Interview: Jay Davis (DatingGold)

We're very excited to present our 20th interview with Jay Davis of DatingGold. Jay Davis is the Affiliate Manager for DatingGold.com; a leader in the dating and webcam industry based in Stockton, California. At just 24 years of age, Jay brings over eight years of affiliate marketing experience to the table in both adult and mainstream.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you?

I am currently 24 years old and I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio (go Bearcats!) - I spent 22 years of my life living in the great state of Ohio before moving out here to California to work for Dating Gold. Most people in the industry know me as 'Jayvis' which is a shortened version of my first and last name.

2. How long have you been in affiliate marketing and how did you get involved?

I started building my own sites around the age of 15 or so. I was a pretty nerdy kid in high school so instead of playing on the football team I hung out in my parents basement for hours on end absorbing everything the internet had to offer (for better or worse). Initially, I started building sites strictly as a hobby and it wasn't until a year or so later that I began to realize the earning potential in all of this. I had a nice portfolio of sites that were earning revenue all the way into college. But balancing the college workload, a social life, a girlfriend at the time and being a member of a fraternity along with still managing my own sites became quite hectic and that lead to me selling off most of my properties to focus entirely on getting the most out of college. I knew I could always go back to affiliate marketing at a later date and I think I made the right decision focusing my attention on my studies. But it just so happened that I didn't need to go back to affiliate marketing (which would have been tiresome to rebuild from the ground up) because all of this coincided with myself taking on the job here at Dating Gold. Now instead of re-building my own stuff, I help our affiliates make the most out of their sites and campaigns. And the rest is history!

3. What was the biggest mistake you made when you first started doing Affiliate Marketing?

When I first started building my own stuff, I was hotlinking a lot of my graphics from other sites. This was back in 2001-2002 when bandwidth was still pretty expensive. I had no idea at the time that hotlinking was such a big deal until I received a legal complaint from someone. Needless to say, I learned my lesson pretty quickly and I ended up writing the individual a heartfelt email explaining that I was just a dumb, 15 year old kid and I didn't know any better (honesty is always the best policy). He was actually very cool about the whole situation and ended up teaching me quite a bit! Talk about a happy ending…

4. Tell us a little bit about DatingGold and what you do over there?

DatingGold is a mainstream, mobile and adult dating/webcam affiliate program that has been in the business for over seven years now. We’re based in Stockton, California and we boast an ever-expanding team of some of the brightest individuals in the business. My official title is “Affiliate Manager” which is a title that carries plenty of duties within itself but I also help manage our featured webcam models, assist in our email marketing and a ton of other stuff I won’t go into detail boring you with. The great thing about working here is that everyone involved can step out of their role to assist in just about anything needed. Everyone is incredibly talented and works around the clock. It's a truly great, fast-paced environment and there’s never a shortage of fun to go along with the work.

5. There are already many online dating affiliate networks out there. What makes DatingGold different?

I think our affiliate support is second to none. A company can boast about having the best landing pages, the best creatives, etc. but if there isn’t a strong backbone to assist affiliates with the aforementioned items, then the company isn’t really worth dealing with at all. I know it sounds cliché but we truly understand that affiliates do not adhere to a typical 9-5 schedule and therefore we try to make ourselves as available as possible. We’re dedicated to our affiliates, they're a viable asset to our company and we do all we can to make sure we’re here for them no matter what. Also, it doesn’t hurt that we’ll pay you the most for your traffic. Just come talk to us and find out for yourself!

6. Do you offer biweekly or weekly payment? If so, how much does one have to make to qualify?

Yes we offer payouts on the 5th and 20th of each month, respectively. We have many affiliates with specific needs, so weekly and customized payments are always doable. Simply contact us and let us know your personal situation and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

7. Which offers are performing well on your network?

On the mainstream side of things, SpiceOrNice.com is performing way better than we ever expected. We always have high expectations but this offer has exceeded in nearly every aspect of our in-house testing and then some. I think the key to its success is that it’s the perfect amount of "risqué" so that’s it’s not totally “adult” and yet it's not completely stale like so many other mainstream dating offers. Not only that, but it’s non-saturated and affiliate’s know exactly how to use that to their advantage. We also recently launched TextNDate.com which is a mobile submit offer (note: NOT a PIN submit)and it’s currently 4:1 (lead to sale) across the board. Anyone out there interested in either of these offers, please contact me and mention this interview… I’ll make sure to get you set up with all of our best performing landing pages, creatives and I'll also set you up at a great rate on any of our offers.

8. Do you offer online training for new affiliates?

We don't have an official training course or anything of that nature but we have absolutely no problem helping new affiliates start off on the right foot. You can't become a whale without starting off as a small fish first (was that a good analogy? I was never good at marine biology) – In all seriousness, we treat each affiliate request equally. Whether it’s someone asking for general starting point tips, or someone that needs a highly customized landing page with a built in API, we’ll be sure to help in every way possible no matter who you are.

