Since september 2009 there has been a outrageous banning wave going on on Google Adwords accounts. Literally tens of thousands of people have found their account in the morning not showing any ads whatsoever anymore. Some of them got the dreaded mail from Adwords telling them it was done and over with. Their accounts were suspendend and they Google would not accept any anymore in the future. But there were also a lot of people who didn’t get any notify at all, and they had to find out that they had been suspended by either calling the Adwords department or mailing them.

Now, I’ve had my fair share of problems with Google too in the past and I have to watch every move that I take ther. Altough I have been advertising with them for more than 3 years and spending millions I have never been assigned a account manager. I think that’s too crazy for words, but luckily nowadays I have somebody with Google who I can talk to about my campaigns and he helps me out on a number of tasks.

Anyway, back to the banwave. So now that things have seriously tightened over at Adwords, how can you make sure you don’t get a ban and lose your business? Let me sum up the most important and obvious ones:

- Do not run any rebill offers. Many, of the advertisers that got hit ran rebill offers such as acai berry’s, colon cleansers, bizz ops, teethwhiteners etc. This is a NO-GO anymore for Google. I’ve heard of instant bans when you try to run those campaigns.
- Watch out for repeated trademark violations. This happened to somebody I know personally. He tried to get round trademark restrictions by being creative with them. Like removing spaces, typo’s and that kind of stuff. If they catch you doing that, game over buddy.
- Do not run similar offers on multiple accounts. A lot of us try to boost revenue by just copying their landingpage to another domain (maybe make minor changes), then copy their Adwords account onto a new account and let it run to gain more revenue. This might have worked in the past, but Google is coming down on those. Have heard multiple stories of people who had their account suspended because of this
- Do not run Google money tree or similar programs. Google has banned every single account that promoted Google money tree or any other affiliate oofer that mispresented affiliation with Google, even if it was way in the past. Stay away from these!
- Watch out for poor campaign performance. Google always wants the highest quality search results for their users, if your account(s) consists of mainly campaigns with poor campaign performance or low quality scores, they will suspend you.
- Avoid reviewsites. Altough this hasn’t been proven, it seems that a lot of bans had to do with people running mainly reviewsites. Google doesn’t seem to like these too much and will protect itself with giving you a ban. What is proven is that reviewsites get slapped a lot and people tend to just copy them to another domain and try again. Do this too many times and it’s banning time baby!

These are the things I heard and read about that are probably the causes for the massive banwave. But besides these major points there are also other violations that may result in an instant ban such as:

- Iframing websites
- Redirecting websites
- Voucher fraude
- Illegal adult content
- Ripping competitors pages
- Outpricing competitors
- Malware or virusses on your websites
- Poor content on your website
- Link farming

So, you really going to have to watch yourself not to get banned for whatever reason. What I tend to do nowadays is to let an Adwords specialist check my page and campaign and get the thumbs up from them before I start running it. I chose to do this with Live Adwords Support. This way you can have the chat sent to you by mail so you will always have prove that you got an OK on your campaign.

You can also contact them by phone on 1.866.246.6453 or easier to remember 1.866.2GOOGLE.

Tags: adwords, adwords phonenumber, banning, google, live support, suspension
Posted in Google Adwords | 7 Comments »

Besides Search Engine Strategies New York this was the first real show I went to since I started doing affiliate marketing back in 2006. SES NYC was pretty cool, also because it was my first trip to the Big Apple, but MAN, ASW was THA bomb! I almost went last year but because of a last minute cancellation from a friend that was supposed to go with me, I decided to drop out as well. Now I know what I missed! These are the guys that went with me this time.

