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Effective API Posting
If you are not familiar with API or Application Programming Interface please read this Wikipedia article. Application programming interface - Wikipedia
API postings are becoming very popular with dating sites both mainstream and adult. In order to explain the benifits lets look at how I use API posting. 1. Surfer goes to one of my dating sites such as realfreedate.comĀ*- realfreedate Resources and Information. (if you signup use a fake email addy) 2. Surfer inputs his information in the fields and hits the search button. 3. When the search button is hit I API post his information to a dating site that is paying me. 4. That dating site(buyer) creates a free dating account for that surfer and emails him a welcome email. In that welcome email is a url that when the member clicks logs him into his account at the buyers site and also acts to confirm his account there. It's that simple. There are many advantages to this sort of posting. 1. The person generating this API posting has complete control of what dating site or sites he signs his members up to. He can in real time switch from one dating sponsor to another without having to change out banners and links. We all have seen how a dating site can do great for many days then for some unknown reason thier ratios and conversions drop like a rock. That is normally due to inboxing problems on their end but we will talk about that later. API posting allows you to quicky switch from posting to one dating sponsor to another. It also allows you to make and test your own signup pages. Surfers see the same dating site pages all the time. Unique and different pages is the key to getting surfers to signup. Being able to make your own signup pages is a big advantage. 2. You can API post the same surfer to more than one dating site at a time therefore increasing your chances of him upgrading and you making a sale. This is the tricky part so be carefull. The average dating site member signs up for 3 to 4 dating sites. Use this figure as a guideline. Signing up a member to 20 different dating sites is going to fill his email box with so many welcome emails that he will know that YOU are the source of these unwanted emails. Using API you can post him to a dating site at time of signup at your site, then another one 24 hours later, another one 48 hours later etc. This is much better than signing him up at multiple dating sites at the time of join. And this is most important: DO NOT sign him up at dating sites that are known to sell this same information to spammers or other dating sites. Now for the disadvantages. The main disadvantage of API posting is problems with the dating sites you API post to themselves. I have yet to see a single dating site that has worked out all the bugs and learned how to fully monetize API postings. Here's some common problems I have encountered 1. Some dating sites require too many fields. Some dating sites require the "Description" and "Looking For" in order to post. This is simply not practicle for most sites that API post. My join form realfreedate.comĀ*- realfreedate Resources and Information. has the required fields that is most common and practicle. In fact the sites that I do the best with only require the email address of the surfer, his IP address, and gender. The less the better. Some dating sites tend to think that the more information they gather at signup the higher the quality the lead is. This is true to a degree but requiring a lot of fields can mean 100 signups at 50% productivity versus 1000 signups at 25% productivity. The math is in favor of less fields. 2. Most dating sites do not return a auto login/confirm url upon posting. When you API post a member to a dating site you REALLY need thier API to respond to yours with a url that acts as a autologin and a confirm url. And this url needs to always work, not just the first time. Members bookmark this url and can use it to login and you can advertise this url to them so they do login the dating site you are trying to promote. Some dating sites send the login url and the user name and password in their email so the surfer has to copy and paste it to login. Surfers are lazy, hell I know I am. If its not one click them I'm not interested. Surfers EXPECT urls to log them in. Copy and pasting your user name was great back in 1999. How many times have you went to a site you had a account with and couldn't remember your user name and password and didn't feel like bothering with doing a password reset or reminder? Most people will just say to hell with it and go join another site. HAVING A AUTO LOGIN URL/CONFIRM URL IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN MONETIZING API POSTINGS. 3. Many dating sites direct the surfer to the credit card page when they click the confirm url. Aggressive is one thing but sending someone directly to a page where they have to pay right away in this situation is quite frankly the poster child of bad marketing. This tactic may work great if its a member that signed up for your site at your site, but for API postings its a sure fire way to lose a potential sale. A member API posted to you has never seen your site so why would they pay before they can see what your site has to offer? This is a no brainer yet many dating sites continue to do this. Use dating sites that send the new API posted member to thier complete profile or home page. 4. Some dating sites sell your members information. Avoid these sites. While it may be in their TOS, you don't get paid for this and the end result is that the member you worked so hard to get will soon have his email address rendered unusable due to the large amounts of spam. It's real easy to find out what dating sites do this, simply make a yahoo email address and signup as a free member and check daily for spam. 5. Some dating sites are not proactive in getting your members to confirm. Use dating sites that send reminder emails to members that have not confirmed at least once a week. Many send 1 or 2 reminder emails then stop sending. I recently attended a google conferance where it was stated that the average dating site member will take 2 to 3 weeks to decide what dating sites to join after finding them. Common sense tells us that if this is the case then it probably takes them another 2 to 3 weeks to upgrade once they have joined a dating site. API post to dating sites that are agressive. 6. Most dating sites do not allow the same email address twice. Most dating sites will not allow someone to signup with the same email address more than one time. Many people may have created a account 3 years ago at a site and forgot all about it. Try to use dating sites that allow them to make a second account with that email addy so you can get paid if they upgrade. Helping a affiliate from 3 years ago is not my idea of good business. If you send the signup YOU should get paid for it. Last but not least cover your ass. Put in your TOS that you can and will sell and share the members info with third parties. I even have a checkbox at the bottom where members can opt out of this. While API posts are not as high quality as a click on a banner, the sheer quantity has a big advantage. Look for other programs that accept API posting besides dating sites. The market is wide open. Thank you Choker |
great post :thumbsup
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Choker, thank you for taking time to participate! I know how busy you are and how valuable your time is, and appreciate you sharing info in this series.
