Associate Programs Newsletter #126

I've just attended Jonathan Mizel's three-day Internet marketing conference in Boulder, Colorado. It was attended by just about all the big guys who are on the cutting edge (or bleeding edge?) of Marketing on the Net.

It was great fun meeting people I'd known only through email.

I'll tell you all about it next week.

(You didn't REALLY expect me to take a break that was 100% holiday did you?)

If you're planning to create a niche site to promote one product, I strongly recommend you have a look at http://www.ballfourbook.com/ .
It's a classic example.

CONTENTS:

1. New affiliate tracking software has impressive features
2. Who should receive the commission?
3. The best bookseller? The answer may surprise you
   – a classic niche site
4. Simple, FREE affiliate tracking system
5. How to build a website in a day for $5
6. Useful resources for website builders
7. Thought for today: I don't do fantasy

________________________________________SPONSOR__________
Thousands of Webmasters can’t be wrong!
Complete hosting solution only $9.95/month. To register or
transfer your site is easy. With our fully automatic online
account creation, your new account is set up within 30 seconds.
FREE domain look-up, transfer, parking, and much more!
http://www.websitefactory.net/ad?0ac9
RESELLERS, tap the booming web hosting industry and earn 50%
commission every month w/our Powerful Agent program!
hostyoursite.com/ad?0ac9
___________________________________________________________

==========================================================
1. New affiliate tracking software has impressive features
==========================================================

If you're planning to launch an affiliate program, here's a new affiliate tracking script you should be sure to check out.

It has an impressive list of features - a lot more features than some far more expensive software.

The script is Little Salesmen, produced by Wes Blaylock. Wes uses it to run his CGI Toolbox affiliate program.

"With a very easy to use interface, you will have no trouble getting the affiliate information you need quickly and easily," Wes says.

It's also easy for affiliates to use. I wish some of the affiliate programs I belong to had all these useful features.

CGI Toolkit's spelling and punctuation are a little rough in parts, but the product itself looks good.

Here are just some of its features:

Lets you approve sales/signups, or set it to automatically approve them.

The payment center lets you add a sale, view/edit/delete affiliate sales, pay affiliates, create and view archives and more.

A simple to use "Manage Affiliates" section where you can view stats, view/edit/delete affiliates, view all affiliates, add affiliates, etc.

Allows you to view the stats on your entire affiliate program to let you see the progress it has made.

Send a mass mailing to all affiliates with fully personalized messages.

Lets you customize all of the e-mails that go out for both first-tier and second-tier sign-ups and commissions.

You can customize all header and footer HTML right from the admin.

A "Page" section which allows you to add new pages for your affiliates to promote with the click of a button.

Real-time statistics.

Simple to set up, the admin is all browser based. There are NO text files to edit.

That's not even half of the admin features.

"The tracking features that you will find in the affiliate login area are going to simply blow your mind!" Wes says.

"This is where it gets really good. We have designed it with features that no other affiliate program has.

"You see, most programmers are too 'technical' to understand the marketing purpose of a program. We look at writing a script quite differently from the rest, and add marketing benefits that the others haven't thought of yet."

A few features of the affiliate area:

No question marks in the affiliate's referring URL (so they can be submitted to search engines).

Affiliates have unlimited amount of tracker IDs so they can track their advertisements.

Real-time statistics for your affiliates on everything.

The tracker IDs are also passed when a sale is made. This means affiliates can track which ad gets the most sales.

Hits-to-sales ratios for each tracker ad formatted in an easy to read graph.

Affiliates can view stats by the day.

Shows the referring URLs and how many hits each got.

Affiliates can add tracker notes so they can be reminded which ad was for what.

Affiliate area runs off a header and footer file which you can edit in the admin. So your affiliate program will not look like everybody else's.

Affiliates can add a short code to the end of their referral URL and send traffic to different product pages.

If the admin desires, the affiliates can view their second tier and even send a mass personalized mail to them.

