Category Archives: Webmasters

Mallcom Turns 15 and You Get the Gift!

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When someone has a birthday, other people typically give them presents but Mallcom has decided you deserve the gifts so to celebrate their birthday they are giving their affiliates a huge boost in their income.  So from now until April 30th, new affiliates will be paid 50% on all their sales from the Mallcom movie store while current affiliates are given a 15% bonus added to their current payout.

50% Affiliate Payouts!

There is no special catches.  We are told this special promo commission applies for all products across the board including DVDs, video-on-demand, toys, Blu-ray DVDs and the new, hot-selling Fleshdrive.  That is huge!  Considering most people are cutting bonuses and promos, this is great news for all those websites out there promoting any pornstar at all because they can easily throw in the promo of that porn star’s movies and make some great extra cash.

The Mallcom affiliate program is proud to announce that it is celebrating 15 years in business. To show it’s appreciation, Mallcom is rewarding all its webmaster affiliates.  Today through April 30 new affiliate signups get 50 percent commission, and current affiliates can get a 15 percent bonus added to their payout. This special promotion applies for all products across the board including DVDs, video-on-demand, toys, Blu-ray DVDs and the new, hot-selling Fleshdrive.

“This is the perfect opportunity for webmasters to generate extra cash and boost motivation,” Mallcom Affiliate Manager Ric Garcia said.

Mallcom started out in 1996 as a small family business in the basement of a home in Queens, New York by a law school student and has turned into one of the most successful affiliate programs of its kind.

“It’s nice to sit back and reflect on all the great years we’ve had, and the great people we’ve gotten to work with,” Garcia said. “We love our affiliate partners, and wanted to take this time to thank them, and what better way to do that then with cold hard cash.”

Mallcom Vice President May Friedman said, “We are looking forward to many more years to come and new challenges to take on.

“We pride ourselves in the personal attention we provide our affiliates. From custom white label stores, to custom banners, to in depth suggestions on promoting your store to its highest potential. Our new shopping cart makes it super easy to link to any item, niche, star, or studio. Couple that with 50 percent commission on every order, and you have the makings of a blockbuster offer. Our phones are ringing off the hook with new affiliates wanting to jump on this offer. We’re stoked!”

For more information, email Ric Garcia at ric@mallcom.com or contact him on ICQ at 108422465.

You can also follow Mallcom on Twitter @Mallcom

The Top 50 Worst Passwords of all Time

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I read today that approximately 1 out of every 9 people uses at least one password that sucks. And by sucks I mean a password on the list of the top 500 worst passwords of all time.  In our life we have so many passwords to remember including one for our email, our online banking, our ATM password, our paypal account, our twitter. So the question is, are you being smart about your password use? Are you using a good password or one of the suck list?

Here are the top 50 worst passwords of all time
(Source: Perfect Passwords, Mark Burnett 2005).

  1. 123456
  2. password
  3. 12345678
  4. 1234
  5. pussy
  6. 12345
  7. dragon
  8. qwerty
  9. 696969
  10. mustang
  11. letmein
  12. baseball
  13. master
  14. michael
  15. football
  16. shadow
  17. monkey
  18. abc123
  19. pass
  20. fuckme
  21. 6969
  22. jordan
  23. harley
  24. ranger
  25. iwantu
  26. jennifer
  27. hunter
  28. fuck
  29. 2000
  30. test
  31. batman
  32. trustno1
  33. thomas
  34. tigger
  35. robert
  36. access
  37. love
  38. buster
  39. 1234567
  40. soccer
  41. hockey
  42. killer
  43. george
  44. sexy
  45. andrew
  46. charlie
  47. superman
  48. asshole
  49. fuckyou
  50. dallas

We all know we need to use better passwords but with so many that we have to keep up with, how can we do it? A friend of mine had a great idea. What he did was, he bought a Rolodex. You know, the ones office people used years ago to keep track of their contacts. He then made an entry for every website or thing he had a password for. For example, Facebook he would file under F. He wrote down Facebook at top to know what the site was, then his username, password and associated email address for that account.

