Review: make money online with T3Leads.com

I was recently contacted by T3Leads to review their affiliate network and that's exactly what I've done. You may have read a few other reviews scattered around the Internet because they seemingly went on a massive marketing spree, chalking up reviews on high profile blogs like JohnChow.com.

T3leads.com is a pay-per-lead affiliate program - they say that "We provide our affiliates with an arsenal of promo tools that are constantly being refreshed by our creative team for maximum performance. You can work with both public web sites, and private web sites own by you." So basically you sign up and they have affiliate deals for you to promote; if a user navigates there from your site and *does something* then you get paid. Simple right?

So what does T3Leads.com actually do for you?
You go through a nice easy registration process (which actually uses AJAX in an appropriate manner to validate your entries) you're through to the admin panel. It's a little counter intuitive because the only navigation you have is a drop-down-on-hover bar at the top. I'm a little unsure on the difference between "Public" and "Private" websites in this particular context and the admin interface holds no answer...

Clicking on "Public Websites" gives me a reasonable list of fairly generic landing pages - clearly tailored towards PPC marketing. The landing pages look like every other landing page you've had the misfortune of landing upon; each targetted towards a specific CPA goal. You're provided with a URL to refer users to (http://411payday.com/?affid=4180 for example). No prizes for spotting the subtle affiliate referal ID in the querystring there.

They're helpful enough to provide you with a list of keywords to use should you wish to drop a PPC campaign on it; which seems like an inherantly bad idea. You see the way to make money on PPC is to have enough suitably long-tail keywords with a low CPC, but specifically targetted to something with a desirable CPA. This way you can get a reasonable number of clicks through at minimal cost (because no one else is bidding on those keywords) and hopefully end up sitting in profit.

The complete opposite thing you'd want is 100 other PPC marketers all throwing users at the same (already oversaturated) market, using the same landing page and keywords as you. The CPC will go up, conversions will suffer and you'll just be wasting your money. The landing pages aren't bad, but sharing keywords with the [x] other users on T3Leads seems like burning money to me.

Banners, banners everywhere
Another thing that T3leads.com does that is actually pretty helpful is offer banners for both themselves and the affiliate campaigns held within. So if you're not into Pay Per Click marketing you can simply grab the source code for the banners and throw them on your blog in a decent position. Click throughs come for free, any sign ups are profit = good times.

They also provide code for a pop-up banner but anyone who uses that deserves to be set on fire. Pop-ups are one of the most evil contraptions on the Internet and we need to encourage marketers to avoid using them. They're annoying, invasive and ultimately browsers will think your website is a terrorist because of it. Pop-ups and pop-unders might convert semi-well, the CTR might be good but they're immoral - don't use them!

Worryingly quiet on how much I get paid?
One of the tools that T3Leads.com uses to market itself is by claiming to have the "highest payouts in the country" but no where do you see quite how much a conversion on each campaign is worth. This is a little worrying for me; I'd never, ever spend money on PPC where the CPA isn't set in stone. It's called risk management. Work out the CPA, the average CPC and the conversion rate - if the CPA is low then the CPC must be tiny for you to make profit. Which I'm guessing isn't the case because you'll probably be sharing the same keywords as the other T3Leads users...

Payment intervals don't matter
The payment interval is a delightfully short 2 weeks, but to me this doesn't matter. T3Leads inability to quote how much money each campaign signup will generate for me rules out any chance of me using it as a PPC portal. Additionally the subject matter is niche enough that very few blogs will be able to run the banners for these campaigns and see anything meaningful in return.

My advice to T3leads is to be up-front about how much each conversion is worth because otherwise uptake is going to be really slow. I'd never run a PPC campaign on something uncertain like that and I challenge anyone else to do the same. It's a nice idea and I like the fact that they're providing the landing pages, but ultimately they need to address a few of these concerns before the business takes off properly.

If you'd like to buy a sponsored review, email me at steven.york@seopher.com and I'll give you information of where to send payment.

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