Hein van der Wielen, director of BlueMango.nl, Frank Rovers, CEO of Feltron.nl, Me and Frank Raaijmakers, CEO of Amdir.nl

So, I know this shows have to be about doing business, learning a thing or two and especially networking, but what impressed me the most are the insane parties we went to. But more about that later. So we came in at wednesday but the show didn’t start untill sunday, so we had some time to spare. We checked in in the Venetian and we had a pretty nice room. It was called the ‘Rialto suito’. Altough it was nice and spacy, it was sooooo noisy! When the party people came in around 4′ish when we were doing some serious sleeping to overcome our major jetlag, my sleeping was over and I was tired the entire next day. Happened to me 2 times, then I decided to wear earplugs at night. Shame on you Venetian.

Anyway, we played some poker at O’Sheas which is an AWESOME place if you want to play FUN poker or craps! Everybody is having a good time overthere and they do not take things too serious like they would in other big casino’s. Definitly go there to play some 1-2 Texas Hold Em, you won’t regret it! Also we did some tasteful dinners and nice clubbing around the city.

Then sunday the show started. Because one of us had to leave on tuesday for a meeting we decided to get gold passes instead of platinum passes because we had to miss the tuesday anyway. So on sunday we attended 3 sessions. One about effective social media techniques, one about monetizing blogs for affiliate marketing and SEO and one that was called ’start monetizing your blog today’. Well, I can say, those sessions didn’t help me one bit and I think most of the people were quite dissapointed about these sessions. Even for a beginner this was pretty basic stuff and nothing new or revealing. Especially the first one, which I had high expectations for, was very dissapointing. ‘Don’t spam twitter’. Come on guys, we want want to hear techniques that can be applied to social media campaigns that drive your bank account to insane figures. But nothing of that. Unfortunately. From what I’ve heard the platinum sessions were a lot better, so the next Affiliate Summit I’ll be sure to hang around for the full 3 days.

We also went to the meet market, but it was SO packed that you couldn’t even say hello to the people you knew overthere. Crazy time! I did get to meet Markus Frind, Founder and CEO of PlentyOfFish.com though, the biggest online dating site in the world.

At night we had Copeac’s ‘Party like a rockstar’ party at the Tryst in the Wynn. Beautiful club, not too big, just right, but not too many people there unfortunately. The party was good and we got to meet 2 other dutch marketeers (which you don’t come across too often in the USA). They are with 4people.nl and do a lot of emailing. It was nice hanging out with you for a bit guys!

After that we went to the XS in the Encore. My god! This nightclub was INSANE!! Decorations were sooo beautiful, the sound was good and the atmosphere was just amazing. What more can I say. We had a GREAT time there!

Monday was a hard day for us. We were sleepy from all the partying, but we had to go out networking on the show again. So this day we mainly exchanged cards with various companies and people and I got inspiration on many new projects by just walking along the booths. I already got a lot of emails and calls from people who want to do business, so that’s good!

After the show we were so sleepy that we decided to take a little powernap. This turned out to be a 5 hour sleepfest. Markus Frind invited us over to a party at the Palms in the early evening. Missed that. After that there was this amazing party thrown by Azoogleads in the Hugh Hefner Skyvilla. Unfortunately we couldn’t go there as we had another party by Clickbooth right at the same time. As you can see by Steve Hall’s picture’s, this was a HOT party.

The Clickbooth party was crazy too. It was called the ‘Hangover party’ and it was shot in one of the 4 rooms the actual movie was shot in. Like the movie there was even a chicken in it. Awesome! We had a really good time there with our friends over at Clickbooth.

And that ended our trip to Vegas. We headed down O’sheas for a quick round of craps and then we headed out to the airport and had a 16 hour flight home. YUCK!

It was an amazing time and show and I hope to see you all at the next Affiliate Summit East from August 15 – 17!!!

Tags: affiliate show, affiliate summit west, las vegas, make money online
Posted in Affiliate Shows | 6 Comments »

Every year I get a nice amount of christmas gifsts from the different affiliate networks I work with. I got a day of racing on tracks with exotic cars like a Lamborghini Gallardo, Aston Martin Vanquish, Porsche GT-3 and many others, I also got a stunt flying experience. It’s so cool how all those networks know what I like because I’m crazy about exotic fast cars but also as a kid I was totally into airplanes and I wanted to be a pilot. One dream of mine still is to make so much money so that I can actually can buy my own plane.

