So, basically, I went to the A4D meetup in San Diego on Saturday, left for Vegas the next day, spent four days and three nights in a drunken stupor, and now here I am trying to remember what happened on Saturday so I could squeeze a blog post out of it.

First of all, if you wanted to go, you should have went. The lineup alone should have indicated that it would be a very valuable experience. That said, I didn’t even stay for the whole thing, and I took the liberty of a 30 min lunch break right in the middle of the thing (look, if I was any sort of professional, I’d have a real job).

Luckily, I managed to take some notes. I’m not sure if I was taking notes because I thought I was going to forget the info I was receiving, or if I just felt compelled to because people around me were. Using these notes and my hazy memory (I was actually drinking during the meetup as well…this blog is really more or less a cry for help), I will now attempt to go over what I saw.

First Speaker: DK from Purposeinc

Seemed like a nice enough guy, but was visibly intimidated by the room. Maybe he wasn’t expecting so many aff marketing pros to show up. He referenced info he had “got from Shoe” a couple times, which was enough to make half the room take him less seriously. He also went into detail about testing creatives for Facebook ads, showing case studies with different creatives and what sort of CTR each one got. Trouble is, only like $7 was spent on each test. With people in the room spending five figures a day on FB alone (if not more), this seemed a little silly to me.

To make matters worse, towards the end of his presentation he casually mentions that he has NDAs in place with Facebook. This was in response to Jason inquiring about shadier methods of getting ads approved. Although he wasn’t willing to suggest any new tricks or system manipulations, he seemed open to the discussion. “Anything said at this conference will not leave this conference by me”, DK reassured us. But, still, c’mon.

Although I wasn’t impressed with his Facebook know-how (or conflicts of interest), I must say that DK knew his shit when it came to local campaigns. It was evident that local was his strong suit. Probably why he saved it for last.

Hagan – Talkin’ ‘Bout Leadgen

I liked this guy. At first it seemed like no one was paying attention but eventually they realized he knew what he was talking about and settled down. The gist of Hagan’s presentation was about how continuity offers are no longer sustainable, and how leadgen is the foreseeable future of AM.

He had a nice little breakdown of how to presell offers based on payout that I think might be helpful for a lot of folks, especially the nooblings. Here is that breakdown in a nutshell:

- Low Paying Offers (Email/Zip Submits, etc) – Direct Link
- Medium Payouts (Insurance, Edu, etc) – Short forms/bridge pages with a short pitch, big call to action.
- High Payouts (Mortgage, that kind of jazz) – Long pitch, very few calls to action.

He also offered a list of books that he thinks affiliate marketers should be familiar with:

1. Ca$hvertising
2. Simple and Direct
3. Blink
4. Extraordinary Popular Delusions

MikeTPowell on PPV

After I stumbled back in to the Legends conference room, having just enjoyed a tuna melt at MaryJane’s Cafe in the Hard Rock Hotel, Mike was already well into his presentation on running PPV campaigns. My notes started getting short and vague at this point. One point that Mike stressed repeatedly is that you absolutely must use a landing page when running PPV, regardless of the offer. If you think about the nature of PPV traffic, this makes a lot of sense.

The Lawyer

There was a surprise appearance by Rob Berkowitz, a senior associate attorney at Coast Law Group, a firm that A4D works closely with. Rob went into detail about how we are all 100% guilty for stealing images and ignoring trademark laws, and how we will all pay dearly for it one day. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, though. For a lawyer.

The Rest

I swore on a bible that Nickycakes was carrying in his back pocket that I wouldn’t disclose any of teh bigg secretz. Same goes for Smax and Dr Ngo.

Guess you better come to the next fucking meetup!

<3

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!!!

A thought occurred to me today: How the heck am I ever supposed to secure my place among the super affiliates if I don’t provide any pics of my fat checks? I was reminded of this when Linkshare was kind enough to send me this rather impressive payment in the form of a paper check. I’m surprised it wasn’t sent certified. They might want to consider using a more secure form of delivery in the future. In any event, here is the proof:

If you would like to know how I did it, please PayPal $97 to offwhitehat (at) gmail. Good luck bros.

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.

Alright, here is my first contribution as an expert super affiliate guru genius overlord.

Everyone knows that when you try to link to something from a MySpace page, it gets redirected to some bullshit warning pop-up that says something like “Are you sure you want to click that fucking link? Do you really know what you’re doing, dumbass!?”

And on top of all that, user created links on MySpace are no-followed. Or so you thought…

Check out a MySpace music page. As an example, we’ll use Dr. Dre (talking affiliate marketing gets me feelin’ gangsta). Take a look on the left under “Dr. Dre General Info”. Next to “Band Website”, you’ll see a link to “dre2001.com/“. Now peep the page source (with FireFox, that would be right-click–>view page source). Then how about a little Ctrl-F action to search through the code? Search for the URL, dre2001.com, and see for yourself that there is absolutely no “nofollow” attribute to be found within the link.

The beauty of MySpace Music pages is that they are easy as shit to boost in terms of PR. All you need to do is befriend super popular MySpacers (like bands and celebrities) and leave them a few comments. Of course, there is plenty of software at your disposal to automate your MySpacing.

Before you know it, you’ll have a PR3 (or more) link to whatever site you want. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a music related site, but that may be more beneficial to you.

And that concludes the first GEM excretion from OffWhiteHat.com. Click here to sign up for a MySpace Music page. No, you don’t actually need to upload any of your grunge garage band’s demos from the mid 90s.