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Cool stuff.
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very nice post, some valuable api info Ive been looking for! thanks
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Interesting read.
Are the Educational series things an officially sanctioned thing, or can any title a thread "Educational Series" if it might have some thing informational to offer? |
Excellent information! I really like how you have taken the time to not only illustrate the benefits but touch on the disadvantages as well.
Thank you. :thumbsup:thumbsup |
Great Post. Thank you.
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Is it legal to do that? |
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Good stuff, man. This is valuable info for those that know what to do with it.
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Choker - Thx for a great post! :thumbsup
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Very good post Choker, some amazing info for anyone interested in doing an API.
As for your french join page http://realfreedate.com/x2-dating.php way to many mistakes on there my friend. Let me know if you need help with it. |
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I'm getting a lot of ICQ's about the one click url that serves as login and confirm so let me go into more detail.
If I have a join page when the surfer clicks join I api that member at that moment to the target dating site. If that target dating site responds with a one click login/confirm url I can simply redirect the surfer to that url and log him directly into that target dating site. The best format for this url is simply like http://datingsite.com/username=joebl...sword=whatever And make that url bookmarkable, don't redirect it to home or whatever, make that the home page. Surfers are getting lazier by the day, the less hassle we make it for them to login the better off we are. |
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Thats a great read Choker some interesting facts on there thanks buddy
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thanks :thumbsup
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Great stuff! Thx! :thumbsup
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Aside from purely legal issues, Choker mentioned a couple of things related to pissing off a customer and basically being a scumbag or not. Quote:
worked so hard to get will soon have his email address rendered unusable due to the large amounts of spam", the customer is not going to be happy with you, is not going to keep buying from you, and will rightly decide that you are a scumbag. Decide for yourself to what extent you want to provide your customers with a quality service and build customer loyalty versus how much of a scumbag you want to be. You can then consider what that means you should do as far as the checkbox labeled "do not share my information", etc. One company uses "Don't Be Evil" as one of the major guiding principles of how they do things and that company, Google, has done fairly well. One economist called them "the most successful company ever". More on Google's ideas about this: http://investor.google.com/conduct.html While the value of Google nearly doubled in twelve months, Microsoft has lost value just about every year for the last ten years. In their "good" years they didn't quite keep up with inflation. We all know MS is fine with being scumbags. Draw your own conclusions. |
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how many people read that? and how many people understand that? lol. i hope you will stay alone in this shitty api bussiness, where you will be always, doesnt matter what you will say, spreading informations of your surfers. congrats
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nice post!!!!!!!!!
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Some great info Choker... thanks!
Do you collect the data first, so you get the email? Or do you just post to the api's you want, as the possible sales comes in? |
Nice summary, as someone who has both implemented and used APIs of others for as long as I can recall, you offer people out there some solid info. :thumbsup
One additional point I think you may want to touch on is regarding usernames and emails (you did touch on duplicate emails briefly). Say you are currently sending your API post to 5 different sites. Let's say the username is in use already at three of them. This doesn't mean they already had an account, it could just be they are trying a very generic or common username. How do you proceed? Some dating sites will append digits or characters to the username, to create one that is unique. This is great as you do not lose out on creating that account. Other sites simply report back the error that username is already taken. Do you then report an error back to your user to choose another, even though the username was available on your site as well as some of the ones you successfully posted data to? No, that wouldn't maintain a very smooth process. You could do your own appending of characters in an effort to successfully find one that is available... this isn't perfect as it may cause delays as you make the API call potentially multiple times until you succeed. Another option is just to skip creating an account at those sites. However, while the easiest thing to do, you are leaving money behind. The same situation can apply for the email address, however it's a more severe problem as one cannot just be modified to succeed; the email must be valid if you have any hopes to convert the member. For those facing this problem, what I would do, is create an email alias at a domain you control. Pre-arrange this with the dating site in question beforehand, so you do not get blocked for fraud. If my domain where I use the API posts is called hotdates.com and user john888 creates an account with an email address already in use, I would dynamically create the mail alias [email protected] and forward this to his actual submitted email address. That comes with its own set of issues, such as making sure you can still get the email through (often, large dating sites will have more resources at their disposal than the average affiliate when it comes to email delivery rate). That is another story alltogether though and best left for another Education Series article :) An alternative may be to offer your users an internal mailbox on your site, where they could login and access the mail from multiple dating sites. This would likely not convert well, however, unless your users are used to coming to your site often to check a message box. Hope that adds some addition food for thought to Choker's article. Enjoy! |
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hmm,so the surfer is unknowingly signed up? can you sign them up to 10 at once? definitely interesting but i guess a numbers game as these people did not intend to sign up for a service in the first place.
