That Whole Elite Clicks Media (ECM) Thing

In true Mike Chiasson fashion I am going to be the jackass that talks about a topic that I know absolutely nothing about. In recent chats with others though its come up a few times so I thought I might share my view on it.

A few weeks back there was a lot of talk on various industry forums about missing payments from the guys over at Elite Clicks Media or ECM as most call them. ECM is a CPA network in the affiliate industry that I really don’t have much experience with myself, but I did sign up with them a while back just to go peak at some offers. My experience with them consisted of working with a guy by the name of Lance Partin who gave me a requested paybump on an offer I was going to split test on them and then he went missing, which I assume means he got the boot (which sucks since he was more helpful than any other AM I had on any other network at the time).

All the same no one likes to hear stories like this on Wickedfire http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/114074-ecm-tanks.html . The thread basically has people mentioning that they haven’t got any payments from ECM and wondering if they are the first network to fail of 2011. Chances are they wouldn’t be the first, just the first ‘bigger’ named one.

Or this http://www.warriorforum.com/ad-networks-cpa-cpm-cpl-millionaire-makers/340842-what-happen-elite-clicks-media-all-accounts-frozen.html

Talk on some other private forums where people were asking if others were getting their money had similar trends.

[Needless to say the only recent threads you could find were bad ones...anyone have good ones I could link to?]

Now I don’t have a clue wtf happened but let me share what view I have here. I also welcome anyone to come school me on the real deal. Perhaps we can get some informed discussions going on here. They actually had a good rating on Affiliate Paying [link here] but as you can see there have now been reviews saying that people aren’t getting paid…

What I’ve Seen/Experienced

• Long time ago I sign up for ECM. Never really do anything with them.
• I receive emails once in a while letting me know their top offer. If I could categorize them in one word I would say ‘e-cig’ because all I really remember is them pushing these hard every week on their emails.
• All of a sudden I started getting emails from this guy ‘Greg Davis’ who works over at ECM.
• I start getting emails about webinars and upcoming product launches from Greg Davis.
• I start to think its shady that a network lets one of their AMs or Associates start emailing their lists about their guru crap.
• I get emails from Greg….aka ‘Mr. 50k a day’ about Rock Star Alliance and how amazing it is. He sends out some absolutely crazy video promo that everyone was just LOLing at. In the promo he pitches a training product that he was going to sell for some absurd amount. I really didn’t watch long enough to hear but some people said it was like $50k…
• All of a sudden people start claiming ECM didn’t pay them and didn’t answer phone calls.
• People start claiming about receiving messages from ‘Mr. $50k a day’ saying that ECM is shut down and they should sign up with his new network the Rock Star Alliance Media.
• Others start claiming that ECM reps told them that some associate changed all their passwords and this totally just screwed their cash flow.
• Yet more people were claiming the network was ran like crap and doomed already.
  

  Greg pointing to his ECM jacket in his promo video.

Obviously I believe every single thing on the internet so this all makes perfect sense to me. Do I believe that Greg Davis cranks out e-cig rebills like no tomorrow? Definitely. Do I think its shady that he is pushing his own network to ECM pubs? Definitely. Then the other day I got an email from ECM saying they received some $6 Million dollars in investor cash to square their situation up and everyone was going to get paid.

As a nosey asshole I find a few faults in this whole thing.

1. I think its hilarious how so many people used to stand up for ECM then with one arguably abnormal cycle all their friends were silent. Just proves that no matter who you are, don’t mess with people’s cash flows.
2. I really want to know WTF happened. I would rather have the owners let people know if someone from Rock Star Alliance were the ones responsible behind screwing everyone, rather than let people think its one company messing up and join the other one who is really the culprit of the problem.
3. It literally looks like no damage control has been done on this. Besides an email acknowledging some ‘ghost’ of a problem and the empty promise it won’t happen again. Really?
4. I seen the ECM guys rolling around at ASE 2010. Those guys looked like some rough mother fuckers. I mean they had ECM baseball jerseys. But not like the ‘home team’ white ones. These were grey, ‘Away’ jerseys! I definitely wouldn’t fuck with those guys for fear that they might get real on me. Shit, I toned this post down to be more of a rumor collaboration than anything else for fear of an ass whooping at ASE11!

