Aden Mott talks about Affiliate Marketing, Music, Celebrities & World News.

It seems that I bitch a lot on this blog and I guess that since I don’t have the time to focus on blogging about affiliate marketing that I may as well use it as an outlet when I have something to say.

If you would like to read the FULL story about my issue with Copeac then you can click here to read it.  This includes email conversations and instant message conversations.

The short version of what happened is that I got permission from Danielle & Mike Krongel of Intermark Media to promote my affiliate link.  I promoted my link for almost a year and brought them a lot of new affiliates with the agreement that I would earn 2% of each referrals commission for life.

An affiliate signed up under my link and was generating me almost $7,000 a month in commissions. After a few months of this, his affiliate ID mysteriously disappeared from my referral account. I was told that it was just a glitch with Direct Track and his ID was placed back into my account.. but the commissions stopped.

I waited a few months and emailed Danielle and was quickly told that I was no longer entitled to this persons commissions because he opened a new company and a new affiliate ID.. But I was still the one who referred him to the network.

A year went by and I said nothing about it until earlier in 2010 when a new affiliate manager at Copeac who had no idea about my situation decided to ping me on AIM and try to push weight loss garbage rebill offers. I explained to her that I do not run those kinds of offers and every week she continued to ping me and try to get me to push them.

Finally I decided to ask her to look into the situation for me about the fraud that Copeac committed with my account.  She came back with a 3rd excuse and informed me that company policy had changed and the affiliate I referred was earning too much money and that he was voided from my account.

Why was I told 3 different stories? Direct Track glitch?  No such thing that could cause this sort of glitch.  The other 2 are jokes also. The company policy did not change until after they did this to my account.  Mike Krongel and his company basically got away with fraud.  I don’t really care what reason they had for doing it. They went about it in the wrong way and what they did was unethical and illegal.

As stated above, I referred a lot of people to them over the years. I was still earning commissions from other affiliates after they removed the $7,000 a month affiliate and this past July, after my correspondence with Kristen about promoting weight loss rebill offers, both of my affiliate accounts were closed, without notice.. along with all of my referrals.

I consulted attorneys and decided that it wasn’t worth it for me to go through all of that. I even asked Copeac directly for a settlement after several of the other companies that I do business with told me that I should stop sitting on it and do something about it. Nothing. It seems that they either don’t care or that they thought I would just forget about it.

If you are looking for a good read, please check out the full story. Read the emails and lies and you will see how shady they were.

FULL STORY HERE

I haven’t been posting often because I am a busy guy, but I need to write this on my blog so that I will be reminded of the respect that I have lost for Kings Of Leon.  KOL has been my favorite band for some time now, I love the music, and it makes me feel good and I think they have a disgusting amount of talent. One of the best bands to come out in years.  I didn’t think that I was going to be able to get to the show but last minute, I found a real nice dude on craigslist that sold me 3 tickets for the pit at a really low price, and I was totally psyched.

So we got to the show to find out that it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity, and they were charging $5 for a bottle of water. It was my first time to the venue and to my amazement, they build the venue in such a way that the sun set’s right onto the stage which I think is asinine for St. Louis because of how disgusting and hot it gets here.  That didn’t stop us. We waited in the pit for 3 hours, through 2 bands.  The first band was pretty awesome, new and refreshing and the second was completely torturous.

During the first 2 sets, we could clearly see that bird crap was falling from the ceiling onto the bassist’s of both bands.  Pretty nasty I know but what are you going to do about a nest of baby birds? Maybe the venue should have put in preventative spikes to stop them from nesting up there but regardless, it was happening so they resolved it by moving the bassist’s a few feet to the left, and that was the end of it.. we thought.

Finally, KOL comes out and everyone was psyched, it made me feel like the 3 hours spend soaked in my clothes was worth it.  3 songs in we see bassist Jared Followill got shit on his shoulder from one of the birds, and he stormed off of the stage and was followed by the rest of the band.

Anyway. I have been to over 500 concerts and thought I had seen it all but this one tops it all. I’ve seen bands play in the rain, snow, blood, mud and the list goes on.  One pussy gets baby bird crap on his shoulder and runs off stage crying.  Spoiled pussies.

FUCK YOU Queens of Leon.

Here is a video someone took of this happening.

Ive done PPC, PPV, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Ive never been into SEO because I am the most impatient person I know. Ive been reading about using SEO in affiliate marketing for a few months now and have recently started a new, BIG project. With all of the terms and conditions tied to affiliate offers as well as the account bans that Google recently started, I think that SEO, for me, will play a big part in my future as an affiliate marketer.

There will always be money in PPC but I think there is even more money in SEO. I think about it this way. When I tell people what I do for a living, I say that I am in marketing. They say “what kind of marketing” and I tell them that I am one of the people who puts ads on the side of google when they search for something (among other things). The next thing that comes out of most peoples mouths is that they don’t like to click those ads. People have become more aware of these ads and tend to not want to click them. So why not build a quality site, full of content and SEO the hell out of it? That’s what I am doing.

We recently sold our salon. It was on the market for a few months and I started to fall way behind on my affiliate marketing. I thought I would be able to run both businesses while Jon was in law school and I was very wrong. Owning a business where you have to deal with people daily is a LOT of work. It was making money for us but I was losing money not being able to focus on my affiliate marketing. I did some major SEO for the salon website and saw that 90% of all new customers were coming in because of that SEO. That is where I got the idea to put the time and effort into building quality sites so that I can build some long term revenue without having to worry about what is next with Google or when I will get another email telling me that the advertiser is pissed about something I did on PPC.

We started with 1 website. I bought a domain that had complete relevancy to the niche and keywords I will be targeting. It was the most I have ever paid for a domain but it was worth every penny. Google, Yahoo & Bing are loving this website and it can only get better. Over the next few months I need to add more content, more offers and SEO. With directory submission, social bookmarking, articles and more I will be pretty busy but now that we are done with the salon we have all the time in the world to get busy!

Well.. Not really.

I didnt feel like doing an ROI calculation but I decided to make a post. After about 5 months not running any offers i decided to get over my lazyness and start some new campaigns in niches Ive never worked with before.

I picked at random and test about 20 a day and keep only the ones that convert and then scale them.

One of the days last week I made over 1k in profits and only spent $12.00 in advertising on Google search.

Ive learned methods on QS and how to get google to like you.  I am motivated and have lots more work to do and lots of offers to test.

Im still unsure if I am going to ever start regularly posting here again but we will see.