SPRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAK

thought it was obvious.

except the traffic doesn't change

hey it's spring break.. we'll just look at porn and not buy it

LOL BINGO! you can BLAME is on anything you want to.

Maybe Jupiter was alined with Mecury and Pluto was in it's 7th solar obit. :1orglaugh

exactly.

I can't work with people who are looking for excuses. People looking for excuses are not looking for ways to MAKE money, they are looking for REASONS to explain why they are NOT making money.

I don't care if you are a noob or a vet here, you need to reread what I just posted and understand it.

Dude, people that get majority US signups are affected by MANY things. You promote clickcash, they process worldwide and are good at it, big ass difference.

I've heard that new designing trends are converting anytime and anywhere!
Some info about this:
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=587113

WTF? Find me the US residents only section of the internet. lol.

Find me which sponsors only process US transactions.

you are way off base.

For those of you who believe in slowdowns, bad internet days, you are ignorant. Don't take it as an insult, ignorant just means you don't know better, not that you are stupid.

Here is a little education compliments of TeamClickCash, a good read for everyone here:

My Porn-Myth:

DO NOT believe that there is a slow time of the year. Do NOT make excuses for why your sales/traffic is down. There are no slow times of the year.. I repeat there are no slow times of the year. (in the adult online industry)

It is ok if you think there are. Just about everyone thinks there are slow times and they make sure to teach others this. You need to unteach yourselves. This way of thinking teachs people how to make excuses and put blame on something else other then themselves, and honestly it is not true anyway. But it is definetly a negative way of thinking regardless what you believe, and you should always be thinking positive. When sales are down think how can i do better not, oh well its not my fault kids just went back in school, etc..

Let me get the excuses out of way... you will hear:
Nov/Dec... it's the holidays people are saving for Christmas, so not spending on porn.
Jan - people not spending their credit cards are maxed out because of christmas.
April - taxes, people too concerned about pay taxes
June - Aug - summer sucks, everyone on vaction or spending more time outside.
Aug/Sept - kids are back in school. just had to spend a lot on tuition or school supplies.
etc...

My personal favorite is the weather... The myth is that when the weather is nice sales are down because more people go out and when the weather is bad people stay in and spend money.

Having so many excuses causes problems from time to time. The winter is believed to be good by many because the northern US gets a lot of snow, it is cold, and people stay in and search porn. But the holidays (christmas in particular) is a bad time of the year because people are traveling or spending a lot of money on gifts... so i guess when you have a good day it is because there was a lot of snow and a bad day was caused by too many people going shopping that day.

Sporting events... another personal favorite of mine. When you have a bad day and it happens to be a sunday from august - jan, don't fear you have the NFL to blame it on. (this works well for Monday nights too and if you are a college fan then you know no one is online during college football saturday). Superbowl!!! Are you crazy! no one makes money during the superbowl why even waste your bandwidth, just shut your servers down.

Politics... If you noticed your sales have dropped over the last couple years, blame it on IRAQ. And when you are having a bad day if it wasn't a holiday and the weather was bad and there was no sporting event, you can always find something political that happened to blame it on... Tentions increase with China... hey the pope died today,, sales tanked..

OHH the economy.. almost forget that one.. Easy to blame it on the economy, just blame Bush... damn gas is up who can afford porn when it is 2.50 at the pumps.

There are so many excuses I could go on and on but the only legit excuse is you.

You can see I covered just about every day of the year above with excuses. so if all of these excuses were true then no one would ever make money, every day would suck. What happens is people don't think about the excuses (slow downs) till they see their sales are down, then they think "why are my sales down" at this point there are two ways you can go.. positive or negative. A negative person will start trying to justify why his sales are down and he will find like people so they can console each other. A positive person will double check all of his stuff, server, links all work, nothing been changed, traffic sources still sending traffic, etc.. and then he will start working harder to make more money. A negative person will make excuses faster and more often and will eventually create his own slow times. " I'm taking off this sunday, not going to make any money with all the football games on, etc..." A positive person will work harder on the "supposed' slow time to ensure he makes more money then usual during these times.