As an internet hundredaire I am a very concerned affiliate. One missing $200 check could crush my banks! We can’t be having this sort of thing going down in the industry without it being addressed. So what else has everyone heard?

Simple Idea Made This Guy $91,478.04…. I’ll Show You How

As many of my close contacts in the industry know, I have a day job working at manufacturing facility. Our primary product is custom plastic injection molded parts. Today I want to tell you a story about someone who had a good idea and I’m going to run through the numbers so you know how much you would need to invest to potentially bank like these guys!

A few months back I was cruising Slashdot and saw a link to a new product that was being funded through the growing popular sigh KickStarter.com. The site KickStarter is intended to help people pitch an idea and let people commit money to fund that idea. You have options for various ‘bribes’ if you will for funding. I’ve seen them range from “Donate $5 to know you are helping  an awesome guy” to “Donate $2,500 and I will fly out, hand deliver this, and take your mom on a date”. I’m sure you get the idea.

The Product

The product being promoted was called ‘The Glif’ and its a tripod mount adapter for the iPhone 4. The idea being that the iPhone 4 is capable of recording HD video and pictures but its kind of awkward to take such pics with a shaking hand. In addition the little mount also lets you stand the phone up for facetime chatting or just casual movie watching. Essentially freeing up your hands.

The Funding

So the owners turned to KickStarter and they actually had some pretty good marketing on the videos they did. They ended up offering 4 options to fund the product.

You can see they offered a $5 donation that didn’t get too much attention. Next$20 which got them like $93k in funds. $50 which got them another $26k. Lastly $250 picked up another $6k.

Naturally everyone is looking at the numbers. A combined $137,417 total dollars from 5,273 backers! INCREDIBLE! Of course all of you player haters are thinking “But Mike they probably had to spend $125,000 on manufacturing that!!”. Well my friends that is where you are wrong. Let me educate you a bit on how CHEAP they could actually full fill these orders.

The Manufacturing Process

As an update to their ‘backers’ the owners released a couple more videos on VIMEO. You can see the manufacturing process below. Once again a very nicely edited video.

Making the Glif from Glif on Vimeo.

Now as impressive as this all looks it tells someone in ‘the know’ a few things. One, the company they chose to manufacture this product has some really crappy equipment. Those of us in the Injection Molding field LOL at those machines. The product they molded is inferior to what it could have been with some design changes. There are noticeable sink marks in the product that could have been seen by an experienced plastics engineer and the fit tolerance I’m sure could have been better.

From the video you can see they are working with an aluminum mold and a cheap hung base. Rightfully so they went with a very cost effective 2 cavity mold that won’t last forever but could probably crank out a few hundred thousand of these.

The price of that mold from a competitive American mold making company would cost in the range of $5k-$8k. The engineering design might’ve been another $1k-$2k but most shops would’ve included it. For this blog post we will consider it separate. Knowing the rough cycle time (length it takes to make product, eject it, and begin next process) and the rough volume of the part I can tell you that this product would’ve been manufactured in most shops for around the price of $0.30-$0.40 per piece. That price includes the machine time and material cost as well as setup times. I don’t know the price of the helicoil off the top of my head but I will play it safe and say those are $0.25 each (I’m willing to bet I’m way higher than they actually are though). They had to ship them in a small envelope so I will say those envelopes are $0.35 each with a $0.42 stamp. In addition there were some secondary assemblies such as installing the helicoil threads (many manufacturers have machines that do this for you in the example of the video they do this as well).

