I love the dating niche. It’s easy money once you crack it, and its even easier money once you learn how to do it internationally, and no, I’m not talking about every other English speaking country out there. This is actually going to be, what I think, a very simple, but hopefully, very informational post for all of you struggling affiliate marketers out there.

The Offer

Here is where you’ll have to do a little research on your own. Find an international dating offer you think will do well. For me, it can almost be a gut feeling that makes me pick promoting one offer over 100 others. Other times, when I feel like spending a lot, I’ll test them all. The best way to go about this is to really hit up your affiliate manager and ask them for some internal numbers. I know you will probably be looking at “top offer lists” but I’m going to tell you something I’ve never published before here…

Many of the top offers, once they get to that stage, fail to perform. In fact, I’ve run several “top offers” before they were so and they crushed it for months at a time for me. Then, once they get up there, they crash and burn. This is due to increased competition which drives click costs up, usually kills lead quality for the advertiser (stop being so shady, affiliates!), and can stretch an advertisers budget meaning more shaving. This isn’t to say every top offer is a loser – I still run some here in there, but my best offers are usually completely new to networks before thousands of other affiliates bombard it with traffic from who knows where.

Step outside your comfort zone and try new things. Look for offers with a simple conversion path. Ignore payouts. So long as its over a couple dollars, you’ll be okay. I’ve had profitable international dating affiliate campaigns on $1.20 payouts, before. Go down the conversion path to get into the mindset of a user. You can use Google Translate to get you through the tough parts. Just make sure if its a leadgen offer, the user wouldn’t have to fill in 50 pages of information before the conversion pixel fires.

Want some suggestions? Be2 has offers in a ton of countries, and the offers convert well (especially with a landing page). I see Cupid has now gone international with an offer called “Ange de L’amour” (either that or they completely ripped the logo) – a French offer. Offers for countries in SE Asia will get you tons of traffic for less than penny clicks on Facebook and some display networks. Brazil and Portugal are some great countries to put early efforts in to (If anyone needs some Portuguese translation done, hit me up and I’ll get it translated for you at a small cost)

Research

We’re not going to be doing an Quantcast or Alexa style research here. The information and stats you’ll get outside of the main English speaking countries is pretty limited. And, come on, we’re not trying to promote an education degree for rocket science – we’re pushing dating at lonely, horny guys and crazy batshit cat loving women. If you aren’t sure how to go about that, get my consulting. </plug>

The most important thing to get down in your ad copy. This is simple, simple, simple! You’ll be gathering data on your own using Plenty of Fish or Facebook. We’ll be looking at 1 core analytic – click through rate (CTR). CTR is probably the most important aspect of international dating campaigns, because the click costs are so cheap for non-English speaking countries you’ll wish you started advertising there from the start (for some of you that follow me on Facebook, you might have noticed my post about getting 540 clicks for 55 cents. This is for a couple Asian dating campaigns, so 1/10th cent clicks are completely viable here).

Anywho, back to gathering data. We’ll start off with a simple English dating campaign. Pick a general dating offer, or one that is already profiting for you, and set it up on PoF or Facebook. Choose 1 image you think will perform well. I’ve stopped using cleavage shots on Facebook, and stick with clean shots, shoulders and up, with the camera angled down at a smiling girl. Something like this. If you’ve gotten the huge image pack from my email list, there is a few in there. Use just 1 image. You probably won’t be making a profit on this campaign anyways, so think of what you are about to do as an incredibly cheap investment into a future of lots of dating monies.

Write 10 different ad copies. More if you want. Make them all different. Play with fear. Go the simple route. Make a complex ad. Make one talking about meeting a girl tonight. Write one about meeting the girl you will marry. If you can’t be creative about it, I can for you. We’re then going to set up our general dating ad at our main demographic – Men 25 – 40 for a typical, general dating site. These guys will take your ads into a little more consideration than horny 18 year olds.

Set your budget at $50 – $100 and just let the ads run. Perhaps you’ll pick up a few conversions, perhaps zero, but you should be getting clicks. Conversions will depend on the offer, so if you pick a bad offer you probably won’t make much back. Again, this isn’t your goal. We want to see our top performing ads.

