Author: [Jim Kukral]
Friday May 12th 2006, 1:39 pm
Filed under: Forge Corporation

To download the white paper… Please visit www.forgebusiness.com and use the contact form in the right-hand side navigation to get your free copy of the PDF. It will be emailed to you instantly.

Affiliate marketing is hard work, and takes a lot of skill and insight to do it successfully. Want to learn more about how to run a successful affiliate marketing program? Now you can. Forge used their years of experience in the Affiliate Marketing Industry to create this comprehensive white paper entitled Affiliate Marketing Do’s & Don’ts.

  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 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.

There's a lot of chatter around the Net right now about the letters that Google is sending out to some of their AdSense publishers. The keywords here is "some" are getting them, while others are not.

I personally don't practice artbitrage, although I get it, clearly I can't speak from experience. What I'd rather do is point you in the direction of a few quality postings on the topic and let you get yourself educated.

Post to read are:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/05/19/adsense-arbitrage-just-the-facts/
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2007/05/google_adsense_16.html

That's it. You won't learn what arbitrage is, but if you're practicing it … get straight on what's going on.

I wanted to extend a personal invitation to become an affiliate for our unique Extreme Sports line of skin care products. Right now, you'll be automatically approved to become an affiliate.If you're interested in representing the Magoâ„¢ line of products on your website, blog or newsletter, please visit their website's affiliate page: http://www.magoskincare.com/affiliate_info.asp.

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 Okay guys, here's my findings for you on this Affilistore software … it's freaking brilliant … as in the English word for quite nice.

You have to have some knowledge of how a datafeed works. You need to be able to hook up a database and some php/html/chmod abilities. The install was pretty simple if you know these things.

Once the data is pulled in there are certain parameters that there's no way to update, and others that easily can be. It's very important to do the install correctly, otherwise you'll end up re-doing it.

The templates are easy to work with for the most part. It comes with one already there for you. You do have to select it after the install process is over. So, don't panic when you notice there doesn't seem to be styles. The pages it creates are very clean and easy to navigate.

It is SEO friendly (could be more so) and it's a bummer is that it doesn't update your feeds automatically. I'm guessing that's what's coming in their paid version … I hope so.

All-in-all I'd give this a BIG thumbs up from Affiliate Blogger, the Affiliate Guild and Best Affiliate Network. Thanks to 5 Star Affiliate Marketing for bringing it to my attention.

Keith Baxter's brand new free report called "Give Pay Per Click the Finger"…affiliate link: http://www.giveppcthefinger.com

If you're interested in learning about a new way to generate traffic, this report is an interesting read. and a quick read too. The times are changing and I it would be a shame for anyone to not read this report and fail like many will. I read it, and I wanted to share it with you ASAP.The times are changing and I it would be a shame for anyone to not read this report and fail like many will. I read it, and I wanted to share it with you ASAP.I recommend you take a break from whatever it is you are doing if you can and get access to this report now. It only takes a few minutes to do.