Depending on how automated the machine is you would probably need a fulltime operator on that molding machine. This could increase the cost of your product per the cycle. Seeing that they needed 2,636.5 cycles to fulfill this order, and an estimated cycle time of 30 seconds. That would take right about 21 hours of machine time. The machine probably cost about $25 per hour to use (sometimes more on a low volume run like this), mind you that cost is built into my estimated piece price. Adding an operator on to that would’ve probably cost an additional rate of like $15-$20 per hour. We’ll go in between and say $17 x 21 hours = $357 for an operator to install those helicoils. The owners seem to have opted for a manual install as in their second video on Vimeo. This bypasses this cost but increased their time needed.

Lets run the numbers.

5,273 (total backers) – 40 (the $5 donations) = 5,233 total glifs needed to satisfy the first order.

5,233 x $0.35 = $1,831.55 cost to make the plastic parts.

5,233 x $0.25 = $1,308.35 cost for helicoils.

5,233 x $0.77 = $4,029.41 S&H costs.

$1,831.55 + $1,308.35 + $4,029.41 + $8,000 (mold cost) + $2,000 (engineering design) = $17,169.31 !!

17,169.31 / 5,233 = $3.28 price for each Glif!

*Remember this price includes tooling costs so the more you make the lower that price gets as the $10k tooling costs get absorbed more and more!

Costs vs Backers

So off every $20 backer they made $16.72! This makes their total gross off the $20 backers to be a total of $77,831.60! $78 THOUSAND DOLLARS from people who wanted to put their iPhone on a camera tripod!

How about the $50 backers? In addition to getting the $3.28  Glif, they also receive a 3D Printed one. We call these Rapid Prototypes and although most companies charge you an arm and a leg for them, they realistically cost about $10-$15 in material per each one. So an order like 527 glifs probably got them a rate of about $20-$30 per from the shop. I would imagine though that these guys bought their own 3D printer, these can range from $30k-$300k depending on what you need it. But a $45k one would’ve handled this job very easily. For arguments sake we will assume they just bought the finished product at $25 each. Bringing their total revenue off each $50 backer to $21.72, $21.72 x 527 = $11,446.44 NET!

The $5 backers were only $200 of all profit and its really tough to tell about the $250. However chances are if someone is donating $250 you want to meet with them or they really want to meet with you. We will just go out on a guess and say they pocketed a net of $2k from those 25 backers.

TOTAL NET PROFIT

Off this simple idea these guys netted $91,478.04

What’s Next?

Needless to say they can market this to Best Buy, direct sales, AT&T stores, etc. They have a HUGE potential for more sales of this product. More sales like I said earlier WILL reduce the costs per piece and they could potentially invest in a larger mold to lower the costs per cycle even more.

How Could I Do Something Like This?

Well you basically need 2 things.

1. A pretty good fucking idea.
2. A manufacturing partner.

Now I can’t help you all too much with the idea. But if you are a smart guy, would know how to market your product, I sure as hell could put you in touch with the right guys to help you actually make it. If you got an idea for a product email me, mc [@] mikechiasson dot com .

The biggest upfront cost of something like this is the Mold and Engineering costs. If I think your idea is good though, I could easily roll those all into a per piece cost so you could leverage it out a bit overtime. The world is yours. What do you got?

Disclaimer

I’m not a salesman for my company and I receive no compensation for any sales. I do however believe that we make the best products out there and are very affordable costs and recommend us to anyone looking for production work. In addition I do have a stake in the company as it is publicly traded. I did reach out to the company above to see if we could work with them when I saw the product. They responded with some requests that I forwarded on to my sales guy, but I don’t think they ever got back to him. All the same, I do love the product, and think the creators are brilliant…and $100k richer.

Radio Advertising and Plugs, Useless Web Traffic?

Recently I’ve reached out to a few different radio stations around the Boston area. Not so much to necessarily start advertising with them, but just kind of browse the shelf space a bit and see what was out there. What I found was that radio stations THINK they are gold…when in reality t seems far from it.

