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Affiliate Marketing

See all posts tagged with 'affiliate marketing'.

Update on the Clickbank Spammer

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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

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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…]

Revenue Magazine: Web 2.0 and More

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I had hoped to pick up the latest issue of Revenue Magazine while at Affiliate Summit, but it hasn't been published.

I then realized that I hadn't yet mentioned the May/June issue which focuses on Web 2.0, going global, building (or killing) your reputation, brand recognition and more. In the regular departments, Mike Moran asks the question “Do you know enough about search spam to stay out of danger?” and I discuss affiliate recruitment in the Affiliate's Corner column.

Did you get your copy? It is available as a digital version and here's a special offer for affiliates only: Get 5 Issues For Only $19.99.

[tags]Revenue magazine, affiliate marketing, affiliate, web 2.0[/tags]

PopShops and RevenueWire: Two Services to Watch

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While prowling the exhibit hall with Anik Singal from AffiliateClassroom, I discovered 2 exciting new services.

PopShops is a GoldenCan competitor which claims to be “the first and only searchable collection of affiliate products (over 10 million and growing) that spans all of the major networks”.

With their Shopbuilder tool, you can create customized storefronts and widgets to earn commissions. Affiliates ID's are embedded into the links and prices and product info is kept fresh through dynamic links. [Read more…]

“I Don’t Believe in Affiliate Programs”

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While trying to clear the fog from the darned red-eye flight that I took on the way down to Affiliate Summit in Miami, I spent a little time in my hotel room on Monday going back through through some of the older notes that we'd received on our RosalindGardner.com support desk.

Having spent 4 hours on Sunday at the jam-packed Meet Market and having just come up from the Exhibit Hall, where throngs of people were ccrowding around merchant and affiliate network booths, the following letter struck me (for the second time) as completely ridiculous.

Hi Rosalind,

In the ad about your book, you talk about your financial achievements online mainly between 1998 and 2002/2003.

But, being an e-business professional myself, I am skeptical about one's success potential nowadays through affiliate programs as the Internet has now become saturated with e-businesses and dominated by some major ones (like eBay.com. Amazon.com, and a few others).

It's now very difficult to have the kind of success that you had in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I tried affiliate programs, myself, last year and was totally unsuccessful. I don't believe in affiliate programs at all.

For example, why would someone buy an airline ticket from my unknown travel site when everyone knows about Expedia.com or Travelocity.com? People prefer to go to the big names (which are considered more reliable and safer) than the unknown ones (which are often considered unreliable and potentially unsafe). Your success was possible when the Internet was relatively new and e-business/e-commerce was a big buzz-word, but that's no longer the case.

I wish you could prove me wrong but I don't think you can!

Regards,

K.

P.S. I hold a B.S. and a M.B.A. degrees in marketing and e-business/e-commerce.

Well, here's what I have to say about that!

SHEESH!

No one will ever convince the well-educated, yet extremely cynical ‘K' wrong. He calls himself an e-business professional, however, his closed mind and bad attitude precludes any possibility of success in affiliate marketing – regardless of what anyone could say to him.

For the semi-skeptical out there, (which is a healthy approach to any new venture) I'll talk about my recent experience at Affiliate Summit 2007 East to help alleviate some doubt.

OK, so if there's no possibility of success in affiliate marketing now, why the heck does the show get bigger and bigger and bigger? Why would merchants and affiliate networks flock to drop big coin to exhibit at Affiliate Summit if there were no affiliates promoting their programs? Huh?

Affiliates of every stripe go to Affiliate Summit – from Super Duper affiliates (the big coupon site folks), to plain ole Super Affiliates like me, Jeremy Palmer and Scott Jangro; and newbie affiliate marketers just starting out.

Right up there with seeing old friends again, my favorite thing to do at the Summit is to meet other affiliates who have become successful and new affiliates who are bringing their well-thought-out plans and site strategies to the Summit for review and to meet potential merchants.