He is able to use more complicated passwords now because he doesn’t have to sit there and try and remember them. If he needs to remember a password he just looks it up in his nifty little Rolodex. WORD OF WARNING – DO NOT SAVE YOUR PASSWORDS ON YOUR COMPUTER OR IN ANY DIGITAL FORMAT, this includes your computer, your iphone, your laptop, etc.  This sort of password filing system should only be done with a physical, non computer type system.

So now what you need to do is start picking some good passwords.  How do you do that?  Well, a good password should always have both letters and numbers and include a combination of both lower and uppercase letters.   A good password should never include any word that is in any dictionary, nor should it include any person’s names.  Hackers use programs that check for those things.   An example of a decent enough password would be 8&7kEp9Z.

You shouldn’t use the same password on different websites.  If you have 10 different accounts that each need a password, use 10 different passwords.  Your email account show not have the same password as your twitter.  This way if one account gets compromised, the rest of your accounts aren’t automatically at risk.

ASACP Frad Alert for Adult Webmasters

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Found this information from XBIZ and thought it was important so I wanted to share it with you guys in case someone tries to scam you in the same way.

ASACP Fraud Alert: and How to Handle It

A webmaster in the UK received an email from joan@asacp.co.uk threatening him and his hosting company under the pretense of child pornography on his site.  Thankfully this webmaster contacted ASACP directly to ask us about this. Know that ASACP does not own asacp.co.uk and never sends such emails to individuals or owners of suspected cp websites. We forward all confirmed reports of suspect CP directly to law enforcement and other international hotlines.

Tim Henning, VP Technology and Forensic Research, investigated this situation – the same as he would a report of suspect CP.  What he learned is that asacp.co.uk is:

  • Registered under the name  “Jane Harman”; obviously whoever bought this domain knew about the recognition Congress person Jane Harman presented to ASACP for its Restricted to Adults – RTA label
  • Registered with Dynadot, LLC t/a Dynadot  (dynadot.com) in September 2010
  • Hosted by Silicon Valley Web Hosting (svwh.net)
  • Forwarding to asacp.org
  • Plus, Tim obtained the list of other domains hosted on the same IP address. Since domains owned by the same person/organization are usually grouped under the same IP on servers, this may be an indicator of who is behind this illegal activity. Plus this information will help law enforcement with their investigation.

Since the information that leads to the identity of the real owner is protected by Dynadot.com and SVWH.net, within their billing records and server logs, ASACP had only two courses of action:

  • Use a lawyer in order to obtain a subpoena to require that this registrar provide ASACP with this information which would have cost more money than ASACP could afford
  • Go through one of our FBI contacts which as it turns out, because internet fraud is such a common crime, the FBI has partnered with the Internet Crime Complaint Center, IC3.gov as the national clearing house to handle these investigations – which is the route we decided to go

Since this criminal used Congress person Jane Harman’s name to register asacp.co.uk, ASACP has provided the results of our investigation and the IC3 case number to both her California and Washington staff. So we are expecting a speedier investigation.

We have also been working with the registrar and hosting company for asacp.co.uk to inform them of this matter and assist them with their own internal investigations. ASACP’s hosting company has also been contacted by us in order to place a referrer block on asacp.co.uk. All referred traffic from asacp.co.uk is now redirected to a forbidden page instead of asacp.org.

We hope this information helps you if you experience a similar situation. Also we could use your help, please contact Tim@asacp.org if you have received any correspondence from an email address using @asacp.co.uk.

FreeOnes Reveals Porn Star Real Names

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It seems almost every day you hear about some new lawsuit about privacy. In fact recently a wife filed a criminal complaint against her husband for violating her privacy with her email. Recently Yahoo was sued for violating the privacy of a woman. Then again so was Netflix, CVC pharmacy, Google, a school district in a suburb of Chicago, and even Facebook.

There always seems to be one issue or another going on at any given time of day in the news about privacy.

But are porn stars not afforded those same rights?

Porn stars use stage names for a reason and that is because unlike most real people in the world, even Hollywood celebrities, porn stars are exposed in a very real intimate way and sometimes fans can get confused and cross the line between fantasy and reality.

It is for this very reason that porn stars don’t need their real names revealed, let alone their real names, date of birth, city and state they were born in, all in one place but FreeOnes has apparently done just that.

