Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

I posted this info several months ago in a thread on WickedFire, but I forgot to post it on my blog.  In case you missed it before, here are a few tips that have really helped me over the last year to grow and manage my business.  As affiliates, we often times only look at campaigns and offers, but there are many more aspects that we need to be involved in when we view our affiliate businesses as traditional businesses.

• Get a CPA, don’t be cheap. You get what you pay for and a good one will pay for it’s self very quickly.
• Stop using a debit card immediately. Get a good credit card, I use the Amex Plum that has 2% cash back. After a little history with them you can usually charge about 200-300k before they make you pay it down. This gives me a lot of float and protection you don’t get with a debit card. When you start doing bigger numbers, the cash back with this card can be more than enough to live off of each month.
• I have tried to stop using a regular checking account and move to brokerage account for all my banking. I use Schwab, but others are good too. I do all my banking straight out of my tax free municipal bonds sweep account. I earn interest on my savings not to mention since i am doing all my checking from this, I earn money off my weekly wires until it is time to pay off the credit card. Many credit cards end up having a float period of 35-60 days. That can be a lot of tax free interest money
• Stop paying wire fees at your bank. Schwab has no wires and most banks don’t either if you keep enough cash in the bank. Bank of America doesn’t charge wire fees on their preferred business checking with only requires a avg monthly balance of 25k. Wire fees can add up, stop paying for them.
• Negotiate your media buys. Almost any rate can be negotiated. I’ve gotten as much as 50% rates by prepaying or signing a larger IO. Say you’ll do 100k if they give you break. Get a 48hr out clause, if the traffic sucks, bail. If it doesn’t, you got a cheap rate.
• Ask Google for credits. I can usually get refunds of $500/m by submitting click fraud info too Google and they will almost always credit me. They do click adjustments, but it doesn’t always catch everything. Audit your traffic and email their quality people if you find lots hits from multiple ip’s or a small block of IPs
• Find short terms investment options. There are some short term bonds, cd’s, etc… that you can put cash in before you need to pay your credit card. Lets say you have a card that the billing cycle is 30 days and they give you 30 days to pay, that’s a 60 day float. You could invest some or most of your advertising costs into a short term CD before you need to pay off your credit card.
• Don’t try and be a baller, save your money. Bank hard now, save, and then live the rest of your life off the interest your savings earns. This means that you should try and live below your means.  It’s ok to reward yourself, just don’t do it all the time and don’t do it when you can’t afford to.

Just a few things that might help you save or make more with the money you have.  Anyone else have other tips that have helped them?

If you’ve been in the affiliate industry in the last year or more, you know about the Tracking202 team.  Whether you are using their tracking202 platform, the self-hosted prosper202 (like I am), or even their various world proxies, almost everyone in the affiliate game is using one of their services.

In the last couple of days they announced the newest addition to their line of services, the Revolution202 Affiliate Network.  While I generally think that the last thing the Affiliate Industry needs is a new network, they actually managed to create a new network that brings offers and services that other networks don’t have.  Stephen Truong, one of the co-founders was nice enough to chat with me yesterday on the phone about their new network and to approve my application.  After talking with him for a bit, these are a few major highlights and services that will be offered with Revolution202:

• They will not be brokering out their offers and taking brokered offers
• Will have both CPA and CPS offers available
• Free coupons to Google, Myspace, Facebook etc for their affiliates
• Instant qualification for Yahoo Gold
• Custom transparent back end that will allow affiliates to see their lead quality, charge backs, cancellations, etc. on the offers that they are running
• They will also be offering their paid services like tracking202 Pro and the future full release of Stats202 for free to their affiliates who push volume
• Not to mention a few extras I can’t talk about yet

Like I said, I’ve already signed up with Revolution202, and you should too.  There are definitely some big things coming their way.  Not to mention, if it wasn’t for their services like Prosper202, there is no way I would have been successful as I have been with my campaign.  I think most anyone who uses it could agree as well.