Perfect Tracking is a CPA Gateway company that is in direct competition with CPALead and Adscend Media. They are essentially just your typical gateway network that was heavily popular about a year ago. At the time it was supposed to overtake CPALead as the number 1 gateway (It certainly had more features at the time), but slowly settled back as “the other gateway network”. Even so, it has enjoyed moderate success overtime simply because when people get pissed with CPALead doing ridiculous things, they want to try someone new.

Anyway, enough rambling. In the past month, I have heard copious amounts of complaints about PerfectTracking not paying out. Nothing new to be honest. I know of a few people (friends that I know well), that have said they received incredibly late payments from them. They never missed a payment, but were sometimes months late. It’s nothing that new in the industry, off the top of my head I could name half a dozen other networks that I know BS around with payments at times. So that’s cool, part of the game. However not paying out at all, and now the latest twist of claiming that it is the publishers fault, is just a scam.

And the thing is, I am not talking about a few hundred dollars. People are claiming to have not been paid thousands and thousands of dollars.

So what went wrong? Why is no one being paid? Well Perfect Tracking released a “statement” here : http://perfecttracking.com/news.php?id=1

There is really only two things to say about it.

We would also like to remind our publishers of the Perfect Tracking terms of agreement that each one of you were required to read completely during the registration process. To make sure that you are in compliance with the terms you agreed to abide by, please click on this link to review the terms again. If your activities are in compliance with the terms of agreement, your use of Perfect Tracking’s site will continue uninterrupted and without changes. However, if your current activities violate any portion of the agreement, your account can and will be terminated without notice, and no further payments will be made.

Alrighty. So they link to the terms of conditions. And just as a quick precaution, I compared the current TOS, with ones I found in Google cache (Currently 20+ days back), and they do match. So before anyone claims they have changed their TOS to fit with what they are now saying, by the looks of it, that isn’t so.

It has also came to the attention of Perfect Tracking that some publishers were promoting sites that contained pirated video content and pirated software.

This winds me up. This infact, makes me furious. I don’t even use Perfect Tracking, and as such have not been scammed. But this here statement is complete and utter bullsh**.

Checking the TOS, it does state you cannot link to “Copyrighted Content”. So that includes what most people are doing nowadays with gateways, Movie sites and TV streams. Ok, fair call. But! I know 100%, without a doubt, that Perfect Tracking contacted friends of mine, and tried to get them to switch to their gateway. And guess what, they were running movie sites. I know this 100%, and Perfect Tracking knew this without a doubt because it was the only site these people owned.

How can they contact people to run movie sites with them, and when it suits them dump them without payment?

Obviously this is not just a change of heart from the owner. It is the same issue CPALead has run into recently. Advertisers have kicked up a huge fuss over copyrighted content, and as such have pulled their offers from all gateway networks. Can’t blame them. Can’t blame Perfect Tracking from shitting themselves either with every advertiser doing a runner.

But, that doesn’t give them the go ahead to rip people off from their already earned earnings. They earned those leads with what Perfect Tracking deemed at the time to be well within the network guidelines. I think hiding stuff inside the TOS “just incase” is just a cop out. And everyone who has been ripped off by Perfect Tracking thinks so too.

Something I have wanted to do for quite some time now, is have a regular post each week posting about a new website that I have found use for. I have done it previously with posts about Quickinbox, Twitterhawk, Peerfly, Zopim and even Livezilla. Admittedly some of those come about under neccesity for my day to day work. But even so, things like Twitterhawk simply interested me with their concept and how they implemented such a simply idea, even though I don’t and have never used their system that extensively.

So, I introduce to you : New Website Wednesday (Insert snazzy logo here).

Every Wednesday from now on (Wednesday New Zealand time), I will be doing a post about a new startup/website that I feel could benefit someone reading this blog right now. It may simply be an informational website, a CPA Network, Sales page creator, really anything. The only condition is it must be free, so no membership or sales page or BS like that, and it must have a URL I can link to (I’m not pimping anyones coaching services or crud like that).

