I was surfing around reading the blogs of other affiliate marketers, and I came across a post by Linda Buquet of 5 Star Affiliates that really bugged me. Not with Linda, no way, but with merchants who think they can rip off the affiliates and totally get away with it.

Seems that DadaMobile slammed shut the doors of their affiliate program right befor Christmas.

That means that any affiliates who were promoting their products and services are basically out of luck for their commissions. Man, I'd hate to be the guy running PPC ads for this affy program … that's gotta hurt!

I think merchants like DadaMobile need to be exposed … to the winter's elements … for the doing bad business.

If you're an affiliate with them, I'd highly recommend you get out of there NOW!!! If you've owed commissions from sales you made prior to the closing of their affiliate program, you need to demand payment. If they refuse, you affiliates need to files a class action suit. Stick together and shady merchants like this will not have as much of an impact in the Affiliate Marketing Industry.

I also received an Associate email from Amazon today outlining more changes to their affiliate payout structure. Man, they're down to 4% for affiliates now … that's just wrong!

The email continued:

Announcing Monthly Payments!

Beginning January 1, 2007, your Amazon Associates payments will be monthly instead of quarterly, paid approximately 60 days after the end of each month. For example, referral fees you earn in January will be paid at the end of March, and payment of referral fees earned in February will be paid at the end of April. As part of this change, referral fee tiers will be adjusted to reflect monthly instead of quarterly item quantities:

Amazon's also sending out another email to some of their associates. I haven't gotten this one yet myself:

Heads up Amazon affiliates and cell phone affiliates, you might want to take a look at this one…  

The Associates Team has teamed up with the Amazon Cell Phone Team to create an exciting new offer for you to earn additional referral fees. Beginning May 1, 2007, when you refer a cell phone with a service plan, you will earn an extra $15 bonus on each referral! Why market Amazon Cell Phones and Service? Amazon offers the hottest phones, 30-day returns, an easy comparison shopping experience, and some of the most competitive cell phone pricing on the Web.

Learn more through your Amazon affiliates area. 

SimpleTuition Debuts Affiliate Program For Organizations Looking To Share Student Loan Comparison Research
Tuesday November 14, 10:27 am ET
Innovative Referral Program Allows Donations to Educational Charitable Organizations

BOSTON, Nov. 14 /PRNewswire/ — SimpleTuition, Inc. (http://www.simpletuition.com), a company dedicated to helping students and parents make sense of education financing choices, today announced the launch of its new Affiliate Partner Program. Available today at http://www.simpletuition.com/friend, the program is open to high school guidance officers, personal financial planners and advisors, as well as professional and student organizations and others that wish to offer objective third-party student loan comparison and research.

As a SimpleTuition Affiliate Partner, organizations that refer parents and students to the SimpleTuition web site for advice will earn a reward for each new visitor that uses the SimpleTuition solution to compare student loans and then clicks through to a lender's loan application site. For non-profit partners and public schools, SimpleTuition is planning to offer the option of donating the referral reward to an educational charity, thereby avoiding any conflicts of interest. A first for referral programs, SimpleTuition is working with leading educational charities, who all share a common vision of helping students and their families attend college, to make this a reality.

"Every year hundreds of thousands of students and parents receive advice and conflicting recommendations from friends, family, co-workers and other advisors about how to best research and manage student loan finances," said Kevin Walker, co-founder and CEO of SimpleTuition. "Since launching SimpleTuition, numerous parents have been telling us how desperate they are for a resource that offers a clear and easy way to understand their student loan options. When they hear of SimpleTuition, they want to tell all their friends. With that in mind, we created the partner program."

According to the recent College Board report, caps for federal student loans are not keeping up with inflation, yet tuition costs keep rising, up 35% from five years ago. With the cost of college at an all-time high — projected to reach $220 billion this year, $86 billion of which will be financed by students or their parents — families nationwide now require multiple loans each year to pay for college. Many are desperate for a clear, concise and easy-to-use resource to help find the best student loan options.