In an unrelated incident to the FreeOnes.com ordeal, I spoke recently to Ben Protzmann, someone who has been in the industry for over a decade now, about this issue and he defends websites doing this by saying things like, well their real names are already out there. We didn’t reveal them in the first place.  So I responded with …. let me get this straight … because someone else stuck their head in an over, you should do it too?

Just because someone else does something stupid, doesn’t mean you have to do it too. Posting the real names of porn stars has no real marketing value whatsoever.

Do you think that a fan is suddenly going to buy more DVDs, or spend more money on buying website memberships because they know the stars real name? Of coruse not. There is no real, tangible benefit to posting a porn star’s real name.

The only purpose it serves is to potentially cause the starlet in question harm.

With the information that FreeOnes.com is providing about a porn star, date and location of birth, and her real full name including in many cases the full middle name or middle initial, any retard with a credit card and $3.95 (yes I said three dollars and ninty five cents) to spend can find out some very real and dangerous information about the given porn star including the names, address and phone numbers of her relatives, where she lives, her phone number, who she may be married to, his full name, and the names, addresses and phone numbers of his releatives.

Identity theft is the very least of these girls problems.

Think what a deranged person can do with this kind of information.

And remember all they needed to do was visit FreeOnes.com, get the information then spend as little as $3.95 at a research website and in less than 5 minutes, some crazy ass fan knows where a porn star lives, who she is married to, their telephone number, the make and model of their car, the names of all of 10 or 15 of her closest relatives, their addresses and phone numbers.

It was revealed today on Twitter than a fan recently got ahold of the real names for Teagan Presley and her husband and used that information to show up at the hotel room Teagan was staying at while on tour.

I don’t know why they did it but FreeOnes.com knowingly and willingly put these girls in harms way by posting this private and personal information.

SHAME ON YOU FREEONES.  YOU’VE MADE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY OFF OF PORN STARS.  IS IT SO MUCH TO REALLY ASK YOU TO TRY AND PROTECT THEM AS WELL?

Let’s Do The Webmaster Math

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Something interesting happened to me today.  A person I have known for a long time told me they wouldn’t do business with an affiliate program because they were only offering a 50% rev-share program instead of the “standard” of 70%.  Then another person said that he would never do business with an affiliate program that offers less than $40 PPS.   Of course both of these guys are owed checks for no less than 10 different affiliate programs and they can’t understand what is going on.  Really?  You can’t understand?  I guess people really just don’t do the webmaster math.

When really established names like Suze Randall and Earl Miller are having trouble paying their affiliates you know things are really bad.  We all know the economy is bad, but is that alone the reason why affiliate program after affiliate program is failing?  Off the cuff it’s easy to blame the economy on our problems but if you look closer, you soon realize we are in a large part to blame too.

How many times have affiliate programs offered things like $100 PPS sign ups on trials and 70% rev share?

Every time I see that it doesn’t make me want to do business with them.  In fact, it does the complete opposite.  It makes me realize how extremely short sided the people running the program is and their bad business decision makes me want to run the other way.  I want to do business with a company who is smart enough to hopefully be around for a long time to come.  With someone making these kind of financial decisions, I know that won’t be the case with these guys.  So that is why I tend to avoid them and as such that is also why I rarely have to chase after money people owe me, because I am smart enough to do business with smart people.

Affiliate programs were originally designed as a partnership between the program owner who has the content and the affiliate who was generating all the traffic.  A real partnership is one where everyone benefits but somewhere along the way things have gotten out of hand and in the end everyone loses.

Let’s say a member joins a website for a $1 trial membership.  The affiliate program for that says pays the affiliate $100.  These $100 PPS promos have been far more common.  Can’t understand it but nonetheless, let’s do the math on that.

On a decent enough site, in a decent enough economy, 1 in 4 of those trials will typically convert to a full membership.  On a decent enough site, in a decent enough economy, the average member will stay a member 4 months.  So if 40 people join the trial, 10 will stay members for an average of 4 months.  $20 * 10 = $200 * 4 = $800.  That means those 40 people that joined, in the end are worth about $800 to that site owner.  But keep in mind, that site owner paid the affiliate $100 PPS on those 40 original joins.  That means they owe $4,000 on the $800 they just made.  The math clearly doesn’t add up.

