I’m 3 minutes away from a Saturday but it wouldnt be right without a typical fraud Friday post. This is starting to turn into a bit of work. So far I’ve been invited to two podcasts and 2 speaking sessions covering fraud in the affiliate industry. Who said running your mouth wasnt a good thing?
Affiliate Managers – reading the blog, pay real close attention because I’m only going to explain this once. As a manager it’s pretty damn easy to get that lead report from an advertiser who is claiming fraudulent credit cards and just terminate the affiliate so this educational post may or may not be of any use to you. However, should you read it and comprehend what I am going to say, you may be able to stop these types of publishers BEFORE too much damage is done and costing you a relationship with an advertiser.
Advertisers - Some of you are experienced, some of you are not and some of you are aspiring to run your own offer. Pay attention because when you start messing with your filters on processing their are most likely going to be options for you to use to keep a lot of this out yourself.
Publishers – You might as well pay attention to. Publishers are likely to participate in a lot of internet marketing forums and I can tell you that methods of using “gift cards” have been talked about openly. If you feel like you are being a “rat”, I’ll give you a different perspective to think about. If you know someone is doing this and you dont report it, you are only costing other publishers a possible opportunity to promote the offer, a network’s relationship with an advertiser and quite possibly the advertiser not even utilizing the Pay Per Performance Industry in which…-> We ALL Lose.
Alright so think about this for a moment. Ever seen those $50 Visa Gift Cards at say Walmart? Say you have a publisher cloaking traffic as is the norm in this industry. Unfortunately for the network, it looks like standard encryption or cloaking and the publisher hiding their precious traffic source. Now say you have rebill offers at $3.95 or less. At an average of $3.95 or less and a $50 gift card, a publisher can run 12 leads a day.
Doesnt sound like much right? Let me show you the compounding mindset of a gift card frauder who really has their shit together. Most of you probably wont believe this but the example I am going to show you is a VERY conservative one. After you see the example, imagine a ring of about 50 publishers who are teaching this to outsourced help and compounding the problem.
Monday:
- 1 Publisher
- 5 – $50 gift Cards = 12 leads per gift card @ avg. $3.95 per trial offer.
- 60 leads total today spread across 10 networks = 6 leads per network
- AVG. pay (conservative) $30 payout on each trial offer
- 60x$30 = $1800.00 – $250 for the gift cards – $100 miscellaneous hosting/traffic = $1,450
- At the very least, this publisher is going to make a $1,000 dollar day.
Not a bad day’s work for a frauder right? Volume is low enough that the frauder probably hits each network on 1-3 offers meaning 1-2 possibly 3 leads at the very most per offer. You really think the advertiser is going to pick up that small amount of leads? 99.999% No. Most networks arent even going to pick that up and see that but that is what you as a manager have to train yourself to look for.
Now let me compound this over a month long period and show you REALLY what an organize frauder is capable of. Managers, you are probably going to drop a brick because they most likely make more in a month than you do in a year. Pretty scary huh.
- Publisher has 30 networks
- Publisher hits each network for 12 leads a month across 3-5 offers keeping conversions down.
- Total = 360 leads @ avg of $30.00 per lead = $10,800.00
- Each card holds 12 leads so = 30 cards x $50 = $1,500.00
- Hosting, Garbage Traffic = $1,000 a month (With what I know this is very conservative).
- so $10,800 – $1500 – $1,000 = $8,300 a month.
$8,300.00 a month people. It’s happening out there. Now the scary part is your organized frauder isnt going to have just one account. Oh no, they know there is going to be casualties of war so they are likely to have 3-5 accounts sitting on a network. So if your organized frauder is spreading across multiple offers, staying under the radar on just 3 accounts at the end of the month they could possibly be looking at = $24,900.00
Scary right? It can, it does and it is happening people. It’s so small you probably dont even see it and the advertiser damn sure are going to see it especially since organized frauders do their research and stick to offers that are likely getting volume. Another thing they will do is trace and offer and possibly hit across a few networks.
This is one organized publisher. Multiply that by 100 organized frauders and you can see what we are dealing with in this industry. If you have low volume publishers hitting you like this, I urge you to take a REALLY close look at them. Their names, their information, even call them. Before first payment, have them send you a copy of their license or passport.
But most importantly…
Learn to identify this early on so that you can communicate with the advertiser and have them take those leads away. Shady networks out there. (I dont want to get off on a rant). It pisses me off to see us have an offer that I know is on shit networks that allow these tactics. Most of the advertisers just dont know any better and as networks sometimes the offer is given out to another network that allows this crap. I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ve literally sat an explained it to advertisers time and time again. Whether you care or not, for those who take their businesses seriously in the pay per performance space, it’s in your best interest to start watching stats ALOT closer on low volume for rebill offers.
If you see a new publisher sending these warning flags, start investigating before it costs you a relationship.
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The other day I saw over a dozen blogs reporting that the FTC would be fining a possible $11,000 per violation of their new endorsement and testimonial rules which was targeted towards bloggers. Some say affiliates as well, but yet again, that is matter of opinion which I doubt any marketer online has solid proof of. When I saw these posts I cleaned up my google reader REALLY quick. Posts like that from a marketer may seem harmless, but to someone who has actually dealt with the FTC on certain issues found myself laughing when I read this at the sheer speculation set forth by marketers. I already knew there was more to the story than that and generally when the FTC publishes it’s used as a scare tactic with important information missing or being misread.
Anyway, to squash all this bullshit, here you go -> $11,000 Blogger Fine Not True
Thanks go to Linda from 5 Star Affiliate Blog because when she blogs she doesnt just put it out there without following through with the entire story. You can read her full post here.