Currently, nearly twenty organizations have already joined the SimpleTuition Affiliate Program. Designed for all types of educational support organizations, partners can choose from three options:

• Partners who want to be able to share student loan information can link directly to SimpleTuition
• Affiliate partners who want to send SimpleTuition applicants (first-time visitors that open a student loan application with one of SimpleTuition's lending partners) receive a referral commission
• Colleges, universities and other organizations can request a customized solution that integrates with their web site

The amount of information on student loans is overwhelming with many different types of loans from various lenders; each with different options, including fees, repayment plans, total loan amount, consolidation options, credit strength scores and FAFSA eligibility in some cases. SimpleTuition allows users to compare multiple financing options from a variety of lenders that can be sorted by monthly payment, total cost of the loan, number of payments, fees and APR. SimpleTuition is not a lender.

About SimpleTuition, Inc.

Founded in 2005, SimpleTuition is dedicated to helping students and parents make sense of education financing choices. Recently featured in FastCompany.com's top 12 innovative websites for Web 2.0, SimpleTuition is the only company to offer an independent and objective solution for researching and comparing parent, private, GradPLUS and federal loans. SimpleTuition is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and is funded by Atlas Venture and IDG Ventures Boston. For more information visit http://www.SimpleTuition.com.

How do you make sense of the Internet noise that's coming at you from all directions?

According to Seth Godin's Squidoo.com…

Searching online should really be called poking online. Because that's what you do. You poke around. You poke in Google and you poke at some ads. After looking at a bunch of links and pages, then, finally, you get it. You understand enough to take action—to buy something or make a decision. The thing is, this takes a long time.

Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo's goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo's goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.

Their goal at Squidoo is to leverage the power of personal recommendation online.

That's an awesome goal, but my first visit to Squidoo left me muttering, "Huh?" I couldn't figure out how it worked. It's like being a PC user in a Mac environment with all the cute names for everything, but I just wanted to get in, do it and play. Instead, I had to do something I hate to do … I had to read the directions.

Squidoo has what they call Lenses. I call them web pages or blogs. They're listed in Lenserolls … so, in my mind that's something like a Blogroll. I came across a Lense that helped me a lot How To Squidoo.

Lensrolling is a way to share the love and create your own personal lens network. List your friends' lenses, relevant lenses on your topic, or even link to other lenses by you!"

Another must read page is thier Squidoo FAQ. There you can read about Modules, which according Squidoo are…

Modules are the building blocks of lenses. A module makes it easy for a lensmaster to point to links, images, blogs or even things to buy. Some modules are curated (you enter all the links and content manually) and others are automatic (you configure the inputs and then the lens draws on RSS feeds to update your lens without any work from you). Similarly, some modules are commerce-oriented and others are just content based.

See how this is like learning a whole new language?! But it's well worth the trouble. PC World calls Squidoo one of the top 25 websites to watch, so clearly reading the directions is going to be well worth your time.

Once you're up and running on Squidoo, you'll want to read the Hot Traffic Tips and Advice from Top Squidoo Lense Masters on how to drive that traffic to your Lense (aka web site).

Do You Squidoo? Try it!

 

Update added 7/11/07

Read a good post on Squidoo Lens and spamming and wanted to share the link with you.

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes.

Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else's affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up. Here are my top 3 tips to succeed with your own affiliate program.

1. How to attract affiliates

One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.

Find complimentary sites - "Complementary" sites are sites that sell products or services that compliment your offers. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate.

Find content sites - There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.

Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs. Get your program listed in these directories.

2. Classifying Affiliates for Better Management

The hardest part of administrating an Affiliate Program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But, by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them.

The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliate. Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board and choose at least three types of the characteristic.

The Second Step is to determine the needs of each type. Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types.

The Third Step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates. Based on the needs you identified in Step two, create and compile linking methods for each type.

3. Safe Guarding Against Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to take action otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning.

I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate's account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it's probably not spam, the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL.

The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

Running your own affiliate program can become an extrememly profitable venture for your business. You can recruit a HUGE sales force promoting your products for you, and ONLY pay them when you make a sale!

About the Author:
Andy Murray is a marketer and publisher writing informative reports to help grow your online business. Get his latest offering "Get Stinking Rich From Affiliate Programs" for FREE by simply following this link: http://www.zerohourmarketing.com/Affiliate-Marketing-Report.htm

My Odeo Channel (odeo/0a80d6da719ef29b)

Once you have your affiliate link, you’re ready to go!