I have done a short write up onto a page over here : http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/new-website-wednesday/

You guys can send me your own new startups, or a startup that you have found useful. And I will be more than happy to do a writeup on them. When you think about it, it is pretty much a free website review, with a free backlink aswell, so not that much to lose. Also, if I do choose to do a writeup on your site, it will ALWAYS be positive. If I was going to write a negative review, I would simply not do a writeup at all.

Nothing to lose, send me in your website

For a long time now, I have been utilizing “Disposable Email Addresses”. These are simply email addresses, that you can use for approximately 30 minutes, and then trash. Alot of people actually end up with hundreds of Yahoo email addresses, that they use only once to signup to someone’s mailing list, or to get to a download without being spammed to death.  Although somewhat sneaky, I have previously used them to verify my email for various services, simply because I get an untold amount of spam to my main email box, and I don’t intend to increase that.

One of the best services out there, that I have been using for quite some time is QuickInbox.com. QuickInbox allows you to get a temporary email address for 30 minutes, and then will ditch it. You can actually extend that and get another 30 minutes with the same email address. This is super handy when the people you are verifying your email with are taking an age to send you the email. But what sets Quick Inbox apart from it’s competition, is the fact that it has a Firefox addon.

The firefox addon allows you to right click on any textbox on any webpage, and generate a new inbox right then and there. See image below :

From there it automatically inserts a new email address. And then opens a new tab in your Firefox with the inbox open. I don’t know of any other provider that has an addon, and as such Quick Inbox is definitely the best I have come across.

In previous posts I have talked about my entry into the Eiknujomorp SEO Competition. At the moment I am sitting around 10 – 12th place. Which for me is still doing pretty well considering I actually haven’t focused on it too much. I want to leave it late to make my run simply so I stay under the radar or my other competition.

Something that has always interested me about SEO, is really analyzing other sites. Alot of people like to do their own tests to see how much weight Google gives to certain things. But alot of the time someone out there has already done it. In this competition I have been keeping a keen eye on “Vanity URL Web 2.0 Properties”. That is quite a mouthful. But what I mean by Vanity URL’s is that when you create a profile on a social networking site, or a bookmarking site, you can select what your URL is going to look like. So for example on Facebook, profile URL’s used to be just “www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4564″, or something to that effect. However they eventually released vanity URL’s which means no matter what your actual name was you could have “www.facebook.com/vanity-url”.

As a little sidenote, Facebook actually did this fairly recently. And there was a huge rush to try and grab common words as your URL. From this, you can try and play Facebook Bingo, where in you type “www.facebook.com/somethinghere”, and see where you end up. Shoemoney actually ended up getting http://www.facebook.com/internetmarketer.

Anyway, with the Eiknujomorp contest underway, I have seen a rugby scrum towards nabbing all the “Eikunjomorp” URL’s from various places. You can check for yourself by going here : http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=eiknujomorp&btn=Search and working your way down.

Now what do you care about these for? Well simply really. If you check most of these Web 2.0 properties that people have nabbed for this contest, most (if not all) will have absolutely zero backlinks. And yet they are still ranking amazingly.

Take the Twitter clone identi.ca for instance. The URL http://identi.ca/eiknujomorp is currently ranked 19th for me. And it currently has absolutely zero external backlinks pointing to it. Now 19th place in the SERP’s is not going to win you any prizes, nor will you get any visitors. But the important thing to remember here, is that this URL is ranking, in a SEO competition, against people who are going non-stop building backlinks, and there it is sitting there with no backlinks at all, and still competing… Amazing.

Also a cool thing is, Identi.ca is dofollow. So a very very easy link right there.

Now as I say, the huge rush is to find these properties first to get the perfect vanity URL, which in this case is eiknujomorp. So if you are entered into the competition, and are now going to create an identi.ca profile for yourself, while it won’t be bad, it certainly won’t be as good  as getting the proper thing.

Even if you aren’t competing in this SEO competiton. Using it to your advantage to learn about easy easy backlink opportunities really is a must. And the shear fact that these things rank, simply based on the URL alone, is a very very easy way to get both backlinks, and rankings quickly.

