4 types of Affiliates:
1)Search Engine Affiliates:
through SEO and or PPC
2)Traffic Affiliates:
high traffic on there sites
3)Email Affiliates:
Large email list. Send out an email on your behalf
4)Coupon Affiliates:
Promo Codes, Coupon Code

10 Golden Rules of Affililate marketing
1: Select a solution
a) sign-up with a network:
Means connecting an affiliate with a merchant through a 3rd party.
Great place to get started..you pay the network network pays the virtual staff
b)In house solution:
-No 3rd party
-Options to use – direct track or idevDirect
-No middle man, so you have to handle all questions, billing, tracking, etc.
2)Create an Affiliate Agreement:
-Legal document written in common english. Make it simple for them (affiliates) so they will sign up.
-Can Affiliates use your brand in marketing and other keywords. Yes or No? May end up competing in $$$ for clicks/ads
-No Spam Policy
3)Recruit Affiliates:
-Have a link on your website to your sign-up page or to the network your with.
-Use a network, they promote you in new/feature/seasonals
-check out abestweb
-Watch out for scams/scammers. Do manual approvals at first to see who is marketing for you.
4)Make great creatives
-Have a simple cut and paste link with all tracking already provided in the link
-Make it easy to find on the the networks. The networks offer EPC (earning per click) info.
-Make interactive creatives, using dynamic code that updates banners and links with current promos and deals
5)Be Accessible
-You have to be there for you vitrual sales force,
-Do it though; Email, blog, phone number, twitter, facebook, IM, in person, etc.
6) Full Time Program Managers
-In house or outsources
-all contact, recuiting, gathering creatives
-Don’t think this is an easy job that can be added to someone already in the office. This is a full time position that requires knowledge, skills, and should be a people person
7) Embrace the 90:10 Rule
-Meaning that 90% of your affiliate sales/revenue is brought in by 10% of your affiliate recruites
-These 10% should be offered special terms, special creatives, take the time to get to know them. You don’t want to lose them.
Communicate often
-Affiliates will often be part of 100′s of programs, keep your program on the top of there mind
-Reminders, go offline too, send a product, snail-mail, demo
9)Stay current
-Things change and new tec is always emerging. Keep up!
-Geekcast.fm for pod cast
abestweb. forum
blogs like ShoeMoney
Revnews
AffiliateTip.com
10)Pay Frequently, Fairly, and Most
Give your top performers (sale people) special deals, higher paid & faster etc.
They may spend $10,000 to make $12,000 so they need that capital back to keep the cycle going.
Don’t make them wait, cash flow is important

—–
Ideas to market:
Use custom landing pages
Make a video. You tube is #2 website in the world
Incenives like contest
News Letters
FaceBook Business Pages Get index by search engines

“We are pleased to introduce Google Affiliate Network . Effective Monday, June 30, 2008, DoubleClick Performics Affiliate will operate as Google Affiliate Network. The integration with Google’s brand is a reflection of efforts to quickly assimilate our business and teams, as well as reinforce Google’s commitment to the Affiliate channel. Together with our new colleagues at Google we are creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion and innovation in Affiliate Marketing.
… Read the rest ->>>

• 100% Revenue On all Traffic to your site
• No clicks needed
• Down-line commissions (aka tiered)
• Easy to implement

This wonder is called Selling Pay Per Play run through NetAudioAds. The basic idea: play an Audio ad when a visitor lands on your site. No need for a vistor to click. They will hear the ad and you earn cash. Want to learn more?

The Video

The Sales Letter

Go directly to sign-up page

I wish us all the best in this new Marketing Venture!

The Following is an email excerpt from an adsense account manager:

We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers. Previously, users could click on the background and full text of an ad, but now users can click only on the title and URL of a text ad. This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the users’ overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.
I want to assure you that we approach these changes carefully, with a view to the impact on all parties involved. Although we recognize these changes may result in a RPM decrease for some publishers in the short term, we expect these improvements will lead to increased advertiser spend in the long term. By investing in the long-run health of the relationship between AdSense publishers, AdWords advertisers and your sites’ visitors, we’re ensuring your continued success as an AdSense partner.

I’m curious how this is going to play out. Wonder what Danny Sullivan (Daily Search Cast) is going to think of this. Wonder how people are going to react to it. I hope to have a new poll up for this later on.

Using Ad$ense?

Ashley Qualls doesn’t sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that’s because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business.

Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother.