Here is an example from a radio station out of Worcester, MA (second largest metro area in Massachusetts). The radio station is 104.5 WXLO which plays soft rock/pop/top hits through out the day. Their lineup is similar to most stations, consisting of a morning show in the early AM period followed by smaller venue jockies that begin playing more music through out the day. Ultimately ending up with an auto broadcast at night that plays various commercials and recordings.

I first came across the idea of reaching out to WXLO after seeing a member discount available to me by being a member of the local chamber of commerce. I figured I should atleast see if I could throw a small buy up and judge the traffic but was completely shocked when I saw their prices. They apparently value their ad space a lot more than a direct response advertiser!

They got back to me with the following stats:

• WXLO.com has an average range of 15K – 17K unique visitors each month.
• Page views average per month range between 94K & 110K.

They offered several advertising boxes, all requiring an annual agreement to receive my ‘discount’.  Looking at their top level offering, their leaderboard banner at the top of every page, 728px x 90px I found some heavy pricing that put an immediate kill on my idea of a cheap buy. They were charging $5,000 discounted price for a year ($6k without discount) for this spot and you are in rotation with all other offers. I counted 8 other banners on display there currently. This would mean…according to their stats I would only be getting 12,750 monthly impressions on my banner for $416 a month. THAT EQUALS A $32 CPM! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?

Needless to say I passed on the opportunity, they refused to offer me a CPC model or share their click through rates. Furthermore they began trying to tell me the only way that users would click through would be if I offered some sort of ‘contest’ to entice them with lol. Their current advertisers were local car dealers and a few other people who traditionally don’t have a clue about advertising and just blow money. Chances are they are getting the banner ads as a residual benefit on some large advertising budget.

Something that really got me interested though was their advertising agent pitched to me telling how their audience is so interactive with them and the quality is way better than other advertising venues. I didn’t believe this line, but this idea stuck in my head. If only there was some way to verify this.

Then this past Thursday my prayers were answered!

KISS 108 Radio Plug

I was flipping through the radio on Thursday, December 23rd and came across another local station, Kiss 108 (107.8 FM). They are almost identical to WXLO but based out of Boston and has a much larger market share. Their website was a lot friendlier to advertisers offering the below preview:

*These stats might be for their national company…it doesn’t specify.

These guys are claiming that they have 1.35 million weekly listeners! Every radio station knows the biggest chunk of these in the morning. Their specific morning show has been on the air for several years, won all kinds of awards, etc. So this works out perfectly for my example here.

So that morning it happened to be one of their radio host’s birthdays. A woman brought in some amazing birthday cake from her custom cake shop. They talked about the cake for 5+ minutes on air and posted a quick blog post on their website with pictures and links (you can listen to the audio here if you want, or see the post here).

This was during their prime time session and all the woman wanted was people to go ‘like’ her on Facebook! Furthermore she made the statement ‘…Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/cakesbyerin where we currently have 5,883 fans!’ Excellent, she just told me the base for this experiment. I closely monitored her Facebook page all weekend long and as of right now 5,927 likes!

From her plug on the radio she received an additional 44 likes !

Obviously this woman got some exposure for a cake she spent a good amount of time making for the radio show, but when your only results are 44 likes…that just sucks. As always you could make the claim that she earned some brand advertising credibility, but with her temporary goal to only get people to like her page, she received just 44 likes out of what, 200,000+ listeners?

Radio What?

So where does that leave us direct response advertisers and affiliate marketers? We have two clear cut examples here where the radio advertising methods just won’t for one us. In one situation the CPM for a paid advertisement looks ridiculously expensive when you are going against the blind juggarnauts that are the car dealers. In the second example, the radio plug, the offline world of SEO, proved less than effective at driving results.

Radio looks dead to me from these examples. Has anyone seen any actual good radio advertising opportunities?

My Halloween Facebook Fan Page Experiment

This is a follow up post to my guest post over at Ian Fernando’s blog, check that post out here. I wrote this post for people looking for more information after reading that guest post, so you pretty much have to read the entire story over on Ian’s page if you hope for this to make sense.

