Which sites to work with?

One aspect of the freebie industry is fundamentally unfair. Sometimes, you do everything right, and still don’t get the credit you deserve. This is the primary cause for people choosing to leave. Who wants to go through all the time, effort, and expense of completing offers, and not even get the credit you paid for? Unfortunately, sometimes that’s exactly what happens.

Fortunately, this is fairly rare. A while back, just about the time Firefox 3 first came out, a bunch of the techno-nerds on the forum were discussing the topic of crediting. To be honest, most of the conversation went over my head. But the consensus was that if you do everything perfectly, you’ll get your credits about 90-95% of the time using Firefox. Safari and IE6 came in at about 90% each. IE7 was about 80-85%. The newest version of Internet Explorer (IE8), which just came out a few weeks ago at the time I’m writing this, has been given the seal of approval by the same techno-nerds, but since I’ve never used it, I can’t give any first-hand information about whether it’s good or not.  But, since I decided to trust the nerds about Firefox, it’s only fair for me to trust them now.

What I DID get out of the conversation is that even if my trading partners do everything perfectly, they’re still going to get burned 5-10% of the time if they use Firefox, and more than that using anything else. Throw in human error in the fairly complex crediting process, and you get a higher percentage still.

By the way, I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to stress it here–no matter which browser you choose to use, you absolutely MUST disable Yahoo and Google Toolbars if you have them before completing any offers.  They have security features in them which will interfere in the crediting process.  Personally, I disabled ALL toolbars before I did offers.  Better safe than sorry, and it only takes about 30 seconds.

The normal procedure to follow when you complete an offer but don’t get your credit is to submit an MCR. MCR stands for “Manual Credit Request”. You’re informing them that you’ve done one of the offers on their site but not gotten credit for it and requesting that the network owner confirm this with the advertisers, override the system, and give it to you manually.

When you have to do that, even the best-case scenario isn’t very good. Due to massive fraud, only about half of the advertisers will agree even to look at MCRs at all. If YOUR offer doesn’t, you have no recourse. Your choices are to either do another offer to replace the one which didn’t credit or to abandon the site completely. And yes, you still have to pay for the first offer, even though you didn’t get the credit. If you’ve been lucky enough to do an offer which WILL look at MCRs, you can expect to wait 4-6 weeks to hear back from the advertiser before you find out if they’ve chosen to accept yours. After the 4-6 weeks, it’s about 50/50 whether they’ll accept it or not. If your MCR is declined, you’re 4-6 weeks older, but no richer. There’s no-one to appeal to. Your choices at this point are either to do another offer to replace the one which didn’t credit or to abandon the site completely.

Because MCRs are such unattractive pains in the neck (and they require LOTS of paperwork from the site owner, too), only about half of the sites accept them at all. If you’re working on a site which doesn’t accept MCRs, even if you DID do an offer that accepts them, you have no recourse. Your choices are (you guessed it) either to do another offer to replace the one which didn’t credit or to abandon the site completely.

As soon as I realized that there was nothing I can do to make offers credit, or to make the advertisers or sites accept MCRs, or to make the ones who DO accept MCRs act more quickly, I began to succeed, because then I could base my business plan on reality the way it is, instead of the way I wish that it was. There IS a way around the whole nasty MCR mess. Different sites run different promotions every month, to try to drum up business. I’ve reached the conclusion that the very best one of these is a guaranteed credit promotion.

When a site is running a guaranteed credit promotion, (which is rare, and always comes with fine print and strings attached) the procedure when an offer doesn’t credit is different. During guaranteed credit promotions, as long as you follow the rules outlined in the fine print, and give them the information necessary to enable them to submit an MCR to the advertiser, they’ll give you your credit IMMEDIATELY, before they even contact the advertiser. Often, they’ll do this even if the offer doesn’t accept MCRs, and just eat the loss.

AFTER they’ve collected the information and given you your credit, they’ll decide on their own time whether it’s worth the aggravation and paperwork to submit the MCR to the advertiser to try to get their money. But we don’t have to care whether they get paid, or even whether they actually bothered to send it in or not. You’ve already gotten your credit, and we’ve both gotten paid. It’s the SITE which has to sit around for 4-6 weeks waiting on a decision as to whether they get paid or not.

I love guaranteed credit promotions. As best I can, I work exclusively on networks which are offering them. There are almost never enough to move my trading partners all the way to Method 2 using exclusively sites which are guaranteeing credits. But I’ll stay with the sites which do for as long as I can. At the very least, most months I can usually make sure that you’ll be working with guaranteed credit sites until you’ve mastered the process, so the amount of human error will be minimized.

In addition, I take full responsibility for chasing down the promotions that are being run every month, reading the fine print, and making sure that I know what you’ll have to do to qualify for the guaranteed credits. If the fine print or strings are unusual, I’ll tell you about them BEFORE you even start working on the site, explain any jargon which they might be using, and answer any questions you might have about the promotion. That way, you can make sure that you jump through whatever hoops they require in order to qualify for them. Your first site has nothing unusual for you to worry about to get your guaranteed credits. That’s exactly why it’s your first site.