Rosalind Gardner

Super affiliate, blogger, and speaker, Rosalind is best known for her affiliate marketing training in the Super Affiliate Handbook: How I made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other Peoples' Stuff Online. You can connect with her on Facebook.

Why it PAYS to Read those Program Emails

August 20, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

I'm sometimes pretty slack about reading emails that come in from my merchant partners. “Not another new product notice… aargh“, is what I typically think when I see them in the Inbox.

But those emails aren't always product promotions. Sometimes they look like this:

“Unfortunately, we have run out of budget for ______ this quarter and will need to pause all promotions by the end of the day. Please have your links down by midnight tonight. This will not be a permanent stop; however, we donâ€™t anticipate receiving more budget until next quarter in October. I will let you know if there are any changes to this campaign and if we may begin promoting sooner. I apologize for the short notice and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Well, at least I got the “aargh” part of the equation right. 🙂

Do, therefore, make it a point to actually read those affiliate program notices on a regular basis! Not doing so may affect your bottom line, and not in a beneficial way.

[tags]affiliate program, affiliate, affiliate marketing, email[/tags]

Update on the Clickbank Spammer

August 16, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

The affiliate spammer mentioned in Affiliate Spammer and the Super Affiliate Handbook has been blacklisted from promoting any ClickBank products.

Coincidentally, shortly after I received that confirmation from Clickbank, that post received a very nasty comment from ‘chris', who called me a thief and various names associated with the female anatomy. I trust that ‘chris' was the spammer in question and I'm glad that he's angry.

Now let's hope that ‘chris' grows up and gets angry at himself long enough to learn a valuable lesson that his mother should have taught him – cheaters never prosper – at least not in the long term.

[tags]Super Affiliate Handbook, Rosalind Gardner, affiliate, spam, Kowabunga, Clickbank, spammer[/tags]

Affiliate Spammer and the Super Affiliate Handbook

August 16, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

On August 1st, I received an email promoting the Super Affiliate Handbook (included at the bottom of this post), purportedly from the affiliate manager at MP3Dollars. I paid little attention to the email, thinking it was perhaps valid as I was once an affiliate of theirs and also have a friend who used to work for them.

I was later contacted by the real MP3Dollars affiliate manager who told me that the affiliate responsible for this email (CB affiliate ID mycpa2003) had in fact busted into their email server and sent the message out to all of their affiliates. Well, it turns out that he busted into the Kowabunga system as a whole and sent that email to affiliates of many of their merchants. I'll say this about that.

I hate spam. I don't do it, nor do I condone the actions of those who spam to make money online as affiliates. I find this case particularly abhorrent as this idiot's actions affect me personally.

Clickbank has been informed of the problem and at very least the affiliate will be black-listed from promoting the Super Affiliate Handbook. I do however hope that Clickbank acts on my recommendation to terminate the spammer's account.

Ultimately, it would be wonderful to see networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction and Linkshare work together to share such information and terminate all of this affiliate spammer's accounts.

In reviewing my records, Clickbank affiliate mycpa2003 sold 14 copies of the Super Affiliate Handbook between August 1st (the date the email was sent) and August 12th.

So as not to profit from the avails of spam, I made a donation of $658.00 (the total amount of sales and double my earnings from those sales) to one of the many charitable organization that I regularly sponsor. It would be my wish that mycpa2003 change his cheating and lying ways and do likewise.

[Read more…]

Alive or Dead?

August 15, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

OK, I thought I'd seen ALL of these ‘send us your contact details so you can receive your funds‘ spam emails from Nigeria and the like, but this one almost made me wish I'd been wearing Pampers at the time I read it.

I said ‘almost‘. 🙂

Enjoy! [Read more…]

Need Site Content? Highly Recommended PLR Site

August 14, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

One of my most HIGHLY recommended PLR (private label rights) site is Alice Seba and Mila Sidman's All Private Label Content service. In addition to offering exceptionally high quality PLR articles in 26 niche topics at very reasonable prices, they also give you one-month complimentary access to their private members-only forum and a list of suggested affiliate programs to monetize your articles.

Here are the niche markets for which article bundles are available.

[tags]Alice Seba, Mila Sidman, articles, PLR, private label rights[/tags]

Will Your Site Be Shut Down Next?

August 14, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

Make this costly mistake at your peril….

I've become increasingly aware of affiliates, primarily new Affiliate marketers, who risk having their affiliate and Clickbank accounts closed, and worse, their entire sites shut down.

What are these affiliates doing?

Well, instead of writing their own content or spending a few bucks on PLR articles, they're publishing content and pictures on their web sites and blogs that doesn't rightfully belong to them – which constitutes a copyright violation.

I've personally discovered and dealt with copyright infringers who've used my articles without permission, copied my sales page in its entirety, posted whole copies of my newsletter to their sites, stolen graphics for which I owned the licence, and used a picture of me over a testimonial for a product which I knew nothing about.

Lucky affiliates are asked to remove the offending material, which lets them to learn from their ‘mistake' and keep earning revenue from their site.

However, the problem has become so prevelant, that I and other publishers of original content who hate wasting time waiting for webmasters to remove pages from their sites, simply bypass that step and have their affiliate accounts closed by the merchant or their site shut down by their ISP.

For example, some affiliates apparently believe that they'll make more sales if they simply copy a merchant's sales page in its entirety to their own site.

You and I know that this type of thinking is idiotic, especially when the affiliate link sends the visitor to a merchant's homepage which is identical to the one that they just read.

Not only does this duplication result in far fewer sales, but the affiliate risks having their site penalized as ‘duplicate content' by Google. Moreover, it's ample justification for affiliate or Clickbank account termination. ISP's, which are bound by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and Clickbank representatives are swift to shut down the abusers.

What about blog content syndication?

Syndicating other's content is usually done for the purpose of increasing the amount of site content, linking out to reputable sites and thereby improving their PageRank and search engine rankings.

There are widgets that make it easy for affiliates to syndicate other webmasters' blog content on your own blog, but just because one can do this however, doesn't mean that one should.

Whether you use a widget or cut and paste the content into your site, using another author's content becomes an issue when whole posts are copied. The ‘issue' becomes even more problematic when the link to the original post is stripped out and no credit is given to the author.

The right way to use another webmaster's blog content is to write your own post on that topic, cite the other author's work by including a sentence or two of their post and then link back to their post using their trackback link.

Your post may then be picked up and included in the Comments section of the post you cited, which is a far more valuable way to earn a link back to your site.

The bottom line is that you need to make sure that you have permission to use other author's content and pictures on your site.

I also recommend that if you don't like to write, instead of ‘beefing up' your site with other webmasters' articles, invest in some private label rights articles to post to your blog.

It's a very low-cost option for increasing the content on your site and you won't risk copyright infringement and all the hard work that you've done to build your site.

Need Content?

My most HIGHLY recommended PLR (private label rights) site is Alice Seba and Mila Sidman's All Private Label Content service. In addition to offering exceptionally high quality PLR articles in 26 niche topics at very reasonable prices, they also give you ane-month complimentary access to their private members-only forum and a list of suggested affiliate programs to monetize your articles.

Anyone Else Seeing a ‘Gap’?

August 10, 2007 By Rosalind Gardner

I just got a report from Jess, an NPT subscriber, that the top portion of the NPT newsletter appears blank until you scroll down the page.

Jess is using Internet Explorer and is displaying a screen resolution of 800 x 600.

Is anyone else having this problem? If so, please do leave a comment and let me know! Thanks!

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