Affiliate Blog

I just posted to my Webmaster Blog about the sale of vBulletin to Internet Brands.

I'm not looking to double post on this topic, so I'll just direct you to the post … Webmaster Blog.

  Imagine being able to post your articles, your datafeeds, and your RSS feeds to all of your blogs no matter what the blog's software platform is. That's the power of Content Farmer!

I've looked around the Internet at a few blogging softwares like Content Farmer, but haven't found one that does datafeeds as part of it's bag of tricks. That's huge!

At slighly more than $200, Content Farmer will serve as a single source dashboard to all of you blogs, making the process of operating several blogs that much easier.

Content Farmer works with WordPress, b2evolution, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, Nucleus, Live Journal and Post by Email.

I highly recommend you get yourself a copy of Content Farmer as part of your afiliate marketing strategy. It does far more than I've listed for you here, so at the very least get yourself educated about it.

I logged in to my phpAdsNew the other day to do a little work with my banner ads, and darned if if hadn't gotten cracked. I hate those guys. They cracked in and damaged the database more or less … enough that I needed to repair it.

Then I thought to myself, why repair when I should upgrade. I pulled up my link to phpAdsNew, and I discover another surprise … and this one was pleasant.

phpAdsNew is now called OpenAds … and it's got a whole new look and feeling going on. It's definately worth checking out!

I visited their new blog to see what what was up with the new digs, and learned…

We are the world's largest adspace community! Our open source ad serving software is used by more websites than any other, worldwide. We're celebrating this with the launch of our new website, www.openads.org, and a commitment to the open source community.

I grabbed a copy of OpenAds 2.0 for my new install. I decide to scrap the old one and start over fresh. They also offer another version of OpenAds that used to be Max Media Manager. So, be sure you pick the one that's right fo your needs.

Then show a little love for the new OpenAds with a banner on you blog or website … like the one I added here.

Hey guys,  feel the love in this room … add me to your blogroll?!

Affiliate Blogger posts and articles are all over the Internet as resources and helpful tips for the success of other affiliates, but this blog … my Affiliate Blogger blog … is my home-base where I bring all those tools and tips together in one place.

I also have the Affiliate Guild, where I offer a ton of educational materials for new affiliates and tools to make the process easier. A lot of those tools are totally free, as are most of the affiliate classrooms and materials.

My personal goal is to help others get started in Affiliate Marketing, and not have to learn the hard way like I did.

Things are much easier these days, and then again with all the changes in technologies happening so freaking fast … maybe in some ways it's harder. That's why I take the time to create thoughtful posts as the Affiliate Blogger … to try and help you stay up with the trends of Internet Marketing.

One of the biggest trends is the movement towards more use of video, and especially interactive video. I've found an awesome tool for you and gotten a great reduction in the pricing to offer as well. It's not free, but it's close to it.

The tool is called Screen Show Pro and it's an inexpensive screen capture tool similar to Camista. Only difference is that Camista will cost you $299 and Screen Show Pro will cost you $29 …  this is a keeper!

I'm using Screen Show Pro to build my interactive videos for my various Internet businesses. I'm liking it a lot!

After I made my videos, I joined the new interactive video community site called FreeIQ. It's free to join and gives both a venue to distribute your videos, as well as your products, services and affiliate links.

FreeIQ is full of helpful and informative educational materials and products … many of which are for free.

Visit my FreeIQ website … http://freeiq.com/bobbiegrennier to learn more about all of this because the Internet is quickly moving towards a video rich world and you need to be a part of it to be successful.

No longer is content king. Now it's all about entertainment and video education.

I get a lot of emails from all sorts of Marketers. I don't post that much about those emails because, well frankly most of them are just spammy crap.

Once in a blue moon I'll get one that's really got some merit to it, and then I'll share it with you.

Your readership is valuable to me. I value your attention to the posts I blog about, and it's that attention that's given rise to the post I'm doing today.

There's a lot of discussion that we're heading into a new age of Online Marketing, pushing Permission-based Marketing to its limits.

A fairly well known marketer named Rich Schefren has released a new report called Attention Age Doctrine. This report outline's his predicitions for the near future of Online Marketing.

Like you, I said to myself … Oh great, another get rich quick scheme being hatched. I don't know about you, but I'm so sick of those tired old pitches full of hype and BS.

I decided to sign-up for Rich's free report and see what he had to say. I was expecting the same old song and dance, but that's not what I got. I was plesantly surprised.

Oh sure, there's a bit of that hype and zeal that marketers use, but there's also some meat to this dish … and it's worth the read. Very much worth the read.

