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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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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.

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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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The last post was around the time that I went to Adtech and when I got home from that Jon and I decided that we wanted to spend some quality time together before he started law school and we did just that.

We went on a nice vacation to Mexico and ended up coming home early becuase we were bored.. yes, bored.  The whole swine flu outbreat caused people to cancel trips and our entire resort was empty.  After thinking about it, we really just love being home.

One of the biggest things to happen to us was we adopted another dog.  She is an Australian Shephard just like Legend and she even has his same colors.  She was only a puppy when we got her but now she is maturing really fast.  We named her Bella and she is amazing.  Such a sweet and loving dog!  She fits right in and Legend and her are like peas in a pod.

Jon and I opened a tanning salon.. yes, finally.  We named it Hot Bod and we have been running it since July 1st.  It is very promising and we cant wait to see what we can do with it.  We are learning SO much, its crazy.

Jon started law school.. he is going to do really well, I am proud of him.  We were both really scared about how it would effect us when he started because we had never been apart since the day we met other than 2 times where we had to travel without eachother.  We spent every moment together since the beginning and now with him starting school we were afraid of the distance but things are actually going great.  The time apart just makes the time we get together much more enjoyable.

I have been trying to decide what direction to take with my affiliate marketing. I will always do it and be part of the industry but I am not sure how vulnerable I want to be.  As an affiliate I am open to getting screwed out of my earnings and having money stolen from me, contracts broken, etc.  I am sick of all of the BS that is involved in the industry.  Stealing, lying, ripping consumers off.  There are ways to make money in my industry without setting up weight loss blogs and work from home blogs.  Too many people do it and look what happens.. Oprah decides to sue.  I am glad I was not part of that!

On a similar note, One of the networks I ran with that i raved about screwed me in a big way.  I promoted then a lot in my blog and got TONS of people to sign up under me.  The deal was that I would earn 2% of what they make forever.  This is what they told me which is why I promoted them.  Anyway, they decided to take away one of the people I refered so I was no longer getting paid.  The shitty thing is that they tried to be sneaky about it and they lied to me and said that it was a direct track error. Then when they realized I was not going to quit demanding to know about it they came up with an excuse that was ready and waiting.  It is really discouraging in this industry when networks decide to be shady. It not only makes you not trust any other network but it makes the industry in whole look really bad.

Aside from all of this, Jon and I have just been spending as much time enjoying life as possible.  We had an AMAZING garden in our yard and its still going strong.

I am not sure of the fate of this blog, I will probably always keep it, just not sure what direction I want to take

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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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I never would have thought a year ago that my life would be as it is today.  Ive had some reminders of Providence come hinder the changes that have happened to my life since I moved here to St Louis.  I am glad to know where I am and where I want to be and this is it.

The year has been great so far. I am branching out with some new niches for my business in online marketing.  In 2 weeks I am going again to San Fransisco for the Adtech convention.  I am really excited.  I am staying for a week while Jon visits with his family in Florida.  Justin is coming also and we are both hoping to talk some business and make some new connections as well as meet some of my new affiliate managers that I have been working with since the start of the year. 

I know that I have posted some photos of the kittens we adopted in the past but sadly, we lost one of them.  The boy, his name was FiddleStix.  He was a great cat and we spoiled the hell out of him for the 6 few months we had him.  I noticed that he had been acting depressed for a few months so we took him in for some blood work and they found a fatal incurable disease called FIP.  It is rare and only happens to every 1 in 5000 cats and he was so young that it compromised his immune system too fast. We were going to just let it ride out and eventually he would die from it but he started to get unbalanced and couldnt stand up so I had to put him to sleep.  It was really hard watching him take his last breath but he knew he was loved and we will miss him.

Many people are not sympathetic to animals and dont see the seriousity in having a pet that you love die.. but those little pets are like family and it just sucks to see an innocent living creature suffer. 

SO.. here is one of the last photos taken of FiddleStix.  He is the one on the far right. to the left is Legend and Fuzzball.. his sister (who did not get the disease). 

Legend, Fuzzball and FiddleStix

We finished remodeling the guest bathroom in our house and next will be the kitchen but we are probably going to hold off for a few months.  There is too much going on right now.  BUT I am really excited this time because I took before ans after photos. The bathroom had a nasty bathtub that didnt drain right and was off color. The vanity and toilet were so gross so i tore out everything, knocked down a wall and redid some electrical work and plumbing.. Who would have thought that I would be able to do that huh!?  haha.   So I am proud to show the photos here: 

BEFORE

AFTER

What a change huh?   Its pretty rewarding to do something and have it turn out nice!

I am going to finish up this post and get some work done outside before it gets dark.  We put in our vegetable garden, it was SO much work with the landscape, tilling and now transplanting all of the veggies and herbs I have been growing, but the work will pay off in the end! Check out the photo

Jon & Me in the garden!

I will post again soon when I am in San Fransisco. After that we are going on vaca to Mexico for a week, I CANT WAIT!!!

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So here is a ringtone for it that I made.  I got a new Tmobile G1 yesterday and you can add your own tones.

If you want to download it then here it is! IF YOU LIKE THIS RINGTONE THEN PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT SO I KNOW I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS ITS GREAT!

Just right click it and hit SAVE TARGET AS

mcdonalds-filet-of-fish-ringtone

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