Now, to pick your top performing ads, first, see if any got consistent conversions after going through that $50 – 100. If it was just 1 or two here and there, ignore the statistic and move onto CTR. Take your ads with the highest CTR ((clicks/impressions) * 100) and then get to translating them. If you need Thai, Portuguese or Tagalog translated, I have guys on my team that can do that for you – however, for everything else, I recommend OneHourTranslation.com. They’re amazingly fast, you’ve got a lot of different people that can translate for you, and it’s extremely affordable. For a few Facebook/PoF style ads, you won’t have to spend more than $20 – 30, probably less.

Now stick them to your offers with hundreds of images. This is the very, very simple process I go through to get things rolling. Many times, its down to the offer. Sometimes, some offers are just shit for the countries traffic, or they expect too much for the amount of data they need for a conversion, but there are plenty of great offers that should help you over come any losses you might obtain. And losses should still be extremely low. With click prices in some of my listed countries, you shouldn’t have to spend more than 20 or so dollars to fully give an offer a decent test.

How do you test landing pages? Much in the same way you test your offers. Create your simple set of ads, split test English ad copies and designs, take your best performing landing page copies and translate them. Is a landing page required? No, direct linking works great for me, many times with 200%+ ROIs, but when I throw landing pages up, even stupid simple ones, they double my returns.

Difficulty: 1.5 out of 5

International dating is simple. My ads are almost always consistent performers across the countries and offers I test. While some offers might not perform at all, others might, or the country might just be a dead end (I’ve found Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong to be very difficult, but that is probably due to the very international climate there).

Final Thoughts

It takes money to make money, and my testing methods prove this. You can go ahead and wing it, and if you are lucky you might make it, but my stats have talked for me. Taking the time to look at those stats and how I got things right, then replicate that success out internationally has helped me to the stage I’m at now. International dating is still a highly unexplored area by most affiliates, simply because many are too lazy to take the time to accurately translate their ads (Google Translate =/= accurate). It’s cheap and can be highly rewarding so jump on it, and focus on it until you make it work!

Oh, and if you liked that first pic, I’ve got more on my old Thai girls blog.

Not all affiliate marketing campaigns have to be well thought out and devilishly planned. This is one such example.

The Offer

So the offer I’m looking at now is World Golf Tour. I see from oDigger that it is available on EWA Network and WolfStormMedia at around $0.90 per conversion. Only $0.90, you say!? That’s right, but payout isn’t everything. I’ve made $50,000 a month with 1-2 dollar payouts, so this should not deter you in the slightest.

Let’s take a look at the offer page.

Wow! Simple, pleasant and easy. Fill in the form and collect your money. That’s about as simple an offer as it gets. Due to the low payout, I can only assume that it has a low scrub rate. The multitude of registration options through Google, Yahoo, or Facebook is awesome, as well. The easier it is to sign up, the faster you are going to make monies.

I’d like to run this on contextual traffic (PPV on TrafficVance), as that is where it will be easiest to target this offer. However, we run into one slight problem. The landing page is about 300 pixels too wide for the standard PPV pop up. You can try direct linking, but even taking a JPG image of this offer page, replacing the form with a big “SIGN UP FREE” button (or an email submit for your own list) would probably be the better choice. While users can scroll side to side on a PPV pop-up, it isn’t something that you’d find most users doing. Perhaps asking your affiliate network for permission to iFrame the signup form would work as well. That’ll be down to a network by network, advertiser to advertiser basis.

Another great thing about this offer is that it can be promoted to multiple non-English speaking countries (SE, DK, NO, FI, NL). This makes it a great choice for Facebook ads, as well. You can test it out on US traffic but you’ll need a high CTR as click costs on FB US traffic can be outstanding.

Basic Research

Quantcast tells us that most people that visit WGT.com are white, affluent men in their 30s and up that are interested in golf. If this comes to any surprise to you, its time to get out from under that rock. If you are targeting with a mix of demographic and interest targeting (say for example, Facebook), take this stuff to heart as you’ll have your best conversions when following this data. With PPV, demographic targeting won’t be as important as interest targeting, especially when it is so easy!

Where to Run This Offer

So if you are going to be running this offer on TrafficVance or LeadImpact, it will be easiest to do so simply by targeting golfing related key terms and URLs. I’ve put together a list of 700+ golfing terms I pulled from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can get it by helping me out by Tweeting about this post. Just click the button below to do so.

Tweet&getit is powered by Viuu

Cool! So you have the list now. If you want to target URLs, I would get a URL scraping tool. My favorite is AffPortal. It’s affordable and super easy to use.