Last week I wrote a small post about the Eiknujomorp SEO Competition. Since then I have mostly spent my time thinking about how to proceed. That is generally the golden rule of what not to do (To sit and think instead of acting), but it has really plagued me about how hard to go with blackhat link building. On the one hand I can go all out, build an absolute tonne of links and walk away with the win. But first problem is google sandbox, and problem number 2 was that the rules state that there is no blackhat techniques to be used. I think they mostly mean cloaking and what not, but even so, I don’t think they expect people to be using XRumer etc.

In the end, I decided to use my actual blog post as my competition entry. I did this for many reasons. The first being that there is little risk of sandboxing my entry. This blog has been around for quite some time now, and Google knows pretty much every page I have on here (And indexes it pretty well). Any post I have on here ranks fairly well, for keywords in its title (Even though I don’t really optimize my posts tbh). This can be seen if you search Google for “Peerfly“. I am always on the front page, generally yo-yo-ing from 3rd place to 6th. Peerfly is a fairly well known company now, and I seem to beat even large forums and well known bloggers (Including Tyler Cruz), so not too shabby.

Aswell as this, any links I build to my competition entry will roll down into my blog aswell. So I won’t just be building backlinks for the SEO competition, but my blog as a whole. Not to mention the little bit of exposure I will get when I am finally ranking.

Optimizations.

For the blog post I removed all the excess about my personal life, and made it a pure post about Eiknujomorp. I will likely add more and more content to that one page. Mostly small optimizations here and there and to get the overall keyword density up, and to show Google that the page is changing often.

I built a few forum profile links using a tool I built quite some time ago. The tool is very very old, and doesn’t work that fast. So it only got me a few links before I got too bored and went and worked on something else. In reality though this is probably a good thing. I expect to build the links up over time, and grow somewhat in a natural fashion. Starting off slow with a few backlinks a day, then ramping it up over time will work wonders.

I also did a tiny bit of Web2.0/Article writing. Just the usual stops, Ezine, Squidoo, Hubpages etc. There is many people out there saying Linkwheels are so 00′s. But they still work fairly well for me, and always seem to give me a boost in the rankings.

So where do I sit now?

I am going anywhere between page 1 – page 3 at the moment. The official results page doesn’t have me ranking in the top 10, so I am obviously not showing up on their listings. That’s fine however, because I think getting anywhere near the front is probably a good sign at this stage. Ofcourse other people could be slowly building their links then boosting it right at the end, but we will have to wait and see.

That’s about it for now. I have a post set up for tomorrow with some interesting stuff contained regarding how I see others going in the competition. Remember, if you are entering yourself, flick me an email or contact me through the contact form on this site.

Eiknujomorp, wtf is that? Eiknujomorp is a SEO contest from the guys over at Promojunkie. I have blogged about them previously. Although I never really entered that one. This particular contest is on a much smaller scale then some of the other ones they do, and as such have a much smaller prize pool. I think that works in alot of peoples favor though. All the large players will have better things to do then win the smaller contest.

The prizes for ranking top in the Eiknujomorp contest is as follows :

First Place: $200.00 Cash (Must rank 1st highest out of the top ten rankings for the key-phrase to win)
Second Place: $100.00 Cash (Must rank 2nd highest out of the top ten rankings for the key-phrase to win)
Third Place: $50.00 Cash (Must rank 3rd highest out of the top ten rankings for the key-phrase to win)

Some may turn their noses up at that. $200 isn’t that much. But it is a good test to see how well you stack up with other big players in the game. Given that this particular keyword is completely new, it isn’t something that would have been SEO’d before. So you are going to be up against people who have started SEO’ing their site roughly about the same time as you.

The Eiknujomorp contest started on August the 10th, and finishes on October 10th. And you can enter anytime within that time frame. Because it has only just started, now is the perfect time to get in there.

I’m going to try and blog a bit about where I stand in the contest, how I build up my rankings, and hopefully how I finish up . If anyone wants, they can email me at support [at] pyrogenicmedia.com with their entry (Or use the contact form). Would be pretty cool to track other readers aswell. If you have a blog, chuck that in there aswell and you will likely get a free backlink from me

If you want to read more about the Einukomorp contest, then visit the official entry page here.