If you look at Rich's list of clients, it's a "who's who" list of the top online marketers. Rich has been around awhile and has spawned some of the most widely used marketing strategies online to date.

Many of these online marketers are still doing business using traditional techniques, but they are listening to Rich's counsel and I can see how many of them are heading in this new direction that Rich's report outlines.

For the last month Rich has been writing his new Advisory report. It's called The Attention Age Doctrine.

The Attention Age Doctrine talks about the new environment of the Internet and where the Market is heading. I think he's dead-on in his analysis.

Unlike his Internet Business Manifesto Trilogy, this advisory will be available only for a limited time.

My advice … reserve your copy now: The Attention Age Doctrine.

I met Marc Chase in a affilaite focused forum. He's an Affiliate Manager trying to fire up a new affiliate program for MyCreditGroup.

Marc's got some strikes against him, as he's got a spanking new affiliate program in a niche that's flooded and really hard to rank in.

Marc's Affiliate Program is in the Finance niche with a focus on Credit Repair, Debt Settlement and Mortgages. It's one of the toughest to break into, and most expensive to participate in.

I know this niche very well as I used to own a business that generated leads for Merchants as large as Bank of America. I used to earn upwards of $50 per lead. That's per lead, not per sale. Money was good way back then, but not anymore if you're new to the game.

So, when I saw Marc's post announcing his offering to the affiliates … I saw some really good things and I saw a few things that could be better.

Marc's post read something like this…

We've put a lot of effort into building a flawless reputation before launching our affiliate program.
We put just as much effort into creating support for our affiliates. 

Some Features:
- Multi Tiered: $50.00 per 5% second tier
- $1000.00 bonus per 100 sign ups
- Additional bonuses of 500.00 for second conversion
- Huge industry and we are hands down the most trusted.

We're even working on health benefits (lots of details of course)

The affiliate page can be found here:
The Best Credit Repair Affiliate Program - My Credit Group

Feel free to research our company thoroughly and you'll see the effort we've put into ethics and integrity.

If you have any questions, or suggestions we'd love to hear from you.

Thank you in advance
Marc Chase

• They're listed with Dunn and Bradstreet.
• They have a flawless seven year old BBB record, which in that niche is unheard of.
• They are registered with the Attorney General and Secretary of State.
• They offer the affiliate a lot of incentives.
• They offer the affiliate revenue potential for the client's many possible trasactions.
• Their payout for sales seems generous.
• They offer a second tier opportunity.
• They don't compete with the affiliates.
• They are very responsive to their affiliates.

What I didn't see caused me to ask Marc a few questions and offer some suggestions:

• I wanted to see a short form for affiliates to put onto their websites to generate sales easier.
• I wanted to see a 365 day cookie set because in this niche clients take a long time to sell to.
• I wanted to see a first-in cookie so that affiliates who really work it can benefit and not have to worry about cookie theft.
• I wanted to know what states they could service, because this niche has lots of legal limitations.
• I wanted to know who owned the company.

Marc was prompt to respond to all my questions, and lightning quick to supply all the elements I suggested. He also gave me some more insights into his company and their ethics:

Debt Settlement. Its rather lengthy so I'll paint some broad strokes
1) Greed - average fee is 14% we charge 8%. It still makes a ton of money. I dont understand 14%.

2) Because we have a credit repair mentality, credit scores are first things we think of. So, while client is saving their "settlement" money, we keep the debts tied up with validation, method of validation, FCBA requests etc. What this does (not always) is prevents them from marking the accounts late while they are saving. Goal being to get them debt free and preserving their credit.

3) Greed again: Settlement companies get paid on the total amount of debt settled. Many debts that arent even necessary to settle are included because its more commissions. We work on repair first (where applicable) if we can get something removed, then its less the client has to pay. Again, still a ton of money.

4) We always attempt to pay for deletions (credit repair mentaility). Collection agents usually just care about money and will delete the tradeline entirely as long as they get paid.

Again, settlement companies don't do credit repair, so those things aren't their concern. Since we want everybody to eventually turn to a mortgage, it is in our best interest to perfect their score no matter what service we're providing.

I am impressed with company's business model, and after chatting with Marc, I'm also impressed with their attention to details and customer service for their affiliates.

I decided to join their affiliate program and if you have finance sites that focus on CPS more than CPM/CPA, this would be a good affiliate program for you too … very ethical todate.

Aug 20-23, 2007  |  San Jose Convention Center

Early Bird Special: Register by Aug. 3, and save $150.

