Aminology

Two weeks ago Nickycakes started a contest where anyone could win his Xbox 360 by being the first to make $1K with Advaliant after signing up to the network through his referal link. I thought I’d give it a shot, so I signed up and got approved the next day. I actually expected some big shot affiliate to hit the $1K mark pretty soon, but after the ‘cakes posted his update two days later, I knew I could do better than those already in the lead.

I was the first person in the contest to hit $1000 in earnings with Advaliant . You can read Nickycakes’ post here .

I made my $1K by running debt relief ads on Facebook. I made and tested dozens of ads. Here are two of the more interesting ones I posted which despite having poor CTRs, managed to get a good volume of traffic without getting slapped with $1 clicks.

This ad did best when targeted at 25-45 year olds in the United States. I had a 0.06% CTR on this ad, which was the best CTR I managed to get in this particular campaign.

This ad was targeted at all college kids in the United States. I had a weak 0.02% CTR on this ad, probably because of the mention of a zip submit, but it converted well.

I kept these going until I won the contest, upon which I killed them and scrapped the campaigns because the profits were eventually simply not worth the ad spend.

I will definitely be working with Advaliant in the future, my account manager Geoff Marcy is a top guy to work with too. In fact, Advaliant sent an Xbox 360 to Matt Marcin who came second in the contest. Matt definitely deserved it more than I did, because he made the $1K in less than 24 hours, while it took me 3 days to hit the $1K through Facebook. Having said that, Facebook did severely limit the amount of traffic I could have potentially done, for the simple reason that lunatics are running their social ad system.

A big thanks to Nickycakes and Advaliant for this contest and for each sending out an Xbox 360 to me and Matt!

So there I was, chilling for a bit on Facebook, when I noticed a ‘tooth whitening’ advert on the usual Facebook ad spot.

Being the curious marketer that I am, I clicked on it to see how exactly the blog was being monetised. The link took me to a blog, which although looked fine, had a strange post on viagra. And literally a second after I noticed this, the page automatically redirected to medsmaster.com, a viagra site.

What’s interesting is the way in which this advert passed Facebook’s manual ad review. It seems like the marketer first waited until their innocent teeth whitening help blog was approved by the Facebook mods, and then inserted a redirect script into the main index page taking visitors to the viagra site.

Shady.

Kudos to ‘the Cakes‘ for this reminder. I actually received an email from my Affiliate Manager about the offer (Instant Action Games), but needed a good kick up the backside to actually do something about it.

I started promoting CPA offers on Facebook back when they had just launched their CPC model. At the time the mods were acting like schmuks and banning pretty much every campaign which involved zip/email submits, which just happened to be the best converting offers. Anyway, I got tired of having my ads rejected so I left it there, until now.

I’ve been running this offer for an hour now and not only is it converting decently (7:1 click to conversion rate at the moment), but I’ve actually had the ads manually reviewed and approved. If you want more specifics on running the offer check out this post.