Full Article Here

Excellent video to watch as she talks about what she has been doing online for the last 3 years to make her the big Money

• Hosted by : Greg Niland , Vanessa Fox
• Speaking about PageRank and Paid Links

During the last week of Oct 2007 Google did a very large page rank update. This left lots of Webmasters (myself included) what was going on? Word is out that the big “G” was/is trying to shake up the paid link industry. I have been hearing that lots of sites experienced a dropped if they were hosting paid links; this was later confirmed confirmed by Matt Cutts.This not only affects the site selling the links apparently, but has caused wide spread changes via a ripple effect. Staring from Host of said paid links to the other sites that have links on those same pages in a legit exchange of relational value. G is trying to get the real value of a vote to a quality web page/site. This doesn’t really seem the right way to handle it.

There have also been reports that YouTube (which is owned by Google) bounced from a PR8 – to PR3- then back to PR8 . Authoritative site “New York Post” has been dropped down to a 5 and this started two weeks before this big shift in the Google ranking system.

• Page Rank what is it.

It is one signal in a vast many that Google uses to rate sites on how site is doing. It is not the TRUE PR of a site. The Google Tool Bar updates every 3-4 months. TRUE PR is going on behind scene with all the signals, all the time. But nobody in the general population has knowledge of what Google is looking at.

• Why should I care about PR?

It’s worth more during negations when selling links, when your marketing your site to others. If you approach another site owner and your PR is 3 Often it is perceived as being “small time” where 6+ gets more respect and possible more leverage in the deal. It does vary from person to person an business to business.
Greg mentioned he pulls shortcuts when building his sites and he hasn’t yet been penalized for it. He is holding steady with no change in ranks at all after this paid link shake down occurred.

Vanessa Fox does bring up that PR doesn’t change your traffic.

So to buy or no to buy?

If there is a Valid way to buy links from valid sites, then there is no harm. Matter of fact it’s good for marketing and getting traffic. Also you get a benefit when you have lots of links pointing at your site. We all know this, and hopefully gain a supplementary link from a nice high PR site. Google is going about it the wrong way and should look at it as marketing. Neither of the hosts, nor myself think that buying links blindly is a good idea. Buy the links for the traffic or banner swap, good business for all parties involved so why the smack big “G”

—> and what about all those links on your user generated site(s)?

Use of the “no follow” tag doesn’t really seem fair. Scenario: People are posting to your sites in masses but all the links go to porn, pills etc, sites. Those links count as weight, and bad for you if your site isn’t about porn or pills….These links can get pull in to the n supplemental index. Basically, you block user generated content and then possible still get bagged for it later. So, it still is going to suck for you.

—->The fix:

Useless “no follow”: to stop people from doing that make sure all those posting are sent to a directory that you can block through a robot.txt file. (good idea Greg!)

And always Manage your user generated content well. Don’t forget there are auto-bots that push thousands of links to porn, pills, and lots of other stuff you do not want to be associated with.

What about directories?

Vanessa Suggest that you apply to editorial directories (like Dmoz) but doesn’t like many others. If it is human edited then then cool, but if it’s nothing more than link farm then the line gets real fuzzy. But go with the gut and if you think you can get the traffic then do it, but if you are doing it for the PR only, think twice.

Greg’s take was if they are willing enough to take your money and still refuse you, then that would meet his criteria of a good Directory (like Yahoo ) But if every body is let in based on paid submission only, then you have found yourself in a bad directory. You know he makes a very good point on this. Why pay to enter a link farm full of the above mention sites you want nothing to do with. Human edited directories that care about what is in there is the right way to go.

Side note:

• There was poll taken over at Digital Point Forums where they ask how often do you check your page rank? and the choices were:
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• After an Update
• I never check my PR

The results: over 50% of people check it either Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.

Pretty staggering.

I personally lost rank on many of my sites. Traffic seems up on a few, but I was sad to see my little green bar go down a notch or two. Oh well, what are you going to do? Just keep on doing, posting, linking, growing and learning….and keep a eye open for the next PR update what what changes it will bring.

This blog will try and keep up with what is going on with the Internet, Affiliate Marketing, Domaining, New Technology, and what the industry leaders of the fore mention are doing on the bleeding edge of cyberspace. I know that I can’t keep up with everything, but I sit in this chair all day and work and read, so I’m pretty hip with the trends and staying “on top of it”.  I will often post an exurpt  and a link out to the rest. Sometimes I’ll make a comment and give my take on it and where it might be heading, but other times not.

I am looking forward to working this blog.