Back to Business: Ad:tech and the Return of the Dark Knight

Well,

It was another wild and eventful Ad:tech.

Where as, most bloggers have already been posting up their party pics, who they met, where they ate.  etc. etc.

I have been deep in the trenches and getting the REAL speak on what is and is not in the Internet Marketing World.

And Folks… ITS CRAP!!!

The amount of stuff going on that is costing you money and the lack of recourse is startling.

I have posted many reasons why you may be suffering in online marketing or maybe you succeeded and then got ‘swat’ back down and now finding it harder and harder to get back on top.

I feel you.

And I am here to tell you the landmines out there (remember: landsmines are meant to be NOT seen and to cripple & maim, as well, as kill you!)

The 1st one I am going to tell you. Is your enemy is NOT the tracking, traffic, networks, banks, IRS, or FTC.

IT’s the damn offers you are promoting !!!

You would think they would want you to be successful.

Sorry, only in Berkley and Cuba does socialism exist.

They want to make money and if they can keep more to them-self.

THEY WILL!!!

How did we discover this ?

Well, After out great idea of the ‘PERFECT NETWORK’ (3rd party accounting verification & hardened credit card & bank wire level tracking)

We took the idea to the floor of Ad:tech.

Like we assumed.

Affiliates loved it and wanted to sign up right away. Even Networks wanted to know what and how and jump on.

Want to know who told us to F*off ???

The offers!!! ( I wont name names, since there is no way in hell I will go toe-to-toe in a slander suit with them)

They had no issue with hardened tracking, BUT when we mentioned 3rd party accounting so that affiliate, network AND offers knew that everything was legit.

They kindly told us to F*off.

There was no way they were going to let the outside world know what their real numbers were.

So Yes, networks scrub and shave.

Know why ?

Because offers, even well know brands, WONT PAY THEM !!!

I know 3 top name affiliate companies owed not thousands but multi-millions from offers that never paid them, BUT they paid their affiliates. (Thank You Azoogle, ads4dough, Neverblue, AKMG, Rev202, C2M, ECM, MaxBounty, Market Leverage, EWANET and anyone else still in business that has gotten screwed by your offers. They paid us EVEN WHEN THEY WERE NOT!)

So, the next time you want blame someone.

Start at the top!!!

I’m going to post all the info I discovered and verified at Ad:tech.

Hold onto your wallets and if your traffic isn’t profitable. Scale back or pause it. You WILL want to know these, BEFORE you spend more money and watch it go down the drain.

IMV

Can you make money online ?

Can you make money online ? That is probably the #1 question that brought you here or you had originally when you started internet marketing or researching it.

The answer is yes and no. Yes, because people DO make money on the internet some $ some $$$,$$$,$$$, but most who try wont for a number of reasons.

1st it take’s money to make money and time is money. If you are not spending it here you could be spending it on a job or a skill development. So, when someone says it only takes time. Well, that IS money in one way or another.

For the most part the people that say its easy are making money ‘selling shovels to miners’ and alot of those shovels are junk or not even a shovel.

I’m too smart to start bad-mouthing anyone directly, especially since online marketing is very ‘interconnected’. What I will do is post questions and verifiable information and let people form their own educated opinions when it comes to people and products.

It’s funny that if people applied the same guidelines to buying a house or life insurance as they do buying thousand dollar information products there would be less ‘scams’ that are done to newbies.

Keep in mind. There are 2 markets in force here. Those that are making money off of the general public and other business’s and those making money off you.  Know who is who.

2ndly refering back to the “takes money to make money” aspect of IM. This is the topic I find most people ‘skate’ around. Why? well if I sell you a course that is $1997 and then you have to have $5,000 to $10,000 in traffic tests to find what works. I am not going to have many customers. But, If I say, “Buy this course. I made thousands, you will make thousands and all it takes it 2hrs a night” I will sell many, many courses. Yes, I will have some refunds. But, as anyone in marketing knows. Unless, something is truly hideous and I mean truly. The amount of profit made vs. the amount in refunds is negotiable. Most people who sell self-help books know that 90% of the people who buy their books. Will not read past the 1st chapter.

Now, does that mean all course and ‘gurus’ are ripping off the public ? No, I know some say that all are. It depends. Are you totally new? Yes, there is tons of free info on the internet AND sometimes a nugget in a course or forum can be worth  and money pay the time you save. You can spend it on testing or buying someone else’s test (what most course’s really are when you boil it down.) Either way, it comes down to which ultimately saves you time and makes you the most money.

3rd and STILL talking about money. Lets talk about testing capital. I find most are sorely lacking in this category and I have seen many lose out because of this. You need to have enough capital to test AND lose AND then come back again. This is alot like  trading stocks or commodities, BUT worse. When you find a pattern in those. You can duplicate. But, what do you do when you find a winning offer and before you have made back the intial testing and optimization investment. That offer or even worse. Niche or traffic source are gone !?

No one talks about that. At least not until recently. When I got started it was “focus on one thing and scale it up.” I, also, saw huge affiliate’s lose vast amounts of income when an offer or traffic source was taken away. Recently I have  started hearing others speaking about diversify. Something I did from the start. Its challenging to test multiple offers on multiple traffic sources and yet it is necessary with how internet marketing has changed in the last two years and will continue to.

Inside of that is still the cost. Lets get real. If you test 10 offers with 100 keywords on 3 traffic sources with your clicks costing you $0.35 and each keyword is tested for 100 clicks for conversion you will need $105,000.00 to test in a worse case scenario. WHAT !!!! no one EVER TALKS ABOUT THAT!!!!! My math MUST be wrong. Well, its is and it is not. You may get some sales so its not a total negative and few people test to this extreme. But, it is the ugly truth (oh there are other ugly ones… we will get to them too.) Now, you will find stories of people that didn’t lost that much money and made good money and still do. Still, if you look at the IRS records for taxable income the groups that claim business income that have the worst income to expense ratio in no particular order are: Gamblers, MLM’rs, Internet Marketers and Day Traders.  When I got into PPC IM I met 3 types of people. Those who had lucked out and made money right away (Very few & were looking for the next one before the current one dried up), Those that were getting a trickle to come in, and those who were ‘burning’ through time and money ‘hoping’ to find something that worked before they ran out of cash or credit. Sadly, to say few did.

Lets look at CPV traffic since its cheaper and its the rave right now:

10 offers

$.01 an impression

1000 impressions per target

100 targets

=$1,110.01

and if your payout is $1.75.

It will take 635 sales to just break even. That is NOT even profiting.

Again, as with any business. You have to spend and test, then optimize and then scale. The 1st two parts always cost. That is why standard business wisdom is to have 2 years of operating expense AND 2 years of livable income. I know few do. Yet, that is the wiser course to take in money and life management.

So, there you have it. Can you make money online. Yes, I have made a living for over a year. Some months positive some months negative and just about everything that could go wrong, go wrong (I’ll detail ALL of that here AND solutions/preventions.) At year-end I was net positive AND I had found along the way nearly 95% of what I thought or told was wrong or severely lacked information to make it useful. There is a lot of competition and a lot of people who would rather make money off you then the general public. With that in mind. Remember this saying, “If it was easy. Everyone would be doing it and successful” and now you know the some of the Veritas of Internet Marketing

IMV