The first affiliate I ran into at the Summit was Ajay Kandala, an affiliate marketer and CJ Performer who introduced himself to me in the elevator. He told me he'd been in the business for just 3 years and had recently quit his job.

There were ‘kids' who, like Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom, never really had a ‘job' other than the affiliate marketing business they created to help put themselves through college. Now they're laughing their millions all the way to the bank.

I heard one story about a merchant and affiliate who connected on a more personal level to discuss how they'd started their now BIG businesses. They were shocked to learn that one had started from a basement bedroom while the other had worked from his bathroom.

I met people who, realizing that they loved affiliate marketing but learned they weren't ready to start their own business, had become successful top-dollar affiliate managers for major merchants and networks in the last year or two.

I also met with a few merchants with whom I'd consulted as recently as 6 months ago – just as they were getting into using affiliate marketing to promote their business – and now they have successful, growing businesses that get exceptional press and affiliates lining up at their Affiliate Summit booths to join their programs.

So, what do all these people have in common?

Belief.

Contrary to K's implied suggestion that a B.S. or an MBA is the best predictor of success potential, it's obvious that won't get him anywhere so long as he doesn't believe in himself or the channel.

Sheesh again.

That's all affiliate marketing is… an online sales channel in which merchants (stores) pay their affiliates (sales people) commissions based on performance.

So then, what's not to believe?

Imagine what would have happened if Mel and Patricia Ziegler of Banana Replublic said ‘why would someone buy clothing from my unknown clothes store when everyone knows about Gap and Old Navy?'

There'd be no Banana Republic, right? But they believed in what they wanted to sell, and lo and behold, their empire grew so big that Gap actually bought the company in 1983.

Anyway, the whole notion that someone doesn't believe in a marketing model based on existing competition strikes me as completely bizarre.

I see proof each and every day that this channel is still very much in its infancy, is growing by leaps and bounds and that existing competition within a niche means little or nothing to those who have a unique plan in which they believe.

Bottom line – Success has no room for cynicism.

By the way, the other thing that the successful affiliates, managers and merchants had in common, was that they'd ALL read the Super Affiliate Handbook – the industry's standard training manual for affiliate marketers. Isn't it time you got your copy of the Handbook?

To Link or Not to Link: The Grocery Store Analogy

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I wrote a review about the Project Black Mask. Although I summarily denounced the basic tactics espoused by its authors, I commended the work on its keyword research and generation section.

Although most of the comments posted about my review were supportive, I got an earful from a few who took great exception to the fact that I linked to Project Black Mask with my affiliate link.

Ooops! I did it again!

Some suggested that despite my warnings, readers may have be persuaded by the sales letter to buy the product for the wrong reasons – and that I was wrong to facilitate their purchase through my link.

Another – apparently without access to Dictionary.com – accused me of ‘profiteering' which is defined as ‘To make excessive profits on goods in short supply.'

Ya right.

Trust me on this – I turned far more people away from that product and saved my visitors considerably more money than I earned from that review.

THAT was my intention.

As to affiliate linking… here's what I think about that… [Read more…]

Can’t See the Merchant’s Landing Page?

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If you're an affiliate who lives outside the U.S. or a U.S.-based affiliate promoting non-U.S. merchants, you've undoubtedly tried affiliate links that redirect to completely unrelated sites (usually a survey site), because the merhcant's offer is only available to residents outside your country.

It's a pain in the butt if, like me, you won't promote offers that you can't check out and soooooo many merchants don't (or won't) provide affiliate links that allow their non-U.S. affiliates access to see the offer firsthand.

Anyway, here's a very simple solution.

Use Proxify.com, a web-based anonymous proxy service that hides your IP address so you won't be identified as a non-U.S. based surfer.

You don't need a paid subscription. Just enter the affiliate link in the search box and voila! you get to see whether or not you really want to promote that product.

On the other hand, you might want to promote Proxify's service to your site visitors and subscribers who have other reasons to remain anonymous. The program is available through ShareaSale.

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