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Affiliate Marketing

See all posts tagged with 'affiliate marketing'.

Clickbank Tracking Enhancements (TID)

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Clickbank has a new promotion tracking enhancement that allows affiliates to add an 8-character tracking code to the hoplink and order process, which provides the ability to accurately track and manage your campaigns.

Key features of this enhancement are:

  • Allows affiliates to add a code to the hoplink process for promotion tracking
  • Captures promotion tracking code during the order process
  • Displays the promotion tracking code in the transaction report(s)

So, if you sell an ebook by linking directly to the merchant from Google Adwords, on your site and through your newsletters, you can add an individual tid (tracking ID's) to each link.

For example, if you are selling the Super Affiliate Handbook, the link that goes out in your newsletter might look like:

http://yourid.merchantid.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=sahemail

Where as the affiliate link on your site could be:

http://yourid.merchantid.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=site

Happy tracking!

Cheers,
Ros

Working the Web from Nigeria

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Here is a question that I received from Samuel in Nigeria:

Greetings Dear Rosalind,

I bought your Super Affiliate Handbook and I really like it. It is highly informative when compared to Googlecash.

Anyway, I am from Nigeria and I love everything about making money on the Internet. I operate a website and have a growing subscriber list which is all about empowering Nigerians through the Internet. Because of my desire to make money on the net and to assist fellow Nigerians who come to my website to subscribe, I have to be properly informed through seminars, information products and most importanly veterans like you.

Now, one of the problems besieging most people in Nigeria is… [Read more…]

Affiliate Takedown: Score One for the Good Guys

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I read a report today at PC World that will warm the cockles of all honest, white-hat affiliate hearts… Court Shuts Down Alleged Spyware Operation. The site was shut down for “secretly loading spyware onto millions of computers after promising users free screen savers and video files”.

Gee, sound like anyone we know and that I ranted at length about not too long ago? Seems that despite a $3M fine, bad practices continue at Zango according to Ben Edelman.

The desired result of such news should be that affiliate purveyors of such crapola see the light and go white… ya well, in a perfect world.

Affiliate Rip-Off

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Here's a question I received this week from D.R. about the potential for affiliates to get ripped off by merchants under certain circumstances.

Is it true that ebook writers using an email capture box on their sales pages are ripping affiliates off when customers being sent to them sign up for the emails, then they sell them a book weeks or months later and we never see a dime for it.

Also if a ebook writer has 2 forms of checkout on his order page if the customer uses the optional one (not clickbank) then again we get no commission.

You have the clout, can you find this out and answer in your newsletter. I received an email from a guru about this very practice. If true then they will lose ALL affiliate selling their product by the thousands.

Thanks.

Well D.R., I'm not sure that I have any clout, but I do understand your concern and do know something about these issues. [Read more…]

Bad Combination: Affiliate Checks and Paper Shredders

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Cross Cut Paper Shredder, destroy the evidence Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later… I was going through a small stack of morning mail that included 6 affiliate checks. What I normally do is open the envelope, remove the contents and throw the envelope in the paper shredder for recycling.

Well, I pulled out the contents of an envelope from Friendfinder, shredded the envelope and when I looked for the check that came with the affiliate letter … it wasn't there! Could it be that there was no check?

Nope.

I sifted through the tiny shreds and sure enough, there was a bit from ‘dley.com'… or Medley.com, the company that handles Friendfinder's affiliate commission checks. :-/

Bummer.

Affiliate Business Financing 101

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Don’t have a fortune (or even a few hundred dollars) to set up and run your new business? Here are some tips…

As the old saying goes, ‘it takes money to make money' and although it's relatively cheap to start an affiliate marketing business, the old saying still applies.

First you'll want to learn how affiliate marketing works, and courses run from a low of $47 for my Super Affiliate Handbook to thousands of dollars for full fledged mentoring programs related to internet marketing. Perhaps you want to learn how to build your own website so you can save money in the long run on designers… and there are courses for that too.

Then of course you will want the best of tools to use in your business. Maybe you need to upgrade that old computer that keeps crashing every time you open a big program, or a faster Internet connection to speed up your research.

You'll probably also want to buy tools that make you more productive, and there will be no shortage of tempting offers for software that promise easy ways to build your affiliate empire quickly.

Once you've got your website up and running, you'll want visitors, and the quickest way to get visitors (without waiting months for the search engines to list your site) is to advertise using pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With minimum bids at Yahoo! Search Marketing running at ten cents a click, getting thousands of visitors to your web site can cost a fortune.