Webmaster Forum

It has been quite some time now since I didn’t anything PPC/PPV related. To be honest, even when I was doing it, I wasn’t doing anything in large quantities. Pretty much all of my ventures into buying traffic through either CPC/CPM or Media Buy methods has been limited to at the max, a couple of hundred dollars. It just has never really hooked me in. And when I have gone at it hard, I have found it too tedious for my liking, and too slow to start seeing anything.

Don’t take that last statement to mean that I don’t want to work hard for anything. But when I compare it to my usual work (Software Development), things seem to go at a much slower rate. When i want something done in the development world, I simple do it. I spend hours coding away, and every single piece of code I write has a direct impact in the application and the final result. With PPC, You are at times left sitting there waiting for things to happen. Waiting for your ads to be approved etc When you do tweaks to your landing pages, it may be hours or even days before you have enough data to compare it to your previous LP. It just get’s all a bit tedious.

Ironically, now with me working a full time job, I think it is a good time to start PPC. Sure I don’t have all the time in the world to work on my campaigns. But I think that works for me. I am busy at work all day, with maybe lunch breaks + downtime to check on stats, make final tweaks. But what that means is that I am not left twiddling my thumbs waiting for things to happen. I can do everything in one big load the night before, and be able to sleep on it (And go through my 9 – 6 job), before I can really get at it. I think it also makes me more hungry for work. Limiting myself time wise has always brought out the best results in me. Some may disagree, and say they can see results and keep themselves busy all day everyday. I personally don’t like throwing money at something, so starting something like this I want to really limit my spend.

Installing Prosper202

The first thing I did and what anyone should do when starting out doing anything PPC/PPV related is install Prosper202. Essentially it is a tracking platform that tracks pretty much every stat you can think of to try and narrow down your campaigns. I seriously do not know any person spending anything over $20 a day who does not use this platform. It is free so you really cannot go past it.

Something that I found out the hard way, Is that this application will just simply not run on Hostgator. You will usually get this error or some variation there of (But with this as the first line) when installing Prosper 202.

The ‘partitioning’ feature is disabled; you need MySQL built with ‘–with-partition’ to have it working”

There is various fixes out there, and some even from Hostgators own support staff, but they all gloss over the fact that Prosper202 was not built to be run by them. That does not mean you need a VPS/Dedicated server however. Shared hosting will still do fine, aslong as it has MYSQL Partitioning turned on. *cough* Wachahost *cough*

Before people go off at me because they used a fix and it installed on Hostgator. Mine did too! After alot of fiddling mine did install. But it then would not spit out links, and had errors using other features etc. At the end of the day, If you are remotely serious about affiliate marketing, you will spend $10 and get a hosting package somewhere else, even just for Prosper202.

Pay Per View (PPV)

So something I wanted to try this time around was PPV. Basically PPV is the backend of Adware companies. For example, Loudmo.com has a program in which they pay for installs on their adware to publishers (Much like Zango). And Direct CPV is the other end of that scale, where advertises and do popups through that adware. Because the popups are done through Adware not through a browser window, they cannot be blocked (Giving you a 100% view rate pretty much).

And btw, Adware != Spyware. Spyware tracks your computer usage, and sends data back to it’s home PC. Adware is simply to serve ads. And users are not (Or should not) be “tricked” into installing it. Most of the time it is done on a gateway system. Where the story usually goes “If you want X you will have to install Y first”. With “Y” being the adware.

Another thing about PPV is that for the most part, instead of bidding on Keywords like regular PPC, you are bidding on URL’s. So for example if a user had some form of adware (Let’s say Loudmo) installed. And they went to www.pyrogenicmedia.com, if someone was bidding on that URL, then they would be shown a popup instantly. Ofcourse no one would be bidding on that particular URL, but you get the drift. Ads are triggered by visitors visiting various URL’s instead of just a broad keyword.

PPV is pretty much the affiliate Band Wagon atm. Everyone is jumping on it, So I thought I may aswell get a piece of the action.

DirectCPV (Bleh)

The most talked about company that I knew of was DirectCPV, and their partner adware distributor Loudmo. They require a $100 deposit first up (Which isn’t that much compared to other companies), but they give a $25 bonus to begin with. Sounded good.

