Former Affiliate Manager Here Spilling CPA Secrets

buddyboy

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I will not name the affiliate but it was a major one. What I will start with is they screw everyone. Me. You. Does not matter. We would have meetings about our shave percentage and laugh. For screwing me over I thought I could best get them back by turning over trade secrets to you. First, we know every bad lead you get. Every. Last. One. We used an algorithm to determine lead quality across all offers, as we had reports on every lead that came back. So if you did 20 bad leads on twenty different offers we knew about it. Surprise! I say 20 because that was door time. I can not say if other networks track like we do. I have read where people brag about hundreds of fake leads. Please. First of all if you do your own leads go find another line of work. Second, no way. We bounce you at 20 or less, and your payout is not happening.

What you need to know about email shaves is that no matter what the requirement is, a certain percentage of email or zips have to fill out the following pages or no convert. Of course we do not tell you that. We would have a hard time getting afiliates to do an offer that read "Simple Email and Two Thousand Offer Signup". So even though you know for a fact your friend filled in his email, if that is all he did, do not expect a conversion.

On to VCC's. Do. Not. Use. Them. We track by bin, and we know a fraud trial offer from a mile away. Faking trial offers is one of the quickest ways to get banned, so do not do it. You need to know the average trial offer cancellation rate is below ten percent. Which means for every hundred trials you send us we expect 90 to stick. The news is not all bad. I will reveal a near ban proof niche if you are not a total idiot. Dating. The reason is the phone number, or lack of it. There are dozens of dating offers and if you stick to 50 or less per offer, you are good to go. Beyond 50 with no paid signup and they complain, but the conversion rate on free to paid is 2 percent, so there you go. Run through 50 on one, then 50 on another, and so on and so on. Do not be a total idiot. Grab some friends, give them ten different dating offers, and pay them ten bucks. It is not hard. CPA though can be huge money. Find one good product to monetize, send quality traffic, and make big dollars. They do not ban you for good traffic. They shave like a mother, but they will not ban you. CL. The reason they ban CL is because they want exclusive access. Most of what you see on Craigslist is the CPA network itself, so in a sense you are competition to them. Easy work around. Landing page, redirect, again you can not be a total idiot. We figured 70 percent of all leads came from Craigslist, so our response is ban it, and take it for ourselves. Do not tell them your traffic source. These mothers will ban your own website and then approach you to advertise on it. This actually happened. If they know a good source of traffic they will ban it to make it theirs.

PPC is soon to be banned. If you look at your offers you can tell that less and less offers allow search. What they are doing is using your money to use as guinea pigs to get high paying keywords. Here is a big secret for you: they can learn your keywords through the referrer, for instance, they look at the referring landing page, scrape the keywords, and do a search. When the sponsored links pop up we move the mouse to bring up the link, if it is your affiliate link they take note of the keywords, save them and move on. Not only do they do it, they have software to automate it. I was told to tell one affiliate his keywords were banned. The advertiser did not approve of them. You can guess what happened to the keywords next, and how they were used.

Yahoo answers is the second biggest source of non PPC leads and they ban that too. Why? Because of exclusive access. As I close my first post I also want to tell you a secret, a deep dark one I heard at a convention a while back. The Can Spam law was written for and by Google. I checked and sure enough the year that law was passed Adwords came out. Funny thing is adwords is nothing but spam on blogs, but in the United States as in other countries, he or she who has the money can make the law.
 
Nice first post man. Welcome to the dark side.
 
The pay thing is a not a factor because AM's have a short shelf life career wise. What an AM basically is is a scapegoat. Here is another secret, nobody does fraud like the networks themselves. Guess who gets blamed? Affiliates beware.
 
Interesting post, can you give us a clue to which network you are from?

On another note can anybody recommend a good network for dating offers?
 
Sometime you just wonder what really goes on behind the scene. I tell you, these networks make a killing with shaving. I hate that sh*T!
 
Wow, amazing post, glad to have you with us :D

Now, let me take a stab at who you are... your from X*Y*7, and your name starts with a J?
 
As far as pay mid to high five figures with commission, some cross six, but again you have to stay long. The reason I do not reveal the network is because I want them to be stuck in the pillbox, but not know they need to defend it until it is too late and you guys have overrun them. They patrol here, and need no heads up.
 
Very interesting. Makes me take a 2nd look at how I drive my traffic to my offers. Is that 20 bad leads just a your-old-company thing, or is that somewhat common throughout the industry? And is it 20 per month, or 20 period?
 
You should write an ebook or offer coaching about fool-proof ways to screw the affiliate networks over. There have been so many stories about networks screwing, shaving and just crapping on affiliates.
 
Great post buddyboy!!! I think we all knew that they shaved commissions but to find out that they want exclusive access to all of the methods we use is something else. I wonder at what point does the cycle stop...

I mean they will piss off so many affiliates and then lose them... The networks will continue to market on their own but with less affiliates.. Interesting to see how the business model will change over time.

Thanks again for the strong post
 
hmm, could be a double agent, all that you revealed has been an open secret for a long time.

As for the anti fraud stuff, fact is bank is being made by those methods across many networks by many people. Could be a post just to put the newbies off.
 
Thanks so much buddyboy, ive heard of cpa networks banning people then copying their form of promotion. That is just plain rude, but not a surprise because the whole IM is fucking corrupt, nearly everyone with power is corrupt in this world. Yet bhw is an exception.
 
About bad leads, 20 if that represents the majority. Out of 100, no ban, out of thirty, bye. Arbitrary. A lead is bad if no contact is made with the person who filled it out. Conversions are different. Say for a debt consolidation lead, send 10-20 real unique people that answer the phone and you should be fine. Google conversion rates for different industries. If the conversion rate on debt consolidation is five percent, you can send 19, as we do not keep track of conversion rates unless they are complained about. Only lead legitimacy. Then move on to other offers. Here is a tip: jconnect.com Grab a phone number, and return the voicemail.
 
Open secret to some but not all. As far as bank being made with those methods, sure it can be done, and I know how. But it is almost as hard of work as legit leads, so why bother? I seriously doubt you know anyone making a fortune off of fake trial offers, unless they are a part of a hundred networks, in which case, yeah, easy permanentish money.
 
The networks know most leads are garbage. But, if real people are answering and validating the lead, you get paid. For the most part, few people fall for the free ipod thing anymore. It is getting harder to get real leads.
 
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Can't wait you reveals all the secret and how to take advantage and avoid get banned by network.
Nice post buddy
 
Awesome thread buddyboy.
Most of those things were expected. They are dirtier than the blackest black hatter
 
Wow, great post! Many suspicions have been confirmed this day. I guess its always best never to assume you are smarter than the next guy.
 
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