Sponsors :: shameless rant - GoFuckYourself.com

PowerCum · 11-23-2008, 12:36 PM

This a BIG rant against all sponsors that still have the "You build it and they will come" mindset. It's a big wall of text, but if you run an affiliate program you better read it because I'm not the only person that feels the same.
I am the kind of affiliate that tends to offer his sponsors to host their tours on my own servers because I can funnel more than 250k uniques/day to a tour page.

If one of your affiliate/sales managers is called Lisa, then FUCKING GIVE HER AN EMAIL ACCOUNT UNDER YOUR DOMAIN AND DONT MAKE HER USE A GMAIL ACCOUNT! (this is completely unrelated to the rest, it's just a sponsor I'm testing and I hate writing mails to anything that is not their domain for biz discussions)

Will discuss the following:
1 ) Introduce yourself and your products properly
2 ) Affiliate managers
3 ) Stupid terms and conditions
4 ) White label sites
5 ) Under radar shaving and facts denial

Introduce yourself and your products properly

Sending a mail with "Hey dude contact me" or saying just "Hi" on ICQ usually gets ignored and sometimes goes to the blacklist if this behavior continues (if you do it again).
Please, take the time to introduce yourself properly. A proper introductions would be something like:
Hello, my name is XXX and I work for company YYY that runs ZZZ sites. I would like to discuss about how could we do some business together for mutual profit

As for introducing your product, be fast, easy to understand and make sure it takes less than 30 seconds to explain what is your product about. Sending me 90 pages pdf brochure or sending me to an URL that has more than 15 lines of text means I will not even bother to look at that crap.
"Look at our site www.example.com to see what we have to offer" means that I will probably not even lose my time looking at what you have. You are contacting me to do business, so do your work and sell your business opportunity to me. Something along the lines:
Our product XXX is better than the competition (other sponsors) because YYY. I think we could make more money together because our product has ZZZ feature that others don't have.

Whatever you or your product takes more than 5 lines to be introduced = failure. If it takes me more than 20 seconds to understand exactly how I could make more money with your program than with my current sponsor you have lost the biz opportunity.

Affiliate Managers madness

When you hire an affiliate manager or some similar position remember that this person represents your company and whatever he says on boards or ICQ gives the same good or bad business image as if the company leader said it himself.
When your affiliate manager jumps into dramma threads like any other board whore there is a very big chance that your program will lose some current and/or future business just because of that. In fact, I assume any person with BIG banner of your program into their sig to be a representative of your program, so take care with whose sigs do you buy.
Make sure your affiliate manager can do what he promises. If an affiliate manager promises something and then he is unable to do it, then you have lost my business forever.
I have dumped completely $15k per pay period (about $1k per day) sponsors because their affiliate manager posted some idiotic comment that I didn't like or just said something I didn't like.

Having someone just spam me on ICQ "We have lots of FHGs and here is the affiliate link <enter NATS code here>" means that I wont even bother to look at your program unless I have requested to be spammed with FHGs.

If I am already promoting your program then make sure that the sales/affiliate manager will contact me ONLY if I'm burning your servers with traffic and you want me to stop it. If I need <whatever it is>, I will contact my affiliate manager only once asking about it. If I get no reply then your program is scheduled to be changed at the first opportunity (this means about two days as much).

Stupid terms and conditions

Unlike other people, I read program terms and conditions... well, my inhouse lawyer does that for me when it comes time to push serious promotion.
When you make your program terms and conditions at least make sure you read them after copy/pasting them. My english is not perfect, but reading terms and conditions with blatant grammar and spell errors makes me stop reading and ditching the entire program.
Also make sure you don't copy/paste other program terms and conditions, and if you do it, at least replace their program and company name with yours.

In the "We don't accept affiliates from XYZ countries" part make sure you don't include all EU countries. If you put my country (Spain), then there is absolutely no way I will signup and promote your program.

In the trademark part make sure there is nothing that may offend my intelligence as affiliate. Something like "If your domain name looks like our paysite domain name you must handle it to us and pay us for the damages you have caused to our trademark" means only 3 logic actions on my side:
1 ) I will immediately build a paysite that is the same niche as yours. If you use non exclusive or semi exclusive content I will buy the same content as yours.
2 ) I will try to takeover your keywords on any SE, and trust me, I can do it.
3 ) Wait for you to sue me and then make YOU pay me damages because ALL my domains are trademark registered in Spain before I put whatever money making site on them. In fact I could sue you for the same thing you will try to sue me.
If I have some domain that looks like yours the obvious choice is to redirect it to your site and make money with it, but if I see some stupidity like this one in your terms you are doomed.