If after reading all of this you still don't believe me thats fine, just tell yourself you will work harder on those days to make money and try keep a positive point of view. At least take away from this the importance of being positive. It is hard for people to be untaught. All of us were taught to make excuses. All of us myself included. It is only natural, we want to make ourselves feel better for why we are not doing as good as we like. Everyone does it to some extent.

A little bit of what I have noticed over the last 6 years.
Slow downs affect all mainstream industries and are magnified when over a smaller location. BUT Adult online (world wide) is not affected by "slow downs".

I had an average day on September 11th (911) with sales. My sales are consistant every week through out the year. I am not the only person. the only time my stats differ is when i do something to affect them (neglect my stuff for a few days they go down, work double time they go up, never fails). If you post on a messageboard or network with a lot of people you will see this is common, for every 1 person that says they are having a bad day there is another person saying he is having a great day.

Also, there are the "scrubs and shaves" people. I am not sure if they are the same people who believe slow downs and when they can't blame it on a football game or time of the year the blame the sponsor for shaving... ive seen them all get blammed by the way.

Your sales will be up some days and down some days it is 100% fact, You can't keep doing better and better every single day. And don't micro analyze. If you ride the roller coster of watching your stats day to day or even worse hour to hour and comparing previous days or hours to the current sales, you will go insaine.. not too mention spend too much time not working. Use sales as an indicator.. when you see them low double check everything.. and then turn it up a notch.. put more effort in.. when you see them high don't be dissapointed when they go back to averge. it happens. Try to look at your stats week to week to compare how well you are doing.

It's funny I've never heard someone say " I'm having a bad day today and it's my fault" LOL ANYONE ever hear that?

I don't mean to sound like I am on soap box. Just trying to help some of you guys who have never heard a different view point on this. Being successful has a lot to do with having the right attitude. If one person reads this and takes something good from it then it was worth the long post ;)

BTW exercise caution when debating this with a firm believer of "slow downs" to some people excuses are their crutch and they dont want to face reality and will not believe what you are saying no matter how convincing you are.

Look here you god damned hard headed know it all fuck. Adult programs use 2 count them 2 main billers. Clickcash bills their own shit. Clickcash has always gotten more out of the US signups through than the 2 main adult billers.

That being said I just looked at my downline stats for clickcash. 27 affiliates that push decent sales, 26 of them are well under their normal dollar amount. The average is 34% lower sales this week than from 1 month ago. Take your argumentative assed out attitude and blow it out your ass ok? :thumbsup

I can hear the keyboard banging now, here comes Will with more wisdom!

everyone should quit now, there is no money in porn.

:helpme

about average for me.. just another day

no point, you know it all aready i would only be wasting me time with you.

so why are your sales down this week? Spring break ?

Mine aren't too far off from normal. As for why my downline is off who fucking knows but there can be reasons for signups going down. As much as you dont' want to believe it by your 55 mile long post up there sales are not a straight line across all year. If you don't think Steve Lightspeed has the experience to know when something is up you are nuts.

Oh and if the main billers can get those non US residents so easy then why do programs geo IP foreign shit? Why do they use alternative billing methods? Why is there a constant struggle in the industry to get the money from these people? God damn they should just call Will, he can make those processors magically approve more out of country cards!

Even you can't believe your constant shills.

last 2 days have been slow, in comparison to last week that was huge for sales.

Yesterday wasn't too bad but TODAY SUCKS :2 cents:

obviously you haven't read my posts, i have STATED several times that people's stats can't be straight line, when you actually read what i post before you reply then I might reply back to you.

WTF does shills have anything to do with me not believing in slow downs, or good weather affecting my sales. explain that one?

Lastly, if steve is neive enough to think that the reasons his sales were down on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 was because of spring break, then that is steve's ignorance or anyone else that belives that.

I will post FACTS for everyone WHY this " spring break" was not the reason why someone's sales were down on Tuesday, or any day for that fucking matter.

