Technoprovement: The Blog of Sam Jones

This post might be lengthy. I haven’t written on my blog in a year and a half but I have to put this down somewhere just so I can put this thing behind me. I’ve felt sick to my stomach for the last 24 hours and I just received some information that has helped me to understand the full picture of what happened to my company’s Adwords account. This is a valuable lesson for me in business and could be even more valuable for new internet advertisers who are just getting started.

By day I am a programmer and a systems administrator. By night (and pretty much my entire weekends) I work with my girlfriend, my cousin, and his fiance as part of an internet marketing company we created. What we do is to create advertisements to promote other websites, buy advertising space for these advertisements, and we are paid a commission if our ads perform (if we earn money for the website owners). This is known as affiliate marketing. I really love it because we get to combine all of our skills and build something cool. We are paid if we perform, and we lose money if we don’t. In that sense it’s very exciting (as you might imagine).

I had really just been getting started advertising with Google, having worked very hard for the last year to build a bankroll and the skills to believe I could be successful with them. And my first few weeks of testing were going really well. Google has a tremendous amount of inventory and wonderful targeting allowing you to reach your intended audience. Long term I felt like Google was going to be a huge part of our success.

Yesterday I discovered that my google Adwords campaigns had stopped receiving impressions. My cousin who works full time for our company called Google’s support line and was informed that we had been suspended for what we were told was “repeated violations of the display url policy”. This meant that when visitors were clicking on our ads they were not going to the sites that we had written on the ads.

Not to get too technical here but the reason for this was that certain websites only pay for internet traffic from certain countries. So the intermediary between us and these websites (the affiliate networks) will redirect traffic that is not coming from the correct countries to other websites where the traffic can still be profitable. Usually this is ok (because the other website is similar), and the affiliate networks will turn it off if you ask them to. Generally the affilate marketer does not receive any commissions from this “untargeted” traffic. The only way to see if this is happening to to view the link from a computer in that country, or to use what is known as a proxy.

We thought we had all of our campaigns setup correctly. We had asked the affiliate networks we were working with to insure that this geo redirection wasn’t enabled because our first set of ads were getting disapproved for this problem. Eventually all of our ads seemed to be setup correctly and we thought we were good. Then yesterday we get suspended and we were left scratching our heads as to why.

Today, after talking to every connection we have that “knows someone in Google” and getting more feedback on our specific case, we found out that one affiliate network we were working with was redirecting international traffic to an adult offer. We’ve never promoted anything adult ever and don’t intend to in the future. And we hadn’t run any Google traffic with this affiliate network before.

Google caught this problem and the new ads we made were never approved, so thankfully no one was sent to that adult page. This of course got our account flagged though.

Google suspends people for doing horrible stuff. Some affiliate marketers promote very shady offers, and of those some are outright scams. Google has to be vigilant against people trying to game their system for financial gain. Its possible that they saw this situation and thought that we were intentionally doing this.

The only way we could have caught this to to have checked the links from proxies in multiple countries, and in the future I’m doing this with ever offer I run. New advertisers, especially if you are getting into international traffic this is very important to remember.

Google, if you ever let me advertise again, I promise to you I will never promote anything through this particular affiliate network in the future. I’ve turned off all traffic from everywhere else that I was sending to them. This was an accident, we didn’t know what was happening, and it will never happen again. You can verify from your logs, we don’t own the last hop (their tracking domain), and no paid traffic ever went over to them because the ads pointing to them weren’t approved.

Either way I am very sorry, I’ve tried extremely hard to be professional and this is a huge disappointment. At first I thought there was just a technical glitch and now I realize that it was much worse.

To new advertisers, be very careful who you work with. There are now over 300 CPA affiliate networks and some of them will cut your throat to make a few extra dollars. This is a painful lesson for me and ultimately it could be fairly devastating for my company’s long term plans. Fortunately we’ve made it as far as we have without relying on Google’s traffic, but if they were our primary source and we made the mistake of working with the wrong people we would literally be out of business now. So for even experienced advertisers expanding into new traffic sources, be careful as one mistake can cost you dearly.

I recently discovered Evernote which is a very handy service that bills itself as your external brain. In a nutshell, the services that helps to you organize “notes” and access them from anywhere (web, desktop, mobile phone). A note can be an a quick text note, a clipping from webpage or your desktop, any type of image, or an audio recording.

What makes Evernote special is that has three killer features and a very compelling price point (free for low to medium use and $5 a month for more space than you could need).

To start off with, Evernote has wonderful optical character recognition (OCR) technology which lets you search your images for text strings. Now you can take a picture of someone’s business card and find their info by searching for their name, number, email, address, whatever is on their card. You’d be surprised how often the ability to search images can come in very handy. Looking for a new house? Start snapping pictures of “For Sale” signs as your pass by and search for them later.

