Category: affiliate

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Affiliate Spammer?

I’ve not heard of MasteryTV, but one of his affiliates is furious:

I signed up as a MasteryTV affiliate partner when it first launched and I’ve been trying to get off Tom Wood’s list ever since.

In every email he sends there is a link labelled “Immediate and Permanent Removal from Mailings”. I’ve clicked that link (which is coded with my email address) each time I receive spam from Mr. Wood, and yet the crap still arrives week after week after *&/=@! week.

I’ve phoned the MasteryTV offices twice and both times left a message. Yet, still the mail comes.

OK, so Tom Wood is a SPAMMER.

Apparently he also has deleted his affiliate program and put a link that earns him money (and not the affiliate) in it’s place. Yikes. That’s not good at all.

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Getting Your Website Ready For Christmas

While most of us have already prepared for the holidays, even those of you who are uber prepared could possibly glean something from this list:

10 Ways to Get Your Affiliate Site Ready for Christmas

I was reminded to hawk Amazon Christmas cards. I remember getting the email from them that they were now (finally) going to be commissionable. However, I had forgotten they were worth 6%. For an Amazon commission, that’s fabulous! (more great affiliate christmas prep here)

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How To Find Datafeeds In CJ

As some of you know, I’ve been pulling datafeeds on my deals site for sometime. Here’s how I found them in CJ.

To Find Datafeeds in CJ:

1. After logging in, got to GET LINKS
2. Choose ADVERTISER LIST
3. Click on ADDITIONAL SEARCH OPTIONS
4. Under the Link Type drop down menu, select PRODUCTS and click FIND
5. At the bottom of the page, be sure to select Return 200 results per page
6. Click STATUS to sort the results (3 pages worth) by relationship (active, inactive, no relationship, etc.)

Note: Only advertisers that have a relationship status of ACTIVE will be of any use to you

To add these feeds to your own feeds you have to manually request it from CJ’s Contact Form (a one-time pain, no doubt). However, if you aren’t earning above their minimums, it will cost you $250. I wouldn’t suggest paying it when there are so many affiliates that offer RSS (free) and that number is growing monthly. I actually only chose to pull an Ebay smart search w/my aff code in it and the Buy.com aff code. Buy.com has had RSS data since before last year (ahead of the crowd).

If you can’t figure out how to do the Ebay RSS let me know and I’ll cover it.

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Bidding on Trademarked Keywords

Those of you who promote via affiliate links know that going over whether or not it is ok to use the term in the ad is frustrating. Google makes it worse by not even allowing any trademarked word in ad copy, even if it’s not against the terms of the affiliate program.

To get around this, people who buy Adwords must use brackets to call a trademarked keyword: {keyword}

I was reminded of this when I saw the ad being pulled on my gaming site today.

Bidding on Trademarked Keywords - affiliate marketing

I have a hard time believing that someone from Amazon’s program would make this mistake. Could it be an affiliate? Certainly ads that are purchased by Amazon go through more review (checks and balances) before they hit the web?

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Some Amazing Adsense Integration

While this smooth integration of AdSense may just push the TOS line a bit (images are only supposed to be run beside adsense w/a border or seperator of some sort), but I think it is one of the smartest ways to monetize your site, while retaining it’s value and aesthetic appeal.

adsense integration

adsense integration

Of course, as Teli pointed out, maybe leading clicks to adsense instead of the higher priced affiliate links may not be a smart thing in and of itself. Whatever you decide, the site is amazing. Be sure to check it out.

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An Amazon Affiliate I Think You Need To Meet

I was so impressed when I first came across Asen on the Digital Point forums, that I was inspired to completely redesign my own deals site. He’s created a residual income with his Amazon store, and since we’d all love to have one of those (yeah, the residual income part), I wanted to share with you what he’s doing.

First, I want to point you to an article that he wrote detailing how he’s gaining amazon affiliate success (even how he spurred traffic really quickly). This is the program he used to create the Amazon store (aff link).

These are some of the stats he cites at DP:

Amazon Items: 22, Revenue: $662.14, Referral Fees: $35.31
Third Party Items: 84, Revenue: $3,017.15, Referral Fees: $155.69
Total: 106, Revenue: $3,679.29, Referral Fees: $191.00

Visitors: 30,000 Uniques/Month.
PageViews: 120,000/Month.

Now, that wouldn’t be so amazing, but apparently this is not something he really puts time into nor has he been doing it long. This is a residual income for him that took little investment and takes even less now. Impressive…

If you could ask him anything, what would it be? I’ll make sure to relay the questions to him.

