Is EWA Really Dead?

UPDATE: It is official EWA is closing their doors

Yet another affiliate network bites the dust. Rumors have been circulating for months of non payments and shady activities at EWA including creating fake Account Managers to attract the ever horny male adolescent affiliates. Just like COPEAC and so many networks of the past, history tends to repeat itself and when you start seeing things like this bubble up it’s just a matter of time. I have yet to see a network recover from this much bad press, but I wish Ryan Eagle the best and hope he can steer the ship in the right direction.

Performance Insider had a nice editorial about the whole fiasco, you can check it out here

Here are my thoughts on Ryan Eagle and his impact on affiliate marketing.

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ASW 2013 Recap and Mobile

Affiliate Summit West 2013 has come and gone, and mobile is still the red headed step child of the show. With 40% of emails opened on mobile devices, record levels of smart phone activations in the US, and more time spent on a phone year over year, I’m still dumbfounded how little so many people know about mobile marketing. In a way it’s a good thing for us since it allows us to stay ahead of the curve, but at the same time it makes it hard because I don’t have too many people with whom to share ideas and strategies with.

Anyway here are my highlights from a mobile perspective:

MobAff Mobile Meetup – For those of you who missed it, we gave away a Lambo full of cash to the winner of our little mobile beer pong championship. It was great to be an environment where everyone spoke mobile. Shout out to Dr Ngo , (best affiliate blogger right now) Moolah Team , TapIt and SendDroid

ASW Exhibit - Although I’d say 25% of booths had the word “mobile” somewhere in their information, when actually talking about mobile it was clear that most companies weren’t really doing anything yet. I ran into Barman who introduced me to some guy carrying a cardboard cutout with “I need mobile traffic” written on it. I told the guy we can help him get app installs on a CPA basis to which he said he only wants to rev share based on in app purchases. He then proceeded to tell me the “beauty” of the games, but couldn’t answer a simple question like what is his Life Time Value from a new user. So let me get this straight you want me to take on all the risk of marketing and buying traffic and wait weeks sometimes months before those revenues are realized? I hope there is no company out there stupid enough to work on those kinds of terms.

For anyone who wants to try mobile CPA here are some tips:

- Play with your own money first to get some kind of baseline CPAs that back out for you

- Manage your channels carefully by using caps and adjusting CPA pricing to reflect quality of traffic

- Use a tracker like MobAff Tracker to discover what devices, carriers, sources, ads bring in the most qualified users

I then ran into Ruck who is always fun to chat with. He is one of the few guys who’s tackling mobile head on, much respect. I topped off the day with some great meetings with Millenial, Airpush, and some of our top advertisers.
ASW Parties - I’m not much of a clubbing type, I’m more of a dive bar with 10 car bombs kind of guy, so I can’t really comment on the big club parties. I did try to go catch Affiliate Ball for a bit, but seeing a bunch of dudes standing around in Bikram  Yoga like sweat box didn’t appeal to me. Only party I wish I went to was the STM Meetup but although I heard great things there is no way it can top the “Here for the Gangbang” password for the secret bar in San Francisco.

Overall another great show, but it is clear that the industry is growing up. I heard a lot of affiliates talk about building their own offers, traffic, or services. Although I respect the move up the value chain, all new endeavors come with challenges and obstacles you can’t predict until you have to face them. Remember if it was easy, everyone would be doing it! For now enjoy having the freedom of being an affiliate, working whenever you want, traveling, earning as much or as little as you need, having networks buy you drinks and showing you a good time!

One last note about the upcoming ASE. I know there are a lot of people hating on Philly as the new destination, but as someone who’se been to way to many Affiliate Summits I’m kind of excited for the change of pace.

Change Your Thinking to Profit in 2013

One of the most common questions I get from our publisher partners revolves around testing offers.

What budget do I need ?

What CPC to start with?

Where to buy cheap traffic?

My answer is ALWAYS the same… and you’re not going to like it. My answer is “It depends…”

Lots of factors can effect the answer to these questions including, how much can you afford to test, how many creatives are you testing, how many traffic sources, are you rotating offers from various networks and more!

Let me explain to you how I view affiliate marketing and hopefully this will change your thought process and help you succeed in 2013.

