Interview: Ken Anglemyer (PointClickTrack)

We're very excited to present our 60th interview with Ken Anglemyer of PointClickTrack.   Ken Anglemyer is the Owner/President of PointClick, LLC a small-town company forged out of Middlebury, Indiana. He runs a CPA Affiliate Network, PointClickTrack that they developed from the ground up as well as multiple other web entities. Ken is an expert in the Incentive Marketing space of affiliate marketing and runs an honest business based on his Christian beliefs. Ken is a laid back, down-to-earth, fun person who is always excited about his next endeavor.  

1. Could you tell us something about yourself? How old are you? Where were you born?

Sure thing! I'm 31 years old which is ancient in this industry, but I've got plenty of spunk left in me. I was raised in southern Michigan, went to high school in Constantine and studied networking at Baker College. Now, I'm a happily married husband with two beautiful kids (7 and 5) living and working in Northern Indiana about 15 minutes south from where I grew up. Since my teen years, I've had an interest in almost anything computer related. I use to be a service tech for a computer repair & service company. After that I took an I.T. position at a vehicle manufacturing company. During my time there, I stumbled into affiliate marketing.  

2. How did you get involved in affiliate marketing? What/Who inspired you to enter it?

One day after work I came home and found a FED EX Overnighted letter at my front door. I opened it up and it was a Real COMERICA Bank check for roughly $3,000. With it was a letter stating that I had been drawn and was the winner of some Euro Lottery spiel in the UK from some registration to a website. According to this letter, I had won some $92 Million prize. My immediate reaction was there is no way this is real. I actually even knew someone that had once worked for the company that sent me the check. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with me getting it or not. Anyway, after some online searching and investigating I found others who had similar letters that thought it was real. I decided to call COMERICA Bank and ask about this check I received with their logo on it. They were able to confirm that there was money in the account to cover the check. I was encouraged, but not for long. I went back online and found out one lady went as far as cashing it. On the last day of clearing in the banks the check didn't go through and she ended up having to pay back the $3,000 plus bank fees. At this point, I realized it was as scam. Now I wanted to dig up all the information I could possibly find about this fraudulent letter. I found company names, people's names, addresses and submitted all of it to the FBI. During my investigation, I came across scam.com where people were talking about getting a TV through an incentive rewards site. I had never heard of anything like this. These people were talking about how they got a 42" TV for very little participation and in the end it only cost them like $30-40! I was obviously shocked and figured, what the heck I have $30-40 I can spare to give this a try. Sure enough, it worked! I was hooked. With a pregnant wife on bed rest and unable to work, money was tight. I found as many freebie sites as I could to help supplement our income. I talked to a few people who ran these freebie sites and decided with a background in web design, computer networking etc., I could create a better site than many sites that people use every day. So that's what I did. I got in touch with a programmer from Arizona that I knew pretty well from my days as a moderator on his incentive industry forum. We created a network script and launched Git-R-Free.com. After launching only three sites to start with, I posted on all the forums I frequented. My reputation on these forums was solid because I had been helping users for the past few years with any incentive industry questions they had. I was even voted User of the Year on a forum with over 10,000 users. I was floored by the response! We did $30,000 in revenue in our first month! With Git-R-Free growing and generating more revenue, I took a leap of faith and quit my job to give Git-R-Free my full attention and time. Eventually, this led to the creation of my own affiliate network, PointClickTrack. To think... All of this was because of some European Lottery letter... Even though that turned out to be a scam, I still feel like I won the lottery!  

3. What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of? When did you first "hit the big time"?

I am most proud of the business I created and the employees we've hired. "Hitting it big", for me, is helping people by providing a stable job with medical benefits while getting them involved in this industry as my employees. I have a very loyal, honest and amazing staff here at PointClick. Everyone works together to better the company, and take care of our publishers however we can. What more could I ask for?  

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

We launched PointClickTrack in early 2009. The same programmer that helped me develop Git-R-Free.com, now a full-time employee, helped me develop our own, completely proprietary, in-house tracking platform. Git-R-Free taught us a lot about bringing in quality incentive traffic. We were able to use this knowledge to build an awesome tracking platform. As for what I do over here; I work closely with the staff on any issues or questions they have while continually working out deals on new offers to provide to our publishers. I dabble here and there in some media buying. However, my main role here is to be the "idea person". I bring these ideas to the staff and we all work towards making them a reality. Many times they are tools for our publishers or new business ventures in our industry. I'm always working on something new, and I'm always excited to release it and see how it performs.  

5. With so many CPA networks competing, what are the factors that distinguish PointClickTrack from the rest of your competition?

We are a trustworthy and honest network. If that is the only thing someone takes from reading this interview, that's good enough for me. There are a lot of great people in this industry, and some amazing networks, but unfortunately there are also a lot of bad eggs. I am proud of our company's stance and I know how our publishers are treated. We pay on time, every time and always do what we can to do the right thing. We stick to our morals and our beliefs and continue to grow a trustworthy company that you don't need to worry about, and I feel like that goes a long ways in this industry. Also, I really do love our tracking system. I love the fact that I know it inside and out. Unlike all of the boxed network scripts out there, we can tweak and adapt ours as needed to meet our publishers' needs.  

