Stedb Video Tutorials
Here are a few video tutorials I made for the Stedb platform. I covered the basics in starting an email campaign. I’ll be doing some more advanced tutorials in the future. These are the only video tutorials for Stedb on the net. I placed them in order.
Enjoy!
Creating an Email List and Importing Data
(Step by step on how to create and manage multiple lists as well as how to import large amounts of data)
Adding Domains and DomainKeys
(Add all of your domains in the admin panel and make sure DomainKeys is enabled for all)
Adding IPs and RDNS
(Add your ips and rdns entries into the admin panel)
Create a Campaign
(Step by step on how to create a campaign from scratch in Stedb)
Unsubscribe Message and Inserting Suppression Lists
(How to change the unsubscribe message to be Can-Spam compliant and how to upload a suppression file)
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing | No Comments »
The Truth of Email/Zip Submits
Email and Zip submits have a nasty reputation within the industry, and rightfully so. The way they work is you click on an offer and place your email address or zip code to recieve your FREE product. Of course the product is never free and you have to fill out an ungodly number of pages to have the CHANCE to recieve that offer. In most cases you end up spending more money than theat particular product is worth! Futhermore the information you place in the fields is passed around from one marketing agency to another. You can expect a healthy number of spam emails in the future.
An example of an Email Submit is located here.
While these email submits can be very misleading, the truth of the matter is they proved very profitable from a marketers stand point. When email/zip submits first came out, all the user had to do was click fill out the first page (the email address or their zip code) and the marketer got paid anywhere from $1 - $2 a lead. Not a bad deal!. Eventually the market became much more saturated with these offers and the advertisers requested that 2-3 pages of information be filled out before you’d get paid.
I promoted these email submits up until about a year ago. While many people bashed them, I was able to make a serious amount of bank hawking the newest FREE (fill in the blank). In fact the way I went about winning that Lamo ( for a few days) and the Vegas trip was about 60-70% email/zip submits. Looking back it proably wasn’t the greatest offer in value to my users. I also ran into a bit of legal trouble through some of the offers I promoted as well. I heard stories within the industry about the advertiser receving hundreds of thousands of leads only to give away one free ipod, for example.
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Inbox Truth | No Comments »
Bot Clicks
A problem I am getting more and more of is “bot clicking”. Bot clicking is when a robot goes in and clicks on your link to make it look like an actual user clicked on your campaign. The purpose of bot clickers is for an outside source to monitor your traffic after you’ve been labeled as SPAM by a few users on the network. This has been going on for a few years now and explains why the statistics on my CTR and the CTR on the ad campaign don’t match up. Major ISPs actually have active bot networks out there that make these “hidden” clicks on your offers.
How to fix?
The best way is to keep an active monitor of the IPs that are clicking on your campaign. Bot networks operate in Ip ranges. I have ranges of known “bot clickers” that I block through my CMS. If your CMS doesn’t have the ability to block certain Ip ranges registering as clicks you need to block manually. They can be a pain in the ass to deal with if not taken cared of.
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Email news, ISP News, Inbox Truth | No Comments »
The Myth of CPC
I wanted to talk a little bit about the myth of CPC (Cost Per Click) as related to email marketing. The theory is that you can make more money on CPC, if traffic is solid, than you would getting paid on a per lead or CPA (Cost Per Action) basis. In my experience this isn’t true.
I’ve been in the affiliate marketing business for quite some time now and have seen first hand the problems of CPC. For example, Offer A on XYZ network is paying out 20 cents a unique click on a mortgage loan application (CPC). Offer B on the same network is paying out $20 a lead on the mortage loan application (CPA). (These numbers do not reflect an actual campaign, just an easy to follow example!). So,
Offer A: .20 a unique click
Offer B: $20 a lead
Which one to choose? These days I always go with the CPA, $20 a lead. In most cases, the CPC might actually earn more but in reality you will always lose. The reason is because the advertiser and/or affiliate network is ALWAYS looking at conversion numbers. If your traffic isn’t converting to their liking they will reduce your CPC amount to reflect what THEY think should be an ideal payout. Furthermore, if your traffic is great and they are happy, you probably could have made more mailing the CPA offer in the first place. You have to remember that on the advertiser side they are always fighting different forms of fraud, click fraud representing a huge portion of their prevention efforts. Suffice to say, it hurts the legit marketer mailing CPC when the issues are beyond their control.
In conclusion always go with CPA. I reserve the right to change my mind, however. If anyone can show me tangible proof that in the longrun CPC outperforms CPA, by all means fire away! I will update this post with evidence, only the tried and true facts though. Until then, Happy Marketing!
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Inbox Truth | No Comments »
Beware of the Valentine Spam!
Interesting article I read about what to expect this valentine’s day in your email box. Watch out men, spam is going after your insecurities. You can view the article here.
This year, however, many spammers looking for ways to score clicks are going back to basics. According to Symantec (SYMC), the anti-spam company that has been monitoring Valentine’s-related spam traffic this month, the most popular type of spam this season tends to focus on one of the old favorites of the spam industries, appealing to men and their insecurities. “This year the top three types of spam tend very much to be related to what we call ‘male capabilities,’” says Michael Chue, managing director for Hong Kong and Taiwan at Symantec.
Filed under: Email news | 1 Comment »
The Value of Happy Birthday!
What is the value of wishing someone a Happy Birthday? It takes less than 15 seconds of your time to write someone and say Happy Birthday, (insert name). Some people even abbreviate this already short sentence with Happy bday. In life and business we spend much of our time thinking up of ways to maximize our ROI. There aren’t many low risk/high reward investments out there, but wishing someone a Happy Birthday is one of those. That person may have recieved only a handful of birthday wishes. The fact that you took the time to appreciate him/her on the most important day of their life makes you stand out.