FACT: 5,747,190 students (major universities)
FACT: 2,282,556 students were on spring break this past week March 13- 19. I think it is safe to say that at least half were girls and we know account for very little of our sales. Not everyone goes on spring break.
For the ones that do go, the weekends are the most popular. I know first hand, I went several times, sometimes more then once a year. So lets assume that spring break affected your sales it would have hit them hard on friday when the MAJORITY of students got out of class and headed out of town. Class all day, then pack up and then hit the highway, check into hotel party all night. This happens on FRIDAY, not a TUESDAY. So if Spring break was the cause of the problem, meaning that a very very small portion of the entire US population that was "off of school and on vacation" which affected your sales, then Friday would have been the day you would have noticed this.

Source: http://www.tripsmarter.com/panamacit...sbcalendar.htm

I think i am going back to " take my word for it" and you people can believe me if you want to or not. Proving this to you takes too much of my valuable time and you still probably are not going to believe what you read anyway.

I'm almost certain its Paycom/CCBill scrub fucking everyone. Sales have been very erratic this month. Somebody is probably doing a bunch of fraud and they are scrub fucking everyone to bring down the average chargeback ratios. Its a few bad apples fucking everyone. Paycom/CCbill use a lot of the same scrubbing stuff so I think its time to look for a true alternate biller to put in the cascade.

the big factor that consistently interrupts sales that is consumer-related and not vendor/middleware-related is a big ass news story. for example 9/11...

will, your not as smart as you want to be.... think about storms, think what they do, especially when phone lines, cable lines and such are destroyed. what happens when you cut these lines or destroy building that routers are in.
major storms cause problems. period.
I missed it but what website do you own?

will76 gets 48 signups a day 7 days a week 365 days a year, every 30 minutes on the dot, never any slow time for him........

ya I am sure he does. A legend in his own mind

storms causing your sales to go down is about as relivant as which website i own is to my post about this topic.

i own teamclickcash.com and about 200 other domains, am i required to post them to make a point here ?

Ok, lets follow your logic.... ( i don't know why i even do this.) how many people do you think were affected by those storms, how many people in the us ? Lets say, that .0001% lost power or internet access because of those storms, why would your sales be down significantly ??? why wouldn't they be relative to the amount of people who were actually affected. Please explain.

This how a storm affects your sales. You own a resturant in middle town us, a tornado rips through the little town and half of the homes are destroyed and you have no power. You can't open the next day and a lot of people are out of town staying with friends. Your sales at your restaurant suffer from storms.

When you operate a business online, even if it was just in the US, and somethign happens that affects a small portion of the population in a small area, you will NOT see this reflected in your sales. Hmmm i usually get 10 signups a day, but today i had 5 because of the storms in the midwest.??? :upsidedow :warning

Will is a hardheaded ass period. Yesterday (the day Steve was talking about) was one of the worst days in a long long time for 27 people I can keep an eye on. This week is slow for 26 people and yesterday sucked. But god damn don't tell Will that because it's impossible. He'll pull some fucking irrelevant statistic out of his ass and call you a moron.

another fucking idiot that can't read.

scoll up a post and try reading again.

Last seven days have been slowwwwwwww for me :(

i want to give you access to how my clickcash stats so you can see how my downline did yesterday. I don't want you to come back and say i am makign up shit i want you to log in and check. They had a much better then average day. So how do you explain that, my guys did great yesterday, the people " you keep an eye on" did bad.

ICQ me chad, check my stats and educate me.

Why don't you explain it? Oh wait you can't, does that mean there isn't a damn reason? Last damn time you were on here yelling about clickcash specifically not being slow their fucking server wouldn't even resolve for 5 seperate people I had test it. Their tracking was all fucked up for a couple of days for whatever reason and you were STILL yelling about this same shit. Let me guess, the 5 people I know checking something are too stupid to know how to do it right and you have all the answers? Why don't you spit out your other tried and true suggestion "change your pages!". Doesn't matter if they've been consistent for 3 or 4 years, when they drop in half and stay there for days on end it's because you're promo isn't fresh. The shit is retarded and I think you know that. You're just so used to coaching 100 noobs that scream when their 1 signup a day is a 0 the next day you don't even bother to look anymore.

