Thursday

Commission Junction Changing Payment Threshold


Are you a CJ affiliate? Do you get paid via paper check? I do and it looks like the threshold for receiving a check in the mail is being raised. This change effects all locations, not just the US as well.

Starting on August 28 to receive a direct deposit for your commissions from CJ.com you must have built up earnings of $50 or more and to receive a paper check you must have earned $100 or more. Nos this isn't too big of a deal and I can see how it will vastly improve their efficiencies and even cut down on their man hours.

Just be warned, in case you were expecting a small check or deposit next month from Commission Junction.

When Is It Changing?

1. The change will be effective August 28, 2008, and will affect the checks you would receive as part of September’s payout.

Why Is Commission Junction Making This Change?

1. To streamline our publisher payment process.
2. To offer publishers an incentive to switch to direct deposit because paper checks are less efficient, more costly and slower than the electronic option.
3. To drastically cut down on paper consumption and better support environmentally conscious commerce.
4. To better align our process with the industry because our minimum commission threshold to receive payment is, almost without exception, far below the current standard.

How Will It Impact You?

1. Simply stated, beginning in September you will be paid once your earned commissions meet or exceed the amount in the chart above (based on functional currency and payout option).
2. If you wish to change payment methods, log in to your Account Manager, click the Account tab>Administrative Settings tab>Payment Information>Edit button. Changes should be made no later than August 28, 2008 to be in effect before the payments are processed in September.
3. We hope you will be able to utilize the direct deposit method of payment if you are not yet using it – it will ultimately benefit you and the environment.

Wednesday

MaxBounty Affiliate Referral

MaxBounty is an affiliate program management company that offers a lot of different programs to fit almost any niche. I've found that they have one of the largest selection of 'email lead' programs, where a visitor only has to register their email for a product and then you get a lead commission. This has worked great in the past on my video game blogs, especially when the Wii first came out and everyone was trying to get a free one...or get one anywhere for that matter.

Also, it's no secret that they offer a great commission to affiliates for recommending other affiliates to their website. Currently they offer 5% of earnings of the referred affiliate to the person who sent them there and this percentage is paid out for a full year. If you get a few good affiliates under you this can really add up and even suppliment some of your affiliate income.

If you are interested please sign up via my referral link below.


Targeting The Less Web Smart


Not exactly sure how to say that, but generally speaking it's easier to get leads from those who are not as familiar with the way the internet works. For example I have a MySpace Content site that provides themes, pictures, and different code to make their profiles fun and generally these visitors are not as web knowledgeable as say those visiting this site. So an ad that we see as obviously an ad, will for them be a potential score for a free product, by simply entering their email.

Lately Ive been trying to market ring tones to this crowd, but to no luck, since they have to register their text code to complete the lead and earn me a commission. Today I got an email from my affiliate manager at MaxBounty announcing a new program trying to push Rock Band 2, which as you know is a wildly popular 'younger crowd' video game. All that is required is a 2 page submit and confirmation of email, which I'm hoping will translate into some good leads and give me $2.60 per lead.

As an affiliate you know it's all about knowing your visitors and targeting what they find interesting. Obviously I'm not going to try and sell SEO services to a bunch of visitors looking to put pictures of Britney Spears on their MySpace profile. ;)

Thursday

Negative Comments on EPN

You may have heard some negative comments surfacing around the net about EPN's tracking. Truth be told most forum posts in the official EPN forum are misleading, don't paint a complete picture, and are made by amateurs who fail to take into consideration the full spectrum of affiliate marketing. I feel that the majority of complaints have no founding whatsoever, generally because there is not enough data, and a few ACRU's can really throw off a week.

My biggest kick out of people are those who collect their dashboard data for a week, showing some big numbers on say Monday and Wednesday and then complain something happened in the latter part of the week with close to zero sales. When these posts claim 'sales' they are really referring to ACRU's. ACRU's payout $25 CPA in the US, which can really spike a graph. The rest of an eBay affiliate's earnings come from getting a percentage of eBay's take, which if you earn under $2500 per mont is only 55%.

I receive over 14,000 clicks per month and take home around $500. It's real easy to sway even these low numbers with a handful of ACRU's, which even if I receicved 4 could spike my monthly earnings by another $100. Do I think it's because their tracking is flawed? No, I just realize that a few big ticket CPA's can vastly obscure actual sales figures, considering only a little over half of my monthly earnings come from winning bids.