One affiliate company really overdome themselves. After a all-expense paid trip to their office in Sarasota earlier this year, Clickbooth now gave me 2 awesome christmas presents. Sure, I’ve done lots of business with them, but it’s always nice to get gifts!

They gave me this insane Gucci watch:

If you look closely it has a G shape in it. So cool!

Also because they knew I was working out to lose 60 pounds they also got me a Wii fitt with balance board!

Thanks guys at Clickbooth, I really love it!!!

If you want to join one of the best affiliate networks there is around, then click here to join Clickbooth!

Tags: affiliate, Affiliate Networks, christmas, clickbooth, gift
Posted in Affiliate Networks | No Comments »

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.

A famous quote by Oprah Winfrey. Did I post it because I love Oprah so much? No. But do I worship all the achievements that she has made so far and the fact that she is among the top 15 richest women in the world with an estimated 2.4 billion dollars, HELL YES!

Did she come from a wealthy family that made sure her future was laid out for her and got her were she is today? No! She fought for it! One failure after another but with loads of perseverance she got to that one audition that changed her life for good.

Why am I telling you all this? Because online marketing is just the same! Why? Because I know it! True, I didn’t come from a poor family or got major troubles in my life, but for my multi-million business that  I have today I had to fight for it! Oprah did loads of auditions, I tested tons of campaigns and spend loads of money (that I really didn’t have at that time) before I found that one golden nugget that changed my life back in 2005. You see, all it takes is one little success to completely change your life.

I’m not going to go to deep into this right now. All I wanted to do is to let you know why I am creating this blog. Affiliate marketing like I’m doing is not pretty well known around most people, especially here in the Netherlands where I’m from. Sure, we do have some guys overhere that do pretty good, but they’re all underground and don’t like to be in the spotlight. Now, to be honest, I used to be one of those guys too and I still don’t like to be in the spotlight (that’s why you will probably not see me do any video’s or anything because of that…. and my ugly face of course).

But day after day I come up with many ideas, new strategies, tips for marketing and stuff like that, that I just want to get the word out. I want to help people on their quest to become as successful as us, what they like to call, ’superaffiliates’. Don’t like that term to be honest, and I don’t consider myself ’super’ in any way, but what I do know is that I’m successful in what do and I know I can help people to get at this level too.

So what I’m going to do on this blog is give you my insights, strategies and tips that I come up (often in bath) or give you the latest there is to know about affiliate marketing from all the people I know in the industry.

One important category on my blog will be the product reviews. I probably buy 9 out of 10 marketing products that are launched. If it’s a hyped product, you can bet I’ve bought it or gotten for review. Most of the stuff I get out of there is not very useful for me, but for a lot of people it will be. But every now I then I stumble upon one little piece of information that is useful and makes me money, and that’s enough for me. But you don’t want to know how much CRAP there is being sold out there, and I don’t want you to spend one penny on those. So that’s why I will be doing honest reviews of the newest products being released in the future.

So what can you expect? Like I said, new releases reviews, tips for PPC, SEO, Social Media, Adsense, Media buys and I’m just starting with PPV advertising now, so I’ll keep you updated as well on those. Also I will start doing some crossmedia campaigns this year, so you can expect some good stuff from that too.

Also for my work I get to meet amazing people and loads of other superaffiliates and marketing guru’s on my businesstrips to the USA (where all the superaffiliates seem to live) and I will try to get some good stuff from them too for you in interviews, video’s etc.

So, in short: we will ROCK this joint! I hope to build a nice community here to all share tips and strategies so we can all reach even higher levels in what we do.

Come check often because I’ll try to write at least 3 posts a week!

Good luck and that all your dreams may come true!!!

Tags: gioom, guillaume van de laar, launch, welcome
Posted in General | 1 Comment »