From what I had heard, Most PPV companies only take Credit Card. No other online checkout like Paypal, Moneybooks, Google Checkout etc. Unfortunately I am waiting on my new Debit Card to get here. No problem, Just use the girlfriends! With her permission ofcourse

Unfortunately…

Any advertiser outside the United States or Canada are required to fill out a credit card authorization request form with the front and back of their credit card as well as a photo ID displaying their name on it. No funds can be added without this information, not even the $100 minimum spend for international advertisers.

Don’t think you will get away free if you are in the US or Canada either. You are still required to pass over all this information, but only after your first $100 spend.

Ok so to begin with. Can’t use the girlfriends CC while I wait on mine to get here as the account is in my name. Slows down things a bit I guess. But even so, identify theft much?  I haven’t heard of anyone being ripped by this company but firstly passing over a photocopy front and back of your CC sounds a bit dodgy. I don’t quite understand how this is required or why it would be needed.

Photo Id. Also a bit crappy to be honest. Have I given out photocopies of my ID before, Sure. Will I give it out to a company that makes a living off installing shitty adware on peoples computers, probably not.

Also as a site note. Direct CPV apparently do accept Paypal payments. But this is how they tell you :

If you’d like to pay with Paypal, our Paypal address is paypal@directcpv.com.

That is it. No “Pay through here, then contact us there” type thing. No gateway to take you through to paypal and pay. Just that. I almost would have paid with Paypal right then and there to be perfectly honest (Aslong as it didn’t require some BS ID photocopies), but Live Support wasn’t on. And I wasn’t about to send through hundreds of dollars blindly through Paypal.

For now, I left it at that. I don’t have my CC here anyway to photocopy even if I was keen enough to pass it out.  At the end of the day, after all my moaning. I do want to give PPV a crack, so if worst comes to worse. I will adhere to the regime.

Yahoo SEM

Yahoo SEM is like a 3 month revolving door for me. I signed up with them about 2 years ago, made a deposit, and used a $100 voucher. I always get this huge urge to use them, and I spend an age setting up keywords and ad copy. Only to stop the campaign in a couple of days due to getting pissed at Yahoo’s interface.

With this in mind, I checked it today, And I had $80+ left in there. Once again, I am setting up campaigns and will try and crank through it. Not really sure how long it will last however (I seriously get sick of Yahoo SEM really fast), but I really can’t waste the money in there.

Next post following this journey I will try and post some tools that I use to speed things up.

I first heard about this a year or so ago. That Digitalpoint Forum owner (Shawn Hogan), was about to get a knuckle sandwich from eBay on Cookie Stuffing charges. At that time, I think cookie stuffing was really at the forefront of every affiliate marketers mind. Personally, and honestly, I never did it in my life. While there were many people out there that made stacks of cash from it, the overall effect was that companies would start operating at a loss, and the roll on from that would be changes in their affiliate programs. Usually designed to give users less and less Commission. My thoughts about this are fairly well documented.

Fast forward a year and Shawn Hogan and cohorts have been charged with additional charges. You can read straight from the source here : http://www.revenews.com/kelliestevens/affiliates-indicted-for-cookie-stuffing/

While the new charges are an interesting development. I think the numbers from the original (And still pending case) are absolutely extraordinary. And paint a somewhat nieve picture of the affiliate marketing industry.

Between 2006 and June 2007, Shawn Hogan (Digital Point Solutions) earned approximately $15.5 million in commissions from eBay. Hogan was eBay’s number one affiliate.

Ok so we have someone turning over 15 million in a year from commissions from eBay alone. And Hogan was the number one affiliate for eBay. I don’t understand how eBay wouldn’t watch him like a hawk. Surely they would have had direct contact with him almost every single day when you are turning over that much. I am personally not an affiliate manager for a CPA company, but if I was, I would would be looking after someone like this like royalty. It’s like when you go to a casino with thousands to blow, the Casino takes care of you, gives you a free room, free drinks etc. How the (alleged) cookie stuffing could have gone on for so long is a mystery to me.

Between 2006 and June 2007, Dunning (Kessler’s Flying Circus) earned approximately $5.3 million in commissions from eBay. Dunning was eBay’s number two affiliate.