At Search Engine Strategies San Jose delegates will be invited to focus primarily on search-related promotions – both organic and paid – for 4 full days, taking away all of the innovative search marketing strategies and tactics used to reach potential customers online. Case studies and best practices will be presented by SEM/SEO industry experts and representatives from the search engines themselves. To learn more, please visit www.SESSanJose.com.

This is our 8th annual San Jose event, and this time around, we'll be presenting 100+ exhibitors, 200+ speakers and 75 sessions. As the industry converges for a week of networking, spirited discussion and high-level learning, here's what else you can expect:

Keynote Conversation with Jim Lanzone, Ask.com
Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone talks with conference co-chair Danny Sullivan about Ask.com's challenge to its more trafficked peers to steal away searchers, including how the launch of its new Ask3D interface.

Keynote Conversation with Marissa Mayer, Google
Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google, talks with conference co-chair Danny Sullivan about Google's moves in search, including recent changes to add more personalized and "universal" search results.

Search Engine Marketing & Optimization Training
Students will be provided with guided, hands-on exposure that puts theory into practice in a highly interactive environment. These workshops are taught by world acclaimed search engine marketers Shari Thurow, Matt Bailey, Jennifer Laycock, Debra Mastaler, Sage Lewis, Christine Churchill and Jim Gilbert will provide you with the practices, applications, and hands-on exposure you need to become (and remain!) a top performer in your field.

Special Events and Networking Opportunities – the Google Dance, Search Bash and more… details to be announced soon.

The Lexington Law affiliates program is going to offer a free training for their affiliates … don't miss out ….

About 30% of Internet commerce is driven by affiliate marketers.
But 90% of marketing affiliates make barely enough in commissions to pay their water bill.

WHY?

It’s not their fault. Anyone can put together a group of affiliates. But few companies take the time and effort to create a powerful cadre of affiliate marketers and provide them the specific, proven action steps that drive more business.

At Lexington Law/Progrexion, we don’t think our affiliate marketing is successful unless the program produces a healthy revenue stream for you. And we’re going to show you exactly how to do that.

On Thursday June 28th at 2:00 EST you can attend a F*REE training webinar, and learn from “super affiliate” Russell Brunson of DotComSecrets, Inc.and the Lexington Law team the closely guarded secrets for raking in huge affiliate checks.

Russell took $20 and a simple idea and created DotComSecrets, Inc, a multi-million dollar online company driven by affiliate marketing. He normally charges $1000 an hour to train the top affiliates in the world…BUT simply by registering for this Lexington Law Firm/Progrexion webinar, you can learn his affiliate tactics absolutely F*REE.

Give us 1 hour – we’ll give you the affiliate marketing secrets that will take your affiliate program to the next level, better your cash flow and boost your bottom line.

REGISTER NOW! If this link does not work copy and paste this address in your browser http://www.dotcomsecrets.com/affiliatetraining.htm

To your success,

The Lexington Law Affiliate
Management Team

P.S. Webinar slots are limited.

WordPress announces WordCamp…

It's been a pretty exciting year for WordPress, and we're pleased to top it off with another WordCamp. You can check it out here:

http://2007.wordcamp.org/

We've got some very interesting speakers lined up, and we're doing 2 days instead of 1. I hope to see many of you there again this year.

P.S. You're getting this email because you signed up for the 2006 WordCamp mailing list. This is the last message I'll send out to that list, so farewell and hope to see you again.

I just received an email that made me laugh out loud … and I had to share. Everyone needs a good belly laugh once in a while. Here's the email with a few private informational parts removed:

This email is to notify you that you have made a sale.

You have earned $0.01 in commission for this sale, which was placed by (I removed the name here).

This will be added to your total commissions for this month.
To verify your stats online please visit ….

Please note that this sale and commission is based on the approval of the order and receipt of funds. If the order cannot be confirmed, or funds are not received, your commission account will be updated accordingly.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

AC Support
Affiliate Classroom

For the record, my affiliate links to AC are more about helping other marketers. So, no I wasn't planning on getting rich off this. The funds earned will go to supporting my work on the Affiliate Guild, where I'm tying to help newbie affiliates get going in this business. But still … this is pretty funny!

Don't cry foul! Be smarter with Google's Adsense Smart Pricing.

You can't blame Google for wanting to do right by their merchants, and try to get them the best qualified traffic possible. Google's attempt to deal with the arbitrage issue has caused some problems for their legit publishers as well.

