For a couple of years now, American Express has served as my loyal business partner and up until now I’ve never said anything but good stuff about them; But that’s changed now.

After Mastercard and Visa, American Express is the biggest Credit Card issuer in the world. Taking on a smaller issuer as a partner has proven to provide me with a little extra flexibility. As a company I spend over $450.000 USD per month on numerous of ventures. Seeing my uncommon situation, I’ve had nothing but respect for AMEX for taking such a professional and supportive attitude. I told my business partners, I told my friends and a few of my friends ordered an American Express card because of that.

Now all of a sudden, without zero communication their Financial department blocked my cards for over-exposure. At least that was their initial analysis. This heavenly fairytale has been going on for over a week now, and it’s going from authentication problems to talk about bank statements.

I’m not as cocky that I expect a red carpet for every service, but I do expect a company to take care of it’s big clients. Definitely considering that this is for corporate use and you are actually influencing revenue margins and therefor profit numbers.

It looks like the worst is behind us now, but it will definitely be a wile before you’ll hear some recommendations from me again..

Losing money is never fun, it just sucks.. But in this industry you always have to invest to see if you can make money on some items or not.

Being one of the bigger affiliate I only go for the big money, since one big cash cow is easier to manage then 20 smaller ones. Per performance marketing basically means that the responsibly lies with the affiliate to make money, which is a good concept compared to flat rate marketing. But it doesn’t always mean YOU make money and sometimes this doesn’t even have to be your fault. Which can make it even worse if you don’t have any grib on the situation.

Let’s say your clients conversion is starting to drop. What can you do about that ? Nothing..

Don’t forget, you client is still monetizing your traffic, as he is always paying you less then he makes on the lead or sale. So who ends up with the loss? That’s right.. You.

I’ve found some clients generous enough to reimburse you for lost sales, but a lot of them don’t do that. I guess what I’m trying to say that after you have lost a month worth of profits and sales still don’t pick up. You need to draw the line, screw traffic numbers or sales amounts. Just monetize everything again and make sure that you start earning some money again and not your client alone..

Recently I started calculation ROI on one of my sites, I send Adwords traffic to. Along the way I discovered that the ROI on the keywords were far from logical.

For some keywords, phrase match generated a lot of profitable sales, where on another keyword broadmatch or exactmatch would determine everything. I guess, this learned me that you never know before hand what is going to convert and what is not. Just throw in all the keywords you can think of and fine tune along the way. You might be surprised with the outcome of your new campaign.

Since I cannot attach an adwords tracking code, to the billing page yet I cannot view the ROI inside of adwords and I have to calculate everything manually, which is time consuming ! If somebody knows of a way to automatically calculate ROI without having to fill everything into Excel manually, I would greatly appreciate it

Next Monday, the 6th of November I’m going to Los Angeles  for the yearly Westcoast WMA, to discuss business with some of my clients, to network a little bit and ofcourse to have a lot of fun !

I’ve started taking my B vitamins, because we have a parties scheduled every night  For the day-time sight seeing I have rented a Audi A6 quatro to help me show myself around.

Because I hate check-in stuff and airport delays, I’ve decided to take a privium subscription at Schiphol Airport. Privium is a business service that allows passenger to use valet parking, business class check-in, customs control by iris scan, privium lounge access and some other extra’s. This afternoon I had an appointment at the privium service desk to have my iris photographed. Everything went so fast, but I was really amazed by how far our technology takes us.  Because of my ICT background, I know some of the stuff is out there but I had no idea of how far along we really are. So after checking in Monday, I should be able to pass customs within 20 second’s. We’ll see

Little side note; the system is only available on Schiphol, but I hope they’ll make it compatible with overseas systems soon. That way I can finally loose important documents without having to worry about it

I believe in doing what you do best and outsourcing the rest.

Last week I launched two brand new sites for a niche market segment. I know my way around in Photoshop so I did most of the basic design work myself. In my own way, and I need everything done perfectly.. so I asked a designer to build me a beautiful, smooth and creative header for those pages.