I have had several program owners and affiliate managers contact me and say "We can change the rules for your particular case". That's not ok unless you send me a notary signed hardcopy of the terms with the needed changes. And usually I just don't even bother with all that bureucratic hassle.

White label sites

If I ask you for a white label site, make sure it's completely turnkey and go under MY domain. subdomain.yourdomain.com IS NOT a white label at all.
I want to have a config file with 5 or 6 lines where I have to put my white label site name, white label site domain and as much a description or hook text/slogan. After uploading this file, some simple css and my logo to the server or just configuring it somewhere, and it should be ready for production state after a total of 10 minutes invested on my side.

Handling me a FTP login where I see about 150 smarty templates is ok, but if I have to edit them all before going production I will just drop your white label site offering. In fact, I don't want to edit a single smarty file before going production.

Under radar shaving and facts denial

If I send you big traffic amounts (50k uniques or more par day) don't get tempted to put the shaving filter on. I will notice it. In order to send you such quantity of traffic, my traffic management system is way better than yours and I can determine relatively easy if you are not counting 2% or even less of my traffic.
As for shaving sales... I always open at least two accounts per sonsor with different companies and have only one of them send the big traffic hunk while the others send the same traffic but much less, just as control mechanism. If the test accounts sales don't drop but the main account sales drop overnight, then all the traffic will drop overnight too.
It takes me 5 minutes to redirect all the traffic that goes to you to another place, even before removing your banners from my ads server.

If you see that the traffic has dissapeared don't contact me asking what has happened, you already should know why I stopped promoting you.
Some days ago I got a sponsor contacting me with "Why did you stop sending traffic to us?" and I replied "Why did you stop counting my sales properly?"... Their reply was "Sorry, that should have not happened" --> WTF???

Most sponsors will deny shaving, but the truth is that when they see big traffic accounts or big sales numbers into a single account they tend to shave a small percentage thinking it will slip unnoticed under the radar.
I don't fucking care if you shave all your other affiliates, but if you try to shave me, you are fighting an already lost battle... so better don't even try.

Rant over

NaughtyRob · 11-23-2008, 12:54 PM

Interesting thread for sure. Very good points indeed. I would love for you to try our sites. I am the owner and board rep and I don't make idiotic drama thread posts. [email protected]
ICQ: 303-738-440
If you would like PPS hit me up, we are currently 60% revshare.

Machete_ · 11-23-2008, 01:04 PM

I wish a lot of reps would read that, and take note

andy83 · 11-23-2008, 01:05 PM

one word.. wow.. i read thru all that in one sitting..

Gr8 points, and some of these points, smaller affiliates would never even dare to think about. True but sad.

AnalProbe · 11-23-2008, 01:11 PM

Same here... I do not promote any program that shaves or has bad rep in any possible way.

You do your homework, and so do I.

LiveDose · 11-23-2008, 01:13 PM

Very nice post.

seeandsee · 11-23-2008, 01:16 PM

shave part was the best

AnniKN · 11-23-2008, 01:27 PM

These points are fantastic, we are planning to launch an affiliate program and will take all of this into account.

kmanrox · 11-23-2008, 02:17 PM

so if you were making 1k per day with a sponsor, and you saw something an affiliate mgr posted that you didnt like, you'd drop the sponsor? that sounds a bit silly to me.

Trixie · 11-23-2008, 02:38 PM

In the similar domain situation, are you talking about domains that you already owned before you'd even heard of the sponsor's site? Or domains that you registered specifically to try to steal their traffic so you can get sales that would have gone to them already without your "promotion"? Because in the latter case I'd have to say you should be less worried about your "intelligence" being insulted and more worried about having shitty ethics. It sounds pretty much like you're saying, "sponsors! Do you think I'm too stupid to fuck you and leach off of your brand without doing any work myself?"

Seriously, your little 1-2-3 sounds really fucked up and threatening. Maybe you should post some examples of 1) domains you own that sound similar to sponsor sites (and what those sponsor sites' domain names are) and 2) when you bought yours and they bought theirs, then I might think you have a good point. Or maybe that you're another "webmaster" reaming sponsors out for their lack of professionalism while he brags about trying to sabotage other people's businesses and undermine their work.

Milo_NiftyStats · 11-23-2008, 02:55 PM

Hello, my name is Milo and I work for Nifty Stats. We are selling cheap ass advertisement for affiliate programs.