This past Halloween I really wanted to try and push some of the holiday offers that might be a really catchy niche during that season. I had mixed results but what I learned definitely was helpful, and I think I could leverage it to future campaigns as well as more Facebook pages.

As I said in my guest post, I was promoting the offer Zombie Yourself Toolbar on EWA. The offer paid $2.70 on a toolbar install. After the user installed the toolbar (I think the Bing toolbar) they also had to signup for a mobile offer to get to see their images. Yeah it was one of those bait and switch offers, meh oh well. You can see the offer here.

So lets start off with how I was going to promote the page. Well I was really hoping to leverage two main sources here. 1 being Facebook Ads, and 2 paying some people on Fiverr.com to spread the word. I am pretty familiar with FB ads and run some small campaigns on there but I hadn’t really used Fiverr yet.

Fiverr

Fiverr was an absolute bust to promote a FB page. I only tried one person who had like 15 good reviews. She (who knows if it was actually a girl) said they would invite their 5,000 friends to like your page and guaranteed atleast 50 likes. Now she guarantees 50 likes but I figured I would see a TON more since my page, unlike other ones I saw her promote, was actually setup to make people share it and like it, etc. After 6 days I think I had like 6 new likes to the pages. The people who liked it seemed like absolute bots as well. They had a handful of friends or maybe like 1,000 friends…that were probably all bots.

The girl PMd me and said she couldn’t figure out why no one was liking the page and would continue to resend the invites but requested I leave her good feedback and she swore she would keep sending invites out. This had bullshit written all over it and I simply told them I wasn’t going to request a refund for $5 but I was totally outing them on the site. All the reviews were positive but I really envisioned that was really happened is this person was someone in some 3rd world country who has a ton of fake accounts linked to their own. They like your page, mind you the like is absolutely useless to you, and then try and get away without completing the job and still get good feedback because they are impersonating a girl who is trying to help you out.

So that was $5 down the drain. I really didn’t expect much but what was more disturbing was that as an FB page owner you don’t have enough metrics available to see to fully confirm that all the accounts are ghost accounts. Unless you manually went and friended them all to see all their private details, etc. I highly doubt I will ever even try Fiverr for anything like that again and I laugh my ass off when I see all the gurus trying to pitch it as their secret outsourcing weapon.

FB Ads

Facebook Ads was where I really expected to pick up volume. As it turns out, I could pick up some serious ‘likes’ from here but as with most Facebook tragedies they had other plans in mind. As many of you know Mr. Green got screwed by FB when they shut down the FB Ads Manager (see post here). I LOVED that app, and I really haven’t done much advertising on FB since because their manual upload is tedious as hell and I am a really lazy guy. Anyways, I grinded out these ads one night, like 200 of em to split test. They rejected all but 3!!! Keep in mind that I used the same ad copy and image for about 40 different interests/demographics. I resubmitted about 3x and got denied every time and basically had to role with the punches.

The ONLY ads that got accepted was a small sample of ones that were created from the actual Fan Page. In other words they were probably some of the worst ads I’ve ever actually paid for on Facebook. It used the page’s title, which was too long so they truncated it, making it pretty much meaningless. They also used the default page image, this could’ve been better but wasn’t horrible, and the default description as the ad copy.

Of the 3 ads that got accepted, only one of them was female based. Although quantcast tells me that the root domain for this offer has high male volume, I pretty much had to just display female ads because of the Bieber photo in the ad. The full demographics were utterly horrible for a good CTR.

• who live in the United States
• who are female
• who are not already connected to What Would You Lo…ok Like As A Zombie?

The Page

Well the page itself was pretty basic. I had uploaded a few pics into the page’s album as you see below.

In addition to that I also had that Justin Bieber photo that was part of the creative package for that offer.

Then I split test a few different ideas for the landing page area. Here was my original setup that I tested just for the hell of it. I had this original image as the ‘Like’ page and then the second image is what they would see after they liked it.