9. What are the criteria for a marketer to be accepted at DatingGold? How does DatingGold prevent and handle fraud?

We have an open door policy for new affiliates. If you sign-up and email me your username I'll be sure to activate your account and help out in every way possible. In regards to fraud, we don't take it lightly (to say the least). We have an entire team dedicated to fraud and I'd venture to say they’re the best in the business. Without disclosing too much information, there isn't much that gets past us. The thing that pains me the most about fraud is that if the scammers out there just spent half as much time as they do trying to deceive programs and networks by placing their efforts into something positive, they could have a long term business platform to build off of. I'll never understand that whole mindset.

10. For those who are interested in working with you - What's the best way/time to reach you?

I'm on most of the major instant messaging applications 9-10 hours a day. My AIM is: Dating Gold Jay, my ICQ is: 403-443-845 and my Skype is: Jayyyvis (can you believe someone took 'Jayvis' ??) I give affiliate my phone number as well. Heck, I even recently started a Twitter to broaden my networking abilities: You can find me at twitter.com/datinggoldjay and I have a Facebook as well. If you can't reach me on one of those I am also constantly checking emails from the office, home or my cell phone. Any path you go down, you're almost guaranteed to get a response within 24 hours, but most of the time I try to get back to you instantly. Go ahead… try me! Jay[at]DatingGold[.com]

11. In your opinion, what are the best places for a new affiliate to learn affiliate marketing? What advice would you give for them?

When I first started in all of this I would lurk industry message boards to devour as much information as possible. Although still ripe with helpful people and information, a lot of message boards have become pretty hostile toward newbies, but luckily there are still plenty of bloggers out there that aren’t pushing some guru-agenda that publish useful information daily. If there wasn't something I couldn’t learn by reading about it I would simply go out there and run my own trial and error campaigns/websites which is painstaking to say the least, but also the best teacher in the long run. I always like to use learning a new language in comparison to learning affiliate marketing. Sure you can pick up Spanish in a couple of years by reading a few books, taking a few classes and listening to a few audio tapes. But I can guarantee you'll learn the language much faster by packing up and moving to Mexico for a couple of months. The same holds true in the affiliate marketing world; you can read all you want but until you get out there and make it happen, you're only helping yourself so much.

12. What's the difference between a Super Affiliate and an Average Affiliate?

Probably their bank accounts? Let's be honest, it takes money to make money. Super affiliates that have already positioned themselves to have the necessary wiggle room to really throw money at something to see if it works or not are at a distinct advantage over the typical newbie who lives or dies on the statistics of an individual campaign. With that said, if you keep your head up and learn from your mistakes you can almost always rebound from just about anything. To think that a super affiliate never fails is just silly. Everyone fails in this business to some degree or another. The ones that prosper are those that keep their head on right and most importantly learn from their mistakes and grow from making them. Also, scalability is extremely important. Super affiliates already understand the importance of scaling out the things that work for them and to drop the excess waste that doesn’t. It sounds simple enough but you would be surprised by the amount of people that just can't seem to pull themselves away from a failing platform. To quote the late and great comedian W.C. Fields: “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it.”

13. What are your goals in 2010?

I'd like to see Dating Gold continue to branch out into the mainstream world. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think we've had a nice hold on the adult industry for a while now, but with products like SpiceOrNice and TextNDate, I’d really like to bring things to another level in mainstream. We've got more interesting products in the pipeline that I can’t talk about just yet… but I think we're going to surprise a lot of people in the direction we are heading.

14. What are your hobbies/interests/passions? What's your favorite movie and why?

I am a pretty normal twenty-something male. Outside of work I love to attend a good concert (I am a huge indie-rock fan) and I'm close to San Francisco and Sacramento so I always have access to some of the best music venues in the country. I have recently become obsessed with Netflix (so many shows, so little time). I'd have to say my favorite movie of all time is Goodfellas because it’s one of the few movies where you genuinely feel good rooting for the bad guys and Joe Pesci plays a classic character that all of my friends and I love to quote. I also enjoy hitting the gym every night (always important when your day consists of sitting on your ass in front of a computer). Since I grew up in Cincinnati, I am a diehard Bengals/Reds fan. I also enjoy tutoring first graders at a local elementary one weekend per month; I call them my little monsters and they’re absolutely hilarious. Other than that, I’m really the happiest when I am spending time with my family and friends back home.

15. Give us a little glimpse into what a typical day in your life looks like.

As Rick Ross so eloquently put it; Every day I'm hustlin'

Many thanks to Jay for sharing your time with us and for sharing some great insight tips here! If you have any experience with DatingGold Affiliate Network, please write a review for them on the DatingGold review page. Ps. If you are an affiliate marketer, AM or Network owner and are interested in answering a few questions about you, your network and affiliate marketing, please drop us a message.