As you can see there is a trend forming, in regards to my EPN dashboard graph looking a little bit like shark fins. This is not because I have way down days in regards to actual wining bids, but because I may miss out on only 1 or 2 ACRU's. Just a reminder to keep your eyes out for where your big money is coming from in a slightly more complicated affiliate program. Furthermore, it shows me that I need to focus on a niche where people haven't heard of eBay before. Wish me luck.

Tuesday

ScribeFire Humps My Face


I own and operate close to a dozen blogs, which for some may not be that many, but for my time consumption it's a lot. Any way I can bring down the amount of time it takes me to produce quality unique content on each blog, the better, and because of this search and longing to spare up time I have found ScribeFire.

ScribeFire is a great little add-on for Firefox that allows you to blog directly in your browser, without actually physically visiting your blog admin panel. The tool itself supports a number of blogging services, specifically I use it for WordPress and it works awesome. The add-on is capable of adding images, categories, pages, simple posts, anything you could do from your normal admin panel.

ScribeFire is starting to grow now as well and are now offering QuickAds. This allows you to instantly add in all kinds of different ads directly to your blog through teh ScribeFire plugin. Built in management allows you to manage banners without actually needing to modify code directly on your blog, which is great for amateurs or those who just don't want to learn coding. ScribeFire is for writers first, but can be utilized by anybody.

SEOQuake For FireFox


If you are like me time is valuable and time spent researching a competitor could be better time spent marketing, fishing, sleeping, whatever. There are tools available to help with this process and SEOQuake is a great add-on for FireFox that helps automate a lot of the leg work and will produce instant data in your browser, simply by surfing to a page.

SeoQuake is a programme, which allows user to view a large number of SE parameters on the fly. SeoQuake for Mozilla Firefox consists of three functional parts: SeoToolbar (requested parameters are shown in a separate toolbar in the browser), Seobar (requested parameters are shown in a separate, fully customizable with CSS, HTML block) and output of requested parameters on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).


The developers of SEOQuake were bold enough to produce the plugin for IE users as well, which can be downloaded here.

Monday

MoneyQuake FireFox Addon


I'm a stat hound and actually starting to leave a wear spot on my screen from checking my Adsense earnings so often. Furthermore, it's not just Google Adsense earnings I'm looking into, I'm actually more into affiliate marketing and having an addon that updates automatically in the bottom status bar is awesome. Saves my mouse from traveling further than it needs to and just makes life simpler. Only problem is that the old faithful Adsense Notifier plugin for FireFox no longer will log me in, so I needed an alternative.

Thanks to some recommendations I've found a great alternative to Adsense Notifier, it's MoneyQuake. Simply by hovering over the MoneyQuake logo at the bottom of the FireFox browser you can get instant updates on a large number of affiliate networks and Google Adsense.

List of Affiliate Programs Compatible With MoneyQuake

MoneyQuake is a powerful Firefox extension, which displays your real-time earning statistics from most popular advertisement systems like:
  • Google Adsense
  • Bidvertizer
  • TraficCashGold
  • StreamRay
  • UmaxSearch
  • PeakClick
  • Buckster
  • SoftwareProfit
  • AdultAdsCash
  • KlikVip
  • AdultFriendFinderrn
  • Begun
  • Yandex.Direct
  • Glavmed
To find out more information on MoneyQuake and download the plugin click here.

Friday

FireFox Colorzilla Addon


For me creating a stylish affiliate landing page is the most time consuming process in my business model, or at least it seems like it. ;) Often I will find a color I want to use on another site, so I need the hexadecimal color code to use in Photoshop or in my CSS style sheet. There is a great addon for FireFox that makes this process a breeze.

Colorzilla does everything I need, like rip color codes off of html pages and comes with a color picker built in. Check out all the nifty treats this FireFox Addon comes with.

  • Webpage DOM Color Analyzer
    • Analyze DOM element colors on any Web page and create a corresponding palette
    • Locate elements on the page that correspond to a given color
    • Find out what CSS rules specify a given color
    • Save, bookmark and share the palettes
  • Online Palette Viewer
    • Click here for an example
    • Allows viewing, bookmarking and sharing any color palette
    • Provides a permalink URL that represents any set of colors
    • Online Eyedropper shows colors in RGB, HSV and additional formats
  • Use Full Page Zoom introduced in Firefox 3
  • Firebug support - allows opening the selected element in Firebug
  • New languages - Indonesian, Korean, Norwegian. Thanks to the BabelZilla team!
  • Firefox 3 support
  • Ubuntu support (gcc4 based build included)
  • Minor tweaks and bug fixes
Get the official download of Colorzilla for FireFox 3 on the official Mozilla Add-On Repository. It is already receiving almost 10,000 downloads per week!