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Good Post :thumbsup
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Thanks Choker!
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good read, thanks
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Good post with lots of useful info. You gave away more than I would on a public forum;-)
With that said, I'm happy to help any PimpMansion affiliate get familiar with our API setup. One thing that should be noted. API postings are not free reign at many affiliate programs, including PimpMansion. Each affiliate is weighed individually to see if our API will fit their needs. This is done to prevent a bunch of waste in our user database. As Choker mentioned above, an over-emailed dating user is not very useful to us. We want to make sure the members sent are of value and will not be wasting our resources. |
Bookmarking this one for when I have some time for exploring. Been curious about dating APIs.
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nice. great post.
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First, I'd like to qualify my comments... I am the lead developer for the most highly trafficked dating site in the US (HitWise). I'm omitting the name as I use this board outside of work and my opinions are my own and should not reflect on my employer. Thank you for respecting the anonymity :)
That being said, this post has some misinformation that I'd like to set straight... Quote:
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You aren't sending a signup you are sending a current user... no, you shouldn't be paid out on this. You're just being greedy. Quote:
I think the main problem here is your view of what an API is and what it should or should not do. An API is a tool (in the dating site example) used to customize the signup process so that a user never has to leave your site and so you can design that signup process in whatever way works best for your users. Everyone has different traffic with different target niches. This allows you to tailer that experience to maximize your lead potential. Rather than just sending them off to some dating site and hoping for a conversion... An API is NOT a tool to be used for spamming of account information to as many dating sites as possible. That's not what it's therefor and this is generally seen as a bad practice. Not only is it unfair to your end user (if you're not telling them before hand that they'll be signed up to multiple sites) but it's also not fair to your sponsors who are paying you for valuable leads. In the end you're just hurting your site's credibility and not at all leveraging the power of an API. I'll post a follow up to this post as well with proper usage of an API and how to maximize your revenue by providing a better experience for your users and providing the highest quality leads to your sponsors. |
Thank you for your education. I hope what you wrote is not filled with subliminal messages to make us become sheeple of nickname "Choker."
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Some great information - Thanks
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Joining a dating site, for many, is NOT an impulse buy like you make it out to be. Mainstream or adult. Our average conversion rate used to be approx. 8-10 days, after they got to explore the site and received multiple "latest match" emails and other email enticements to join. Sometimes, all it takes is for a free member to see a "match" sent to him that does it for him and he'll go upgrade; it doesn't mean this particular match that got him hot and bothered was sent in the first day. However, you have other sites that I'd classify as "fake dating" who spam the member like mad with fake messages and notifications as soon as they join; these easily see the member convert right away or not at all. |
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The way Choker is running it, doesn't hurt anyone, doesn't fraud anyone and it isn't scamming anyone. |
Effective Use of an API - Part I
In this post I'll focus on best practices for implementing multiple APIs to maximize your revenue potential by providing a better end user experience and supplying your sponsors with the highest quality leads. These methods are used by affiliates who do over $10k a day in new leads. Valuable leads that convert well for the sponsor and will help move you into second tier payouts. Why not work on your payout per lead while you're at it? Many payouts in the dating industry are based on your lead quality. That is, how well your leads convert into paid accounts...
First, some background. Most dating sites payout on lead acquisition rather than on a CPA basis. They may offer other payout methods as well but a non paid lead does have SOME value to a dating site as they are listed in the search results and could possibly cause another non paid member to become a member. This price is not set in stone and even if the site doesn't advertise it, there are probably multiple payout levels depending on how well you perform. Sending a ton of junk traffic is not the best method to make friends in mainstream. Mainstream dating is high profile business and many companies spend millions creating an effective brand in the marketplace. Associating that brand with a spammy site is NOT what they want you to do. The benefits of using a Dating site API as an affiliate:
In the next post I'll go into a working example of a very effective proven method for making APIs work for you and your sponsor. |
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Choker's business is traffic quantity... it shows in the post. |
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