But not all affiliate programs pay $100 PPS for long.  Looking around $30 to $40 PPS is more common.   In fact out of the 20 affiliate programs I browsed tonight at random while writing this article, every single one of them paid either $30 or $40.  So we’ll call it $35 for example purposes.

You send 40 joins to that website.  $35 PPS * those 40 members = $1,400 you just made.  Great!  But as you seen before, those 40 joins really aren’t worth that much to the website.   They just lost $600.

A lot of websites try and make up the loss in doing up-sales like selling merchandise to their members or cross-sells with memberships being offered to their members, to other sites at a discount.   This money can often be significant but even still, common sense tells you that in the end the math just doesn’t add up.

The whole idea of being in business is to make money, no?

Now let’s look at high end rev-share programs.

A membership to this example website is $25.  The affiliate gets 70%.  That means with each join or re-bill the affiliate earns $17.50, leaving $7.50 left over for the website owner.  This $7.50 per member has to pay at the very basic level, the cost of credit card processing fees, chargeback fees, new content, web hosting including the cost of excessive bandwidth usage, banking fees, including payroll, and customer service costs.  So really what is left over for the program owner?  $7.50 per month, per member quickly is reduced to pretty much nothing.

An affiliate wants to make the most money they can from their traffic but in the end, an affiliate program can’t survive if they keep paying these over inflated fees.  So it is really no surprise that affiliate programs, even the big ones are having a hard time trying to find a way to pay their affiliates – I mean if you pay your sales team more than you are making from a sale, how do you expect them to stay in business for long?

So our lesson is this … you can do business with people all day long that promise you the world, but I want to do business with people that I know will be there to pay me today, tomorrow and next week.  You enjoy your $100 PPS promos or your 70% rev share promises, while I sit back and actually enjoy getting paid by the people I do business with.  I’ll take 50% any day and know for sure I’ll actually be getting paid than the promise of much larger numbers and be left with empty promises when it comes time to actually pay me.

Some comment posting SEO secrets

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Everyone loves free traffic to their website. I mean who wouldn’t, right? And everyone knows that the best free traffic you can get is from search engines. So then the question is, how exactly do you get your site to the top of the search engine to get all that free traffic?

Our friends over at Google tell us that “Webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages”.

Getting one site to link to your site is called an inbound link or in the SEO world, a backlink. In general terms, the more links from other sites to yours, the better. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of these links to your website.

So what do you do? Does that mean you should go out there and start trading text links with every website you can find? Of course not. In fact, Google tells us that not all links are equal. To Google quality is more important than quantity. Getting a few links from relevant, authoritative sites can greatly improve your site’s rankings, while dozens or even hundreds of links from other less authoritative sites can do almost nothing for you.

Google tells us that an authoritative site is one with “fresh, revolving content”. This means that the site is always adding new original material and revolving content is simply material that continually gets added and moved around on your site. Now keep in mind that’s the official answer from Google. In reality what the SEO experts have found is that a site with similar content and a high page rank is what you want.

So if you trade links with an adult site that has page rank of 1/10, that one link may not be as valuable as trading links with an adult themed site whose page rank is say 3 out of 10. Page ranks go from 1 to 10.

This site for example has a page rank of 4. The LukeisBack website has a page rank of 5. The website Adult DVD has a page rank of 4. Google’s home page is a PR8. Facebook is a PR10 site. If you aren’t sure you can easily get plugins for your web browser like the SEO toolbar for Firefox to help you find out.

Page rank is updated about twice a year. The more quality, relevant sites that link to you, the higher your page rank goes.

So you would think, oh page rank is what matters for search engine rankings then, no? No. Although it’s easy to make that mistake in thinking that, in reality the same data that determines your page rank (backlinks) helps you get better search engine rankings but one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. That is why a site with a PR1 or heck, even a PR0 site can get decent search engine rankings.

It can get confusing, I know but just keep this in mind. If I want to rank #1 in a search engine for my desired keyword, I need to get people who have a good listing already in that keyword and a good page rank to link from their site to mine.

