control and organize your links. It has an awesome geo-ip redirection feature built in that was a Godsend for myself. You see, I have my stink plastered all over the internet in the form of static links I have dropped over time. Many of these links still consistently bring in leads/sales. Problem is, a lot of them are on sites that get international traffic. If I have one link redirecting to an offer that only accepts say US and Canadian traffic, then those Australian clicks are going to waste. Most likely they are redirected to some completely irrelevant or lame offer (Webfetti, anyone?).

So instead, I have these links point to my domain that has KBlinker installed, where I have everything setup to re-route specific countries to the appropriate offers. Of course, it takes time to find relevant international offers and maintain the thing (since offers get dropped all the time), but at the end of the day, I’m making money off of international traffic that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Check out KBlinker.com to learn more about its capabilities. You can currently get a single domain license (which is all you really need) for $50.

Article Drip

One problem a lot of affiliates face when building sites and trying to get them to rank is of course link building. We know that Google likes to see your site gaining backlinks steadily and consistently, but it can be difficult to arrange it so that links appear (get indexed) gradually when you’re buying directory submissions or social bookmarking packages. If too many links appear pointing to your site in too short a period of time, Google may frown upon this.

Another issue we face is with article marketing. We know that having articles relevant to our niche posted on several sites with backlinks is a good thing. Trouble is, it can be very time consuming or expensive to come up with UNIQUE articles for the various article sites so as to get the most value out of those links.

Andrew Scherer was nice enough to provide me with a free review of his new Dripped and Spun Article Marketing Service. This service is a great solution to the problems detailed above.

All you need to do is submit your URL, title, keywords, etc, and you will have a unique article written for you and then slowly submitted to 100 directories over the course of a month. In order to make them unique, the article is manually spun using interchangeable keywords to make each article original. Since the article spinning is done manually, the spun articles actually come out nice and readable (unlike most of the auto-spun articles I’ve seen).

This service is currently going for $44.97 and you can order it here.

Twitter Snipe

Twitter marketing has really taken off in the past couple months. I even saw #Acai Berry as a trending topic the other day. Before Twitter gets ridiculously saturated with spam, there is still money to be made.

My approach to twitter marketing is a bit different than what seems to be popular, and this tool isn’t really conducive to it, but I’m sure there are a lot of you out there that can think of several ways to utilize it.

Twitter Snipe basically makes it a breeze to follow people that are likely to be interested in whatever it is you’re promoting. For instance, if you’re pushing a weight loss offer, you can enter the keyword “diet” and have Twitter Snipe automatically follow anyone and everyone who is tweeting that keyword. The fact that it is nearly in real-time is what I think makes this tool so powerful. Right when some young lady tweets about how she wants to try a new diet, like magic, there you are following with your interesting profile relevant to her current interests (and interesting links).

What sets Twitter Snipe apart from the other Twitter tools out there is that it has a very handy “unfollow” feature built in. I talked before about how it just isn’t appealing to have 10x less followers than users you are following. In order to weed out those who ignored your follow and are highly unlikely to follow back in the future, you can remove them all with a simple click of the mouse.

In order to use Twitter Snipe, you’ll need to install it on your own server running PHP 5.0 or above. Installation is pretty painless. A copy of Twitter Snipe currently costs $77. Get it here.

Alright, I believe that’s enough plugging for today!

If you’re one of those newer affiliate marketers who is frustrated with losing money on PPC and need a bit of positive reinforcement to help motivate you and realize the potential in this here crazy business, then this post is for you.

To be honest, I’m getting pretty sick of Facebook. What a royal pain in the ass to have to constantly re-create and re-submit ads after they are disabled. I had a good run with them, but now I’m getting more involved in other things and I think our relationship is just about over.

To celebrate the burning of this bridge, I’m going to go ahead and outline in detail a very laser targeted dating campaign that will make you a few bucks. Of course, if enough people stumble upon this article and run it, it will probably become worthless rather quick. It definitely won’t make you rich (because of the limited size of the target audience), but it has always been profitable in my experience. I’ve been running this campaign and slight variations on it for over a year.

It’s also worth mentioning that this of course doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to Facebook. I’m sure with a little imagination you can find ways to run similar campaigns on other platforms.

