Hiding CL traffic

I just started with CJ about 2 months ago. I began by posting direct links on Craigslist (which I did not know was against the rules at the time). In my first day I made $150 with just 10 posts. I then did nothing for 3 days, and made $80, $60, and $60 respectively.

They questioned me about it, and I was honest with them. I told them I was new to this, and that I didn't know it was against the rules to use CL. I also told them not to pay me, that I was working on website so I could do things the right way. I even told the merchant that I expected the leads to be reversed.

They still sent me my check.

Anyways, here's the important part. I've been talking with my merchant, and they said that they have NO PROBLEM with me using CL, as long as they approve my ads, and my landing pages first. They've already approved my method.

CJ also said they have no problem with me using CL, as long as my website doesn't simply redirect to the merchant's site, and that (this is their exact words) I should keep that in mind while I'm building my site.

I'm facing a little bit of a dilemma here. On the one hand, I can try to get full approval from CJ. If they approve my method, which it sounds like they might, I can immediately scale it up 10 times and be pulling $1k per day no problem. If they deny me, I'll be SOL when it comes to traffic.

On the other hand, I could hide the fact that my traffic is coming from CL, control the flow so as to build up earnings gradually, and be constantly worried about being banned.


Does anyone have similar experiences with CJ? Can the merchant dictate how they will allow you to generate traffic, over riding what CJ says?

Any advice would be a great help guys. Thanks.

How big is your text on the craigslist ad? i made $400 in one day and got banned from another network. they banned me right after they sent the check. i barely put anything on the page, just redirected it.

One way you might want to go about it is build your site using WordPress
and maybe an autoblog plugin to build up some posts quickly (3 or 4/day).

Then make some individual 'pages' that you can use as 'landing pages' and
use a plugin like this to set the
referrer to one of your 'landing pages'.

By doing this and adding content to the site regularly, you can tell C*J or
your AM that you're building up traffic from search engines and other
organic means.

When/if they question the traffic from the 'landing pages' you can simply
say you're running some PPC campaigns, Facebook Ads etc or, if they're
actually allowing you to advertise on CL then these pages will work well
for the AM to look at (even though you're still essentially direct linking to
the merchant via the plugin).

Anyhow, just an idea.

Well I've actually been working on a website. I'm fine with loosing a few conversions if it keeps the network happy. Though I don't think I'll loose to much. Right before I took the CL ads down I actually put up a really simple landing page. The page was scaring away only about 20% of my traffic.

I'd really rather avoid doing any kind of redirect if I can help it. I'm just concerned that they are going to see where my landing pages are getting traffic from.

@donutking:
My ads on craigslist looked like completely legitimate, not like spam. They were a few paragraphs long. Standard size for what you would expect in the section I was posting in.


I'll probably try to get approvals. If they deny then I think I'll set up a redirect to cover my tracks from CL > My website.

Absolutely the merchant has final say. They are the ones in a sense paying you. It just took the middleman (CJ) to hook you two up.

I personally have had this experience. I was using CL, same deal, made a $100 per day and let it cruise at about 50-80 for a full month, then payday rolls around and lo and behold I have an email asking me about my traffic.

I used a double meta refresh but explained that nobody wants to click a ridiculous affiliate link and CJ was cool with that. Then it was up to my merchant to re-instate me and they didnt. Im still waiting actually. They basically are just letting it go and not accepting or denying me which is even more frustrating. Calls, Emails, everything went unanswered.

Hey styles thanks for sharing that. Have you ever had an experience where a merchant allowed you to do something that was typically against C*J's TOS, and C*J then allowed you to proceed?

hi there kaj01

get a script that shows one page to your visitors but another to the network

I'm not tecky but I know there are scripts on here that can do that

So the link on CL would take the visitor to your domain but use a double refresh and spoof or hide the referrer with a clean wh page

When the networks look at the page it is a clean wh landing page

Maybe someone with more tecky knowledge can chime in here and be more specific

oscar

Yeah you should be able to do a script like that in php, just look at the refer code and if it comes from CL redirect to the merchant and if not don't redirect it.

helaughs said:

Yeah you should be able to do a script like that in php, just look at the refer code and if it comes from CL redirect to the merchant and if not don't redirect it.

Click to expand...

thats a great script. I hope somebody will share it. that way, we can mix white to black hat. little chance of getting banned.

axedbydax said:

thats a great script. I hope somebody will share it. that way, we can mix white to black hat. little chance of getting banned.

Click to expand...

This should work for you:

When I was doing CL, I just meta-refreshed and never got questioned about the blanked referrer. Now, I'd probably just slap up an easy WP site with text links, and install the CPA Redirector plugin.

Search for CPA-Redirect or CPA-Framer, either will do the job. they just do it slightly different.

the framer is adding incentives in the top frame. the cpa redircetor is without.