So with all of that being said, how can you go about building some backlinks to your website?  Well one easy way is to find a blog or two or three that you like and start posting comments or replies to their posts.  Don’t be a spammy ass, just post a relevant reply making sure you link your site name and your page URL when making a reply so you get a backlink when making a comment post.

However I should mention not all blogs are created equal.  If a blog has a “no follow” tag – as most blogs do – comes default in wordpress even, then posting a comment is pointless.  the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.  To know if a blog is using the nofollow tag simply go to the page on their website with a comment already posted, view the page source, and click edit, find “nofollow” and if it is there, move on.  If it is not there, great – you just found a great resource for your website!

If you run a wordpress blog and want to take away the “no follow” tag for your comments then you should look for a plugin like – Wp-Dofollow. It can easily be found in the wordpress plugins directory.


The Truth About Alexa Exposed

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No matter what the experts may say about the extreme inaccuracies in the Alexa reported statistics, the one thing I think most people will agree is that at the very least Alexa data is fun to look at. It’s fun to see who they are saying is most popular. Last week Twitter was #11, this week #10, Facebook is #2 and this same time last year, where was it? Has it really gotten THAT famous in just one year’s time?

But as fan as it may be to gawk at the facts and figures they present to us, we can’t help but at least think about those experts who claim the data given at Alexa is so unreliable, that looking at their “top lists” are pointless since the information they use to make them is completely false. So we know more know if Site A is more popular than Site B, than we did before looking at Alexa. They claim simply put that Alexa is not in any way shape or form reliable. Not only that, but it is flat out false.

If you search “Alexa is a joke“, you’ll find over 1.6 million results in Google. But colorful commentary aside, let’s break it down to simplistic terms.

If you have two websites, one ranks 100, the other ranks 200. The site who ranks 100 should, in theory have more traffic than the site that ranks 200. Right?

Well, it should be right but the reality of the situation is, it isn’t correct. They base their statistics on a sampling of traffic from those who use their toolbar and as such they have no real way to know how many visitors actually visit site 1 or site 2, they can only guesstimate based off of a small sampling of data, then they guesstimate on the rest and what happens when you guess?

You guessed it …. you are just as likely to be wrong as you are to be right.

But so far it’s just been idle chatter and speculation. I wanted to actually put Alexa to the test, a real test.

I was starting a little project with a friend of mine, a membership site. I registered a domain name and setup Elevated X on it to process the movies on it. This site has no traffic, no promotion, heck it didn’t even have a website on it. I put up a single page, with one graphic – no SEO to it. The site itself got 0 visitors other than myself and my partner in the last 60 days. Zero.

The site has a google page rank of 0/10, which is as it should be there is no SEO to the site at all, no back links, nothing.

So how does Alexa see this site?

Alexa Traffic Rank: 1,182,852

SERIOUSLY????????????????????

How does this happen?

Let me explain why this is a problem.

I have a porn star website that has been up for about 9 years.
This site gets about 800 unique visitors per day. This site is a PR3 website and has thousands of backlinks.

The Alexa Traffic Rank for that website is 3,269,433

I have another porn star website that has been up about 2 years. The site gets about 600 to 700 unique visitors per day. The site is a PR2 website and also has a few thousand back links.

The Alexa Traffic Rank for that website : 1,503,388.

So the point of all of this is what?

Stop bragging about your Alexa ranking because in the end it really means nothing more than saying your BlaBlaBleeBla Ranking is —-. Both mean nothing.

Where are your ad dollars going? Really …. do you actually know?

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For awhile now I’ve been meaning to write this article but haven’t quite honestly had the time to get around to it.  But recently something re-inspired me to do so.

It is amazing to me, especially in today’s tough economic times that people will spend money on ineffective advertising.

Even more amazing to me is that there are people out there who shell out money month after month and have no clue how effective that ad is for them.  Those people typically give the excuse “well the ad is such a good deal so it’s worth it”.  Really?  How do you know if it’s a good deal if you don’t know what your return is on your investment??!!  Those people who say that make me want to smack them. 😛

Case in point.  There is an affiliate board out there where you can chat about sponsors.  Years ago get after I had made a post on GFY I got an ICQ from some guy inviting me to use their board and he claimed it was the 2nd or 3rd largest adult webmaster board out there.  I went and took a look and noticed someone I knew was a paid advertiser there so I thought I would give it a try.

