One of the biggest time savers for me is using Skype. Contacting international publishers for meetings, messages, and application approvals has never been easier. Also, a lot of affiliate managers use AIM to do the bulk of their communicating. I much rather here a voice on the other end and I seriously dont have time to type all day.
If you want quick conversations with your AM at C2M, I would highly suggest downloading skype today. Get yourself a good headset. Nothing more annoying than hearing a bunch of racket in the background. 
Your affiliate managers Skype handle is the exact same as their AIM’s.
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Our stance on not dealing with email submits anymore is starting to make the rounds. I’ve seen threads now on PPC-Coach, Wickedfire even Blackhatworld. I’m a member of nearly every community imaginable online, most I rarely engage in conversation with. There aint a whole lot I miss. One post in particular at PPC-Coach caught my attention. Back in my younger days I probably would have retaliated with some ill-thought remark but what’s the point of “e-verbing”?
IS THIS A JOKE? I can’t believe the level of professional this rep portrayed.
First off, I am keen as to what exactly “professionalism” is in this industry?
Is it owning a CPA Network, coming into the office whenever you feel like it and checking in on your Affiliate Managers to see if they are offering the best payouts or telling their publishers that they want to see volume before giving them a pay bump?
If that’s Professionalism, I gladly flush it down the toilet.
Is owning a CPA Network and not giving input on how publishers can increase their revenue and overall business professional?
If that’s Professionalism, publishers are ultimately working with people who arent going to increase their bottom lines in the fastest manner possible. That’s a choice you make. I know when I was publishing that I was looking for every tip I could get and it mostly came from people “hired” as managers with zero marketing experience.
Is owning a CPA Network the thought of sugar coating the truth, allowing bullshit to keep running which just causes their publishers to not maximize their ROI and take away from the network itself?
If that’s Professionalism, it will only allow our network to grow that much faster because we dont do it.
The fact is this. Email Submits are volatile. Publishers and Networks get scrubbed, shaved, told their traffic sucks without proof, and not to mention non payments. My act of “unprofessionalism” in stating these facts most likely saved you a ton of money. If my wording offended you then most likely you have not been a publisher long enough to get to know Convert2Media.
We are not going to sit around for a couple of months and milk it (so to speak). Bottom line is that our “unprofessionalism” allows us to double in revenue and publisher growth each month. Publishers who work with us know and understand we arent going to give you something that is crap. Why would we? If you dont make money, we dont make money. Plain and simple.
We work with advertisers, we work with networks and we work with publishers. We want to deliver quality leads to the merchants and networks and we want to show publishers how to do it. We want to go beyond quality expectations with advertisers and we want to serve publishers the way they are supposed to be served and that THEY are the ones that make the wheels turn FOR networks, NOT the other way around.
Being unprofessional is something I dont think about.
Being truthful, upfront and honest is the LEAST we can do helping others manage their business.
If we have to cut a few softies in the path, so be it. We serve it gladly.
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I promised a longer explanation for the immediate discontinuation of email submits on Convert2Media, so here it is. First and foremost I would like to get a few things cleared up right away.
1. Convert2Media did not get stiffed for any money. In all actuality, Convert2Media was getting scrubbed harder than a wire brush bath at a nuclear power plant. It wasnt because of bad traffic either. It was the intense fluctuation and non-consistencies of everyday publishing that we saw.
2. I just out of the blue decided to discontinue email submits after two years of publishing reflection and day to day, month to month issues dealing with them altogether.
3. Our sources were in fact paying us for leads on THE ONES THAT WERE ACCOUNTED FOR and there lies the problem. As a network I’ve seen more bullshit in this industry than I care to explain but let me go ahead and explain a few that really messed up.
The blame goes on EVERYONE not just someone. Let’s face it, there are some shady ass advertisers out there. There are some shady ass networks out there. There are some shady ass affiliates out there.
It all goes hand in hand. In this industry, someone is always going to try and one up another no matter who it is. Let’s face it, no matter what you do and no matter how legitimate you may publish somewhere along the line you have either or will run into some issue that just pisses publishers off past the point of not caring. Allowing that behavior just continually adds to the cycle.
I dont know where it all began or where it may end but I for one will just not deal with it anymore. Getting scrubbed on the network side and paying publishers out of company profits is a risk we take as a network. I know this, I understand this, I planned on this but it has gotten to the point of where it’s becoming quite redundant to even try in this space anymore. We will leave that up to others.
I was not trying to make an industry statement although we’ve shown up on a couple of forums now and looked at as some type of leader in a movement. I still see email submits going strong and there are networks who actually have excellent track records with them. I published for two years with Azoogle, Maxbounty, and ROI Rocket without a hitch.
I am here to tell you that there is a TON that goes on behind the scenes that a network doesnt even see or realize until they start watching everything like a hawk. With thousands and thousands of conversions a day there is a lot of room for stupid crap to happen to even the networks.
A lot of people get screwed in this vertical all the way from advertisers taking matters into their own hands and affiliates retaliating. Then you have networks playing the middle man who either engage in the activity themselves or have no realization they are in fact being screwed as well.
No big dealio. If we are getting screwed over then you are getting screwed over and none of us even know it and we made a company decision to chase other verticals to focus on and test that are not such a headache.
Now that it’s out of the way, Michael, Ryan, Steve and I would like to thank all of our email submit publishers for their business. Maybe somewhere down the road Convert2Media will develop their own line of email submits. I also welcome any companies that read this blog to present their ideas, opinions and frustrations as well.
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SEO Mentality – Build pages/sites/blogs/whatever to rank highly in search engines and ultimately have free traffic driving sales. This is awesome of course, free traffic coming steadily, who doesnt want it right? Of course with SEO you are on a time factor. Back in the day, some will remember when I ran my SEO firm. At that time I was not involved much with paid traffic. At the time I personally felt that optimizing for search engines was the best way to get traffic. Ultimately it is probably considered the best and a long-term way for residual traffic but their is something I want to express to a lot of people who go down the SEO route.
Once I got involved with paid traffic I started coming to the realization that I was spending a ton of resources and time in developing content for sites that mainly was filler. Had I took a step back and looked at the scope of things I would have figured out that if I had ran a PPC or another paid traffic campaign to some quickly built blogs and landing pages I would have determined profitable keywords.
The whole time I was spent concentrating on SEO allowed me to build a lot of crap that mainly did no good for me other than produce pages of content that could potentially bring visitors to my site and allow them to navigate to maybe one of my pages that has keywords that potentially pull in the sales.
The point is this:
While SEO can potentially bring you sales and long-term traffic, I much prefer to run quickly setup paid traffic campaigns. This allows me to generate keywords with data that helps me determine whether they are even worth building a long-term site/blog/pages around. If you run a paid traffic campaign you can get results in minutes/hours/days and you will also already know what type of text along with those keywords produces sales. Doing it this way allows you to already have a good idea on how to properly write your pages that you definitely would like to be rank.