Nerds Love Asian Chicks

Okay, to be fair, plenty of non-nerds have an inclination towards Asian women, but never mind that for now. From testing various keywords with different dating sub-niches, I determined that guys who are heavily into sci-fi, anime, RPGs, and martial arts are also heavily into asian girls. Not a huge surprise perhaps, but something you might not have considered.

You could always build an Asian-oriented (no pun intended) landing page, but I’ve always found landing pages to be unnecessary when promoting dating offers on FB. That is, as long as you find a decent offer/lander from the merchant.

The best converting offer I’ve used this with was Spicey or Sweet which I was running through Affiliate.com (who no longer has it). They had me at $3.50/lead. Copeac still has Spicey or Sweet with several landers, but I don’t see an Asian one currently. If you ask your AM nicely, they might be able to hook you up with one.  Ads4Dough also has Spicey or Sweet. You will probably have to cloak the offer to something a little less “suggestive” to get it approved by Facebook.

Check out the Finding Singles offer from Neverblue. They have some customization options you can utilize, such as changing the graphic on the LP (say, from a blond white girl to an asian girl in glasses). You can also change the title text on the LP. The Facebook nazis seem to be alright with Finding Singles. You might also want to try actually running it. It doesn’t convert as well as Spicey, in my experience, but it was still profitable (about $0.19 EPC).

If you know of any other Asian themed dating offers, feel free to test them out as well.

The Campaign Details

Since I promised full details, here are the exact interest keywords I targeted for one particular ad:

Anime, Anime Club, Anime/Manga, Animemanga, Bleach, Chobits, Dragonball Z, End of Evangelion, Final Fantasy, Full Metal Alchemist, gundam seed, Gundam Seed Destiny, Gundam Wing, Hellsing, Inuyasha, Love Hina, Naruto, Naruto Shippuuden, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pokemon, Prince of Tennis, Robotech, Wolf’s Rain, Yu Yu Hakusho orrr yugioh

Feel free to add your own. I can’t remember exactly (that’s from a now-disabled ad) but I believe the target audience was around 100k. Single males, 18+, of course. Here, take the creative, too, you greedy bastard:

I ran that particular ad for several months, only in the evening hours and consistently on Thurs, Fri, and Saturday. I would throw in other days randomly as well.

If you have any experience with FB ads, you know that an ad’s effectiveness will dry up if you run it too often. At the peak of this one’s performance, it was getting a CTR of nearly 2%. The all-time CTR (after running it after it had cooled down significantly) was %0.30. I had to pay 11 cents per click to get decent volume, but I could run it at 3 cents without getting a “bid too low” warning from Facebook.

I ran this ad using a URL redirect which some of the time directed to Finding Singles with Neverblue and some of the time to Spicey or Sweet (Asian) with Affiliate.com. Here are the stats from Affiliate.com:

“Main” of course is the subid of the campaign detailed above. “you2b” is shitty YouTube traffic which obviously doesn’t do anything spectacular. “MA” as you can see has a slightly better conversion rate. “MA” stands for “martial arts”. It was an identical campaign except it was targeting males 18+ with martial arts related keywords on their profile. This target was somewhat bigger, but for whatever reason the CTR just wasn’t quite as good and I had to pay around I think something like $0.19-$0.25 per click.

Since I’m feeling generous, here is another creative that was effective with similar campaigns:

Not quite as effective as the first, but still pretty good. Hopefully those two creatives will give you an idea of what works and what you can realistically get approved.

In Conclusion

Like I said, this specific campaign isn’t going to make you rich, because of the low volume. But hopefully it will be that “ice breaker” for someone out there, or at the very least give you a little insight on a successful campaign to inspire you. I’m willing to bet some of you already have some ideas on how to take the fundamentals of this campaign and apply/scale elsewhere.

Best of luck.

EDIT:

I guess it wouldn’t be full disclosure if I didn’t give you the title/body of that ad.

I know there are a lot of anti-Twitterers out there crusading against the rapidly growing Twitter monster, but aside from the ethical debate over whether or not it is socially healthy to be hyper-connected to each other with play-by-play updates of our daily lives, there has also been much discussion on how to monetize this strange new obsession.