Right away I noticed there wasn’t much chatter on the boards.  There might be 2 or 3 new posts a day, but most of them were by the board owner like the “joke of the day” or something like that.   There may be a few replies here and there but for the most part the board seemed dead.  I mention this to him, right away starting to question his claim of being this popular adult message board.  He claims that he had thousands of users, they just don’t post for some reason.

The explanation seemed reasonable enough so I stayed around.  I tried to help the guy out and make a few posts myself each day and went out of my way to respond to the threads that others started.   Then one day I noticed that the owner of the board made a reply to a post I had made as another person.  Like he meant to post as himself but forgot he was logged in as another person.  I wondered then just how many make accounts he posted under.

Still I’m a nice enough person so I shut up about things and just went about my business.  One day the guy contacts me.  He said he was having some financial troubles for one reason or another and wanted to know if I could help him get my friend to renew their upcoming ad account a few months early if he offered them a super discount.  I called my friend and helped to arrange the deal only the person who normally makes the payments was out of the office, as she had just had a baby and the guy would have two wait a day or two for the money.

The guy freaked out on me as if I had scammed him.  It was the craziest thing I had ever seen.  Instead of fighting with some insane person I thought it just best to ignore him.  This guy sent me maybe 20 messages most more crazy than the last and I just didn’t respond.   I didn’t speak to him for about two weeks.  So then he had his mother contact me and let me know that if I was looking for him he was in the hospital, he had had a heart attack.  Later on he would do something similar only this time it was diabetes.

I eventually decided to forgive the guy after about 93 apologies from him.  So a few more months go by and he contacts me.  He explains how he desperately needs money to pay his board mods.  Apparently he pays out a few thousand each month to maintain his board, which I never understood why since well, it was a single site with almost no traffic and hew as spending like $7,000 a month on people to help him run the boards.  But anyway, he asked if I knew anyone who wanted an ad.  I made a few phone calls.  I called Tim from Twistys and right away he was interested but when I said the name he was like ummm ya no, we aren’t buying any ads right now. It was a very strange reaction.  But I kept on.  I wanted to be a nice person and help the guy out so I contacted a company I had recently been doing some consulting for.  The owner said he would pay for the ad, it was cheap enough so I contacted the site owner and let him know that this person had agreed.

I had him email an invoice to the person and the ad was to go live the next week.  The same night day the board owner put the ad up, before the people even got the invoice to pay.  When the company got the invoice they didn’t pay right away so the board owner was really really being crazy again, saying some weird things to me so I contacted the company and asked them about paying the invoice.  Again I didn’t profit in any way for this, I was just being nice, going out of my way to try and help some people out.  BIG MISTAKE.

The company who had originally agreed to run the ads decided against running them.  He wouldn’t say was but he was very insistent that he didn’t want to have anything to do with this place.  I was then tasked with telling this crazy man that they decided against it.  He of course freaked out.  Called me every name in the book.  I was a lying cheat, a whore, a slut, a scammer, a bitch and so on and so on.  I tried to explain rationally that I don’t own this company and I can’t force them to run an ad with him.  That the agreement was the ad would start next week and they would pay you prior to the ad going up.  It was him who jumped the gun and put up the ad and I’m sorry but I can’t control what other people do or say.

Now after this ugly mess, why in the world was he pulling out?  This board had ads by several companies so they had to be doing something right.  No?

I did get the owner of that company to finally speak to me.  He said “Look, I did some digging into this company.  It’s a scam.  You say the ad was up for a day or two yet server stats show not one single referral.  Are you telling me that in a 24 to 48 hours that this guy claims our ad was running, not one single person from his supposedly busy message board bothered to click on the ads?” (keep in mind this was a skin for the message boards, a static sticky post on the boards and a banner up top).   He said that he talked to a few friends and they told him some stories about this guy and this company.  He wouldn’t go into a lot of details other than to just prove his point about the zero clicks in the time the ad was up and well to be honest that is really all he needed to say.  That really did prove his point.

I then contacted my original friend I told you about who had run ads there for years.  They went digging through their logs and found that in the last 9 months they had only gotten 1 click on their ad.  1 click?  Seriously?  How do you have a banner up at a site for 9 months and only get 1 person ever to click it.  Surely that just had to be a icky banner.

