Many Body Theory

SocialHour and SocialReach are two ad networks where Facebook and MySpace application owners can just add an iframe and get paid on a CPM while SocialHour and SocialReach bank off of running CPA offers from affiliate networks.

Facebook is now attacking these networks and forcing them to swap out their offers and run less-competitive ads. Attached is an email that SocialHour sent to all of their publishers:

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Facebook Publishers:

Due to circumstances beyond our control we are being forced to temporarily pause our advertisements on the Facebook platform.

Please remove our ad tags from all of your Facebook applications by 9pm PST tonight.

We apologize for the short notice however this is beyond our control and we hope to continue Facebook operations again in the near future.

Note: We will still be accepting traffic from all other sites.

–
Phillip H
Director of Sales & Business Development
SocialReach, LP

I am on the side of SocialHour, SocialReach the other ad networks and any application that is running offers on their own. So what that people are stupid enough to click on an ad that says “Someone has a crush on you” and think if they give a website their cellphone number that they will find out who their true love is.

Second — Facebook, seriously? Is this really about the ads or is this because you know SocialHour does a better job monetizing traffic than you do? I remember going into Facebook and meeting with their team to talk about monetization — everyone there is clueless. I laid out the framework on what to do and they still can’t get it right.

Third — the Self-Service Ads go back and forth every week on whether they should allow ringtones and weightloss ads to show — I am not going to hold my breath on the application network standing ground given Facebook’s history.

One of the best books ever is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. This is a six chapter book where each chapter is a different “weapon” on how to influence people. What I love about this book is that he takes examples from what people have done in the past — what is also great is that he takes a scientific approach versus the MBA approach when showing how tests were run.

Seriously, read this book. Whether you’re an affiliate, in-house marketer, selling your services.. whatever it may be: this is a must read and should only take you a week if you spend 1 - 2 hours a day on it. I have seen offers go from barley profitable to 2x-3x ROI when making changes based off of these six weapons of influence.

Reciprocation - People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing.

Affiliates — That “free trial” where you’re giving away a month’s free of your product and all you ask in return is for the buyer to pay for the shipping/handling.

Commitment and Consistency - If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement.

Affiliates — this is why email/zip submits work. Just get the person in the funnel and interacting with the website.

Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing.

Affiliates — Doesn’t this sound like those “Ashley placed this game on Facebook” or “5 people think they are smarter than you” type ads? It also should remind you of all of those fake blogs.

Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures.

Affiliates — can you say: Oprah? This is why affiliate offers leach off of celebrities and the offer page will mention that the product has been featured in 60 Minutes, NY Times, etc.

Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.

Affiliates — This is why you always want to have attractive people in your creatives and landing pages. People like attractive people.

Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying offers are available for a “limited time only” encourages sales.

Affiliates — how many times do those landing pages have a countdown clock whenever an order is supposed to be made?

http://www.ppc.bz/stuff-that-is-actually-useful/some-blogs-that-are-good

PPC.bz the unofficial source of all things affiliate marketing has categorized this blog as something that is actually useful.

Note: this spamming might not be done by SinglesNet internally but by one of their affiliates (the joys of allowing anyone to join your network)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/a-bunch-of-hot-spammers-had-the-day-off-of-work-lol/

This is older than social networks, in fact, it is almost as old as Craigslist from what I can remember. An old trick to do on Craigslist was to post on their personals of a girl looking for a guy and then BAM you have someone who is single, you know their location, potential profile info (if they send you a note with picture) and you can easily reply back with a “find me on one of these dating sites” canned responses.

I do not encourage the above mentioned practices, however, I will say they can be very effective. To be fair, my hat is off to the guy who pulled this off on Twitter because I was thinking about something very similar for the last two weeks

Get ready for Ad:Tech SF 2009!

I am really stoked for Ad:Tech SF this year. Things have come a really long way for me since 2008 and I can’t wait to see what happens between now and Ad:Tech 2010.

If you are going to be at Ad:Tech remember to hit me up. nick [at] many.body.theory.com

So I’ve been keeping busy but I did want to name down some offers that you should be running right now:

GameVance Downloads. This is an offer that Azoogle is running and is the shit. ‘Nuff said. I’ve got some sites that aren’t Facebook or MySpace where this rocks on but I won’t be telling you where. I’ll tell you this, I’m the only one running it (so far on this site) and its on the perfect under 25 demographics.