Grab conversion pixels and post them on the offer. Not all your keywords and URLs will be winners. In some cases only 1 out of 1000 may be profitable. Some people think PPV is cheap traffic, but it can be relatively expensive to test. This might be the case with this offer. Remember to stick with it, spend $20 and see where it goes. If you are picking up some conversions, this is good. Spend a little more to make sure conversions are consistent. I’ve spent $500 in one day, only to make $100 back. I paused everything that didn’t convert and after a week I made back that $400 loss and was profitable for more than a few months. That is sometimes the sacrifice you have to make to get things working on PPV traffic.

Now, if you are going to try this offer out on Facebook, here is a sample ad I would use:

“Love Golf? – Then play World Golf Tour. Play against the Pro’s scores and beat them in tournaments for real cash prizes. Sign up FREE now!”

It is a stupid simple ad that you can use when targeting appropriate interests (You can target any of the Tiger Woods Golf games, Sim Golf, or go as broad as Golf if you are feeling up to the challenge). It gives an emotional connection that requires a response (Love), induces challenging the users skill to build interest, as well as a call to action with the key term ‘free’. That’ll be a biggie to your CTR. If you are planning to run this offer in non-English speaking countries, please use a professional translation service like onehourtranslation.com. Google Translate will do a horrible job trying to get this exact message across.

Remember to split test your images and landing pages constantly so you can better maximize your ROI!

Final Comments

What you are left with here is a very simple offer. Target middle aged men into golf. It’s not a difficult task to pick up some really easy money here. I realize this post isn’t as extremely in-depth as my other posts, but it really doesn’t have to be. This is not something that you are going to have to think about for a long time to break a profit!

I can’t say I don’t blame you for asking this question. It’s very difficult to make new affiliate marketing campaigns last more than a week or so with little effort, much harder than it was a few years ago, at least. Any one that’s been it as long as I have knows that’s the truth. We’ve had to battle rising competition, dying traffic sources and inflated cost per clicks in an ever dying economy. Coupled with “banner blindness” and consumers becoming more web savy, this all leads to shorter campaign lifespans for the average affiliate marketer.

Don’t be the average affiliate. Times change; adapt.

I want to open this post further by identifying one of the main problems that lead to low quality, short campaign lifespans. Fake blogs, fake polls, incentive advertising, false and misleading claims – this is the a general painting of the CPA affiliate marketing industry. While that’s a broad statement, there are enough people out there that know exactly what I’m talking about, and it is quite possibly one of the main issues that networks and advertisers aren’t doing enough to combat. Publishers that engage in shenanigans like this are out to make a buck for themselves, but on the whole, are forgetting that there is an advertiser out there that is just as money hungry as them. When an affiliate goes out and misleads a user, they’re going to generate a poor lead on that offer. This drags down the overall lead quality for the offer, which in turn drags down other affiliates through higher scrub rates, lower payouts, or a complete shut down of that offer.

So one of the ways to combat poor quality affiliates is to be a high quality affiliate. Send qualified traffic to your offers.

What are some ways we can pull up quality? Knowing your target market is key. Credit report guys: how do you think those credit report advertisers feel when you send traffic to them like it’s an IQ test? Fans of 50 Cent and Britney Spears probably isn’t going to make up a majority of your target market. I can tell you off the top of my head that its going to be people interested in buying houses, cars, small business owners and newly weds somewhere in their older 20s to 40s. Now that is as qualified as I’m going to get by basic targeting.

And how fucking hard is putting in a little effort to really know who your target market is? Spend a few hours today and browse magazines at a local bookshop. Look at the ads in major, high profile magazines. Do you think that any business would sink 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars on an ad in those magazines if they weren’t making money from it, or under a very high assumption that it would, in one form or another, generate revenue and positive buzz for them? These guys do their research, and pay their marketing teams millions of dollars a year to know that these ads are effective, or should be at the very least. Find the demographic/psychographic data of that magazine (email and ask for a media/press kit and it’ll tell you right in there who’s reading them) and you’ll be able to sync that up with hundreds of different affiliate offers.

Presell is essential to qualifying your leads. Giving people more information through a landing page on what they’ll be getting after they opt in, sign up, or purchase is key to lifting up quality. It doesn’t even take a lot of effort to come up with a very effective presell. One of my longest lasting offers, that I’ve been running for the past 6 months, uses a simple 3 bullet style landing page. It lists the benefits, gives them a slight heads up on whats on the other side (after they opt in to a list) and shoots them off to an offer to regain all the initial costs I lost by paying for the traffic. It averages about $100 a day, but I spend 5 minutes a week tweaking it and changing bids. About 2 – 3 hours of time for $18,000. I knew my target market, I knew the solution, and I simply gave them a quality answer to their problems.