6. One way to keep affiliates happy is to pay them on time and faster. What steps has your network taken to ensure that your affiliates will be paid on time?

Cashflow is king. We understand this and it's why we stick to our default payment system of Net-25 for all new publishers. In this industry, the thing that drives me bonkers is all the instances you run into where someone boasts weekly, net-7, net-15, net-30, etc. When in reality the payment doesn't actually come through until net-30/60/90 or worse! Does this limit who will work with us? Yes it probably does. Some people strive to see their payment terms set to "weekly", even when "weekly" is actually 30+ days. We strive to be an honest and trustworthy network, and when we say Net-25, we mean it. Do we have faster payment terms? Yes of course. We work with our publishers that have a history of generating quality traffic and get them taken care of. Payments by default are issued on or just before the 25th of the month for the previous month's traffic. Payment options are Check, Wire, ACH (USA), and Paypal with a $25 minimum threshold.  

7. What kinds of offers are doing well right now for your network and publisher base?

Because of my incentive background, I have many relationships in that space. We have a large publisher base that are purely incentive traffic. Our incentive publisher accounts and non-incent accounts are kept separate and are handled differently. Our system works with the account by the type of traffic they are sending to our offers. For incentive publishers, we are having success with credit reports, entertainment related products/trials, and some health/beauty related deals. For our non-incentive publishers, we are seeing some success with Daily Deal and Discount shopping type campaigns both for US and International.  

8. What are your favorite traffic sources - PPC, Social, PPV, Media buy ad networks or any others? Why?

Anything that is REAL! Traffic isn't just traffic anymore, in my opinion, so I like the real stuff.... whatever flavor it wants to be. I'm flexible. I just don't want fraud and we don't work with anything adult/x-rated.  

9. What are the critical skills an affiliate marketer requires to be successful?

A personal drive and motivation goes further than anything else. They have to stay positive and not let a bad $100 test run on an offer end their excitement for an idea. If they can do that, then I'd say they have a good chance of growing in this industry. It only takes one solid campaign to make money. That could take 20-50 fails or could happen on the first try.  

10. What advice would you offer to an affiliate who is looking to make some serious cash in the incentive affiliate marketing industry?

First step, get a reliable, quality incentive script. You really need something that will help you monitor and control your user-base. This is key! If you don't have control of your traffic, you won't make it long in the incentive space. Most advertisers that are willingly allowing incentive traffic understand it is going to be lower quality, but there is a difference between lower quality and fraud. Word of advice, do not get sucked into anything related to micro-worker sites, m-turk jobs, etc as this does not provide good quality traffic to the advertisers. The majority of networks do not tolerate it nor should they allow this form of traffic to any offers.  

11. What are your plans and goals in 2012? Where PointClickTrack may be going?

As I said I'm an idea man. If you could see the idea sheet/workload on my programmers desk you'd be shocked. Haha, poor guy... but he's awesome at what we does and we work very well together. We have a few things underway one larger then the rest, and are hoping to reveal that very very soon!  

12. What do you think is the greatest challenge facing the industry are right now? And what would you do to solve it?

People frauding advertisers is the biggest problem that comes to mind. We are constantly thinking of ways to prevent and stop it. The key to the problem is stopping the frauder BEFORE he or she has committed fraud. Our advertisers deserve our best efforts in stopping them. It also helps our publishers. Especially those who have difficult time controlling their traffic. Also the number of fraudulent publisher applications we have to sift through is staggering! This is an industry-wide issue that ties up everyones' time and resources. Furthermore, good publishers are sometimes denied because anti-fraud rules have become so stringent.  

13. What is your dream car?

Ah man.... Well when growing up I had a crazy long poster of a Lamborghini Countach hanging above my bed, so ya that's pretty much been my dream car since I was a teenager. Although, I must say materialistic things don't rev my engine much. I can't fathom ever dropping that kind of money on a car. There are so many other things that money would be better spent on. Not to mention, I have to wait behind Amish horse and buggies every morning on my way to work and I don't think they'd appreciate a super car's engine revving behind them!  

14. Thanks a lot for this interview. If there is anything else you would like to say to the readers of Affpaying.com now is the time!

First off, I want to thank God for blessing so many people with income through PointClick, LLC. Next, I want to thank you Gao for everything you do for us and with affpaying! I think everyone owes you a round of applause for the content and information you provide to everyone in our industry. Lastly, remember to keep an eye on us. As I said, we have something big cooking and I can't wait to show you all!  

Many thanks to Ken for sharing your time with us and for sharing some great insight tips here! What are your thoughts on the interview? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments section below. Also, if you have any experience with PointClickTrack, please write a review for them on the PointClickTrack review page. PS. If you are an affiliate marketer, affiliate manager or affiliate network CEO and are interested in answering a few questions about you, your network and affiliate marketing, please drop us a message.