I then began using the setup that I reference on the guest post on Ian’s site, where I would have them ‘Like’ the page, then share it, then see the final offer page. I tried a few different things out and eventually settled on this as my final call to action offer.

The Results

Things to note from my split testing. During my ad spend I had about an 85% Conversion Rate to ‘Like’ my page once they clicked on my ad. This was awesome in my opinion and I was pumped about it. However during my split testing I removed all references to forcing people to ‘Like’ the page before they could see the content and they still ‘Liked’ the page without needing to be reminded to do so. Liking it did nothing besides let them interact with it on the page and yet 85% of them continued to do so without any special tricks on the page. It helps that my ad said for them to like the page, but I think I might be on to something a little bit bigger. I would guess that most Facebook users have the naturally reaction to like a page once they visit it, if presented with that option.

Sharing went up SIGNIFICANTLY once I made two changes. I got rid of the default share button and added some orange arrows pointing to a larger share button. I also told the share button to open in a new window instead of the regular page. This brings the share window into a handy pop up and doesn’t remove a user from the page.

Below you can see the total adspend on FB Ads. Just under $100 averaging $.27 CPC.

And here is the result of the Facebook click throughs from my Prosper install (please don’t get too worried, I more than made up for the deficit on PPV).

The page ended up with right about 600 total ‘Likes’ by the end of Halloween. So its safe to say about half of them clicked through on the offer to complete it. Disappointing numbers on this campaign to say the least. Of course I probably wouldn’t have shown you every little detail had it been a multi-million dollar hit! It didn’t nearly expand as much as I had hoped, didn’t come close to going ‘viral’. If I had my way with the Ads I definitely could have leveraged different ads into $.05 CPC monsters and cranked out some better volume and turned this campaign around. Volume is definitely the key, pages like this have the potential to scale up to hundreds of thousands of fans!

As I had said in my guest post you can download the full FBML code that I used on my page, Facebook FMBL for This Page. You can also see the live page in action still on Facebook HERE.

All in all though it was a great experiment and I definitely look forward to building pages in the future. Who else is currently working on pages? I would love to see yours!

Info Products, Single Sale vs Rebill, Starcraft II Case Study

Today I was following up on a post on StackThatMoney.com about his Facebook bidding strategies and I couldn’t help but laugh as his example product was one I had actually promoted in the past.

This got me to thinking about info products and what the better option is, to go Single Sales vs a Rebill product. Allow me to elaborate a bit.

Info products are usually digital downloads of some sort. They can range from software, forums, but typically are down loadable e-books. ‘What is an e-book?’ you ask, well basically it is a PDF…e-book just sounds better than pitching ‘Pay $67 for this Word file I saved as a PDF!’. There are several sites out there specifically for affiliates that ONLY focus on digital downloads. My personal favorite is ClickBank. They have a TON of offers and once you are a member you don’t need approval for about 99% of their offers, you can just throw up a campaign and you are good to go.

A few months ago I was testing out some campaigns on ClickBank to promote the upcoming release of Starcraft II. Starcraft II is a hit sequel to the original video game that sold something like 10 million+ copies. So I figured it should be pretty good potential for a quick campaign. For this campaign I was waaaaay too busy playing the beta release to even worry about making landing pages so I knew I wanted to direct link the products. Therefore I needed a site that had a decent lander of its own and had to have a pretty good payout to beat the CPCs I was going to be paying on Google, Facebook, etc. After looking around I found myself in a small dilemma that I wasn’t quite sure which product to promote. I ended up narrowing it down to two completely separate ‘Guides’.

The two products I was eying were Shokz Guide and Star2Pros Strategy Guide. Below are their ClickBank marketplace listings. These snapshots were taken today and are obviously MUCH different than they were a few months back.

