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

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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!

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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.

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I have been planning some very large media buys and I cant wait to meet some new companies who can offer me some quality traffic.  Its really exciting. The best part is getting to see all of the regulars in the industry, the sad part is not seeing the people you saw 3 years ago who have fallen off the face of the earth.

In this industry you need to keep going and stay up to date, I learned that lesson in the past and am ready to go.  We are 4 months into 2009 and I have had more success in 4 months than I have in 3 years. You can imagine why I am pumped for Adtech!

I am staying at 2 seperate places.  First will be some REALLY cool place I found in Nobb Hill called Prescott Hotel.  You would be shocked if I told you the STEAL that I got it for from Priceline.com .  I was naming my own prices just to see and I thought to myself that there was NO way they would give me a 4 star hoter in Nob Hill for that price.. and then what do you know, i got it!

For the convention I will be staying at Hotel Whitcomb. I chose it because some friends and AM’s are staying there. It will be good times. I havent done much research on where the parties will be but I am sure they are going to be great.

See you all next week!

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First the site was offering the Google Cash & Govt Grant and now it has switched to just Government Grants with Obama speaking on the offer page. Pretty funny but scary.

I do not promote those offers anymore and I would not suggest it to anybody. Just for the simple reason that you could end up getting screwed by the advertiser when they themselves get busted and cannot afford to pay their affiliates.

These offers have been the trend for the past 6 months. Between this and the fake diet offers YES they can make affiliates a ton of money.. but legally do you want to take the risk?

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If you think about it, you would only be targeting people who wanted to see ads and then would not have to pay for wasted impressions. Pretty cool

The article is here

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I will try to keep the blog updated with some of the projects I am working on. So much happened in my life last year that I ended up falling out of the loop with everything that was going on in the industry.

I am so motivated that I cannot even sleep at night. This will be a MUCH better year financially than last year.. and last year was great.

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Most disappointing was that we missed the first day on Sunday and by Monday, everybody was hungover and tired and all of the affiliate managers I was hoping to meet with and talk to were not in the right state of mind. For once, I did not go to the conference to party but to work.

Now that we are home, we are swamped with ideas and luckily I only have my business card out to about 10 people who I hope to speak with therefore limiting the number of harassing calls from networks trying to steal my business.

The event was great but I am not so sure about Vegas.  I can say that I am not a fan and it is not what I expected.  We had a blast hanging with Justin and Jonathan on Tuesday night and our hotel at the Venetian was beautiful.

See some of you at AdTech in April!  Enjoy the photos from the Summit below.

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I have installed the moneymaker theme from the guys at uniqueblogdesigns.com and am going to be having it customized to the colors I like from my last blog, as well as some other neat things.

Seems everyone is changing their blogs so its about time i jumped on it.

Hopefully I can have it customized and my logo designed in time for ASW .

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Up until about a month ago, I was using tracking software that someone had made for me when I started in the industry.  It was custom, outdated but it had worked wonders for me while it lasted.  Soon enough I bit the bullet and tried out Prosper202 because of all of the hype I heard.  It is probably one of the best tools I have ever seen offered to affiliates for FREE.  If you are an affiliate and you need good tracking then I suggest you install this tool.  If you cannot figure out how to use prosper then you can use the Tracking202 for free as well. It is web based and so simple that any idiot could figure it out.

2008 was great for me but 2009 needs to be better. Affiliate Summit East is coming up this weekend in Las Vegas and Jon and I are excited to go.  I need to expand on my ideas and meet some new people and make some new ideas.  I will never discuss how much I earn per year, or how much I made last year but it was key to achieving every goal I had last year and to help me start my new ones this year.

I have been digging around with the idea of media buying. That is something that is in the works and it takes a chunk of change (minimum of 10k with many of the big wigs such as myspace).  That is pocket change to some people I know in this industry and to others, its a gamble.  My goal is to get this rolling while maintaining my PPC efforts and staying up to date with the newest info and software.  I fell out of the loop in 2008 when I stopped being interactive with the forums and my friends in this industry.  It was still a great year for me, but it could have been better if i figured out things like Prosper SOONER.

One key mistake I made in 2008 which I cannot express to people enough.  If you are new in this industry then you need to make sure that you sign up with TRUSTED networks.  Do some research before you go off throwing your money into a company that is going to screw you in the end. By screwing, I mean shaving leads, stealing your keywords and then “attemptin” to keep your money.

It happened to me with 2 networks in 2008.  One is CJ as I wrote about earlier this year and the other I will not say because it was part of the deal in me getting paid.  What happened was a great campaign popped up on the network. It was one that I had experience in with its niche so I knew I would kill it.  I did amazing with it, about $30k in the few weeks it was active.  Once day I was told that I needed to take down the site, stop promoting it, etc because I was bidding on keyword that the advertiser did not “like” (they had nothing to do with trademark).  I took down the site and waited and to make a long story short, it took me 8 months to get my final payment.

The offer was pulled from the network because they did not comply with the advertisers rules OR put any of the TOS in the campaign for the affiliates to see. In turn, they tried to place blame on the affiliates and hold $$.

The worst part of all of this…. Which pisses me off to no end and I am sure it has happened to many other affiliates that I know…  The keywords that were converting for me that the advertiser demand I stop promoting..

Since the very next day that I took down my site and stopped promoting with those keywords, THE ADVERTISER WHO ASKED ME TO STOP HAS BEEN BIDDING ON THOSE VERY KEYWORDS.

They stole from me. From my idea, unique.  Its sad but it happens.  Which is one point to everybody that you should mask your keywords so that nobody knows them but you.

It has been almost 3 years for me in this business. I love it. My goal is to keep at this in 2009 alongside the other business Jon and I plan on opening and make this a prosperous year. In my 3 years I have worked with probably over 20 networks and I have to say that out of all of them the people at Copeac and Advaliant have been the best.  Danielle at Copeac and Alla from Advaliant have been amazing.  All of the other employees inside their companies including Eddie from Copeac have been informative and helpful in getting me what I need when I need it instead of blowing me off like some other networks do. That is what being a real affiliate manager is all about.

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