Secondly, it has tremendous search capabilities, letting you specify tags, geographical location the note was taken, date created, whether the note contained a to-do item, whether that to-do has been completed or not, etc. Just about anything you can think of, you can search for. And searching is faster than putting things in folders (think gmail).

Finally, Evernote has outstanding syncing capabilities, letting you access and store your data wherever you are. The iPhone app is wonderful and they continue add device specific features to the service (geo tagging using the iPhones’s GPS for example). They have really pulled off one of the best desktop/web/mobile solutions I’ve seen for any service yet.

So what does Evernote have to do with GTD? What’s great is that the tools are very flexible so they can work with your existing personal organization scheme. So if you want to apply GTD principles for example, you create notebooks for GTD contexts and then use tagging for projects. Or you can use notebooks for both contexts and projects and search by combining them. You can create individual notes for action items, or you can have a single note with a number of items each with a “to-do” checkbox. Through its really great UI and functionality, Evernote lends itself to your style instead of forcing you to use it in a certain way.

To wrap it up, Evernote is a great service that can both boost your productivity and help you have to remember less while making your information easily available from wherever you are. For someone like me who is constantly suffering from information overload and has a horrible memory to start with, Evernote is exactly what I needed.

Juixe Techknow has posted a truly wonderful collection of programming quotes. Some of my personal favorites:

The software isn’t finished until the last user is dead.
Anonymous Support Group Member

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Tom Cargill

Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?
Anonymous Code Monkey

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Brian W. Kernighan

So the iTunes App Store has been out for a little over a month now and we are starting to see some initial sales numbers. The remarkable thing is that some of these numbers are rather, well, remarkable. Let’s look at a couple examples:

1. Tap Tap Tap has posted their (Semi)Final Numbers for July with the juicy takeaway being that their two current iPhone applications brought in $75,177.38, leaving them with $52,815 after Apple’s cut. Simple math here shows that they would be on pace to make $633,780.00 during the next year for just these two applications provided they maintained this pace. Of course, they are already hard at work on their next two applications as detailed in their post here.
2. Mac Rumors has posted that a smaller developer named MintApps is currently making a more modest but still impressive $158 a day from their nutrition application. The significant datapoint here is that this particular application is currently only ranking in around as the 800th most popular application on the App store
3. NeoSeeker reports that overall App sales for Apple are currently raking in $1 million a day.

The really crazy thing is that we are only at the very beginning of the app store. As adoption grows, well you get the picture.

I apologize for the delay in posting over the last 2 months (both regarding part 2 of the Python bot series and new articles in general). I’ve been doing a lot of traveling not keeping up on things as well as I should. So in that vein, I’ve decided to write a post with some quick tips on traveling for the technologically-inclined.

1. Skype, Skype, Skype. If you are going international, get an account and prepay for some phone time. Then buy a portable headset and microphone. Whether you bring a laptop with you or go to Internet cafes, Skype will allow you to make calls for incredibly low rates anywhere you can get an internet connection. For me right now, my cell phone costs 50x what Skype does per minute to call back to the USA.
2. Manage servers? Sign up with Pingdom for active monitoring. You can then rest assured that as long as you aren’t getting emails or SMS messages, your servers are working fine. This is a good idea even if you aren’t traveling, but since you might be checking your voicemail less (or never) if you are on the go, moving more communication to email can be very helpful. This of course requires you to still check email but you might be already planing on doing this anyway.
3. A Nintendo DS can help you pass time on long flights and train rides. But to carry less stuff, get a mod card and put all your games on one cartridge. Only games you already legally own of course (wink wink).
4. On a budget and/or want to meet more people? I recommend exploring the options of couch surfing and staying at youth hostels. In either situation you might end up scoring free wifi as a great bonus.
5. Use online apps to help plan your trip and save money. A great list of the 25 best is located at this geek travel guide

Have a safe and happy trip!

Sometimes you need an excuse to learn a new programing language. For me, that language is Python and that excuse is creating a ‘bot’ for Twitter. I won’t talk about what the bot does yet, since it’s only about 40% done at this point, but I thought the experience of learning how to create it was valuable and worth sharing.

Why Python? Well Google, xkcd, and Mark Pilgrim seem to like it. For me, that’s actually good enough right there. And why Twitter? My good friends Shawn Smith and Mike Lambie think it’s a pretty cool service and will probably keep growing. So I figure it’s worth learning the Twitter APIs.

Continue reading ‘Your First Twitter Bot (in Python)-Part 1′