When I was originally looking at these the products had almost identical gravities, their landers were both decent (Shokz has since updated theirs and it looks about 50x better), and there wasn’t too much competition on paid traffic sources. The BIG difference that popped out was Star2Pros avg Sale was $11.92 when I was first looking at it, while Shokz was $19.81. The avg rebill total for Star2Pros was significantly less at the time, almost non-existent, so one would assume that Shokz was the clear winner.

So as any decent internet marketer I decided to promote them both and rotate my offers. I was getting sick CTRs on Facebook and my CPC was like $.04 for certain demographics. Of course those demographics didn’t convert nearly as well as the more expensive ones did….isn’t this always the case. Interestingly enough I got a few sales on the Star2Pros product and none on Shockz. I felt a little uneasy about this because the Star2Pros product was a rebill product, which meant the user would get monthly billed. This typically indicates a forum or a service is included that gets updated…basically if they end up not liking the service they will ask for a refund (all Clickbank products come with a 30/60 day refund policy).

Unfortunately for me this campaign ended up going bust since some big name marketers decided to use an almost identical set of ads on a product launch of theirs and pitched things like ‘YOU CAN COPY THIS CAMPAIGN AND MAKE MONEY NOW, TRY IT!’…there goes my volume. However the experience definitely let me experience some issues with the rebill model as compared to a standard sale model.

Standard Sales Model on ClickBank

• Person buys products, you get commission. This is usually anywhere from 25-75% of the purchase price.
• Person has 60 days to request a refund. If they wait until day 59…you still lose 100% of your commission.
• Unless you previously harvested their email on a landing page, you will never get business from this customer again (well you actually can see their email address in your clickbank sales but to use that to remarket is ‘questionable’).

Rebill Sales Model on ClickBank

• Person buys products, you get a commission that is probably lower than a standard product.
• Person has 30 days to cancel the service and request a refund. They will automatically be rebilled the following cycle (usually monthly). Once they are charged for the following cycle they are no longer eligible to request a refund for the prior cycle, they may still cancel and request a refund for the new cycle that was just billed.
• Receive an additional payout on the monthly rebill, usually very similar to the original payout.
• You continue to receive cash from the user until they cancel.
• The user’s satisfaction with the product is out of your hands, you rely on the site owner to keep the subscriber happy.

In my case the payout of the single product would be $19.81 per sale. While the Star2Pros was like $12 recurring. In theory on the second month of a rebill I would’ve made more money than the Shokzguide. I quickly found that direct linking offers like these sucked. It was a lazy mistake, but what can I say, I’m a busy guy. My costs to acquire a sale were just about 2x the initial sale amount. After a bit of target optimization it got to be right about 1.5x the payout. So best case scenario is the user stays subscribed for 2 months and I am right about even with a small portion of profit. 4 Months later I am happy to say that each month I have about a 20% attrition rate. This can be thought of like this:

So as you can see if I am able to maintain this attrition rate I would end up with something about $52 average lifetime value. This is 2.5x the Shockz Guide payout! Obviously this could end up being weighted in several different ways. I am merely displaying how it would look for me given my current stats.

Luckily for me my split testing yielded this as the converting campaign, and I am now at a point where my average subscriber is about $30 total value to me. I am in the green on the campaign and still have a steady monthly incoming coming from a campaign I had paused.

Things to Understand

Lets be realistic. This is not for the faint at heart. There is a lot of risk in putting your advertising budget into something that may take months to recoup! Furthermore like many paid campaigns your volume may dry up before you are able to even know if that particular campaign will be a winner. If 80% of my sales cancelled after the first month I would be in the red hardcore. I think most everyone will agree though that the rebill method rocks because it has the potential to have some long term income as well!

*I ended up purchasing the Star2Pros guide and thought it was absolutely terrible. The quality was no where near the Shokz Guide and the author basically said on every page ‘We are changing some things around so check back next week to see the updates!’. Apparently it works as I have people on their 5th monthly billing cycle lol. I stopped promoting it after actually seeing the product. The traffic was drying up and I really didn’t feel good about promoting an absolute trash product anymore.