Year End Wrap Up From The ClickFather

This is a crazy time of the year between ordering client gifts and wrapping up year end business for our several companies. It was an amazing year as we more than doubled last year’s total payout to Affiliates (we are talking about a high 7 figure increase here folks) We also are very happy about adding some great agency business (Geico, Proflowers, All state, Dish Network and many others)

Toy Drive 2012

On Saturday morning my daughter Natalie and I met Jon Fondy and Anthony Alves from our team at a local Wal-Mart store with a 20 ft U-Haul. Our goal was to purchase 100 kids bikes for the KLUC.com toy drive. We ended up with 103! This is our 13th year participating.We established a website, xy7givesback.com to keep track of the drive the 10 days it ran. Anthony from our team updated it daily with totals all told they raised over $200,000 in gift cards, 16 large semi trucks of toys and 2600 bikes!One of the most rewarding things was after I tweeted and did a Facebook update, several other people went to the toy drive including one of my Affiliates Tino.
Tino and his family were so inspired they went out and bought 10 bikes and over $500 in gift cards that made me smile as I got to use my influence and social media to get others to act. Thanks Tino and all others that retweeted and came down to the toy drive.

I also want to give a digital shout out to Google for donating over 40 million dollars this holiday season.Check it out here

End of year clean up and advice

Each year I spend this time looking at the year’s performance and making major plans for the coming year. I also look for opportunities I may have missed, or Affiliates that I can work more closely with. It is also a great time to plan for the coming year. The first quarter is always one of the strongest for business opportunities and diet products as people look to improve their appearance and quality of life.A few Affiliates asked for this so here it is, a recap of traffic sources as I see them:Search Traffic:

I personally still love MSN/Bing as they are much more lenient on ad copy, Do instant activation and have much more traffic for less money than Google. It is a gem for many savvy marketers as competition is much less allowing you to uncover niches. I also like 7Search (once you disable the broad targeting)

Display:

I like Yahoo display along with Megaclick. Both have tons of traffic and at really good rates (If you negotiate them) for Megaclick contact Arikka@megaclick.com

Email:

Wow, so many changes here. If you want to get some insight come to the mailer meetup at the Palms Jan 8th 2012.

Mobile:

Again I like MSN best and the click to call feature, No bots, real traffic very monetizable (is that a word?)

Gems:

Advertise.com is a new one I am working on and they seem very willing to do what they need to make it work. Also now that myads.com has opened up Rubicon traffic to the public, it is worth a new look and some testing.

PPV Traffic :

A couple of months ago I wrote about PPV traffic and which services were best. Over the past week I got a handful of complaints about Lead Impact so I stepped in and initiated a call. To say I was not impressed would be an understatement. I advise all my readers to be very careful when dealing with companies that do not care to see the customer’s side of things…

Instead of me telling you what transpired I had Phoenix Morgan who is well known and respected in our industry as a top notch media buyer tell you:

Kevin wanted me to write about a rather nasty experience I had recently with Lead Impact and how
it can affect other pubs. Seems that Lead Impact has a policy that AFTER you submit your creative’s and
you THINK you know what the bid price is. They can at their discretion and WITHOUT any warning change your category, subcategory and bids. I discovered this after running traffic for weeks and the stats
in p202 not matching the adv & traffic platforms stats. The money was WAAAAAY off. It took awhile to
find out what was up. P202? Idiot typing? WHAT!? Well, we still don’t know in my case what happened.
But, we do know that a bid that was seen as .00385 somehow changed to .017 (which isn’t even the lowest
rate for that country.) Upon finding out. I called up and had a very harsh talk (her to me, not the other
way around) with ‘Nicole’ She ran a report and said “we did nothing” BUT, when I went on to ask about
bids being changed and non-notification. She confirmed not once but 3x that, “YES! lead impact
can change their prices if they feel the category and subcategory does not match your ad AND there is
no notification, no pausing of traffic. They just do it. When I asked how we would know this, she brushed
it off and said “There is a disclaimer (tiny one) when you put in your ads. Saying we can change the
category and pricing at our compliance discretion”. I even informed her that I had 4 other affiliates
that had notified me of the same thing happening in their campaigns!!! She didn’t seem to care and was
very abrupt. Kevin then was cool enough to try to mediate, but also discovered that Lead Impact has a
“there is mistake, we don’t care” attitude. Now I can tell you I have run with ALL CPV platforms and
everyone had a glitch when I 1st started and everyone EVEN IF I MADE MISTAKE gave me credit or
refund if some error happened. If anything to say, “Hey, we know mistakes happen. We will help you out
the 1st few times you mess up, but don’t make a habit or we won’t in the future” Fine that’s fair enough.
So, a warning to anyone on Lead Impact. Check your bids at the keyword level every day. Since, you never
know when they will change them or for what reason. Too bad, since they have tons of international
traffic.

-Phoenix

Traffic sources I would personally run away from:

Sitescout: Although I have heard reports that a couple of people are making money on it
Lead Impact (details above)
Clicksor (too many bots, low quality traffic)

Predictions for 2012!

Pay Per Call and all mobile search will take center stage as a primary source of traffic for many offers here is why:More and more people are relying on their mobile phones for everything, so naturally the mobile search and display market will become even more lucrative. Many people have not even touched this market. I am buying heavily on several sites. At the Affiliate Summit I will be talking to several media buyers in a closed room discussion of how to really capitalize on this market and scale to 7 figures monthly. If you are a media buyer that spends at least 100k per month now, and have the time, dedication and drive to be successful drop me an email for an invite to the “Inner circle”

Affiliate Summit and Mailer Meet up

Xy7 Elite is once again the Platinum sponsor of the Mailer Meetup being held in the Kingpin suite of the Palms Casino and Hotel on Jan 8th, 2012. If you are a serious email marketer this is the place to be. You can apply to attend at www.mailermeetup.com. I know there are some other parties that night from fly by night companies that just want to throw a party…. It’s up to you if you are a serious marketer we would love to have you. If you want to just get drunk and screw around then I urge you to check out the parties from fly by night companies like “Insignificant Traffic” or whatever new name these guys come up with… In my opinion companies who cannot pay their Affiliates weekly or on time should not be throwing parties at all. Remember all the guys that threw Playboy mansion parties? Where are they now? Certainly not paying Affiliates weekly or at all?
Lastly,I want to thank my readers and all our Affiliates as this has been another great year for us. We know the market will always change and we strive to always be ahead of that curve with the support and know how you have come to expect from the Rapid Response Marketing Family. We know without good partners like you we are nothing so again, thank you and Happy Holidays.

-The ClickFather ™ and his dedicated team of superstars