Maybe wrong thread

Varius · 11-23-2008, 04:09 PM

I think a lot more ranting could be added to the affiliate rep section, but aside from that, excellent post.

Tempest · 11-23-2008, 05:25 PM

I'd like to know which sponsors he's caught shaving..

poto · 11-23-2008, 07:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tempest

I'd like to know which sponsors he's caught shaving..

me too...

Bro Media - BANNED FOR LIFE · 11-23-2008, 07:51 PM

First, nice post, I enjoyed it alot. Very well said.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trixie

In the similar domain situation, are you talking about domains that you already owned before you'd even heard of the sponsor's site? Or domains that you registered specifically to try to steal their traffic so you can get sales that would have gone to them already without your "promotion"? Because in the latter case I'd have to say you should be less worried about your "intelligence" being insulted and more worried about having shitty ethics. It sounds pretty much like you're saying, "sponsors! Do you think I'm too stupid to fuck you and leach off of your brand without doing any work myself?"

Seriously, your little 1-2-3 sounds really fucked up and threatening. Maybe you should post some examples of 1) domains you own that sound similar to sponsor sites (and what those sponsor sites' domain names are) and 2) when you bought yours and they bought theirs, then I might think you have a good point. Or maybe that you're another "webmaster" reaming sponsors out for their lack of professionalism while he brags about trying to sabotage other people's businesses and undermine their work.

Second, if you don't want anybody to register a domain similar to yours to promote you, then make sure you spend that extra $10/yr per domain to get any variations of your domain, otherwise it's your fault an affiliate decided to make money from you by sending you sales using a domain similar to yours to promote YOU.

scouser · 11-23-2008, 07:56 PM

affiliate reps in the cpa world (eg, advaliant, cpa empire (who have called me about 5 times and left voicemail, just to say hi when i signed up...)) do a fantastic job. if my sales go down on some (mainstream) affiliate networks, they notice and send an email and see whats up

in the adult biz its pants. even if you are making lots of sales.

