Last week I stumbled across a marketing ‘push’ by an internet marketer that kinda/sorta disturbed me. Do we become so enslaved to the ‘Almighty Conversion Rate” that we find ourselves turning to deceptive marketing tactics?
Is Seth Godin right? Are all marketers really liars? (hey I still have to read that book yet!).
I tend to [...]

I can’t believe it.
I received two checks from Linkshare this past month or so, about $40 bucks worth. Some good Tim Horton’s mad money :lol:.
These commissions go back the past year and half or so and I wasn’t counting on receiving any of it. Not because I thought Linkshare was crooked and wouldn’t pay [...]

Just found this in my inbox:
The ability for advertisers, publishers and Commission Junction to understand each others’ activity is an important aspect of the CJ Marketplace. We openly display information within the CJ Account Manager(TM) - EPC, Network Earnings Ratings and program descriptions - so that you can make informed decisions about which affiliations and [...]

Remember that little hobby site of mine that I was going to fool around with in May?
Monetizing A Hobby Site - Without Adsense
Update On The Hobby Site
Well I accomplished a little bit of smoke, but no fire yet. Here are the stats for May:
Rules:
No Adsense
No Popups
No Flashing/Strobing Banners
*And of course no download spyware crap either
May [...]

Can I just say I’m happy to see everyone back from the long weekend?
My traffic was done across most sites, I made a whopping $3 in commissions between Friday and Monday and it was so quiet everywhere I just had to do boring stuff - like work!
I’m a happy camper today, commissions [...]

So everybody else really busy this week? Things are snowballing again, so not much posting from me. I haven’t really been keeping up with everyone’s blogs and news so I’ll get to that later tonight hopefully and post a weekly update.
Good news for the hobby site I posted about earlier: Monetizing A Hobby Site [...]

I have a hobby type website that I haven’t done all that well with in terms of $ and traffic. It’s less than a year old (last fall), *nowhere* in Google (unless I pay for ppc), yet traffic is rising every month through word of mouth, bookmarks, and some from Yahoo and MSN.
The website [...]

Blogkits and Overstock have partnered to work with bloggers:
Overstock Blog Banners
A quick read shows a 5% commission with a $25 minimum payout agreement. To take advantage of this you need to sign up with BlogKits. Looks to me like a subaffiliate agreement with Linkshare?
I predict … this is just a start and more blog focused [...]

Now THIS is what I’m talking about - get creative!
Take a lifetime of experience and put together a resource that is not only invaluable to people wanting to travel to Disney World, but is at a consumer friendly price:
Walt Disney World Travel Guide
The manual offers invaluable travel information including details for planning your trip, [...]

There are three tv shows that I watch faithfully, and one of them is The Apprentice. I shut down the computer and plop myself in front of the television each week to see what I can ‘pick’ from the show, what can I use? It’s amazing how the ‘real world’ tasks actually parallel online promotion [...]

So I’m not quite as old as dirt (yet), but anyone else remember Coleco? Here’s the one I remember most:

[source]
Look what I found:
Coleco Handhelds Re-released
A cry for help (and where I found the above link):
Coleco handhelds are back!
Ok, I just did some quick Googling and I couldn’t find where to buy these at. Anybody else [...]

Earlier today Clickbank was under a DDOS attack. Try logging in to Clickbank and you’ll be greeted with this:

(sorry about the blurry pic)
You can follow the shenanigans over at Clickbank Success Forum. Things seem to be normal on my end (hoplinks are working and I can login), so the storm may be over now.

If you’re an affiliate of ShareASale, you’ll want to add these to blogs to your feed reader:
ShareASale Affiliate News Blog
ShareASale Corporate Blog
We will be updating 2 sets of blogs to start with, the first will be an affiliate focused blog where we will release info on programs that we feel are doing a great job, [...]

ShareASale is offering a bonus to affiliates who sign up for Direct Deposit payments:
Free Bonus - Sign up for Direct Deposit
So for April 21st and April 22nd 2005 - that’s Thursday and Friday, if you sign up to be paid via Direct Deposit to your bank account instead of by “Check” - we will put [...]

MarketingVox.com comments on a report by AdAge.com:
Papers Might Lose Billions in Classifieds to Online
Newspapers will likely be losing billions of dollars in classified ad revenue to non-newspaper online classified ad sites by 2007, according to McKinsey & Co. execs who addressed the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference
Another indication that there will be a huge [...]

Are you linking out to your merchants in a framed window? Might want to reconsider that:
Emarketer.com - Worried About Buying Online
The challenge for online merchants is to ensure that their online payments systems are secure, and to then convince women, a key shopping demographic, that it is safe to use a credit card online. Alternate [...]

Bad news today as it was announced that Affiliate Manager Forum was hacked and the forum wiped out:
The Hacker that Knocked Out My Affiliate Manager Forum and the Bounty I Have on Them
Shawn Collins is not going down though and will rebuild. He also offered a reward:
I really appreciate the outpouring of support. But please, [...]

Here’s the typical mindset of a person getting started:
“I’m starting out, so where do I get my domain name, hosting, autoresponders, how do I design a webpage and get it live on the Internet, how do I process credit cards…�
Then this misguided individual will go all out to find out how to do all these [...]

What are your plans for the growing ad blocking trend? More and more surfers are installing popup blockers (heck I hate those popups too) and activating ad blocking options in Norton’s and other software. Then we have Firefox and the tweaks and addons to block ads (including RSS ads and Adsense btw):
The Ad Block Project
Adblock [...]

So the latest ‘oldie but goodie’ I’m reading is Dan Kennedy’s 63 “Killer” Marketing Strategies (see free download link below). Somehow I found it in my mile high ebook pile.
Although the focus is on direct mail, surely there are some nuggets for us affs to grab hold of?
Some notes:
Every element of an ad, printed [...]

Threadwatch was discussing an old thread from 2002 that was brought up over on WMW:
Finding Good Affiliate Niches
I started reading…stopped…made some coffee…came back and settled into reading this gem. And then printed it off in a .pdf
Great read and it’s surprising how valid the info is today, three years later.
Enjoy the read.
ETA:
Found another [...]

Jay Abraham has a nice outline for the importance of a Unique Selling Point (USP) and how to define and create it:
How To Create A Unique Selling Proposition
If you prefer a .pdf file, you can grab it here:
Jay Abraham - Your Unique Selling Proposition
How do you get your business differentiated? By creating a Unique Selling [...]

Very interesting read over at ClickZ regarding online advertising and the growing demand for inventory:
The Inventory Issue
Over the past few weeks and months, I’ve been seeing a lot of signs. Big media players on the hunt for online inventory have snatched up sites such as MarketWatch and About.com. Startups like Bloglines and Feedster, ostensibly conceived [...]

Over at SEOmoz Blog there’s an interesting article (Link Building with Discounts) regarding Lucky Magazine and how it promotes online shopping sites.

Sure enough, inside were “links” to hundreds of stores both online and off from which to purchase the trendy gear (clothing, accessories, hygiene products, furnishings, etc.) that was featured in the spreads.
As I flipped [...]

Login to your ClickBank account and you’ll see this announcement:
Dear client,
Great news! A new, simpler hoplink url format has been added. The format is as follows:
http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net
Affiliates may find higher conversion rates using this newer format because the personalized domain name will not be recognized by filters and spyware that block advertisements. Also, vendors [...]