Seth Godin's new ebook is ready : KNOCK KNOCK, Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site That Works

I'm a great believer in products that say what they are so " KNOCK KNOCK, Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site That Works " pretty much covers that base with no issues, plus being a great fan of Seth's books and projects you pretty much can't go wrong with buying this latest book, click here to grab a copy or here to visit Seth's Blog and site.



It only costs $9, I'll be grabbing a copy this week and give you my thoughts after I have devoured it. I got hold of his last Web Building book (Big Red Fez) a fair while after it had been plublished so it'll be nice to get this one while it is still fresh and focused on today's Internet market.

You can also sign up and promote the book for a 50% commission, in what I believe is Seths first dabble in affiliate marketing and Seth's affiliate program is being run on the PayLoadz affiliate network ( a pay pal specific network for downloadable products). Though calling it an Aff network is being a bit kind, as the site is very geared towards being a seller or buyer and once you're logged in it's not the most affiliate friendly Aff network to navigate, far better options are out there for getting affiliates to promote a product.

What a week....

Well for anyone who missed the fun it was a bit of a chaotic week at LinkShare, to cut a long story short though. Still validation problems, which meant people couldn't get paid, people from a range of countries were terminated due to being from coutries with high fraud or listed by the US government as "not nice people", some people got validated but had the wrong payment name listed so now get checks to a name they can't cash and then finally LinkShare decided it would pay everyone anyway as the system was still buggy and driving a fair few people up the wall... teething problems for sure...if that was too short a version then click through to ABW for the full blow by blow.

But anyway after a week of more posts on LinkShare based forums than anyone had seen in the past 6 months things cooled down a lot with that final annoucment that everyone would be getting paid and didn't need to validate themselves just yet.

Meanwhile over on ShareAsale Brian has snuck out the release of another neat little tool for affiliates, the "Return Days Analysis" tool which allows affiliates to track exactly how long it took for a purchase to take place after the cookie was first created...pretty darned neat Brian!

Over at CJ it's been a week of "what is a parasite" as Buy.com move from LinkShare to Commission Junction , declared that they had terminated any relationships with parasitic publishers and promptly got nailed for that in rather short order

At AMWSO we've been busy releasing a new Beta Version of the Data Cleaner, this version 2.6 has a bunch of tweaks and additions in it to make it easier to use. We've also hooked up with Century Inc to run their affiliate programs on CJ and ShareAsale. And we're waiting the grand release of Mondera's new jewelry deals focused site onto the affiliate program, last tracking tests are being done now.

Exploring a couple of new clients in the software and jewelry industries, more on that as we see it develop. Just two more weeks before the US Embassy takes my $100 and says "No!" , good affiliate program that would make, "paid not to convert". So I wonder what law I can break to get required to go to the USA and get around this whole Visa issue.

... all that and it's only just Wednesday.

Payment Tip for LinkShare Validation

Seems that just about everyone has some kind of problem getting validated on the new LinkShare system. Problems range from "can't get validated" to "got validated and then unvalidated" to "got validated but set the wrong payee info and can't change it". The later seems to be effecting overseas affiliates more than US affiliates...

So here's a tip to use if you are stuck with the wrong payee address. While LinkShare work to fix this issue set your Payment Threshold very high, this will stop you getting checks that you can't cash and having to go through the fun of sending them back to be re-issued. Once the payee issue is fixed then lower your manual threshold.

I've also been playing with sub accounts for sub users and this new system on LinkShare is looking really cool the more I play with it. You can effectively create a whole network of sub affiliates with their own acccounts under your master account. The payment is sent to the master account and from their you could pay out to your sub affiliates... pretty neat for people who want to act as mentors and train up sub affiliates and retain a cut of the revenue as their trainees develop.

Meanwhile over on CJ, I was marginally surprised to see that after we rejected Ebates from our new merchant their that CJ (not Ebates) sent an email to the client asking for clarification... Wow CJ! You mean having them target our organic traffic and domain name is actually value added!!" I think not... granted if Ebates had contacted us directly I'd have been less surprised, still would have said no, but the speed at which we were contacted to ask to reconsider means that I doubt Ebates even knew they had been rejected before CJ were asking for them to be let back in.

There is most likely a place for Ebates in marketing, but it's not in Affiliate Marketing.

LinkShare Introduce Affiliate-Specific Payment Thresholds

A neat new feature on the LinkShare new consolidated payment system is the ability for Affiliates to set their own thresholds, this is especially important to over seas affiliates who can end up paying more the cash a cheque than they make on cashing it.