11-23-2008, 12:36 PM	#1
PowerCum CjOverkill Industry Role: Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Woldwide Posts: 1,328	Sponsors :: shameless rant This a BIG rant against all sponsors that still have the "You build it and they will come" mindset. It's a big wall of text, but if you run an affiliate program you better read it because I'm not the only person that feels the same. I am the kind of affiliate that tends to offer his sponsors to host their tours on my own servers because I can funnel more than 250k uniques/day to a tour page. If one of your affiliate/sales managers is called Lisa, then FUCKING GIVE HER AN EMAIL ACCOUNT UNDER YOUR DOMAIN AND DONT MAKE HER USE A GMAIL ACCOUNT! (this is completely unrelated to the rest, it's just a sponsor I'm testing and I hate writing mails to anything that is not their domain for biz discussions) Will discuss the following: 1 ) Introduce yourself and your products properly 2 ) Affiliate managers 3 ) Stupid terms and conditions 4 ) White label sites 5 ) Under radar shaving and facts denial Introduce yourself and your products properly Sending a mail with "Hey dude contact me" or saying just "Hi" on ICQ usually gets ignored and sometimes goes to the blacklist if this behavior continues (if you do it again). Please, take the time to introduce yourself properly. A proper introductions would be something like: Hello, my name is XXX and I work for company YYY that runs ZZZ sites. I would like to discuss about how could we do some business together for mutual profit As for introducing your product, be fast, easy to understand and make sure it takes less than 30 seconds to explain what is your product about. Sending me 90 pages pdf brochure or sending me to an URL that has more than 15 lines of text means I will not even bother to look at that crap. "Look at our site www.example.com to see what we have to offer" means that I will probably not even lose my time looking at what you have. You are contacting me to do business, so do your work and sell your business opportunity to me. Something along the lines: Our product XXX is better than the competition (other sponsors) because YYY. I think we could make more money together because our product has ZZZ feature that others don't have. Whatever you or your product takes more than 5 lines to be introduced = failure. If it takes me more than 20 seconds to understand exactly how I could make more money with your program than with my current sponsor you have lost the biz opportunity. Affiliate Managers madness When you hire an affiliate manager or some similar position remember that this person represents your company and whatever he says on boards or ICQ gives the same good or bad business image as if the company leader said it himself. When your affiliate manager jumps into dramma threads like any other board whore there is a very big chance that your program will lose some current and/or future business just because of that. In fact, I assume any person with BIG banner of your program into their sig to be a representative of your program, so take care with whose sigs do you buy. Make sure your affiliate manager can do what he promises. If an affiliate manager promises something and then he is unable to do it, then you have lost my business forever. I have dumped completely $15k per pay period (about $1k per day) sponsors because their affiliate manager posted some idiotic comment that I didn't like or just said something I didn't like. Having someone just spam me on ICQ "We have lots of FHGs and here is the affiliate link <enter NATS code here>" means that I wont even bother to look at your program unless I have requested to be spammed with FHGs. If I am already promoting your program then make sure that the sales/affiliate manager will contact me ONLY if I'm burning your servers with traffic and you want me to stop it. If I need <whatever it is>, I will contact my affiliate manager only once asking about it. If I get no reply then your program is scheduled to be changed at the first opportunity (this means about two days as much). Stupid terms and conditions Unlike other people, I read program terms and conditions... well, my inhouse lawyer does that for me when it comes time to push serious promotion. When you make your program terms and conditions at least make sure you read them after copy/pasting them. My english is not perfect, but reading terms and conditions with blatant grammar and spell errors makes me stop reading and ditching the entire program. Also make sure you don't copy/paste other program terms and conditions, and if you do it, at least replace their program and company name with yours. In the "We don't accept affiliates from XYZ countries" part make sure you don't include all EU countries. If you put my country (Spain), then there is absolutely no way I will signup and promote your program. In the trademark part make sure there is nothing that may offend my intelligence as affiliate. Something like "If your domain name looks like our paysite domain name you must handle it to us and pay us for the damages you have caused to our trademark" means only 3 logic actions on my side: 1 ) I will immediately build a paysite that is the same niche as yours. If you use non exclusive or semi exclusive content I will buy the same content as yours. 2 ) I will try to takeover your keywords on any SE, and trust me, I can do it. 3 ) Wait for you to sue me and then make YOU pay me damages because ALL my domains are trademark registered in Spain before I put whatever money making site on them. In fact I could sue you for the same thing you will try to sue me. If I have some domain that looks like yours the obvious choice is to redirect it to your site and make money with it, but if I see some stupidity like this one in your terms you are doomed. I have had several program owners and affiliate managers contact me and say "We can change the rules for your particular case". That's not ok unless you send me a notary signed hardcopy of the terms with the needed changes. And usually I just don't even bother with all that bureucratic hassle. White label sites If I ask you for a white label site, make sure it's completely turnkey and go under MY domain. subdomain.yourdomain.com IS NOT a white label at all. I want to have a config file with 5 or 6 lines where I have to put my white label site name, white label site domain and as much a description or hook text/slogan. After uploading this file, some simple css and my logo to the server or just configuring it somewhere, and it should be ready for production state after a total of 10 minutes invested on my side. Handling me a FTP login where I see about 150 smarty templates is ok, but if I have to edit them all before going production I will just drop your white label site offering. In fact, I don't want to edit a single smarty file before going production. Under radar shaving and facts denial If I send you big traffic amounts (50k uniques or more par day) don't get tempted to put the shaving filter on. I will notice it. In order to send you such quantity of traffic, my traffic management system is way better than yours and I can determine relatively easy if you are not counting 2% or even less of my traffic. As for shaving sales... I always open at least two accounts per sonsor with different companies and have only one of them send the big traffic hunk while the others send the same traffic but much less, just as control mechanism. If the test accounts sales don't drop but the main account sales drop overnight, then all the traffic will drop overnight too. It takes me 5 minutes to redirect all the traffic that goes to you to another place, even before removing your banners from my ads server. If you see that the traffic has dissapeared don't contact me asking what has happened, you already should know why I stopped promoting you. Some days ago I got a sponsor contacting me with "Why did you stop sending traffic to us?" and I replied "Why did you stop counting my sales properly?"... Their reply was "Sorry, that should have not happened" --> WTF??? Most sponsors will deny shaving, but the truth is that when they see big traffic accounts or big sales numbers into a single account they tend to shave a small percentage thinking it will slip unnoticed under the radar. I don't fucking care if you shave all your other affiliates, but if you try to shave me, you are fighting an already lost battle... so better don't even try. Rant over __________________ CjOverkill Traffic Trading Script Free, secure and fast traffic trading script. Get your copy now

11-23-2008, 12:54 PM	#2
NaughtyRob Two fresh affiliate progs Industry Role: Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Inside teen pussy Posts: 29,602	Interesting thread for sure. Very good points indeed. I would love for you to try our sites. I am the owner and board rep and I don't make idiotic drama thread posts. [email protected] ICQ: 303-738-440 If you would like PPS hit me up, we are currently 60% revshare. __________________ [email protected] Skype: 17026955414 Vacares Web Hosting - Protect Your Ass with Included Daily Backups