On top of the quality of your traffic another thing that you’ve got to fight is scale. This world has nearly 7 billion people, but you’re only targeting a handful when you drop an ad on Facebook or Plenty of Fish or TrafficVance or where ever the hell you’re targeting. Banner blindness sets in within the first 5 to 10 views of the same banner. If you can’t make an impression on the first few times someone sees your ad, you’re going to be left with fuck all. Constantly scaling to new traffic sources, as well as rotating ads and banners will increase the lifespans of your campaigns, no matter how shitty the quality. I’m kind of pinning the tail on the donkey here, but I see so many people complain to me that they make great money on x traffic source the first 3 days, then people stop clicking, and their conversion rate sinks from those that are clicking. Your clicks are just bored of seeing the same ad or going to the same offer that they might have hit before… or you’re really finally getting scrubbed due to your piss poor quality traffic.

All in all, it comes down to running a legitimate business. Are you out for the quick buck, maybe 1k today and tomorrow and that’s it? Or are you looking to build a long-term development that, yes, on a day to day basis might not generate as much cash, maybe due to more expensive clicks or less scale, but makes you 10k over 6 months? Run a tight ship, know who you are targeting and why you are targeting them, and learn that there is more out there than just Facebook and PPV, and you’ll slowly start to see that you’re going to develop better campaigns that last much longer. It’s really as simple as that.

This is a follow up to a question asked in my “Ask Questions Get Answers” post. If you have a question related to affiliate marketing, leave a comment in the comments section of that post and try to drop a follow up post on my blog to answer it later.

If you aren’t familiar with Paid to Click sites, they’re exactly what they sound like. You sign up on these sites, click links and get paid fractions of a penny or so for each link you click. In most cases, you are required to stay on the advertiser’s page for 15 – 30 seconds to earn your payment for that click. You can buy referrals and make money off them if they stay active, too. That being said, if you are in  a tight spot for money, you’ll still just be wasting your time with this crap. The most you’ll make is a couple bucks a day and I’m sure only the top 1% are only making about that much. I don’t know the real stats or anything like that, but come on! Check out the sites yourself and have a laugh.

So you have the ability to pay others to click your ads. This is going to be pretty random and generally crappy traffic for general affiliate offers. Most people log on, click links, open the page, wait, close it and move on to the next. In a way, this is very similar to setting up a CPM campaign on PPV traffic. It blankets all targets, and you pay a flat cost for all of them (usually discounted from normal targeted PPV rates). In the end it is all about having the right offer for everything.

Now that isn’t to say you can’t make money with them. You want to know what you’ll see a lot of? Other Pay to click sites advertising on them. Set up your own PTC site, drop it on a bunch of these and you’ll probably be able to make some bit of cash. The only real kinds of niches I see working here are other crappy make money online schemes. You’re going to have to do a lot of landing page split testing, add in countdown timers, sound, video – the works – to see any bit of success. At least, that is how I’m gauging it.

So is it the best place to advertise? No way. Is it new? Nope. Is there money to make? Absolutely. It all comes down to what kind of research you are doing. My advice to you is to go and sign up for all of these sites. Check out what ads people are paying for, and track how long they stay on the site. If its on long enough, create a similar campaign and scale as much as you can!

As a follow up to my previous post on how some affiliates are screwing over the rest of us, I thought I might share some tactics that you should not use to promote affiliate offers. If I find out later that any of you guys actively use these poor promotion techniques, I’m going to find a screwdriver and ram it up your rear end. The end.

Anyways, some bad lead generation tactics:

Being extremely vague about what you are promoting. I see this with game offers. We’ll see an ad headline like Wanna Play? An ad image of random designs, an attractive girl or something completely unrelated to an offer and a very short ad body like “Come play this awesome new game!”. The truth of the matter with this promotion method is that it really isn’t that bad. It can generate a high CTR, but your CVR will be miserable unless you know who you’re targeting… and that is also the reason lead quality might be piss poor.