In addition, I like to provide my websites with hand written unique content. Not the shady shit all the copycat, num minded losers take from other websites and make their own. No.. I am talking from-scratch, exclusive content.

I am no writer, hell.. if we’d take my blog and put it through a spell checker I’d swear the thing would beep 24/7. So who’d be better to provide my pages with content then a professional copywriter? My pages are already up and running, complete spelling mistake free and professionally written.

Plus, all this managing and organizing really makes me feel like that year of International Business and Management Studies (IBMS) wasn’t a complete waste of time

Since the beginning of this year a lot of affiliate networks are trying to motivate affiliates with expensive incentives. On a few colleague blogs I’ve already read about new phones, beer coolers, 50” Plasma Screens etc, a brand new Xbox, PSP’s etc.

This month, AdultFriendFinder is taking it to the top by giving away a Ferrari to their top growth affiliate. Nope, this does not mean the biggest affiliate but the affiliate who makes the biggest jump in earnings. Even though I think this is an awesome way to get affiliates to send more joins I would rather have milestones for a higher payout.

Let’s say that I would get $30 USD for every join. How about they give me $40 per join if I sent over 50 joins a day. If I do this for 2 long years, I’m able to buy my own Ferrari. This way you keep the affiliate motivated for 2 years, give him or her something to work towards to and you can do this for multiple affiliate, so that not only one affiliate ends up with the Ferrari, but eventually a lot, lot more…

The problem of being self-employed is that you can never really get away from the office. About ten days ago, when I was on the beach in Argelès I got a call from one of my merchants, telling me I had to remove my listing from their branding keyword. The site I was advertising for, is a comparison site holding four of the major players in that industry.

I told them I can do two things:
- I can either leave it like this, and keep giving you guys traffic or;
- I can make a separated landing page, where you guys are NOT listed on, only the three other merchants.

My affiliate manager for that particular program had to even think about this. I don’t get why merchants are so obsessed with their own keywords. They can’t really forbid affiliates for other programs to go on their keywords so if your site is still listed on that landing page, and the creative is not competing with your ad listing; just take the traffic

Some people can really make life too complicated

The problem with the Internet is that everybody with a little common sense can just steal your ideas and “litterally” make it his own. It has happened to my friends, business partners and yes… even to me.

Now with Googles latest update regarding their landing page quality bot, I was affected by people who have stolen the entire concept of my site. I have counted the number of copies of that particular site and my site was copied 4 times, even my text and thumbnailed pictures were used. Even though one competitor had the curtisy of changing a few words and his affiliate codes ofcourse

For the last two weaks I have worked my ass off to come up with new content that does not challenge content from my friends, but I am pretty sure my content will only remain “a virgin” for so long. Copycats and other fucked up people will get a hold of my site and copy my ideas into their own. Only this time, they need to be prepared to face the consequences…

Imagine a Sauna…
Imagine your Office…
Imagine your office in a Sauna…

Right…

My current office is located on the attic of my house, right below a slanting roof in a good sequester house. You can imagine that his is a sauna waiting to be born. And I’m not even in California

Yesterday I decided enough is enough and I went to a local electronic mega store to buy myself a mobile air-conditioning unit. Because my car couldn’t carry the unit in an upwards position it had to lay down and when I got home I still had to wait 7 hours before I could use it. Impatient bastard that I am, I couldn’t wait longer then 5 hours before using it. Luckily the environment killing CFK’s were already lowered into the device, because my office was getting noticeably colder.

Today I have had the most productive day in weeks I have finally been able to work for 8 hours straight again. Little downside though; I’m not able to work in my boxers anymore

After I quit my first year of University it was a while before I had really studied again. To be honest, I never studied again So you can imagine that I got off to a slow start while preparing for my Adwords exam. The exam consisted out of 104 questions about internet advertising in general, ROI and the adwords program. You had to score 75% but I nailed it with 82,7%

Conclusion: I am now officially qualified to use adwords and manage client accounts. And besides that, it’s always nice to have Google liking you