Remember the last time you saw an As Seen on TV ad? In the beginning it looks like a good offer at a reasonable price… then they start throwing more bonuses at you, and sometime even double the offer and then cut the price in half again! How in the world do these As Seen on TV offers make any money? Besides the mass amount and cheap production, most infomercials are making money on their customers through data collection, extra s&h costs, up selling and third party advertisements sent out with products.

I recently ordered a new product from the As Seen on TV line, Crazy Critters. My dog loves to rip apart her stuffed animal toys, so Crazy Critters is supposed to be somewhat indestructible. Our dog Foxy managed to break one of the squeakers in the first day, but the animal is still in tact and she loves it.

You can see the Crazy Critters landing page below. It states that you get one Crazy Critter Fox for $10, then the Raccoon is free (plus S&H). The shipping and handling is where they get you and make some extra money. It’s $6.99 for the first Crazy Critter, and $6.99 for the additional free plush ordered. I ended up ordering the Fox and Raccoon and the total came to $25.66, still a good deal in my book.

Next is all of the fun promotional spam they send along with your shipment. It really wasn’t much, but it’s good to know what’s being sent out and how companies market their products. You can see the assortment of goodies below.

Most of the collection is pretty harmless. Another up sell for Crazy Critters, another for a cheap diamond ring, but the killer is another one of those fake checks (like we saw with Snuggie) that gets you stuck on a rebill offer. What looks like a $10.00 rebate check, actually gets you a paid membership to American Leisure for $98.95 a year… automatically hitting the credit card you used to buy your original product (Crazy Critters in this case). On the back of the check you will notice how they spell out “eighty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents” so it is less obvious.

Granted it comes down to the consumer to read everything they receive and sign, but how many seniors ordering this stuff for their kids could easily fall for this. It’s a bit shady, but it might be performing well enough for As Seen on TV and other distributors to continue offering very low priced products, then making money off these promotional mailings. If only 10% (which is very high) of the people receiving these fake checks actually sent them in, that would bring in more business than the actual products they are shipping out. If the FTC and industry is going to come down hard on rebill offers, shouldn’t these fake checks fall under the same category?

Do you have a media kit for your blog? Media kits can be anything from promotional packages, to press releases, but in this article we will be focusing on creating a media kit for advertising purposes. I personally never had a media kit and always casually worked on a one on one basis with parties interested in advertising on this blog. As the blog continues to grow and there is more of a demand for advertising, it is important to create a media kit.

Why Create a Media Kit and How it Will Save You Time?
Almost everyone has an “Advertise Here” link or page on their site, but it doesn’t always have as much information as it should. Advertisers are spending their precious money, and before committing to an ad campaign, they would like as much information as they can get. An advertising media kit include information about your web site and company, advertising locations and rates, testimonials, web site traffic/demographics and any press related or news about your site. Also be sure to include pictures and charts to make your numbers stand out and not have a boring media kit.

A media kit will not only make your web site look a lot more professional, but it can also save you a lot of time. If you don’t have a lot of information on your site about advertising, or a media kit, you may find yourself continually writing the same thing to people every time you get a new request about advertising on your site. With a media kit, you can simply reply to each email with a nice response and include your media kit pdf.

How to Create a Media Kit.
The easiest way to create a media kit is to simply open a Word document and just start putting everything together. Media kits are heavily available online. Searching for a competitor or related web site in your niche and finding their media kit is a great way to get an idea on how to setup your media kit.

eLance and other freelance web sites always have requests for media kit creations. If you are to choose this route, you just need to compile your information and send it over to a designer to put everything together and set you up with a nice PDF file.

Here are some excellent resources for help creating a media kit.
- Media Kit Template (you fill in your information)
- More Advanced & Informative Media Kit Template
- Create a media kit with Microsoft Publisher
- How BusinessWeeks Creates their Media Kits

Whether you have a PDF media kit, or simply an “Advertise” section of your site, make sure that you are providing as much information as possible for advertisers. The benefit of using a PDF media kit, is that your site and advertising information is on your site for everyone to see.

Since internet marketing first started, email addresses have been scraped, sold, bulked up and spammed to death… so why should Twitter be anything different? Yesterday Jon wrote a post on a service called Followers for Sale. The concept is simple… pay these advertising networks to bring new followers to your Twitter account. In addition to Jon’s post, I also had a request this week to review a paid Twitter service on another blog I run. With two Twitter services gaining my attention in one day, I thought it would make for an interesting case study to see how well these companies work, what they charge and if these followers will actually stick around… or most importantly, are of any value!

First I had to go out and find what services are available. The best way of doing this is just going to Google and searching “buy twitter followers“. You will get a big mess of results.

The best way to setup this case study and to measure results, is to create a few new Twitter accounts and use them separately on each of the Twitter follower services. This is also necessary because Twitter limits the amount of people you can follow daily. Using the same account along with each of these services would be a huge red flag and would ultimately ban your account.

For this Twitter Follower case study, let’s use 10,000 followers as the price point and what I will order for each Twitter account.