11-23-2008, 01:05 PM	#4
andy83 Confirmed User Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 1,605	one word.. wow.. i read thru all that in one sitting.. Gr8 points, and some of these points, smaller affiliates would never even dare to think about. True but sad. __________________ Available Skimmed Traffic Available Ad Spots BUY NICHE BANNER CLICKS OR IMPRESSIONS, SELL YOUR SPOTS FOR A FLAT RATE, SELL YOUR AD SPOTS WITH PROTRAFFIC.COM

11-23-2008, 01:13 PM	#6
LiveDose Show Yer Tits! Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Somewhere Out there... Posts: 25,792	Very nice post. __________________ Scammer Alert: acer19 acer [email protected] [email protected] Money stolen using PayPal

11-23-2008, 01:16 PM	#7
seeandsee Check SIG! Industry Role: Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Europe (Skype: gojkoas) Posts: 50,945	shave part was the best __________________ BUY MY SIG - 50$/Year Contact here

11-23-2008, 01:04 PM	#3
Machete_ WINNING! Industry Role: Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 14,579	I wish a lot of reps would read that, and take note

11-23-2008, 01:11 PM	#5
AnalProbe pain in the Ass Industry Role: Join Date: Jan 2004 Posts: 3,727	Same here... I do not promote any program that shaves or has bad rep in any possible way. You do your homework, and so do I.

11-23-2008, 01:27 PM	#8
AnniKN Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: South of the border Posts: 1,682	These points are fantastic, we are planning to launch an affiliate program and will take all of this into account. __________________ StraponCash \| HDPays Need affordable Photo Retouching, Video Editing, Design, Coding, Writing or Data Entry? 435-155-252

11-23-2008, 02:17 PM	#9
kmanrox aka K-Man Industry Role: Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: The Gutter Posts: 29,292	so if you were making 1k per day with a sponsor, and you saw something an affiliate mgr posted that you didnt like, you'd drop the sponsor? that sounds a bit silly to me. __________________ Crypto HODLr Crypto mining Angel investor

11-23-2008, 02:38 PM	#10
Trixie Confirmed User Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: near Seattle, WA Posts: 1,850	In the similar domain situation, are you talking about domains that you already owned before you'd even heard of the sponsor's site? Or domains that you registered specifically to try to steal their traffic so you can get sales that would have gone to them already without your "promotion"? Because in the latter case I'd have to say you should be less worried about your "intelligence" being insulted and more worried about having shitty ethics. It sounds pretty much like you're saying, "sponsors! Do you think I'm too stupid to fuck you and leach off of your brand without doing any work myself?" Seriously, your little 1-2-3 sounds really fucked up and threatening. Maybe you should post some examples of 1) domains you own that sound similar to sponsor sites (and what those sponsor sites' domain names are) and 2) when you bought yours and they bought theirs, then I might think you have a good point. Or maybe that you're another "webmaster" reaming sponsors out for their lack of professionalism while he brags about trying to sabotage other people's businesses and undermine their work. __________________ WebWhoreBucks: Girls, a guy and a tranny -- unique indie porn!

11-23-2008, 02:55 PM	#11
Milo_NiftyStats Confirmed User Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 181	Hello, my name is Milo and I work for Nifty Stats. We are selling cheap ass advertisement for affiliate programs. Maybe wrong thread __________________ PROMOTE YOUR AFFILIATE PROGRAM WITH NIFTY STATS. PACKAGES FROM $119/MONTH! HIT ME UP ON ICQ: 491000600 GET NIFTY STATS FOR FREE! CLICK HERE!

11-23-2008, 04:09 PM	#12
Varius Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: New York, NY Posts: 6,890	I think a lot more ranting could be added to the affiliate rep section, but aside from that, excellent post. __________________ Skype variuscr - Email varius AT gmail

11-23-2008, 05:25 PM	#13
Tempest Too lazy to set a custom title Industry Role: Join Date: May 2004 Location: West Coast, Canada. Posts: 10,217	I'd like to know which sponsors he's caught shaving..

11-23-2008, 07:56 PM	#16
scouser marketer. Industry Role: Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: bcn Posts: 2,280	affiliate reps in the cpa world (eg, advaliant, cpa empire (who have called me about 5 times and left voicemail, just to say hi when i signed up...)) do a fantastic job. if my sales go down on some (mainstream) affiliate networks, they notice and send an email and see whats up in the adult biz its pants. even if you are making lots of sales.