I dropped CCBill on a PPC account I was spending thousands of dollars a month on because the 1:50 ratio went to 1:3000 overnight and never recovered. What excuse do you have for that one? I'll just bypass common sense and ask you these important questions from now on.

:321GFY no need to waste any more time

sarcasm Do you speak it?

Steve, you don't look at the yearly picture? Or quarterly? You're not going down man, not with your portfolio.

you like all these "lets say" games, allot of noobs like to play that, but lets just say you have no idea who or what was affected if any, and neither do I.
its obvious your still confused and do not know how the net works. I was not talking about a few people losing power, you should read what I wrote and not want you want to believe.

Now to go way back to my first post that you had to be an asshole about, you should read that also because that also seemed to confuse you.

That's not correct, nor is it logical. :)

If there were a chargeback issue with a processor, or with a merchant account, reducing the number of transactions coming through the gate would actually make the chargeback situation worse.

For instance if someone gets 1000 sales and 3 months later there are 100 chargebacks from those sales, that would be a 10% cb ratio in the month the chargebacks came in - NOT referred back to the month the charges were made.

So if you then decided to scrub so hard that the number of transactions the next month was only 500, you would still have the same chargebacks coming in from 3 months prior -- when there was a problem under your theory of scrub -- and with the same 100 chargebacks you would have a 20% ratio, or double the ratio.

HOWEVER, if you doubled the transaction volume to 2000 transactions, that same 100 chargebacks would end up being a 5% ratio, a drop by half.

Neither 5, 10 nor 20% is allowed, I chose the numbers to make the math easy for the example. Chargebacks are allowed in percentages under 1 or 2, depending on the region, and getting more volume is the name of the game.

So this theory of scrubbing is yet again proven false.

Who knows why some days suck and some days are great. There is no real logic for it, and the law of averages isn't formulated on one days worth of numbers.

LOL... you should apply this to yourself.
:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Good post Kimmy. Most people don't realise that more is better.

Will, post some stats up for inspiration :)

It is rare for me to add to a thread like this but I will. We have 10 years of processing on our own merchant account and this has been a bad week cross the board, today being a real bummer.

I agree with Will that trends cycle up and down and I also agree that we had normal sales on 9/11/2001. It is odd when so many people see a dip at the same time.

We are seeing excellent, high traffic and much lower than normal closing rates. Declines are not any higher than average so procssing is not the issue.

Sales do cycle and might shift around to different programs unless there are Internet problems. I have no explanation that makes any sense for this particular cycle but unless men have stopped masterbating things will cycle back.

It's a horrible week and so far unexplainable by anyone. I just hope it ends soon.

This is most sponsors list of excuses as well. I am going to put my foot up the next sponsors ass that trys telling me any of these things ever again.

Overall maybe but some individual programs definately get scrubbed harder at times.

Your assuming that it takes 3 months for people to chargeback their credit card. If they chargeback within a couple weeks then scrubbing will most certainly be effective in lowering chargeback ratio for the month. Heavy scrub + rebills will dramatically lower chargeback ratio. The other major flaw in your logic is that you say by increasing transactions you will decrease the chargeback ratio. This obviously isn't correct if the chargebacks take less than a month to occurr. The other major problem with this is that even if you assume that chargebacks take an average of 3 months to occur, by increasing transactions you will increase the chargeback ratio dramatically in 3 months. So if they increased transactions they would destroy themselves in 3 months unless they dramatically increased transactions processed every single month. This would be basically a ponzi scheme where at one point the bubble would burst. Since ccbill/paycom have been around a long time I find it highly unlikely they would do this. So logically if chargebacks are high this month they would scrub immediately to prevent more chargebacks. And assuming a long term chargeback ratio they would still scrub to avoid a bubble bursting scenario.

I think that sums it up.

We had a record day yesterday, but average day so far today.

Why do so many people reply to someone and type their response above the person's quote, instead of below it, like a normal homosapien would do? This is not a preference thing, it's just incorrect.