I do have a personal twitter account, but I try to keep it separate from business. However, I do have a few additional accounts that I use for marketing purposes.

None of my friends “IRL” are into internet marketing in any capacity whatsoever. The closest is probably a friend I’ve had since kindergarten that used to bank pretty nicely selling bootlegs on eBay back around the turn of the millennium. Just the other day a female friend of mine followed me on Twitter, so I went to check out her page and see who her followers were. Who did I see at the top? John Chow.

I suppose that is one approach. Just follow as many people as you possibly can since you know that some of them will invariably follow you back. Then just speet (spam tweet, I just made that up) all day and wait for the $ to roll in. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not the “hello friends! I want to teach you how to increase your passive income!” type. At least not when my real name and likeness is associated, in any case…

Where I have found success with Twitter is by cultivating a follower base with a sincere interest in whatever it is I’m doing. Many people have found success doing this with celebrity-based Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, some of you have gone as far as impersonating notable personalities. This will work in the short-term, but has no real longevity. On the other hand, acting as some sort of obsessed fan tweeting about the same person all day will also turn people off real quick. So what is the off-white hat solution?

Without revealing any of my awesome Twitter accounts (best one gets around 200-300 new followers per day, and I don’t do shit other than tweet maybe once a day), here are the steps I take when creating and priming a new Twitter account:

• The Name – Obviously very important. Using the exact name of a celebrity/band, etc might be a bit much. Try to incorporate something else into it that gives people the impression that you are the “official” Twitter for that personality, even if it that specific celebrity is not actually the one updating the account. You may or may not want to actually use the word “official”.
• Tweets – Obviously don’t spam crap, especially right off the bat. Just do a quick Google news search to find relevant info and make a tweet about it. Include a link. You can check the official website of your subject for updates as well.
• Be selective about who you follow – Any Twitter savvy user can tell you, your follower:following ratio determines how cool/important you are. Keep your list of people you are following to a minimum. Many Twitter-crazed youngsters will see your impressive ratio and follow you based on that principle alone.

Monetization

Okay, great, you have a ton of followers. Now how do you capitalize? Well, luckily famous people and bands are always selling something that their fans want. Whether it be an album, a DVD, concert tickets, memorabilia, whatever. All of these things can be monetized through the proper affiliate marketing channels. And boy, does Twitter make it easy.

Tiny URL

The fact that Twitter automatically appends just about every URL you post into a Tiny URL is a great blessing. Over the past few years people have become more aware of and more put off by affiliate links. This may have been the fate of Tiny URLs as well, if it weren’t for Twitter making them totally mainstream and acceptable. So you can go ahead and convert that obscenely long iTunes affiliate link through Linkshare into a Tiny URL link, tweet about Joe Blow’s new album release with your link, and the user will have no idea whatsoever that they just clicked through your affiliate link. On top of that, iTunes (or whoever) will have no idea where you are sending the traffic from (unless the referrer leaks…if you’re that paranoid just use a double redirect).

This concludes my Twitter marketing seminar. Sign up as an official consultant now for $50,000. That’s $150,000 off the usual rate. Refer your mother and your grandmother to become consultants and you’ll get your own island.

If you’re not already familiar with phpbay, I’ll give you a moment to slap yourself.

Go on. Right in the face.

Phpbay is an incredibly useful Wordpress plugin (API is also available) that allows you to display relevant ebay listings on your websites to earn a commission. In order to use it, you’ll need to be signed up with the Ebay Partner Network. Some people have reported difficulty getting approved by EPN, but there are alternatives available. You can also join the Ebay affiliate program through the Pepperjam Network.

There’s a reason you’ve heard about Phpbay so much around various internet marketing portals: it’s awesome. But instead of just praising it like a lunatic in hopes that you will purchase it through one of my sneakily masked affiliate links, I will instead give you some other useful info that I myself use that will make your phpbay stores even more awesomer.

Ebay Search Results
Depending on the nature of your site, a lot of times users will land on your site and not realize that you’re simply serving them eBay results. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing. However, they may try to search for items that you don’t have listings for on your site. If you just have a regular old wordpress sidebar search bar, it’s not going to find what they are looking for unless you’ve included matching content on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to display ebay results on your site that match their query?

