Last year we discovered a website that was an exact clone of Loquax. The siteowner had not only downloaded the entire site but also had the audacity to adapt his logo to look like Loquax and include the Loquax duck. After a few emails to the ISP hosting the site the index was removed. However, a couple of months back it was discovered the rest of the Loquax files not only still existed, but were now in many of the search engines.

Emails were again sent to the ISP, but this time ignored. Contacting the siteowner was not possible as the details on a whois lookup are false. Finally, as a last attempt to reach resolution before instructing someone legal to takeover we phoned the ISP and after a brief chat action has now been taken and the content removed!

The shock of this was that the guy at the end of the phone was so decisive. One look at the other site and action was made. Great stuff!

Another shock materialised in the first publisher email from Accelerator Media. Accelerator Media is an ad-network Loquax became part of probably over 18 months ago, maybe longer. It’s owned by eType and we’d been part of their ad-network for a number of years. After restructuring their big clients (e.g. Friends Reunited) stayed as eType and smaller sites like Loquax were put on Accelerator Media.

In effect any representation we once had vanished over night. Communication from eType was never great, but they served us well for the time we were with them. Unfortunately a number of issues came together (e.g. poor quality ads, one of our competitors on the same network, lack of communication) that made us decide to move elsewhere.

For the last 6 months or so we’ve been with another ad-network. No one from Accelerator Media has contacted us about the drop in revenue and no one contacted us even asking why we weren’t showing banners. Perhaps it’s not their way or frankly they didn’t care or we weren’t that important an affiliate or partner for them, but from our point of view it demonstrated their attitude towards partner sites… i.e. they’re not interested!

To get a ‘first communication’ email from them some 18 months after being on their network and some 6 months after serving our last banner also quite clearly demonstrates that moving to another ad-network was a sensible decision. It’s nice to see that perhaps eType are now taking more interest in Accelerator Media, but for us it’s too little too late.

3. Get a Text Link From DGMPro

As yet I’ve have not been told otherwise that this is not the right way to get a simple text link from the new “increased functionality & reporting” DGMPro system which “has been totally redesigned to allow greater usability”!

1. Login to DGMPro
2. Go to ‘Manage Creative’
3. Select ‘Browse Creative’
4. Use pull down boxes to select advertiser and text link
5. Click Go
6. Click ‘Get Code’
7. Code doesn’t work straight away so wait for about an hour (at least).
8. Go to ‘Optimise Content Unit’
9. Select required link/content unit from drop down box
10. Curse as you have over x number of links called ‘text’
11. Find right merchant code for the link you set up
12. Get code – If the link doesn’t work go back to (7).

And this is “greater usability”?

101 Ways to Avoid Affiliate Work is an occasional look at ways people can waste loads of time and thus avoid putting up links and trying to earn a living from affiliate marketing.

Last few days have been spent messing around with the Loquax forums. The switch over from phpBB to vBulletin went smoothly enough and the new forum looks great – however most of the time has been spent doing admin. Lost usernames, forgotten passwords, failed logins – it’s been non stop and very time consuming.

Although a lot of the options to retrieve details are on the site, we have problems from AOL who block all emails from us these days. In some ways I think AOL should foot our admin bill as 90% of all our admin/support enquiries stem from their ISP users who because of AOL’s inability to distinguish between spam and double opt in email adds extra work load to our business.

Overall though, the good news is that the users seem to like the new system. We had just the one “i preferred the old forum” and a couple “if it wasn’t broke..” grumbles. The best though was “the colours look bland”, which was kind of strange as the colours were identical to the old forum!!

Activity though is up and the move to vBulletin has definately been worthwhile. Our server load is low which is a major bonus as phpBB caused us far too many load issues and too often caused site wide issues. Now for some much needed sleep!

Luton 3 Southampton 2

Unable to hold a lead
Ineffectual for large periods of the game
Lack of passion
Tactically clueless
Unable to defend
Concede easy goals
Concede last minute goals
Lose
Gutted Supporters
Same Saints, Same S**t, Different League

So is DGMPro working or is it still in development? I’ve logged in a few times now and whilst the new interface is most certainly DGM I’m not so far convinced on the Pro part. Apart from the links not working (we’re now on s2d6.com urls which sound like a Star Wars extra) the interface is actually worse than the old DGM2 system.

The main problem with DGM2 was it was slow and stats were poor and it was outdated compared to other networks. So far DGMPro does not look like it will solve many issues other than stat reporting and given that this supposedly tested by affiliates to iron out bugs, all I can wonder is how the hell did they miss so many obvious things.

E.g. If you subscribe to a new merchant you can’t go from the newly subscribed page to that merchant page to obtain a link… why?? Surely that’s logical?
E.g. If you call up a text link why do i then have to select “get code” to get the text link – why can’t i just have the text link.
E.g. Why is the ‘Join campaigns’ section so horribly laid out!? Show the basics only with more information on deeper links.
E.g. Why are all their creatives seemingly in iframes?
E.g. Where’s my nwk code gone?
E.g. What the hell is the random= bit?
E.g. What is “Doll House” in the merchants categories?

Perhaps the above is being harsh especially as with the links not working you’d assume this system isn’t live. But if it is live then there’s still a lot of work to be done. A number of programs we promote have been switched from DGM over the last 12 months to other networks, and this new DGMPro in it’s current guise has done little to encourage any change in that policy.