 |
 |
 |
We took a few moments to interview one of the HasOffers’ twin brother founders: Lucas Brown on their affiliate network software. HasOffers has a low cost to entry and allows networks and even individual companies to effectively run their own affiliate programs. Lucas talks about how and why they formed HasOffers and were they are heading in the near future.
(Illustrations courtesy of Louis Gray and Jeannine Schafer)
The FTC revised its guidelines regarding truth in advertising practices. Specifically targeting Internet Marketers and social media. The main focus of the revised guidelines are on stating your relationship with the product/advertiser and not using any deceptive marketing practices.
The FTC wants bloggers to disclose the relationship with the product they are promoting on each entry. One broad disclaimer is not enough in their eyes – whether it is in your terms and conditions, on a FTC Disclosures link on the home page (or all your pages).
This even applies to tweets and facebook status updates. The FTC recommends using hash tags on twitter for example: #ad or #paidreview. Even videos, such as those posted on youtube channels, must also adhere to the same disclosures.
While the FTC will not likely go after individual affiliates, it is putting the burden of regulating affiliates on the advertisers and networks. Most advertisers and offers have stipulations that you can not use fake testimonials and must follow applicable laws, however until now they haven’t really been monitored or enforced by most companies. The new FTC focus will force advertisers and networks to more closely monitor affiliates and stop any questionable marketing tactics.
Here is a FAQ the FTC put together regarding the new guidelines:
The Health Converter team interviewed Wes Mahler of Tracking202. In addition to giving insight on the free open source conversion tracking software, Wes provided some clever tips on how to be successful and target your marketing.
In his last post, Calculating Success – Figuring out ROI’s – Part 1 we covered a couple of things.
- Established a click cost as our basis for figuring out profitability
- Discussed the formula involved in calculating a EPC.
Now that we have an EPC we’re going to move on to figuring out how to get a CPC from a CPM cost. We know that CPM is the cost per 1000 people that see your ad. Typical CPM rates can range from 10 cents to 10-20$ CPM. Just depends on the site and how they value their traffic.
In order to do this we need to get things in terms of clicks. To get things in terms of clicks we need to add another metric and that’s CTR. As discussed in the previous post CTR stands for Click Thru Rate. This is the % of people that click on an ad. Pretty simple right? I get asked a lot what a good CTR is. Of course there is about 100 factors that go into making that determination like placement on the page, how focused the site is to the ad, etc etc. If I’m just doing a Run of Network buy I typically like to get a .1-.2% at a minimum.
Remember those word problems we used to have in school and how much you hated them?
If you’re in marketing whether that’s affiliate marketing or offline marketing, you’re involved in one big word problem all day long. Lots of algebra and figuring out what the numbers need to be to make things work. I know most of you just throw campaigns up and see what happens with some basic targets to hit. But what if you had a good idea before you started. You can test how different things would tweak your profitability. Have you ever done the math on a 10% conversion rate improvement? Or what about a 5% ctr improvement on one of you ads? How does that effect profitability?
In this series of posts I’m going to talk about the formula’s we use to figure out the math of marketing. I know it’s not something fun to most but it’s really interesting to see what little improvements can do in every step of the process. I’m coding up some calculators which I hope I’ll have done by the end of the weekend. Then you can just plug in your metrics and come up with some insightful answers without doing all this math.
Terms we’ll be working with:
- Impressions = Number of times your add is shown
- Click = vistor to your website
- CPM = Cost per thousand impressions
- CTR = Click Thru Rate, how many people click through and and or page
- CPC = Cost per Click, how much you pay for each click
- Conversion = takes some action like buying something, generating a lead. Basically something you make money one.
- Conversion Rate = the percentage of people that come to a particular offer that turn into conversion
- Payout = value of the conversion. I’m an internet marketer so payout is my lingo.
- EPC = Earnings Per Click, how much you make for each click that comes to the offer page
I know for our advanced readers you already know all that crap but we have all types here. 
The Health Converter team made a big splash at the Affiliate Summit East this year and leveraged our relationships with industry insiders to give you some tips and news. In this first interview, Justin interviews Tom Cohn from Venable – the leading law firm for FTC compliance. Tom gives advice to both advertisers, networks and affiliates on staying compliant. Affiliates should take heed as the FTC is now starting to look at blogs and review web sites.
Hello there!
My name is Cheri, and I am a new affiliate manager here at Health Converter. I just wanted to introduce myself and remind you that we are here for you! So if you have any questions or need help with anything, you can easily reach me via Email, AOL instant messenger, or Skype.
Email: cheri @ healthconverter [d o t] com
AIM: CheriHCSupport
Skype: CheriHC
In case you were wondering about my internet marketing experience:
I have over 8 years of online marketing experience and specialize in: Blogging, Social Media, Direct Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Community Management, Promotions, Events & Tradeshows, On-Camera Corresponding, and Public Relations.
I am entirely responsible for the complete maintenance and promotion of my own brand. My own blog articles receive as many as 26K daily unique visitors. I am partnered with Youtube as a Makeup Beauty Guru, and have over 20,000 subscribers (and growing every day). I explain the tips and tricks that I use to “Beautify” myself, while also interacting with the terrific community of girls that now follow me on my adventures because of this Youtube Channel.
I’m also an avid gamer and am almost constantly on my PS3 or 360 (when I’m not working, anyways) – sorry boys, I will probably beat you! In fact, this past spring I was an official Frag Doll Media Correspondent for Ubisoft and helped them demonstrate and market their video games at public events, shows, blogs and online communities.
I was also selected by Skout, the fastest growing Mobile Dating Network APP (featured on CNN, Fox News, etc) to cover press releases, relatable topics, and work to encourage community growth and involvement while representing the face of the Skout Community.
Hobbies: I love photography, makeup, art, writing, eating, sleeping, etc. I also went through a brief modeling phase (before quickly becoming interested in other avenues of success, of course) and was even selected to compete in the Maxim Hometown Hotties contest this past year.
If you’d like to get to know me a little more, I actually have a personal blog that you can take a look: http://www.heycheri.com.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like the inside scoop on our latest offers, highest converters or if you have any questions in general!
XOXO Cheri XOXO
I know what you are thinking. A measly 2% increase? What’s the point? Ask anybody that is making six figures a month with Affiliate Marketing if they’d like an extra 2%. Of course they would! That’s an extra $2,000 in their pocket every month. Sometimes in life it’s the little things that add up.
In case you haven’t seen all the posts lately (like this one and this one) about Bevo Media, it is now publicly launched and ready for action. It is a tracking platform for paid traffic, along the lines of Prosper202. It does have a lot of nifty features that 202 doesn’t have, and they are putting some serious marketing muscle behind this release to make it a major player in the PPC / PPV / Media Buy tracking & analytics field.
I just got back and all caught up from the trip to New York, so now it’s time for the obligatory wrap-up post. For those of you that were not able to make it, you should definitely put it on your calendar for next year. For pure value, contacts gained, and networking, this was the best show of the year for me so far. Ad-Tech in November would have to be pretty spectacular to beat it.
Sponsors