Thought 1

Digital media sold is just like any other marketplace. There are sellers and buyers. The more buyers buying from a certain sellers the more competitive the environment. The more people competing the more likely that the price is going to be as high as it can be making it difficult for new entrants.

Thought 2

Media buying affiliates job is to find market inefficiencies. With all the talk of RTB, SSP, DSP and other technologies designed to help the market find more efficient pricing there is still huge inefficiencies especially in mobile. Your job is to find those inefficiencies and make profit on the spread, not to come up with creative non-compliant strategies to scam a profit margin.

Thought 3

All you need to do is find traffic that generates you a higher EPC than your CPC. It is really that simple! All these other factors like Click Loss, LPs, Conversion Rates, etc are just indicators but at the end of the day you want to generate more revenue than your ad spend. I don’t care if the traffic costs .15 CPC and you’re generating .20 EPC or traffic is .02 CPC and you’re generating .03 EPC.

Thought 4

You need to become traffic and offer ambiguous. What I mean is let go of your assumptions like “I run dating” or “I only do push” your job is to find traffic and plug in whatever hot offers are around to find what generates you profit. For example if traffic source A doesn’t back out for your offer then keep plugging in offers until you find out what will make you money, and vice versa with offer, plug different traffic to see what sticks.

Affiliate marketing is an arbitrage business and doesn’t need to be complicated with things like ad copy, landing pages, tracking etc. At the end of the day just find traffic that backs out to the offers you’re working with and watch your profits grow in 2013!

MobAff Tracker Still Paving The Way

There have been many Mobile Tracking solutions popping up which is a great sign that mobile is finally maturing as more affiliates and advertisers see the potential of mobile inventory.

Before I get into the new features we’re rolling out I want to clarify a few things about our tracking solution since there is a lot of mis information out there.

We our building our solution for enterprise clients. There is a reason why agencies, large media buyers, ad networks, and affiliate networks trust our platform for their mobile marketing needs. We use leading database providers like Maxmind and Scientia Mobile (not WURFL) for our analytics for the most accurate up to date data. Speed comes from server and back end optimization not “proprietary” black magic systems.

The main concern affiliates have is why not offer a self hosted solution. The reason is because most affiliates  are running on VPS or poor performing dedicated servers. We use a mix of server optimizations, caching, load balancing, and other secret methods to insure our system stays as fast as possible. To build a truly scalable platform SaaS is the way to go and giving code away either compiled or open source is not scalable.

Lets recap what you’re getting for $150 a month.

• Powerful hosted solution… no need to worry about installing complex buggy systems
• Built to scale processing over 100 million rows of data
• Built for speed – redirects under 100ms even with redirect rules
• Access to Enterprise grade data on every visitor

Our product is not built for the mobile affiliate starting out, but for the mobile affiliate who knows who to scale and wants a reliable platform to make mobile media buying easier and faster. We are now integrated with over a dozen mobile ad networks for quick deployment and conversion tracking.

With that out of the way lets talk about some cool new features about to be released.

iOS and Android SDK for App Install Tracker - Did you build your own app and want to track conversions… we have a proven lightweight non intrusive SDK that will integrate with our tracker allowing you to track performance on all your media buys.

Landing Page Module - Generate code to be used on your landing pages to track CTR and CR of your custom landing pages.

Ad Network API Integration - You can now get reports from ad networks offering API directly into the tracker for the most accurate Impression and Cost Data

We staffed up and now working on Phase3 of our Tracker so stay tuned for the best mobile tracking and analytics tool on the planet.

Mobi Gold Secrets a Robert F Carrera Theft

UPDATE: Looks like the thief deleted his thread after he got called out.

As most of the readers of this blog know, I have no interest in becoming a guru. I release all my training for FREE in the hopes that as affiliates become successful in mobile they will join my network or sign up to use our tracker.

Thanks to a gentlemen from Warrior Forum it has come to my attention that someone decided it was a good idea to jack my copyrighted material and sell it without permission.

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/712164-easily-make-26-342-46-two-months-simple-mobile-campaigns-anyone-can-create.htm

Apparently Robert F Carrera not only copied my the flow of my training, he didn’t even bother to change the copy! Skip to page 2 of the thread to see him being called out on it.

If you want to get my my FREE mobile training click here

For those of you who got robbed by this criminal contact me.