Ask The Experts - Roundtable ASW08 Final Day
Posted on February 28th, 2008 by SOBMyself, Ian, and Joe walked into the conference and got our seats close to the stage, not realizing the concept of this “roundtable”. Anyways, what it was was this. A whole bunch of “roundtables” with an expert in any particular field sitting on it - be it seo, affiliate marketing, payment experts, affiliate managers etc. We just happened to sit on a table which comprised of just the 3 of us, and not expert. Anyways, Jim Kukral got on stage and introduced each of the experts on various tables, and most of them had other participants on it. However, the one next to us had Alex Rampall, CEO of Trialpay.com, with no one sitting by him. Jim asked if anyone would like to join Alex, and since I didn’t have any expert on my table, I decided to join in. Good call on that.
Alex began explaining what trial pay was. Judging by the name, I was assuming it to be just another Paypal wannabe, but I was wrong. Trial pay, according to Alex, is a medium through which merchants can cross promote products. For instance, during Valentines Day, download.com ran a promotion of free downloads for a bunch software from Lavasoft, mIRC, Kapersky Anti Virus etc. that ranged from $20 and up. The way they did it was like this. They offered the software for free, but you had to sign up with one of their partners, like Blockbuster, McAfee, PCTools, eBay, FTD Florist etc. to get the free software. Most people do not want to pay for a software, but since it is Valentines day, and they may be sending flowers, they could use FTD for flowers and get a free software.
What TrialPay does is acts as an intermediary between download.com and other companies. So if a user signs up with Blockbuster.com for instance, Trialpay gets the affiliate commission for it, takes its cut and passes the rest on to download.com - pretty sweet huh?
Since this was a very informal affair, and we were allowed to switch tables, I then sat at John Hasson’s table, who was talking about affiliate marketing. John, I have to tell you. He really does not hold anything back. He will tell you all the dirty secrets, tricks, tips, dos and donts. He is truly an extremely genuine guy, and a shrewd affiliate marketer. I also have a video of John at this table, I will post it later.
I will just bullet point John’s tips, since most of it is self explanatory:
- If you are running financial offers, turn them off at nights and weekends. How many people are really going to be looking for a loan on a weekend?
- Use multiple ppc engines, and not just the top 3 - ie. MSN, Yahoo, Adwords. There are plenty of them. Run a search on Google for PPC Engines that work.
- Try Business.com ppc
- Try Amazon.com ppc
February 28th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
I kept meaning to hit other tables, but John kept dishing the goods, so I stuck around. It looks like one of the ASW crew snapped a photo of that table with us: http://www.flickr.com/photos/affsum/2296533892/
Joe Tech’s last blog post..Affiliate Summit - Day Two : ARC, Moniker, and More
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February 28th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Joe,
thanks for that image headsup, I have it up. I never finished explaining to you about trialpay, but I guess you can read it here now.
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February 28th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Hi, thanks for the mention. One thing I would like to clarify about turning them off during the weekends and evenings… It Really Depends on what kind of finance offer.
A Pay Day loan would probably do well at 2am.
But a Business Loan probably won’t.
Test it and track your conversion per hour. You will see a patter, and adjust your bids accordingly.
John’s last blog post..Commission Junctions EPC Demystified?
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February 28th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Oh yeah, my wife thinks your blog looks better then mine
John’s last blog post..Commission Junctions EPC Demystified?
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