How does this relate to me or my blog about email marketing? First off, I recently had a birthday, January 21st, and secondly using email marketing to wish someone a Happy Birthday can really touch someone’s life. For example, one of the more memorable Happy Birthday wishes I recieved was a greeting card from a friend of mine. You can view it here. This is a contact I do business with and you can bet in the future I’ll continue to my relationship with her.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Lycos calling it quits
I give credit to the guys over at Deliverability.com for bringing this to my attention. You can read their article here. Lycos has decided to shut it down. All the emails will be redirected elsewhere.
Below is the listing of all the domains that will be affected. Start scrubbing your lists now since these will be inactive.
benoist.name
caramail.com
caramail.lycos.fr
caramail.lycos.fr
jubii.co.uk
jubii.dk
lycos.at
lycos.co.uk
lycos.de
lycos.es
lycos.fr
lycos.it
lycos.nl
mail.lycos.at
mail.lycos.co.uk
mail.lycos.de
mail.lycos.es
mail.lycos.it
mail.lycos.nl
multimania.com
tripod.co.uk
tripod.de
tripod.es
Filed under: Email news, ISP News | 1 Comment »
Email Intelligence
This is more catered to the Affiliate Marketing industry but has revelance in other industries as well. Profitability in email marketing comes down to many factors, but one often overlooked component is the ad campaign itself.
For example, let’s look at two affiliate offers. We”ll call them Lead X and Lead Y. Lead X and Lead Y are the exact same lead with matching fields. Everything is identical except two small conditions, the leads are hosted on different advertising networks and vary in price. The advertiser on Lead X offers $20 per lead while the advertiser on Lead Y offers only $18 per. Natrually you want to go for Lead X, right? Not so fast!
Lead X | Emails Sent: 100,000 | Clicks: 3,000 | CTR: 3% | Leads 130 | Earnings: $2,600 |
Lead Y | Emails Sent: 100,000 | Clicks: 3,000 | CTR: 3% | Leads 160 | Earnings: $2,880 |
The above example is called Split A/B testing. I used basic examples to make the math easy for both you and me. Usually, Split A/B testing is done on a much smaller scale to test the conversion ratios of similar offers. Anywho, you might ask, “Why did Lead Y do better than Lead X eventhough Lead X has a higher payout and they are the exact same offer?!” One of the biggest factors to consider is the scrubbing of the lead. In an perfect world you would have generated the exact same amount of leads for both advertisers. However, Lead X has a larger database of leads they are scrubbing your traffic aganist than Lead Y. Even worse, I’ve experienced networks offering higher payouts, but they engaged in a practice called shaving. Shaving in a nutshell is stealing leads without paying for them.
Use your intelliegence and always test similar offers before you put your time and energy in promoting an offer. The example used above are very basic in nature. Email marketing is much more complicated than the example I provided. Do your research and your email intelligence will show in the form of increased profits.
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment »
Explosive Growth
One of the trends I’ve noticed in the different industries I’ve been part of is that growth occurs in waves, not steadily. It’s true that the actions you take on a daily, consistant basis affect your growth negatively or positvely. However, growth itself comes in small and large spurts.
I remember during my highschool years, when I first got into internet marketing, I was able to support myself with one or two great months out of the year. It’s true I still lived with my parents, but I still had bills in excess of $1,000/month plus other expenses that teens spent their money on. During the wild west of email marketing in 2000-2003 anything went. I would find various methods of inboxing ISPs, mostly AOL, and when those loopholes would close I’d move on. This explained the inconsistancy from month to month in my early days. As I got smarter , I began reinvesting all profits back into the company instead of buying the next hot toy. My dreams as a kid was to have the hottest car in the school parking lot to impress the ladies. Well, my senior year of highschool I bought a BMW Z3 for 23K cash. It was a real sick car but not the panty dropper I thought it was. I was still a dork with no social skills.
Anyways, enough of my teen years and back to the point of this post! When you are struggling, don’t be discouraged. Building a business takes time and effort. If you believe in the work you are doing, you will be rewarded. Explosive growth appears in waves. It could be an important contact you made, a presentation to an organization, or some new technology that you have mastered that triggers your growth. Keep up the work and you will experience explosive growth. It’s what you do after those first waves of success hit you that will make or break your company.
Filed under: Inbox Truth | 2 Comments »
A Little Self-Indulgence
Affiliate Summit West is comming next week in Las Vegas. I won’t be attending this year because of prior commitments. After all, it will be hard to top one of the best trips I’ve ever been on from last year.
Affiliate Summit is the premier event for affiliate marketers. Some of the more important contacts I’ve made to date were met hanging out at the bar or at hosted parties during Affiliate Summit. I know AS 2009 will be just as great, probably better, than 2008. Here is a little video footage of my experience at AS West 2008, enjoy!
I did not actually get to KEEP that Lambo. I won, err earned, the trip to Vegas, 3 night suite stay, and the green “Money” Lambo for 2 days. We managed to pull out the victory for top revenue during the month of their promotion.
XY7 went completely overboard with their promotion of this, in the best way possible for me! Live camera crew, hired show girls, man oh man! Additonally, nothing secured a business relationship like taking clients for a spin in the ultra fast lambo. It was definately a great experience to live out while I still have my youth.
Anyway, hope to hear some great stories from AS 2009!
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing Events | 4 Comments »