But what do you do if you don't have a fortune (or even a few hundred dollars) to spend setting up and running your new business?

Working another job to finance your business is a really bad idea unless you somehow managed to be the only person on the planet who was blessed with a 48-hour day.

There is a better option and it's all about how you manage your finances.

Most of us didn't get any training as children or young adults on how best to manage our money. ‘Save for a rainy day' is the only thing I remember my mother telling me about handling money, and guess what… She was wrong… in part.

I'm richer now than my mother ever dreamed of being and that's because I ignored her advice. From the time I was a teenager, I took a path much less travelled in regards to money management and it has ALWAYS worked like a charm.

I'm not in the financial consulting business, so I won't bore you with the details. However, I do know someone who offers sage advice to those who were led up the garden path on the subject of money matters and are now seeking a better way.

His name is Leo Quinn, and if you're in debt up to your ears and can't even think about how to fund your affiliate business, his advice could put you on the right path. If you are serious about debt relief, Leo prescribes uncommon methods that I know from first-hand experience really work.

Back in 1997, Leo created a program that shows folks how to get control of personal debt and get rid of it.and how it can be done very quickly.

Leo started teaching this at local community colleges in the New York area. The response to this simple but very effective strategy was so great that he was told that he should write a book about it and distribute it online so more people could benefit.

So in 2001, Leo wrote his book, “How To Own Your Paycheck Again!“, and since then thousands and thousands of people have used his strategy to dramatically change their financial well-being. And don't worry… what he prescribes is neither illegal or immoral. 🙂 It is all above board and like nothing you have ever seen before. It's the kind of financial advice that you would have pay thousands to get from a financial planner.

And it's a far better investment than buying an information manual that instructs you to go out and spend even more to build your business, when you don't have it to spend. Why not learn some techniques on how to pay off your debt quicker and more money in your pocket?

Now for a limited time, Leo has agreed to give NPT readers a huge discount on his program. (Even without the discount, it's a great deal, however.)

So, if you need to get out of debt before you can get into business, get Leo Quinn's book, “How To Own Your Paycheck Again!” today!

Super Affiliates: Tips for the Best of the Best

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Ros Wins the JackpotHello from Carmel, CA., where I'm spending a few days on the tail-end of my Casino Affiliate Convention trip. As I live in the near-desert, it's a lovely change of pace to breathe fog and listen to the ocean.

Although some exhibitors and speakers (including Mr. Rabie of Betcorp with whom I was supposed to split the 90-minute stage time) pulled out of the conference after news that Peter Dicks, U.K.-based Sportingbet PLC Chairman had been arrested at J.F.K. airport on September 7th – CAC2006 was very well-attended.

“The Super Affiliate Session: Tips for the Best of the Best” presentation was jam-packed with affiliates and a couple of affiliate managers.

Now you may wonder why an affiliate who promotes dating services almost exclusively and drops a whopping fifty cents in slot machines per trip to Vegas would speak to affiliates in the gaming sector.

Worse, during the introduction, I had to admit that I hadn't yet been able to find a coin slot in which to drop a couple of quarters! 🙂

But the truth is that my lack of gambling knowledge wasn't a drawback at all. It actually made researching those tips for the ‘best of the best' much easier.

I simply put myself in their customers' shoes by pretending to be a newbie interested in learning how to play poker online.

After finding their sites, I then decided whether or not I would feel comfortable opening my wallet based on their poker instructions, casino recommendations and other information.

Have you ever surveyed your own site(s), or better yet – your competitors sites – from that perspective?

Put yourself in a newbie's shoes and pretend that you are about to make your very first online purchase. Now go and look at some affiliate sites in your niche. Look for the best of the best and answer the following questions.

What site elements encourage you to trust the webmaster of one site over another? What convinces you that purchasing online is safe? Would you remember their site to return to it later? Are you given incentive to get more information on the topic? Would you remember the webmaster's name? Is there something that makes you believe that the products promoted by one affiliate are superior to similar products promoted by affiliates on other sites?

Make note of the techniques that strike you as the best of the best. Incorporate those elements that work to build visitor trust and your reputation as a trustworthy purveyor of quality goods into your own affiliate site.

Then watch your conversion rates and commissions soar!

Note: Quick tip for affiliate managers. Let your staff techies attend the SEO sessions while you go to the affiliate training presentations. Then share what you learn with your own affiliates!

Cheers,
Ros

P.S. Check out the picture above very closely and notice how much I learned from my research for the Casino Affiliate Convention! 🙂

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