So then I noticed there was a Vivid Cash banner up there.  I contacted my rep who I had at the time gotten rather friendly with and she was like “Ya that place is a joke.  We had our ad up there for awhile and they never produced any results.  The ads were so cheap we couldn’t help but give them a try but they never produced any results for us.  We never even got one referral from that place.”

So I started to put all the pieces together.  The board was real enough and some of the people were real but very few of them.  The owner of the board had a lot of fake accounts of which he posted on himself to make his board appear more busy than it was but even then the activity was extremely low.  But even then because the ads companies were being offered were so extremely cheap they felt like they were getting a great deal because he would promote the “normal ad rates” at as much as $2,500 a month and then sell them to companies who were his “special friends” sometimes as low as $50 a month and in one case for as low as $500 for an entire year.

It was  a great snow job to say the least but that brings me to the point of my lesson for today and that is that it is our responsibility to know what an ad is REALLY worth.  You can’t keep spending money on advertising because someone tells you it is a good idea.  I could tell you a lot of things but it doesn’t make them true.  I could tell you that if you give me $100 today I will make you $500 tomorrow, but who is to say I am telling you the truth?  Just because I seem to be a nice person doesn’t make it so.

Even if a company isn’t running a con on you, maybe just maybe your type of ad isn’t right for that site or the banners you designed suck wee wee.  Seriously, you should see some of the crappy ads people try and submit to run here.   I just flat out won’t let them, for their own good. LOL

So what you want to know is this …. I spend $X per month on my ad and in return it gets me how many referrals / click throughs a day?  I ran some tests on this site with rotating banners on the post pages.   I ran the tests with three banners, from 3 different websites, they rotated randomly on the posts page – at the very bottom.  Each one got about 2,200 unique impressions per day (on average) – which means each ad was seen by about 2,200 actual people per day.  From that the one got about 12 people who clicked on it (on average), one got 32 clicks per day and one got 41.

Over a 30 day period that works out to be 26,400 people per day seen each of the three ads. The first person got a total of 360 new visitors to their site, while the second got 960 and the third got 1,230.  Next I did a ad with another banner.  In all it got 104,588 impressions and out of that 1,025 people clicked on it.  What does all of this matter to you?  Well how many clicks a person gets on their banners on this site really don’t mean much to you BUT knowing this information about the money you are spending on advertising is important. Without knowing it, how do you know what you are getting for your money?  What you need to care about is the return YOU are getting on ads you are paying for.  What I learned from this is that certain types of banners work better than others.  But well, what you need to know is if YOU spend money, does anyone at all ever see that banner or ever click on it and visit your website?

I don’t care if you only paid $2 for the ad, that’s $2 you should expect to see a return on.

Why not just take a $100 bill, light it and burn it?  Because that’s pretty much what you are doing if you aren’t keeping up with how you are spending money.

Had people really been paying attention they would have known that they were spending money, even if just a little bit, on nothing. They aren’t getting any return on their investment and the argument “well it’s such a cheap ad” doesn’t cut it either because if it’s so cheap, just give me the money and I’ll take it and go to dinner on it. You’ll get just as much return as you would running a banner on a site that nobody really visits.

  • If you spend $20 on an ad and 0 people click it. You just wasted that $20.
  • If you spend $200 on an ad and 0 people click it. You just wasted that $200.
  • If you spend $500 on an ad and 0 people click it. You just wasted that $500.

Do you get my point yet?  If you want to just throw away good money, throw it my way.   Seriously.  Every penny counts.  So before you renew an ad with a company, ANY company as yourself this.  What is that ad really worth to me.  Am I renewing it because the guy seems nice enough or because it’s really worth having the ad up there?

Now just to be clear …. the point of this story isn’t to say don’t run ads with this guy or that guy.  It is simply to get you to start paying attention to where you are spending your money.  If you are going to spend even $1 on something, you need to be a responsible business owner and pay attention to what you are getting for that $1 in return.

With today’s hostile economic climate, you need to know where your money is going and what it is doing for you.

Every penny counts so don’t let yourself fall victim to an ad scam.  Be smarter than that.