Dunning is supposedly Shawn’s cohort. And really it follows the same line as above. Something interesting to note, is that Dunning is eBay’s number 2 affiliate. But notice the commission amount. He is 10 MILLION behind the number one affiliate. That means that Shawn Hogan was atleast 10million ahead of everyone else in the eBay program.

The news article ends with a very good point.

Regardless of the innocence or guilt of Hogan and Dunning, the fact that the U.S. Attorney deems cookie stuffing criminal should be a wake-up call for our industry.
As Linda Buquet stated when she first talked about the case, “For the blackhatters out there that say, ‘cookie stuffing isn’t illegal and all is fair in love and affiliate marketing’ – I say you better take a very close look at this case!”

As I said at the start of this post. At the time of the original charges, and even still today. People see Cookie Stuffing as “getting their own back”. That it is just part of the game. Affiliate networks screw over publishers, and they in turn do the same. A never ending cat and mouse game. But given the possible repercussions :

• Imprisonment of 20 years
• Maximum fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain/loss (whichever is greater)
• 3 years of supervised release
• $100 special assessment (per count)

I suggest many affiliate marketers will sit down and take note.

Note : The defendants have not been found guilty by a jury. Anything said by me is purely comments on the case, and does not indicate whether the accused are guilty or not guilty. I have no inside information that would point to them being guilty. I will leave it at that

Today I received the following email from CPALead (3 times infact, I have 3 different accounts with them, in the early days you needed more than one account to track which sites did what).

Hello Wade,

In order to ensure the quality of your traffic, we are closing your account due to inactivity. If you have a balance remaining on your account, you will be paid in full for it on your next scheduled pay date. Even if your payment is below our minimum threshold.

If you would like to continue using CPAlead’s services, please reapply here:

http://www.cpalead.com/get-started.php

We apologize if this has caused you any inconvenience.

Be assured that this is a necessary procedure in order to continue providing you with the highest paying offers in the industry. We hope you understand that our new security procedures are being put in place in order to protect the lead quality of our network, thus giving our legitimate publishers access to the best offers in the industry, guaranteed!

Please remember that we do not tolerate copyright infringing content, fake content, adult content, extremely offensive content, or misleading content in anyway. All publishers found to be running these types of sites will be banned without pay. Give the users what you are promising them!

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your affiliate manager or simply reapply for a new account immediately.

Regards,
Robert Reynolds
CEO, CPAlead.com
robert@cpalead.com
866-996-4666 ext. 107

There is also a whole bunch of junk down the bottom about me not disclosing this email. Don’t quite know what the harm would be. And in anycase, I have my policy that if you send me emails, I can out them. So my policy vs yours

Back to the case at hand. As I said above, all 3 of my accounts got this message. Admittedly only 1 is really used at all, but still it makes me wonder if they are doing a blanket booting, kicking everyone out, and then making them re-apply. I’m sure they will keep the top earners, but it disheartens me when stuff like this happens.

I’ll admit, I don’t use CPALead at all right now. Probably haven’t used them in months. However when I first started this blog, I had CPALead banners up. Back then I was heavily into them. From those banners, I got a bunch of referrals under my name. And thus each month I make atleast payout simply from my referrals alone. It isn’t making me a fortune, I never intended it to be, but it is still money none the less.

Feels kinda wrong when someone takes $50 from your back pocket each month for no reason. And even worse when I do work to bring CPALead business (I don’t make money unless my referrals do), and then they change their mind at a later date.

This has been spammed to me every which way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you have already cashed in on this. But Mr Guru himself, Shoemoney, is giving away a free $60 Myads coupon. Along with a short video walking you through what the interface looks like of Myads.

What is Myads? Essentially it started out as the ad network for Myspace (See MyspaceAds), similar to what Facebook is using nowadays. But since Myspace started going down the crapper, mostly because of Facebook’s dominance, they have extended the network to include a bunch more web properties. Mostly the Fox network, but also alot of other high trafficked websites.

Anyway, With a free coupon there really isn’t much reason to not go and blow it and see what happens. Unfortunately the coupon is USA only (Me being from New Zealand), so I couldn’t try it and see if you needed to make a deposit or anything like that. But I’m pretty sure it is an instant credit.

–> Check it out!