The PPV Secret No One Bothered To Tell You About

Before I started working with PPV all the experts told me to do some market research about how they work and what works. Other affiliates and even my affiliate managers all suggested the best way to do this was to was to install the adware applications on your own computer and just surf around a bit and look at what pops up. Smaxor from A4D actually made a comment on a webinar saying something like “if you don’t have gamevance installed on every computer you own you are just throwing away money.” I agreed and began installing pop up software and didn’t really notice much of a change. I would see one pop a day if I was lucky.

Then a discussion got struck up over at Internet University (now Millionaire Mentors launching soon) about people’s lack of pops. Fortunately one fellow was kind enough to share a little tip that someone over at the largest PPV company, Traffic Vance, had shared with him. While most of us would simply go install the GameVance toolbar to start seeing pop ups, there was a secondary toolbar out especially for advertisers to get to scope out the competition. I heard rumors that this version has been around per request of some of the higher end advertisers. Either way I don’t think TrafficVance cares if people use it, after all they end up making more money!

This toolbar functioned quite similar to the original one in every aspect….except instead of seeing the Gamevance max of like 4 pop ups a day, you see a constant flurry of pop ups. This is useful for a few reasons. You have a MUCH easier way to look at several competing ads in a shorter period of time. You can notice what offers are being promoted and where. Lastly you can use to cost your competitors some cash if that’s your thing.

So why am I sharing this with everyone? A few weeks back I had commented on a post over at PPV Playbook and referenced this ‘special’ install. I thought nothing of it really seeing as how I’ve had it since before I was even advertising on PPV. Then when I got 20+ emails/pms about my small comment I realized that people want this thing. I already had one person email me and say that having this would be better than having the PPV Spy from Bevo Media.

Some Quick Disclaimers

1. When I downloaded this file it was from a GameVance download screen so I know it came right from their website.
2. I do not have that link anymore so the best I can do is upload the .exe (well in a zip format) to my server.
3. I’m not into distributing virus/trojans but obviously one has to suspect that running an exe there are risks. Feel free to install on a Virtual Machine or something, but leave the crying off the blog.
4. I didn’t make this and no way claim credit for its awesomeness. Just passing it along.
5. I wouldn’t recommend installing this on your main machine because it literally gets so annoying surfing with pops every few minutes.

So get out there, spy on your competition, don’t cost me too much money in wasted pops, and let me know your results with it. I think my highest count was like 8 pops in an hour or something (when I was reading message boards!).

DOWNLOAD THE GAMEVANCE MULTIPOP TOOLBAR HERE

UPDATE: After finishing up some meetings this morning I made it back to some very disgruntled emails from certain *unnamed* companies requesting removal of this information and toolbar. Rightfully so I do not own any copyright to the rapidshare links that were provided earlier and have removed them per their request. Fortunately everything else above isn’t owned by them so I will happily leave this information available that the tool exists and can be helpful to us as advertisers. Happy torrent hunting!

Buy Your Email Lists, No Worries Thanks To Me!

Alright so this week I saw a few posts over at AffBuzz.com and wanted to comment on them. Firstly I saw it listed on Shoemoney’s site as one of his blog posts but then started noticing several people promoting it. This is the trick to know if someone is selling your emails to other people. I am going to debunk this trade secret right now and save everyone who was planning on buying email lists a bunch of worries.

Do I approve of buying/selling email lists. No not at all. I perfectly believe in say having someone like Frank Kern give you XX% of their profits for a program that you promoted in your email list, that’s basically what affiliate marketing is all about, so get over it people. This is the price you pay for signing up for someone’s list, you get to listen to their pitches as well.

So back to the point at hand, I saw this post on Shoemoney’s site and then saw this post referencing it from Jonathan Volk’s page. Why are these guys both pushing this idea? Well firstly it’s a great idea in concept. It is one of those things that you hear and go “Holy shit I am totally fucking doing this from now on!” It gets you so motivated you might very well sign up for their mailing lists that they have each been pushing pretty hard lately. So lets not blame them for sharing the secret to try and make us feel more comfortable signing up for their lists, I actually give them each props for that. They found a way to present us with valid info that might make us more likely to convert (sign up for a list) kudos to both of them.

However lets blow this concept right out of the water here.

1.) Shoe referenced it works on gmail and Most other email services. Well I tried it on gmail, lotus domino server, yahoo, aol, and my shitty web host’s squirrel mail. Out of those 5 relatively major email providers ONLY gmail accepted that command. This proves a couple things. First Gmail is obviously amazingly awesome here and we should all switch to it. Secondly Shoe’s claim is a quick info note that has a lot of flash appeal to us but not too much reliability.

2.) How reliable is having a stupid ‘+’ sign in there to track your emails? Well its about as reliable as my current affiliate campaigns (that aint saying much people)! I will illustrate in the below screenshots how in about say 3 seconds any email list seller/buyer can scrub their list of your attempts to track who is selling your emails.

Most list providers allow you to export to Micrososft Excel in some fashion (.xlsx, csv, etc). You basically open your list, no matter how large it is, and use the replace function. Where the box prompts you what you want to Find just insert “+*@” (no quotes) and then say replace it with “@” (no quotes) and say Replace All. There you go! This little quasi code says replace anything that starts with + and ends with @. In a matter of seconds it removes all those handy tracking ids we spent our time separating out. See the below images to get an idea how I did it with a quick list I typed up.

So as good as an idea this was to wow us and make us feel save to sign up for our favorite blogger’s email lists, it is absolutely worthless! So now that you are worried that Shoe and various other people are going to sell your email look on the bright side. If someone like Jeremy comes up to you and says “Hey I have this list of 100k emails you want to buy for $20?” you can now drop your hard earned cash and know that no one is going to know bought their emails! Ta Dah!