Fellow program owners: How do you monitor and deal w/ fraudulent affiliates?

• November 26, 2011

So we had this guy sign-up as an affiliate about 60 days ago. Starts sending a bunch of sales right away, very steadily, like several every day.

I was curious about it so I kept looking at the referring URLs (we use NATS 4.1), as I randomly do with affiliate sales anyway, and noticing that all his sales came from the same, solitary blog post on a bunch of differently domained sensualwriter blogs. He only had one single photo of one of our models, and just 2 or 3 written (poorly, at that) sentences.

So I was thinking, maybe this guy just has a ton of traffic from good trades and keywords or whatever.

Sales keep rolling in from him, but I remain curious.

So now, about 60 days later….the CHARGEBACKS are rolling in. In fact, he’s now at about a 9% chargeback rate for the number of sales he’s sent, and I’m sure it will increase in the coming weeks.

So I think it’s safe for me to assume he’s banging cards? Or is it? 9% seems pretty high from one affiliate. Our overall CB ratio is only like 1% normally. Is there any way this guy could be anything other than a thief/scammer/cheat?

I’ve already suspended his account and emailed him about it. No reply as of yet. It’s only been a day or so.

Funny, he had just messaged us a few days ago asking when we do our payouts.

I wonder how some of you other program owners out there handle this type of thing. We had a bad problem before with Filipino "chat traffic" people. Nothing but chargebacks. Banned them all. Never again.

I take the time to browse over our sales each day, looking for patterns which might indicate suspicious transactions (i.e. – females names for the credit card), and when I do see ones that look fraudulent, I go right to the biller and refund them.

I also look very closely at each and every chargeback, especially ones from an affiliate sale. If it’s a trusted, long-time affiliate, no problem, it happens. Friendly fraud is almost impossible to stop really (guy joins site, enjoys it, then lies to his bank saying he didn’t make the purchase and does a CB). If it’s a newer affiliate I don’t know, I scrutinize it closer.

Also relevant to the discussion is we are now in the midst of trying to set-up our own merchant account to end up with more of our money—instead of those high %’s that go to our 3rd party billers. But with that, comes the added worry of dealing with things like I’ve described above even more. Which having your own merchant account makes a bit more stressful as you need to keep your CB ration % under a certain level or risk losing the account completely (we’ll still keep our 3rd party billers in our cascade of course).

So I’m just curious to hear the thoughts and experiences from some of the other program owners out there on some of this….
Read more at: gfy.com

automatize your adult work… What tools/ scripts do you use and recommend ?

• November 21, 2011

well i started to work harder on my adult projects, but i always wanted to work smarter too..so…
What tools/ programs/ scripts do you guys recommend for:
- video cutting
- blogging
- getting backlinks
- creating galleries…..

here are mine:
- easy thumbnails
- managewp
- chameleon submitter
- scrapebox

and yours ?
thx

“Easy Thumbs” is at the top of the OPs list. One day in the 1990s I made a similar post and someone mentioned they were tired of resizing each image to make a thumbnail of it. We responded with a cool new tool that would automatically make thumbs from a whole folder full of images. The more things change the more they stay the same.
raymor

Read more at: gfy.com

Any pros/cons of joining ASACP (or others?)

• November 17, 2011

I work in software, haven’t done much in this industry (but I am trying to learn about it!) please forgive me if this is off topic.

One thing that puzzles me, I used to see ASACP logos on all kinds of adult sites and now I don’t see them anymore.

Have you ever been an ASACP member, or been a member of some other social cause (prevention of animal cruelty, etc.. etc…)

What were the pros and cons? are you still a member?

If not, why did you drop out of it?

Thanks!

The use of the ASACP logo is up to the sponsor. We are a member/sponsor and reference it in our footers, but don’t include the logos often because the logos aren’t consistent with our own designs.

ASACP is great with no cons in my opinion and a cause we believe in. Especially helpful to put to bed any false perceptions people may have of porn companies.
Allison

Read more at: gfy.com

Looking for advice – finally hit a decent search term.

• November 10, 2011

My legal tube site (www.pregnancytube.com) is ranking for a lot of decent search terms, including #2 for “pregnant porn” on the Goog (my original goal was to get in the top 10 for it).

What do I do now? Leave it how it is and make money? Attempt to get #1? Expand the site in hopes to monetize it even more? Sell it? Sell links from it?

This is my first ‘big’ break, so I want some sound suggestions on where to go from here. I’m making sales and that’s good, but I’m sure there’s more I could be doing.

1. the difference in traffic between #1 and #2 isn’t much, in fact I’ve had some sites be more productive in #2 then #1, as long as you are above the fold you are good. i would however take #11 over 8-10. the descript Google shows below your site is much more important then being 1, 2 or 3.

2. changing the design is stupid, if its working now and you are well ranked, leave the design alone!

as for the advice you asked for… try to optimize deeper pages on the site to rank more preggo related longtail terms. let the site float and make money, youve already reached the top, enjoy it. screwing with it too much might topple it. id take what you learned and apply to other domains/terms.

when you first get to the first page you will see a lot of movement, sometimes drastic. 30+ position movement from hour to hour. after a while you will settle into your spot though, if that ends up being below #2, then i would think about making small changes to try and move up a bit.

1c from a guy that doesnt know SEO
Why

Read more at: gfy.com

What happened to GreenGuy&Jim?

• November 3, 2011

Anyone know what happened? The site/board is now redirecting to Sexsearch

..that was an old ass community there

I figured the income from b2b webmaster services dropped below a certain threshold, Jim had other income and responsibilities, so greeny took over the board responsibilities.

It’s not impossible there was a dispute over the name, thats the nature of business, but the way this biz is collapsing and consolidating it’s not the most likely explanation.

The argument against there being a name dispute is that there’s now a aggregator on it – they just let it drop as irrelevant.

Bill8

Read more at: gfy.com