All you have to do, as we’ve discussed earlier, is to pre-sell your affiliate’s products by marketing the same through your affiliate link. An affiliate link leads the would-be buyer to the affiliate merchant’s payment processing page. Once you have managed to do that, your job is done, and the affiliate merchant will take care of the rest. This system makes affiliate marketing a very convenient home based business for anyone!

Pre-selling, however, should be carried out through effective marketing strategies to make this venture really profitable for you. These marketing strategies should be able to ensure a high conversion rate, or the power to convert the people who would be exposed to your affiliate link into successful sales.

Here are some of the more popular types of marketing campaigns being used as promotional tools in this home based business:

* Promoting your affiliate links through viral marketing. Viral marketing is a very powerful strategy that would rapidly expose your business message, or your affiliate links in this case, in just a short period of time. Viral marketing tools usually involve eBooks, special reports and other information products. We will discuss this effective promotional tactic for your home based business in the succeeding lesson.

* Marketing your affiliate links through forums. As we’ve discussed in a previous articles, promotion in online communities is an affordable and efficient way in spreading the word about your products or website, including your affiliate links. You could try to be active in these forums, befriend other members if you have to, and before you know it, you’ll have more traffic for your site and more referrals that could rake in some good commissions for your home based business.

* Article marketing. As we’ve likewise discussed in a prior article, writing articles and submitting them in various venues, with your resource box firmly attached at the end of each piece, is a magnificent way of promotions. People would scour the Internet for information, and if you write something about what they’re looking for, you’ll win their favor and expose your affiliate links to them aswel. This could only redound to the benefit of your home based business.

* Search engine optimization. As we’ve mentioned earlier in these lessons, having your own website would help a lot in marketing your affiliate links. If your website carries your affiliate links, you could always optimize the same for the search engines and drive a humongous amount of traffic to your pages. Every visitor you’ll have would always carry with him the chance of clicking on your affiliate links.

* Create your own mailing list. With a mailing list in place for your home business, you won’t have to lose any visitors. You could always “capture” them, warm them up for an offer later on, or present to them new packages that they might be interested with in the future. Most successful affiliates make a killing with their mailing lists alone! We will discuss this in detail in one of the the forthcoming lessons.

These are but some of the ways by which you could market your affiliate links. If done well, they could assure for you a very successful business that can be easy to sustain as well.

Mal Keenan can show you step-by step how to set up and run a successful online home business. Learn the 7 essential strategies to internet marketing success. To receive your free 7 day mini-course visit: http://www.malkeenan.com

Marketers have found that blogs are excellent tools for communicating with their audience. Anyone who has something to sell or an idea to promote can benefit from using blogs.
Search engine marketers especially favour blogs because they have a number of features that make them the darling of search engines.

1. Fresh, Updated, Relevant Content

When you write a good blog about a theme that youre passionate about and post to it frequently, youre creating fresh, keyword-rich, content that search engines love.

2. Natural, One-Way Links

Search engines view links to your site as a recommendation of your site content. More links pointing to your site or blog boosts your visibility and search engine rankings.

Google gives more weight to natural, one-way incoming links, and blogs make it easy to get two types of one-way links to your site.

· Similarly Themed Blogs

A well-written, authoritative blog, with unique content, is likely to get linked to from a number of other bloggers writing on similar topics. These are natural links that are viewed highly and given more weight by search engines like Google.

· RSS Feed Syndication

Blogs and the RSS feeds built into them, help you build valuable, one-way links to your site by syndicating your content online.

3. Get Indexed Within Hours

When you post to a blog it pings a number of services that list blogs. This notifies the service that your blog has been updated.

Search engines like Google give more weight to blogs that are updated regularly. It is possible to get your pages indexed in Google and other search engines within hours of writing your first blog post.

Compared to the time it takes to index a website (days, even weeks), you can see why blogs are better search engine optimisation tools than static websites.

Indirect SEO Benefits of Blogs

Besides the SEO benefits, a well-written, authoritative blog can also create publicity and branding for you, which promotes even more people to read and link to your blog.

Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More.