I know. I hate when people do that.

Today has been HORRIBLE! No rebills, very very very low signups.....This is pretty fucked up. We're down at least 75% today.

I saw that one coming since even before I was born man :glugglug

I dont know why people are jumping all over Wil,l his points are largely valid. I have always believed the summer slowdown to be caused by a webmaster slowdown as webmasters work less hard in th eheat, take time off, go on vacation etc. In some years I have encountered a drop in sales but if im honest with myself it was because I stopped working so hard. When ive worked hard ive had some of the best periods of growth during the summer months. However I think that he also is naive to believe that there are never random problems which can drastically impact sales for people on a given day. He is talking longterm and his points are valid but there can be short term problems.

For example when CCbill changed their affiliate admin recently and people complained of problems I noticed that for a few days our net% jumped from its usual 60%~ level to 80%~ before returning to normal. Anybody would be hard pressed to convince me that those were not related. I know for sure I did no extra promo work of my own that would result in the increase in unreferred sales and traffic etc looked normal.

But yeah, dont stress about a single days sales, work hard and only analyse your stats in minute detail once a week. Or once a month. As your sales volume increases things become more stable and patterns appear more clear.

Did you see the original poster Will was talking shit about to start off? I think he has enough experience to know when a day is shit or not. :2 cents:

Fucking slow down for everything now !
Xmas, after Xmas, spring break, summer, holidays, olympics, bin laden
arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
What's left ?
42 days in a year ?

I hear that. A lot of sponsors really believe this shit as well. I believe that from a sponsors position their over all sals may drop at different times of the year, like summer for example. But this is not from a lack of customers signing up, but from a lack of work by their affiliates. What happens over the summer, kids out of school, people take vacations, so do webmasters. Webmasters take more time off, so they work less, therefore make less money. There are still plenty of customers out there, so people like me, who continue to work 24/7 continue to make good money.

I believe processor problems can affect people. Sure that is possible. If you processing through company A and company A has processing problems, sure you will be affected. But beyond that, everything else is an excuse IMO.

So why does someone's sale tank one day. If you go from 1:50 to 1:5000 from the same traffic, sure you have a problem. If you check EVERYTHING on your end, maybe it is the sponsor, i am sure they are not 100% problem free. So it is you or the sponsor causing the drop, nothing else. Not the weather, or time of the year, or current events, or anything like that.

The problem most people have is that they don't understand, with all things being equal) some days you will just get more paying customers then the next. 100 people walk into a sex shop, 25 buy. The next day different 100 people walk into sex shop, 43 might buy. That just happens, and it has nothing to do with anything else other then the law averages. You have to average your sales over time, day to day they will vary under exact same conditions. Week to week, or month to month depending upong your traffic volume, they will be very consistant.

This is my last post regarding this issue or even trying to help people for that matter. 95% of the time sales drop (not just the normal up and down t hat averages out, but really decline over time), it is the webmasters fault. 98% of these people blame it on something else and make excuses. Excuses = not trying to fix the problem but accepting that it is out of your hands, not your fault. So they will never be more productive. So here I am trying to help educate people, so they can compete with me. I don't mind helping TCC people which also helps me, but why am i trying to help educate all of the clueless here who are in the dark about slow downs. So i concluded I am the idiot for trying to help these people, I just assume let them keep t hinking what they are thinking and keep making what they are making.

The other thing people don't realize this thread was titiled, very slow sales today. Ofcourse you are going to get more people who had lower sales reading this then people who were having a good day. just the same if i started a " I had great sales today" thread, more people who had good sales day would post there then people who did not.

So i am not going to debate this with you people, you are right I am wrong, I am a legend in my own mind, i am nothing, don;t listen to me. However, if you want to work with me, or have intelligent conversation I will never turn anyone down. But I am drawing a line in the sound here and now, if you believe the pope dieing, war with iraq, the summer, kids back in school, bad storms in the us, etc.. please do not signup to TCC, and do not work with me. I refuse to work with negative people who rather make up bullshit excuses then go out there and bust their ass and make their own results.