Thursday

EPN 'Make Good' Issued...for some


Many affiliates for the EbayPartnerNetwork are announcing that they have received their makegood for the ACRU reporting errors earlier last month. Unfortunately there are also a number of people reporting that they have not received any makegood, I'm one of those people. I've contacted my account rep and she has verified that I should have received it by now and I qualify for one, but it just has not posted. Below is the message I got back from EPN support:

Thank you for writing us back regarding your 'make-good' field on your
Payment History page.

I have checked your account and I can confirm that this note is missing
from your 'Payment History' page. I've forwarded your email to the
Finance team at eBay Partner Network. They will review your question and
get back to you in the next few business days.

Sorry for the inconveniences you have while waiting.Thank you for your
patience and understanding.

Kind regards,


Hopefully they will be able to give me some news by the weekend. Hiccups in the system like this really effect my Adwords campaigns and other initiatives I make to promote my sites. Also, let this be a reminder to all of you affiliates, make sure and stay up on your reporting and news from the program you are affiliating for. Had I not known a makegood was to be issued, nor had I contacted my rep, I may never received my makegood payment.

I'll be reporting what I received just as soon as I know.

Tuesday

NewEgg Mall Affiliate Program


I'm not sure about you, but I am a massive fan of anything NewEgg. It seems like no matter what I am buying, if NewEgg.com had it, it was cheaper even with freight. The only problem was that their inventory of items was limited to electronics, but now they've got a whole line of products similar to Amazon at the NewEggMall. I've been biting the bullet waiting for them to release an affiliate program and now it looks like they are offering one through Commission Junction.

NeweggMall.com, a subsidiary of Newegg Inc., is a premier online shopping destination for general merchandise. Launched in 2008, this elegant e-commerce site boasts a wide-ranging selection of apparel, accessories, auto, home living, jewelry & watches, and outdoor & garden products to meet the demands of the most selective customers.

Building on the success of newegg.com, the second-largest online-only retailer in the United States and preferred destination for technology enthusiasts, NeweggMall.com brings the same customer-centric principles to the broader market: great product selection and pricing, fast delivery and outstanding customer service. With more than 15,000 unique products available on the site, NeweggMall.com continues to seek out, evaluate and add merchant partners who can deliver the high quality e-commerce shopping experience customers have come to associate with the Newegg brand.
Looks like the NewEggMall affiliate program will drop a 30 day cookie and earn you a 4% flat commission on whatever is purchased. This is lower than what you can get through Amazon, but a much better cookie length. Furthermore the regular NewEgg.com affiliate program only offers a 3 day cookie length, so you better get while the getting is good. Affiliate programs like Amazon only offer a 1 day action period and I think we will see NewEgg drop the length of their cookie after this site kick off as well.

Affiliate Incentives


It's important, as in any business, to familiarize yourself with the companies that you affiliate with. Knowing their business practices and strategies will help you become a better affiliate for them and also give warning to things you may want to step away from. By becoming entrenched with a certain company though, blinders can be put on to similar affiliate programs that may offer some nice incentives.

I operate a number of automotive themed websites and blogs, which I affiliate for parts warehouses and places like eBay. While eBay is my primary source of affiliate income I also subscribe to affiliate program updates in my reader from the operating affiliate network. This means that whenever an affiliate incentive is being offered by another affiliate, in this example AutoPartsWarehouse.com, I can take advantage of the bonuses they offer. Often these bonuses are time sensitive so staying on top of an offer is important.

Currently AutoPartsWarehouse.com is offering affiliates a $50 or $100 activation bonus. This means that for an accumulated sales amount of $300 or more, you will receive a one-time cash reward of $50. If you generate an accumulated sales amount of $500 or more, you receive a one-time $100 cash out reward. Obviously this can really add to a monthly income for affiliate beginners or long term marketers alike. Had I not been attentive to the updates from my Affiliate Network I would not have been privy to this great lil bonus that should be easy to accumulate for the month of July.

In addition to staying up to date with bonuses and incentives, often times companies will provide seasonal promotional material. Web graphics and banners for affiliate programs will be updated during the holidays for special promotions that the company may be running. Being July and the 4th is around the corner make sure you are using all methods possible to promote your niche and make those extra affiliate sales.

Text Link Ads Promo Code

Looking to save some money promoting that new niche site of yours, well check out this promo code for Text-Link-Ads.com where you can save 15% in the month of July. The 15% off will continue for the LIFE of the campaign you start for any order in July.

Text-Link-Ads Coupon Code : july15