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We are launching another contest today with the new Smoke Challenge. This contest runs from today (Oct.7th – Oct. 31st). Details of the contest can be found here. We are doing a 2 part contest on this one. This contest is for Smoke Assist and Smart Smoker. Here the prizes:
- Details – Any publisher who generates 100 leads to either offer or a combination of both offers will receive $250 Cash or a Visa Gift Card Equivalent.
- Grand Prizes – The top 3 revenue producing publishers will receive one of the following:
- Breitling Super Avenger Aviation Chronograph Watch
- Bose Lifestyle 48 Series DVD Home Entertainment System
- Alienware Aurora ALX
Disclaimer: In order to qualify for one or any of the grand prizes the top publishers must producea minimum of 1,000 sales from either of the offers or a combination of them.
Be sure to read the offer descriptions on both of these offers. They have a strong brand and dont allow PPC traffic nor trademark/url bidding or PPV traffic. These campaigns accept Email, Social, SEO and Banner traffic. Fire up the media buys! These offers accept traffic from the US and Canada but do not allow traffic from Michigan and Utah.
Check out the contest details -> here.
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- 05
- Oct
- 2009
C2M Launches WFReview 3.0 Review Plugin For WordPress
Posted by: Ruck under Convert2Media News, Reviews
A very rare and exciting offer has hit the C2M network and we are happy to have the exclusive on it! Not very often does an offer come for MARKETERS and more importantly one that can speed the process of landing page creation and optimization. The WFReview 3.0 Review Plugin For WordPress does just that! This offer is owned, operated and supported by a Convert2Media Publisher as well.
Bloggers, this is a unique opportunity to promote an offer any marketer will be interested in. This offer pays out a whopping $33 and is located in the cost per sale/branded trials category of your affiliate interface.
A quick synopsis on what the WFReview 3.0 Plugin uses:
- Creates Affiliate Review Sites
- National Directories
- Imports Posts Extremely Easy
- Reviews Blog Posts
- Reviews Directories
This is not a product lacking in support. The WFReview 3.0 team also has a support forum to help you with anything you need help on as well as Tutorial Videos coming soon. As an affiliate you will need to signup with us. We are handling the affiliate program and distribution for WFReview 3.0.
As a blogger or email newsletter owner this is great news for you. The first time around this product was a huge hit and very popular product among Affiliate Marketers. This time, support is top notch and the previous owner has taken back his product to make it even better. You can be the first to promote this offer today by signing up and doing a blog post, newsletter mail out or RSS Feed.
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- 05
- Oct
- 2009
Traffic Needs Failure Teaches Affiliates A Critical Lesson
Posted by: Ruck under Randomness
I’m really going to hold back and not get to personal with the Traffic Needs Affiliate Network. If you dont already know, they have gone out of business. There really is no need to link to them considering overnight they took their website down. This is one group of people you will want to stay far away from in the future. As a network they failed often times with affiliates awaiting payments for months and just recently they screwed over a ton of networks and publishers by not paying them accordingly.
The lesson to learn is that even C2M had trouble getting payment on time. Unfortunately for them, (an excuse the unprofessionalism), Traffic Needs is filled with a bunch of no-face pussies. I look forward to meeting any of one from that sorry excuse for an ex-company at any event. As a matter of fact, I’m begging for it.
Personal hate aside…
Traffic Needs recently had a couple of offers that converted exceptionally well. First let me start out by saying that the reason they converted well is that they had Domestic Processing on their backends. Anyone that is familiar with domestic processing on the backend already knows that you have to be one of two things to make this work and not get your merchant accounts shut down.
- Extremely awesome on the backend for support to keep chargebacks down below the ratio threshold.
- Extremely shady and changing up offers before the chargebacks hit.
Unfortunately what most affiliates dont know, and even more importantly, they didnt understand was that this company with the exception of Gomin (this is my opinion on him) was filled with morons who failed in every previous business they entered thru the parent company of Razor Media. I have to leave Gomin out of this personally because he was the only reasonable person I dealt with and he went to bat for us and got us settled up on a network level.
However, Traffic Needs in whole screwed a ton of my friends, my own publishers and even partner networks regarding payments. They played the game very well at scamming everyone. Unfortunately for affiliates, most NOT All their loyalty lies in who carries what offers. That is a very dangerous game to play. Sure you want the highest ROI you can get but at what price? What good is promoting the best converting offer when there is a possibility of not getting paid?
I almost blame myself. I could have stepped and stated what I really knew. I first had a go at them in the Wickedfire Affiliate Marketing Forum. It’s very easy to see when a company is full of shit however my vision is typically different than 99% of the people in the industry. They may not know what I know and publishers for sure are at the bottom of the totem pole as far as knowing.
My apologies go out to all of those who did not get paid by Traffic Needs. Seriously, a terrible situation. When you have your publishers calling your cellphone, contacting you via LinkedIn and Facebook asking for help on recovering funds, it really says a lot. Had I spoke up sooner, a lot of this could have been avoided.
However…
For all of you I DID warn, (and there’s a lot). I told you this company was bad news. I knew from the very second we dealt with them, they were a sinking ship. Yes, I do think it is crappy you wont be paid but next time you might just pull your head out of your ass and start listening wont you? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether your network is telling you the truth. I know with our publishers, we had competing offers we were trying to put them on to get them away from the Traffic Needs offers. Unfortunately, I think a lot of publishers were thinking we were just trying to get some business from them. I dont have to explain how stupid it was to think that as a publisher do I?
Traffic Needs fiasco and non-payment does all the explaining for me. Affiliate, pull your heads out and pay attention who you work with. I know publishers out over 50K from them and are facing large advertising debts because of this. I cant stress how much moral can be damaged in something like this. I’ve faced it as a pubisher and as a network owner and it can be brutally tough to recover from.
{edit} At this time it looks like the Traffic Needs website is up. Is there still life here?
