Evidently StumbleUpon has been doing some heavy duty spring cleaning, banning some users from the system. I would generally pass this kind of news without paying too much attention to it. However, there is one thing puzzled me a bit. Namely their PPC advertising. I advertised using this option a little. I don’t remember spending more that $200 on their ads due to the low conversion rates.
So StumbleUpon wants their users to submit pages about dogs and cats and and then they offer you to create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to those pages. But if you submit a page that actually is made to make you money, you are braking their TOS? Are you kidding me? I don’t understand the logic. If you do please enlighten me.
Here is one more account for you to ban http://vladtheaffiliate.stumbleupon.com – I probably have broken your TOS, besides I don’t need your traffic. You can have it all.
I lately have come to realize that all the posts about StumbleUpons quality of traffic are bunch of BS. If their traffic was so good people would exit AdWords in thousands. The truth is StumbleUpon’s traffic does not convert and can actually hurt your AdSense earnings. I also have not seen a single conversion from their PPC. I don’t even know why do people even bother using their PPC. Spend that money in AdWords at least the traffic from Google converts better.
Yesterday I received a call from John Nardolilli of LinkConnector. I have to say that none other Affiliate Network comes even close in customer care. Seriously! I have barely made $200 with this network and yet they treat me as I was their top affiliate.
Last November I had chance to meet in person with John in Cary, NC. If you have just recently signed up with Link Connector and John is your account representative- congratulations! Your are in good hands!
Anyway, one of the reasons for John’s call was to let me know about their new widget. You can see it in action on the right.
Although you will not benefit much for SEO purposes while using this widget, it is nice little (or big- depends how you you configure it) “devil”. You ave absolute freedom as to the size of this widget.
This is something new at LinkConnector. In fact, yesterday you may have noticed a test post. There was a glitch in the code, and the script did not display properly within a blog post, should you decide to use the widget within a blog posts (WordPress).
For the short time of playing with this new widget, I can say that I like it a lot. It is fast and it is configuarable on many levels. If you have not been to you LinkConnector account, you should take a look at this new widget.
If you are following “PepperJam vs CJ” situation, you might want to tune in to Sam’s podcast over at Cost Per News and listen to his interview with Kerri Pollard. The interview not to be missed. So there it is, my shortest post ever?
photo credit: pixel0908Some times you can’t help but to be a spectator. Just as Affiliate blogs began to calm down over Mr. Mahalo, a new controversy is brewing on the horizon. In fact according to Kris Jones the controversy was taking place during Affiliate Summit and maybe even during Jason’s keynote address. I find this to be very ironic. I was quiet strong critic of Calacanis’ keynote speech. However, listening to podcast I now can say that I took a lot of what Jason said out of the content.
In his speech Jason mentioned how the Internet was looked at as a “plain leveled field”; a great opportunity for anyone to succeed. Every one was equal, opportunities were wide open and the sky was the limit.
So how does it look for a perspective of a “nobody”. And by nobody I mean myself. Because when I look at both CJ and PepperJam, I feel like I am less than nobody.
I wonder how soon will the “Goliaths” begin to demand “exclusivity” of affiliates? Seriously. Imagine if one network would ask you to either work with them exclusively or get out. Would you feel like you are on a “plain leveled field”?
That is my initial impression of PepperJam Network. The only disappointment I have is that I did not join this network sooner.
Those who read my blog regularly may remember my frustration about inability to communicate with some merchants from other networks. Thankfully I don’t see this ever to be an issue with PepperJam Network.
I wanted to put PepperJam at the very center of this post. However I can’t get out off my mind many fruitless attempts to contact affiliate managers on other networks. The ability to reach your affiliate manager can be crucial to the success of your campaigns. Especially if you have ongoing PPC campaigns. Imagine waking up one morning just find out that your money are being wasted on this one landing page. and to discover later that merchant’s affiliate manager has some serious “mystery” disorder with “nowhere to be found” symptoms. Now there is a network out there where these sort of mystery affiliate managers do not exist- the PepperJam Network.
There are really many great features at PJN and I would be wasting my time repeating things written before by other bloggers. Kris Jones has a list of many outstanding reviews of PepperJam, make sure to read at least a few of them.
I on the other hand will just point out how easy it is to communicate with your merchant partners. First of all, to locate contact information of merchants is the matter of one click. Even of those that you have not partnered with yet! As soon as you join a particular program, that merchants email is automatically added to your address book. But if that was not enough, it appears that you will be able to IM your merchants!!! Even though most managers are offline as I am writing this review, it was hard to resist not to take the screen shot of the IM window:
How cool is that?!!
To conclude I will say this. Other affiliate networks should really follow PapperJam’s example, or risk to loose their merchants and their affiliates. I have noticed a few merchants have their program listed with PepperJam while still offering the same program on other networks. I am switching to PepperJams creatives first thing tomorrow.
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