All you have to do is go into search.php and replace some code. Starting with the line:

Delete everything up to:

(including that string) Replace with the following code:

Ta-da. That piece of code is brought to you by Wade himself, creator of PhpBay Pro.

In some cases, your particular theme may not have a search.php, but rather a searchform.php. I have not yet devised a way to make this work with this sort of rogue theme, but as soon as I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.

Make the Entire Listing Clickable
By default, only the text of your phpbay listings are clickable. Poo on that. Why not make the whole thing clickable? Depending on whether or not you are displaying results in rows or columns, you will need to make the following adjustment to the respective file.

If you’re using row results, you’ll want to edit the file called template.ebay.results, which is located in the “templates” folder inside the phpbay plugin folder. The original file looks like this:

The new, edited file should look like this:

Now, for those of you using column results, you’ll want to be editing template.column.results, located in the same place as the other template file. The original file will look like this:

Go ahead and replace all that with the following code:

There you have it. Now your auction results are completely clickable. Mo’ clicks = mo’ money. But beware, mo’ money = mo’ problems.

Removing Icons
On some sites, I like to go the extra mile to minimize the ebayness of the results displayed. To do this, I simply remove those pesky icons that are so reminiscent of ebay. I almost always get rid of the “But it Now” icons, and I sometimes get rid of the paypal logo. To do so is really simple. You’ll need to edit the same files talked about above, except all you’ll need to do is delete the line of code that calls that particular icon.

In template.ebay.results, you’ll see a string of text that says:

Deleting that line entirely will remove the paypal logo from your listings and not adversely affect anything else. Similarly, deleting:

will effectively remove the bid/buy it now logo.

In template.column.results, you’d simply need to delete

to remove the paypal logo, and so on and so forth.

In a future post I’ll go into detail about how to construct your Phpbay sites in such a way to minimize your bounce rate and maximize your CTR. But for now, it is time to open another bottle of Martinelli’s award winning apple cider.

I know talking about Facebook Ad trouble is sort of like beating a dead horse now, but this is my damn blog and I reserve the right to bitch.

Everyone who is in the know knows that IQ offers are hot. By hot, of course, I mean they’re converting wonderfully and not quite as regulated as other profitable offers. At least, that is the impression one gets while perusing Facebook with the sheer abundance of IQ ads to the right.

Now, I know the old song and dance; resubmit, tweak, resubmit, resubmit, tweak, resubmit, until eventually you get an intern that isn’t a complete tool to approve your ad. That’s all fine and good. But after having about a dozen IQ ads rejected, I decided to do a little experiment.

Instead of linking to the Challenge IQ offer at Ads4Dough (which is the one I so dearly wanted to promote), I decided to link somewhere else. Are you ready for it? I linked to an ACTUAL FREE IQ WEB SITE. That’s right. I found a non-profit (as far as I could tell) website that offered 100% free, legitimate IQ tests.

Knowing fully well that most Facebook interns shit their pants when you use the word “free” in your ad copy, I made sure to omit it. I then submitted two separate ads both linking to the free site, both using puzzle type images with very simple title and body messages that got the point across (while still avoiding the term ‘free’).

The result? I bet you can guess.

The content advertised by this ad is restricted. Per sections 8 and 9 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, this content is prohibited from being advertised on Facebook. Ads for this product, service or site will not be accepted in any form, and may result in your account being disabled.

So, now Facebook is basically threatening me for trying to spend my advertising dollars to sate the desires of their enthusiastic userbase to demonstrate their intelligence quotient so that they may pat themselves on the back and revel in their computer generated recognition. As retarded as it may be, college kids love that shit. So in essence, I was trying to spend my own money to enhance user experience, and I was not allowed to do so. What a shame.

Oh, but don’t think I’m giving up. I’ve already started tracking down young women that work for Facebook ON Facebook, then cross checking their names on MySpace and adding them as friends (using a different social network I think will rule out any chance of suspicion). Budding online romances will soon ensue, followed shortly by a flurry of ads for online casinos and fuck buddies on Facebook. And you’re all gonna be like WTF!?

Psh, Facebook. More like poopbook.