Obama Survey - Email Submit from Hydra. Most of you kids are buying traffic on Facebook and MySpace so why not run an Obama survey? I suggest creating multiple Facebook campaigns because half of  my ads were approved… the other half slipped through the cracks. Used the same creatives, just tweaked the demographic targeting.

For those who have been waiting for the full suite of keyword generation tools (I’ve updated the archive for the slang lexicon.. and it has been pretty sweet so far in testing) — don’t worry. Also, I’m incorporating neighborhoods with the city/zip keyword tool and will be expanding into Canada, Europe and Australlia. Stay tuned.

If you see an offer that works let me know so I can steal it from you see what’s up.

Many affiliate marketers are not web designs or web developers so many times they either rely on pre-built theme and will just swap out their ringtone offer for a dating offer.

WordPress blogs are really starting to be pushed out as the new landing page. They are easy to setup because most $5/month hosts will offer basic PHP an MySql access and if you don’t have that WordPress will host your blog for you. With all of the themes and plugins, you are sure to find the right look and feel for your landing page depending on the offer. There are tons of skins from business themes to gourmet food layouts. Many times WordPress themes are also pre-SEO’d where they implement the proper use of HTML tags and are easy to load by search engine spiders.

Outside of the ease of use for affiliates, WordPress blogs are just that — blogs. Many times affiliates have review sites where they will rank multiple offers based off of the payout and conversion rate. With a blog you can write entries based off of your various offers and even allow comments to be turned on. Every day or two affiliates can write a fake comment that reinforces the original blog statement. When a user reads the  comments a sense of trust is gained because the users will believe that others also enjoyed the various benefits of the offers that the affiliate is currently reviewing.

With Google AdWords cracking down more and more with landing page quality score and more affiliates wanting to run more offers at once, I feel WordPress blogs are going to explode when it comes to landing pages. Thoughts?

Today I spoke (again) with Commission Junction about why they are over two weeks late for paying out a small four-figure amount.

Commission Junction (the worst affiliate network on the planet) claims that my bank’s routing number which I have used countless times for other affiliate networks, jobs, paypal is not valid. By that logic, the checks that I write to my land lord should also bounce because every one of my checks have the same routing number printed on them. They promise that they will pay me… in three weeks. Are you kidding me?

Since this fiasco I have stopped all advertising with Commission Junction and now just waiting to get paid so I can stop logging into cj.com and wonder if the world’s worst affiliate network will get off their butts and write a simple check. It’s getitng to a point where I am wondering if they are ever going to pay me or whether I should take legal action against the network.

If you are using Commission Junction (or looking into using the world’s worst affiliate network) — stop and use a network that is much more reliable such as Hydra.

Link: Hydra Network - an affiliate network that will pay you

According to CJ.com affiliates are supposed to be paid around the 20th. The 20th was MLK day so its expected that a direct deposit should be made on the 21st.

Today is the 22nd.

I was told by CJ.com that I should wait until after the 26th before I start worrying about whether they forgot to pay me for the month. Are you kidding me?

Hydra Network is amazing. They post online an actual date for when an affiliate should expect their paycheck and pay you on time. How hard is that?

If you’re looking into starting affiliate marketing, or if you’re already an affiliate and not a member of Hydra Network, I highly suggest you join it. The payouts are amazing and affiliates get paid on time (perfect if you don’t have a lot of cash and you’d like to see a fast return — but of course, who doesn’t?).

Link: Hydra Network

Today was the first time I dropped by the San Francisco affiliate marketing meetup (Meetup 202) hosted by the team at Tracking202 for Affiliate Tracking Software.

This was a great chance to meet local affiliates and see the trends in the pay-per-click and social media space. I walked away with some ideas on new tools to develop that will be useful for affiliate marketers (which will be made available for free) and some interesting verticals that are currently being tackled.

There was a decent amount of information being flown around. I was able to teach some affiliates several tricks and insider tips as well as learn some insider tips from others. If you are currently an affiliate or looking into affiliate marketing you should be attending this meetup.

The next meetup will be the first Saturday of February at 401 Bush Street.