I'm talking about Adsense Smart Pricing, which was Google's original answer to dealing with arbitrage junk-clicks. It's definitely having an effect in favor of the merchants, but guess what … it's got a wicked backlash to it that is hurting those White Hat Publishers as well. Opps!

The problem is that there are poor quality advertisers/merchants out there as well. And if your site happens to run in the same keyword set that those poor quality advertisers do, then you've got problems my friend.

What happens is the the consumer comes to your site, clicks the Google ad and lands on the crappy advertisers landing page … the consumer then bails on that crappy site immediately.

What's that mean for you? Means Google is going to punish you for sending that advertiser what they percieve as bad traffic, when you were not at fault at all. Oops! 

So, there is something you can do combat the evils of the bad advertiser syndrome.

Log into your AdSense account and then wander on over to the Adsense Setup area … look for the Competitive Ad Filter and click on to it. In the box of URLs to block, paste in a copy of this list of Bad Advertisers to be Blocked.

Do this and you'll made a big dent in the amount consumers fleeing from your Google links. Life will be good again!

LinkShare announced their newest affiliate tool called Automated LinkGenerator, but boy did they make it difficult for their affiliates to understand what the heck this thing is and what it does. It's kind of a datafeed, but then again it's kind of not. Here's the email announcement I got….

LinkShare is pleased to announce a new Web services offering for affiliates, called Automated LinkGenerator. Web services are Web based applications that use open, XML-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data with clients.

Automated LinkGenerator creates LinkShare affiliate links for any product on a merchant's site that offers LinkGenerator. This new feature provides the same functionality as the LinkGenerator tool in the Individual Product Links interface, without having to log into the Affiliate Interface to get your links. This new tool does not replace Merchandiser (LinkShare's datafeed), but will be helpful for getting direct links from merchants that do not offer Merchandiser feeds.

If you are interested in using the Automated LinkGenerator, please email us at linkgen_request@linkshare.com to have this new tool enabled. Once you are enabled, the Automated LinkGenerator will be located under the LinkShare Feed Synergy Services area of the Affiliate Interface. To create an Automated LinkGenerator link, you will use a REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services to request links for a given merchant URL. You will then send a URL from the merchant's site to LinkShare using the specified link format (see the Automated LinkGenerator Help area).  The URL can be sent through a browser, a tool like wget or curl, or an automated script.  For each URL provided, LinkShare returns a click link.  You can request up to 1,000 links within an hour.

Web services applications are accessible using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST. Web Services use HTTP with XML for communication. These are ubiquitous technologies and any device capable of using these technologies is able to both host and consume Web services. Web services concepts are simple to understand and with the addition of various tool-kits provide a low barrier to entry and easy software development.

For information on setting up a Web services, please visit the following sites:
REST - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
Web Services - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service
Web Services & PHP - http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/03/24/phpws.html

I received a nice email from Google today letting me know that they've upgraded their analytics tool. Here's the deatils….

We are happy to announce the release of a new version of the Google Analytics reporting interface. Since you are an existing user, you will automatically be upgraded - there is no action required on your part. To access this new version click the "View Reports" link next to any profile in your account by logging in at http://www.google.com/analytics.

For a smooth transition, we've listed some helpful resources and notes below.  Also, you will still be able to access your old reporting interface for at least a month by clicking "Previous Interface" below the "View Reports" link for any profile in your account. Other than a few improvements detailed in the version notes below, your data and configuration settings remain unaffected by your choice of interface and your data continues to be tracked in the same way as it was prior to this redesign.

*What is new?* In the new version, your reports have been redesigned for clarity, greater visibility of important metrics, and ease of use.  Here are just a few of the features you'll notice:

- Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.     

- Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.      

- Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.     

- Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.The new interface has everything the previous interface had and more. In addition, links within reports make it easier to navigate related information and explore your data.

The following resources are available to help you get the most from the new Google Analytics interface:

- Report Finder Tool: will help you see where data from the previous interface is located within the new version (it is also linked to from within your reports on the left nav menu.     

- Product tour:        http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html     

- FAQs for more details about the new version:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.pypage=FAQ.cs

- Help Center: includes articles related to the new version:         http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/     

- Support: if you encounter any issues with the new version that you can't resolve with the help center, you can contact our support team through the Contact Us link at the bottom of the help center web page, or receive higher-touch support through a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant. Find one here:        http://www.google.com/analytics/support_partner_provided.html      

- Analytics Help Forum: If you would like to discuss the new version or get tips from experienced users, please visit the Analytics Help Forum in English within Google Groups at:        http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help