Targeting young is also a poor sales tactic. Again, another gaming offer no-no and even something you’ll see with dating offers for those that can sneak the ads up on Facebook or wherever else they’re advertising. Most of these games and dating sites require you buy a subscription or in-service item. How is 13-year old cousin Jimmy going to do that? Well, assuming he’s as naughty as I think he is, he’ll steal Daddy’s wallet, but I’d like to think more kids these days aren’t like that. Target the required minimum age on offers, and no lower. Always keep it about 18 for gaming offers and 25+ for dating offers is the norm.

Don’t be a misleading little prick. If they fill out an offer and you promise something on your landing page in-return for filling the offer out, you better be using an incentivized offer. DO NOT incentivize non-incentivizable offers. The lead quality will be awful. On top of that, if the advertiser finds out you’re doing this with their offer, good luck getting paid!

Trademarked terms should not be bid on or included anywhere on your ad copy without permission. Again, if networks or advertisers catch you doing this you’ll be in big doodoo.

All in all, poor quality leads will cost you more in the long term. You’re putting huge risk on something for a relatively small payout (short term campaign due to lead quality and possibility of not getting paid versus being able to scale out the same offer over a longer period of time).

Have any other examples you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below!

I’m going to take a little time every Saturday and Sunday to read over some of my favorite blogs and share the posts with you here. I like to relax on the weekends and pause building any new campaigns, just because that’s something I don’t want to have to stress about when I should be hanging out with friends, going to the club, and enjoying the freedom that any 9 to fiver would give themselves. I know some of you love to hustle 24/7, but I find taking a break gets me reinvigorated and ready to start something up on Monday. Anyways…

Affiliate Marketers Are Experts At Nothing – Finch comes out and tells it like it is. He’s a great writer,so be sure to look back and read his old posts. This one just talks about what real business equity you pick up with affiliate marketing as your only income source. Pretty much zero, but you can nurture your skills into something far greater that you can use to turn into a real business.

Keeping It Clean – Josh Todd writes on the GetAds blog about why mischievous affiliates are making it harder for the rest of us to make money.

How to Project Affiliate Earnings: 5 Metrics and Formula – Geno gives up good info about affiliate marketing metrics and how to use them. It isn’t a post based on CPL offers like you’ll get on EWA or the likes, but it includes many of the same principles that we use.

Testing Offers 101: From Red to Green Another post by Josh Todd, this time on InsideAffiliate, that covers the basics of testing new campaigns. This is the method that I, as well as many other affiliates, test our campaigns and analyze whether or not we think a campaign has the ability to become profitable or not.

Always Ask About Budget – Adhustler talks about a campaign he launched, only to have to pause it later because the advertiser hit their budget limit. A good reminder for newer and veteran affiliates.

How I Gained 92% More Email Subscribers – Jeremy gives up some good advice about building a list and what landing page layout worked the best for him. A great case study that was written not to swamp a niche. Classy!

I get this question a lot when I do consulting?

“Why does Facebook always disapprove all my ads, even if I submit, like, 200 – 300 ads with the Facebook Ad Manager? I put in a big mix of 100% legit ads, so they should at least approve those, right?”

Well, I want you to imagine you’re some nerdy college student and you just nailed an internship job at Facebook. Sweet, right? But then they put you on the advertising team. Great… NOT! You just got the kick-ass job of looking at tiny pics of underage girls, and disapproving them… all – day – long.

Now if this were really you, would you really inspect all 300 of those images from one advertiser, or get sick after the first few and batch disapprove them? I have no idea how the approval/disapproval system works at Facebook, but I imagine they have the ability to just disapprove all your ads at once somehow.

Slow it down. I always seemed like I had more success submitting 20 – 30 different ads at a time, rather than 500 at once. Facebook has also banned accounts for submitting/resubmitting too many ads at a time, so its a safety precaution, as well. This isn’t just with Facebook, but almost every other platform, I’ve seen some kind of batch disapproval like this.

If you want to submit more than that, split it up over multiple Facebook accounts. I’ll go into that with more detail another day.

Make sure you’re on the mailing list (sign up form is on the right!) because it’s Freebie Friday! I’ll have a pretty unique, nice looking landing page available for download when I send it out later today!

Short answer: Yes. Some of you may received this email from Facebook -

Upcoming system change:

As you know, we continuously work to make our ads system more accurate in order to further improve the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Among other ongoing improvements, we are refining our ads delivery system to better reflect the goals of our advertisers. This change will take place over the next few weeks and, assuming current bids remain unchanged, will mean that:

• CPC advertisers (advertisers who have chosen to bid “cost-per-click”) may receive more clicks.
• CPM advertisers (advertisers who have chosen to bid “cost per thousand impressions”) will continue to receive impressions but may receive less clicks.