Here is a list of paid Twitter services and their rates.
BuyTwitterFriends.com = 10,000 Followers for $49.99 (0.0049 each)
TweetSourcer.com = 10,000 Followers for $60.00 (0.006 each)
UnlimitedTwitterFollowers.com = 10,000 Followers for $74.95 (0.0074 each)
Twitter1k.com = 5,000 Followers for $104.97 (0.0209 each)
SocialKik.com = 10,000 Followers for $150.00 (0.015 each)
USocial.net = 10,000 Followers for $447.30 (0.044 each)
Tweetcha.com = 10,000 Followers for $474.99 (0.047 each)
PurchaseTwitterFollowers.com = 5,000 Followers for $249.99 (0.049 each)

As you can see, there is a bit of swing between follower services. USocial.net being the most expensive. For this study, I will use the first three providers, test results, the possibly compare to the most expensive solutions and see if it’s actually worth the money.

The majority of these sites specialize in bringing you “untargeted” followers, but for a higher price it’s possible. If you are looking for a self managed and cheaper solution, I’d recommend Tweet Adder. Instead of paying a service to send a select amount of users for a one time cost, you can use your own software to continually bring in new targeted followers every day, and for multiple accounts. It can be a pain to follow users, then remove the ones that aren’t following you back… but you can build up a 10,000+ Twitter account for under $100 with adder software programs.

I’ve setup the new Twitter accounts, made orders with the first three follower services listed above. Now we just play the waiting game and I will report back next week on first results.

Get ready, here’s comes AdTech San Fran 2010! Internet marketers and companies will be flocking to AdTech in San Francisco, CA through April 19-21st. With the coming of AdTech, comes the time for networking, celebration and most importantly, the parties!

Below is a list of the parties going on during AdTech San Fran, mostly provided by AdRants. For any parties or events that aren’t mentioned, leave a comment and I will add them to the list.

Monday, April 19
5:00pm -  ad:tech Delegate Mixer – Conference Only
7:30pm -  ad:tech San Francisco Opening Night Party (Unofficial)
9:00pm -  Partner Weekly’s Rock Out

Tuesday, April 20
1:00pm -  Affbuzz ad:tech Underground
5:00pm -  Meetup202
6:00pm -  Blumberg Capital & DoubleVerify Cocktail Party
6:00pm -  AdRoll + Girls in Tech After Party
6pm – 8pm – WhereJohn Colins Lounge 138 Minna Street (map)
6pm – ad:tech Big Networking Bash
6:30pm -  Oldtimers Party
7:30pm -  Cocktails For A Cure
9-2am – Get Money + Get Paid AdTech Party
10:00pm -  Clickbooth Party (Win 2 Free VIP Tickets Below)
10:00pm -  Moss Networks VIP MIX+MING

Win Two VIP Tickets to ClickBooth’s Apocalyspe Party
Expect the unexpected at ClickBooth’s Apocalypse Party, where over 4,000 attendees will receive full entertainment, top notch networking and party with the Industry Immortals. RSVP now if there’s still room available. Unfortunately I had previous plans this year and won’t be making it to AdTech, which is your gain! I have TWO VIP TICKETS for ClickBooth’s party and am giving them away for anyone lucky enough to attend.

To enter, simply leave a comment on this post on why you’d like to attend CB’s Apocalypse AdTech Party. Retweet this post and receive a second entry! Please only enter if you will actually be attending AdTech. Two winners will be selected contacted and posted on Monday morning. (Comment Winner: Benny)

How exciting! It’s time for a new social advertising platform to go live. First we had Facebook, then MySpace and PlentyOfFish all opening up their networks with killer advertising platforms. With amazing demographic targeting we haven’t really seen before, it opened a whole new world for affiliate marketers. With another platform being released, we are all anxious to get in early and reap the profits of being first to place new ad campaigns. However, what should we expect to see from the Twitter ad platform?

For anyone who has used SponsoredTweets or Ad.ly, you may have been given a taste of what you might see. Unfortunately for many, advertising through sponsored messages on Twitter hasn’t been everything is cracked up to be. It’s often hard to pull a profit and the CPM prices are usually too high. It will be interesting to see how Twitter’s advertising platform compares not only to the likes of SponsoredTweet and Ad.ly, but also how much they are changing advertisers.

TechCrunch broke the news and provided even more details on Twitter’s new ad platform and what we can expect:

Here are the details outlined in the articles:

• As we previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.
• Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. The Times piece notes that companies could use this to combat negative tweets (they can place a positive tweet at the top of the page)
• A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.
• One ad will be shown at a time



• Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo
• Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets

As with most ad platforms, it’s usually limited to only a few major companies in the beginning while tests and ad results are being studied. Once the platform opens to the masses we will see an onslaught of new advertising like Twitter has never seen before. Will Twitter end up going through the same hassles as Facebook Ads in continually updating their terms and conditions, while allowing less and less affiliate related offers.

Branding can only go so far, so let’s hope for something unique and special from those first big name companies who are advertising on Twitter.

Remember when the idea of getting paid to send out “Sponsored Tweets” to your Twitter followers? It didn’t go over well and many were disgusted and hated the idea. Now with Twitter releasing their own advertising and have stated “In the next phase of Twitter’s revenue plan, it will show promoted posts in a user’s Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser.“… everyone will have to accept the fact that Twitter is a real business too and needs advertisers.

A few sites have already been reporting their thoughts on the new platform.

• AdAge -  “Twitter Has a Business Model: ‘Promoted Tweets’”
• NY Times – “Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads”
• TechCrunch – “Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets”

What are your thoughts on the new Twitter Ad Platform and how does it affect the future of businesses like SponsoredTweets and Ad.ly?