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JotSpot Affiliate Program Closing – Without PayPal You Don’t Get Paid

PayPalSucks.comIt was very frustrating for me to learn that the JotSpot affiliate program was closing. As a social networking geek, as you can imagine the JotSpot wiki was something I enjoyed helping others find out about. Of course, I have a balance at Jot and since they are closing the affiliate program, I attempted to cash out, but they won’t cut me a check or pay me by any means except PayPal.

I emailed marketing@jot.com and got two responses from Ryan Pollack. Both were clear that there was no discussion on this. It was PayPal or the highway.

I even asked if they would consider Google Checkout and they wouldn’t. Pretty ironic that Google’s latest purchase refuses to use Google Checkout. What does that say?

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Google Toolbar 4.0

Google Toolbar ads can be seen all over the web. These affiliate links are hawking the newsest version of the Google Toolbar. Google Toolbar 4.0 is designed to improve search usage for the average user:

According to Google, its new enhanced search box works as follows, “As you type a search query into the new Toolbar’s search box, you’ll see a list of useful suggestions based on popular Google searches, spelling corrections and your own Toolbar search history and bookmarks. You can also click the ‘G’ icon in the search box to search different Google sites, the current site, or sites for which you’ve installed custom search buttons.” With the enhanced search box feature, users can start to type a query and immediately see suggestions based on the letter configuration. This is especially ideal for those of us who never excelled at spelling. If users are unsure of how to spell what they are looking for, the Google toolbar offers suggestions on what is actually being searched for. The toolbar also saves searches, which appear above the suggestions–even after only one letter has been typed into the search box. The customized feel of this functionality is a great way to search, as it feels more personal and intuitive. Search engine sites are always updating and upgrading their services to appeal to both the Web savvy and the not-so-Web-savvy. The Google toolbar has become much more streamlined and user-friendly. It still offers a pop-up blocker and shortcut buttons to other Google sites. Additionally, users can bookmark sites within the toolbar and access them from any computer.

As the only geek who will admit to using the Google Sidebar, I don’t think I could ever willingly download a toolbar, but I can see that there might be usefulness here. I’m sure my poor mom will download it, along with her Yahoo, AOL, A9 and other toolbars. There’s going to be some point when there’s no room left on her browser for actual browsing. 😉

This brings me to the point, Can Toolbars Ever Have Advertiser Value? Is there ever going to be a day when toolbars aren’t assumed to be 1-filled with adware and 2-only for newbies? It seems to me that the only type of browser insertion that *is* trusted is the Firefox extension. Will IE extensions be trusted, once IE7 releases?

I don’t have the answers, only questions. Anyone have input here?

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Gaming Digg is Easy

After the recent post on Gaming Technorati, I thought I’d share a little of what I’ve seen about gaming Digg.

For obvious reasons, I won’t go into great detail, but I can share a general idea of how it happens. And, I won’t be talking much about the top 100 users either…

I hardly have to tell you WHY you might want to game the system, but I can tell you why you may NOT want to game Digg.

The reasons for doing so are obvious to most (traffic, links, attention). But I will point out that the reason spammers do their best to game the system is not for blogosphere glory, but because they want long term links going to their affiliate sites via search engines.

What I mean is that if I get Dugg with a title like “Buy Some Viagra Fellows: Top Ten Women Searches on Google” I have probably just given that Digg story *great* placement for the keywords ‘buy viagra’. Of course, after the Digg story dies down I can go back and add my affiliate links into the page, giving me a highly ranked SERP for my trashy keywords.

Now, getting Dugg on this and making it work means Digging it yourself. But, you can’t do it as a new user and you can’t do it on your own account. Here’s where it gets shady (or way more shady, if you’re white hat like me)…

There are bots, two that I know of, that will assist you in creating Digg users (you’ll need several hundred to ensure a Digg will get traction). If you want to get to the first page you’ll need to get there in the first 30 mins or so. It takes few Diggs to do that. Not saying it isn’t possible, but it’s much easier right after posting.

And, of course, if your story isn’t Digg-worthy, it’s not going to get traction anyway. The above story would have to have pics of the ladies (clean) and would have to be written either very authoritatively (ie no passion) or with classic tongue-in-cheek humor (and it’d need to be accurate).

Anyway, there is one bot *I have heard* that is excellent for creating a large base of Diggers. Of course, this is work, and you probably earn your high SERP for the effort involved, but that is how spammers are gaming Digg.

I did hear one tip on a WebmasterWorld show that I really love, SEO Rockstars. Their guest shared that his technique is to make all of his bot Diggers’ names start with the same letter as the day of the week he works them (random Diggs stories so they aren’t caught on). In other words, Monday’s Diggers might be Mandy, Morris, Mitch, MegaMan, etc.

Now please, please don’t ask me about that bot. I won’t divulge my source(s) on that one you evil spammers. 😉