It's being done on a per channel basis so that affiliates who are running multi user accounts can set a different threshold per channel. A very nice feature for everyone outside the US.

Merit Making Time

My wife is very religious and believes in making merit to ensure that the family stays healthy and fit... one might think that with the number of accidents Alex has suffered that it isn't working...but that wouldn't be true as on all other fronts life is good, business grows and everyone is fine.... just that we haven't found the specific merit making ceremony to prevent Alex from running into things :)

So Monday was a day off from the office as we had all the neighbors round to enjoy the merit making out our house. Not 100% sure what is being said and done for about 90% of the event, I must admit that I generally sit in and go with the flow. This is the first major merit making we've done since we moved in to the new house (other than birthdays where we all head down to the temple in the mornings) , and we're looking forwards to renewed good fortune in 2005...which of course is good for everyone else we work with, because if I'm doing well, then they must surely be doing well too :D

Pictures and sound clips to follow on the forums.

Do Affiliate Bonuses Really make any difference

I put this question "Do bonuses make any difference to you?" to which the majority answered "no not really", or in a couple of the more detailed replies "Only if I am working on something the bonus is linked to when it is running, if not....no."

And so we reach an Affiliate Managers nightmare scenario of offering a $10,000 bonus and it having no impact,to which the marketing manager says "no more pennies for your marketing channel"

We've tried various ways to test interest, ranging from "email us to join in" to "email us to claim your prize" and the generic, "Just make more sales/ your first sale and we'll give you a bonus"

One issue we've seen time and again though is that bonuses don't necessarily attract people who plan to support you long term, running a bonus on an affiliate program with a good brand, tends to attract PPC bidding on that trade mark that then vannishes after the bonus ends. The participants banking on the bonus covering their PPC fees and that they will still come out ahead.

Right now I'm leaning more and more towards Organic SEO based bonuses where long term benefits for merchant and affiliate should be good if the merchant can convert the traffic.

As I type we've just launched the latest Mondera Bonus Campaign for Wedding Season and a GoodTimes Entertainment SEO campaign.... running side by side it will be interesting to see which pays out the most for the most growth in sales.

An interesting idea I saw on Aff Boards the other week was a bonus based on maintaining a google position for specific keywords. Paid every month for as long as the position is maintained (obviously with the listed page being mainly focused on the merchant running the bonus), that's a very interesting concept I think I have to try very soon!

Content is King if you want to win on Google...

It is, I believe, every affiliate’s wish to have unique site content absent of any re-write or editing restrictions, effectively content with an “open license.” Many sources do exist for content that can't be changed, but there are very few sources which allow an affiliate to manipulate the article and make it unique and specific to their site(s). However, this trend could be changing in the near future.

There is a war between content sites and sites which purely provide product lists. Google, for the moment, has clearly indicated that sites providing unique content will prove victorious in the battle. This means affiliates who want to compete on Google need to have unique content for their sites or risk vanishing into that ever increasing special black hole Google seems to reserve for affiliates.

So where does an affiliate get unique content from? Some affiliates can write their own, but it's generally a minority that has the time or desire to do so. A few pay for content to be produced by freelance writers on networks such as Elance (www.elance.com) or by professional copy writing services such as InfoSearch Media (www.infosearchmedia.com).

Others are lucky enough to get content from their merchants. That is until the merchants realize that distributing their own content is only a short term gain for long term oblivion. The content’s value is diluted and degraded due to being repeated and copied to a point where the merchant loses control of it. Affiliates absent of the gratuitous merchant turn to sites such as Article City (www.articlecity.com) and ARA Content (www.aracontent.com) where the content is free, but can't be edited or changed. In most cases, content provided from these sources must also retain links and/or credits to the author as well as the source site.

The obvious solution is to have merchants develop content specific to their affiliates, no credits required, no back links requested (well other than affiliate tracked and tagged ones that is), the right to edit, cut, slice, dice and the expressed permission to generally edit the content to make it unique.

The niche of "open license" content has but a few players in the arena. For example, Wikiepedia (www.wikipedia.org) while not a merchant, does allow articles to be re-written; however, this permission does come with a few strings attached as they apply a fair number of requirements in order to use the content. In May, the Affiliate Management team AMWSO (www.amwso.com) will commence a copy development service for the 15 or so merchants we manage. At the end of the day though, each individual affiliate still needs to sit down and work out how to make the content unique to them if they want to win their battle with Google.