Do I need to do anything?

As a CPM advertiser, you are indicating to our system that it’s more important that your ad is seen by your audience rather than clicked i.e. you have chosen to pay for impressions, not clicks. If your main objective is to increase awareness of your business with an ad impression, there is no need for action. However, if your most important objective is to drive clicks on your ads, you should change your bids from CPM to CPC.

Yeah… I kinda did a O.o face when I read this to. This is Facebook’s idea of using their ad system to generate more revenue with lesser cost. They’re hoping to bring in big brand names with this move; those with huge advertising budgets and little care to whether or not a user interacts with the ad, just sees it. It works on the subconscious level. A Facebook user sees the brands logo or product, doesn’t really think about it, but the next time they go shopping and see that product, they’re gonna want it.

But how the hell does Facebook split up traffic that clicks and traffic that doesn’t click? And why? Well, I’m not too sure, but I’m guessing it might have something to do with traffic that comes from apps and those they come from user profiles. Traffic from apps always sucked in most of my Facebook ads experience. I’d have a 1% conversion rate from app traffic and 13% from profile traffic. Most of the clicks were probably accidental. My other theories are that any ads set up as CPM that get a CTR of above a set percent well be retroactively disabled and only work on CPC settings. Extreme, but its just an idea.We’ll see in the next few days/weeks what is to come of this.

Why would Facebook do this? More money, obviously. Every experienced affiliate marketer knows CPC mode is more expensive. And now with everyone having to switch over, you can bet it will get a hefty amount more pricey per click. Facebook is ruining a lot of business models for its own gain. Those who switch with it will be the ones on top, but it’s still a poor decision by Facebook, I think.

This was a funny statement, though:

“As a CPM advertiser, you are indicating to our system that it’s more important that your ad is seen by your audience rather than clicked i.e. you have chosen to pay for impressions, not clicks. If your main objective is to increase awareness of your business with an ad impression, there is no need for action.”

This would be fine… if you don’t mind summing up your business in 100 or so words and a tiny image. I think my business is a little more valuable than that and honestly, when’s the last time you saw an ad from a big brand that didn’t have a call to action on it? Click here for more info, see where you can get a test drive, see why we’re the best, etc.

I just got this email -

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. ?As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. ?Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks. ?If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling. ?These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

* Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
* Sites that charge for “free” software
* Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
* Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
* Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account. ?In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies. ?Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
You may also review the complete AdWords Terms & Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
In addition, our FAQ about Account Disablings can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

It’s really funny as I haven’t touched the account for such a long time, and the only time I tried rebills on Google was when green tea was all the rage. I had a small stint with acai berry that quickly ended when I spent $100 in about 5 minutes. The little things like this really can come back to haunt you I guess. It is reminders like this that make me want to focus on quality, and while quality can sometimes be harder to convert, I think in the long run it would be more worth it (as you aren’t having accounts across all platforms shut down!)

I’m looking at my AMEX account online and seeing I racked up a $11,000 charge from Myspace. Well, that would be great if I actually set up a campaign profitting so much I could afford to drop that kind of money… too bad that’s not the case.

Unfortunately, what happened is there is an asshole, another advertiser on Myspace, that wants all the impressions and banner spots to himself. Instead of just outbidding us all, he’d rather sink way low, and click fraud us, to the tone of 45,000 over 5 hours, at around $0.25 cents a click. You can see the details and join the conversation over at Wickedfire.

I’m not alone in this click fraudery. A friend of mine got hit hard, and a few others on WF. Apparently, one of the guys click frauding (if there is more than one. I don’t know) is a big? asshole publisher on a network or two.

I’m still in the process of getting this all settled, so its a bit frustrating that I’ll have to see this on my credit till Myspace can get its act together (2-3 weeks probably).

On top of that, I’m testing out PPV traffic with TrafficMedia. The experience has been fine with a few good profitting campaigns. However, they are having some errors with there financing stuff. Basically, my account balance keeps going negative and more negative despite me freezing all traffic. I think im at around $-700 when over the past few days I’ve only spend $500 and should still have $100 left in my account (manual prepayment). Those that have been on automatic withdrawals have had they’re money taken due to this error. MediaTraffic is currently on the issue and will return everything to normal as soon as they know what’s wrong.

Oh, and for all of you emailing me with “Hey, hit me up sometime let’s get something started together!”… Read this.