An Open Letter To All Affiliate Programs That Offer / Plan To Offer Hosted Free Sites

[[BV]]

I do everything myself. I shoot the content as well as do all the designs myself. On this last couple of free sites (which are not for BVCash BTW they are for my other new program BeachModel Ent.) I wanted to try something a little different.

First thing is I'm tired of designing my pages for 800x600 and decided to widen things up a bit. Second thing I didn't like was how sparse my warning pages looked since there were no recips or anything to other sites. This is why I opted to fill up the warning page a bit more to take up some space. I honestly did not think that it was too awe inspiring. Just an over sized logo with a little sales text on it that you can click on instead of having banners.

For the rest of the HFS I basically laid them out how I did my others for BVCash which are listed and making great sales conversions on many link lists including Link o rama. The only thing I did a little different was making a over sized banner at the top and bottom that matched the content from the free site but showed a little bit more explicit shots for the purpose of enticing a click.

I feel that these new free site designs will work great. but if you guys don't think so and want to assume that they will not without actually testing them, then that leaves me no choice but to go back to the old way of doing things because they will never convert if they don't get listed.

Excuse me for trying to think outside of the box and try something a little different instead of the same ole thing day in and day out. IMO these are very basic simple designs.

Cheers,
BV

PS: Linkster you're not wasting your time giving me advice. Don't feel that way. However you were wasting your time trying to see if your codes followed thru to the sign up page. Do you do that to everyone? Did I ever do anything to make you think I was out to cheat my affiliates? I'd appreciate it next time if you are unsure of something like that to just PM, ICQ, or email me instead of doing what you did and giving me and my sites a negative image for the rest of the readers that might not be able to understand that you screwed up.

Cheers,
BV

[Greenguy]

Originally Posted by [BV]

...PS: Linkster you're not wasting your time giving me advice. Don't feel that way. However you were wasting your time trying to see if your codes followed thru to the sign up page. Do you do that to everyone? Did I ever do anything to make you think I was out to cheat my affiliates? I'd appreciate it next time if you are unsure of something like that to just PM, ICQ, or email me instead of doing what you did and giving me and my sites a negative image for the rest of the readers that might not be able to understand that you screwed up....

Don't take that too personally - there are a lot of webmaster (myself included) that do this with every sponsor. We look at as much as we can - hosted materials & the tours being the most important.

Part of it is past shady sponsors, but mostly it's checking for coding errors, because we know how easy it is to fuck up the coding on a HFS

[[BV]]

Originally Posted by Greenie

Don't take that too personally - there are a lot of webmaster (myself included) that do this with every sponsor. We look at as much as we can - hosted materials & the tours being the most important.

Part of it is past shady sponsors, but mostly it's checking for coding errors, because we know how easy it is to fuck up the coding on a HFS

No worries, I would encourage that practise also.

My concerns are for other less tech savvy readers and potential affiliates that may have gotten a negative image from reading his posts and may just pass me over because they might not figure out Linkster was using the wrong CCBill affiliate ID for the site in question.

Some sensitive issues such as this are best discussed privately until you are 100% sure, then by all means call me out.

[Useless]

Originally Posted by [BV]

Excuse me for trying to think outside of the box and try something a little different instead of the same ole thing day in and day out. IMO these are very basic simple designs.

In my "shock & awe" post above, I wasn't referring to your HFSs at all and I hope you didn't take offense by it. The big old powerhouse programs are the ones who tend to massively over design their HFSs.

I/we certainly understand why you'd want to place as much marketing as possible on the warning page - and we WANT you to. My advice would be to use multiple blocks/tables of different sized text mixed with graphics, rather than creating a single large fpa. When the surfer hits a warning page, he's searching for the enter link and a solitary fpa is easily passed by as an obvious ad. If you break it up a bit, you are forcing the surfer to slow down his visual scan of the page because the enter link could be in there somewhere between the ad blocks.

BTW, ditto what GG just said about us checking HFS errors. Hell, I've completely forgotten to link my text and banners to a paysite tour on my own free sites in the past. There's nothing quite like having a free site listed at the L-O-R, DD's, and SG and wondering why the sponsor's stats show no hits. Oh, that's right - my links all say <a href="#">

[[BV]]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

In my "shock & awe" post above, I wasn't referring to your HFSs at all and I hope you didn't take offense by it. The big old powerhouse programs are the ones who tend to massively over design their HFSs.

I/we certainly understand why you'd want to place as much marketing as possible on the warning page - and we WANT you to. My advice would be to use multiple blocks/tables of different sized text mixed with graphics, rather than creating a single large fpa. When the surfer hits a warning page, he's searching for the enter link and a solitary fpa is easily passed by as an obvious ad. If you break it up a bit, you are forcing the surfer to slow down his visual scan of the page because the enter link could be in there somewhere between the ad blocks.

BTW, ditto what GG just said about us checking HFS errors. Hell, I've completely forgotten to link my text and banners to a paysite tour on my own free sites in the past. There's nothing quite like having a free site listed at the L-O-R, DD's, and SG and wondering why the sponsor's stats show no hits. Oh, that's right - my links all say <a href="#">

Sorry, and thank you for this post. I take note and understand your point about the surfer passing up scanning too fast. This info will be incorporated and will help me greatly on the next HFS I design.

[Linkster]

BV - yeah I defintiely do check every one of the sponsors - just an old habit It comes from having once made HFS's for sponsors a few years ago and the need to make sure they were passing through aff's as it seems everyone uses different coding. And I would agree as has been posted - my statements werent aimed at you - it was really a general statement as there are sponsors that have come looking for help and we freely give it - then they disappear and never implement it or at least try it
In your case - there is nothing wrong with thinking outside the box and trying things - it is something I wish more people would try - the only reason I noted some things is that your interpretation of thinking outside the box is something a few others have tried when they were thinking outside the box as well over the years - to you its a "new idea" and thats great - to me its something that 5 other sponsors have tried and it didnt work so I just try to use a little experience and pass on some of the knowledge Ive picked up - which is what I think you will find with a lot of the "older people" here (although I think that there are two of us here that are really old!)
And again it was a bad assumption to use my bv cash id - that one slipped by

[[BV]]

Originally Posted by Linkster

BV - yeah I defintiely do check every one of the sponsors - just an old habit It comes from having once made HFS's for sponsors a few years ago and the need to make sure they were passing through aff's as it seems everyone uses different coding. And I would agree as has been posted - my statements werent aimed at you - it was really a general statement as there are sponsors that have come looking for help and we freely give it - then they disappear and never implement it or at least try it
In your case - there is nothing wrong with thinking outside the box and trying things - it is something I wish more people would try - the only reason I noted some things is that your interpretation of thinking outside the box is something a few others have tried when they were thinking outside the box as well over the years - to you its a "new idea" and thats great - to me its something that 5 other sponsors have tried and it didnt work so I just try to use a little experience and pass on some of the knowledge Ive picked up - which is what I think you will find with a lot of the "older people" here (although I think that there are two of us here that are really old!)
And again it was a bad assumption to use my bv cash id - that one slipped by

It's all good.

I just hit the big 40 myself.