"This script can integrate with any payment system you have – guaranteed," Wes says.

"The whole script is completely customizable, all from the browser.

Here are a few more features:

It tracks by cookies and IP addresses giving you a stable means of tracking.

Handles one-tier or two-tier programs easily.

You can pay out percentages of a sale, or a flat fee for all sales on one or two levels.

In the admin, you can pay one affiliate more than you pay the rest. Every affiliate is set up with the default payout, then you can change each affiliate's rate individually if you want.

Export features allow you to export to programs such as QuickBooks or MS Money for automatic check writing.

Other CG Toolbox products include Mail Master Pro, for sending personalized e-mails, and ClikGate Pro for creating fully automated password-protected directories.

Les also offers several free scripts.

The two-tier affiliate program pays 35% on the first tier and 15% on the second tier.

Learn more here:

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/little-salesmen

________________________________________SPONSOR__________
http://registrar4less.com/home.htm
Save $20.00/year ! Domain Name registration now Only $15.00
Same registration Network Solutions offers for $35 per year.
---Free Domain Name parking
---Complete control using our "Manage Your Domain" utility
---Easy Transfer using our "Transfer Your Domain" utility
---Instant Domain name registration (indexed within 24 hours)
No Hidden Fees- More than 18,000 names registered every day!
Register yours now - You will be glad you did
http://registrar4less.com/home.html
__________________________________________________________

=====================================
2. Who should receive the commission?
=====================================

An intriguing feature of the Little Salesmen affiliate tracking software is that the merchant can set it up in different ways, depending on which he believes is fairest.

The merchant can choose which affiliate gets the sale when a customer clicks on two affiliate links.

"You can have it to where the first affiliate that the customer ever clicked on gets the sale, or set it up to where the last affiliate that the customer clicked on gets the sale," Les Blaylock says.

I reckon both affiliates work for the sale, but it's mainly the LAST affiliate's pre-selling which achieves the sale, so if only one person is being paid the last affiliate should receive the commission.

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/little-salesmen

Who should earn the commission is being discussed on the Associate Programs Message Board.

Have YOUR say:

http://AssociatePrograms.com/discus/index.php

===================================================
3. The best bookseller? The answer may surprise you
     - a classic niche site
===================================================

On the Associate Programs Message board recently, someone asked which bookseller is the best one for an affiliate.

Amazon.com? Barnes and Noble?

No. it's Nexchange, says Shawn Collins.

"I've sampled a lot of the booksellers and I think Nexchange is the best one, because of the customization and payout they offer," says.

Shawn runs the successful http://www.ClubMom.com affiliate program, so I decided ask him for more details. His answers led me to Ball Four Book - http://www.ballfourbook.com/ - a fascinating example of a site set up to promote only one product.

If you want to set up a niche site, study this one.

The site includes an interview Shawn did with the author Jim Bouton, a biography, reviews, excerpts, a newsletter, a link to a "Ball Four" message board, a baseball timeline, and more.

"When you read 'Ball Four', the characters in the book really come alive - the former teammates, the managers, the various friends and enemies," Shawn says.

"I wanted to take the book a step further and actually find out what the guys from 'Ball Four' had to say."

So Shawn got a copy of Baseball America's Baseball Address List and wrote to the characters in the book. Their replies are published on the site.

Here's an interview I did with Shawn:

Q: On what site or sites are you using Nexchange to sell books? (I presume we're not talking about ClubMom?)

A: Ball Four Book – http://www.ballfourbook.com/
BabyLounge – http://www.babylounge.com/

Q: Please give some example URLs.

A: Ball Four Book has links to buy "Ball Four" on every page on left navigation bar.

BabyLounge:
http://www.babylounge.com/brvicky1.shtml (title of book, book cover and other spots are links to buy the book)

http://www.babylounge.com/cooking.shtml (this page features recipes and recipe books)

Q: Briefly, how would you describe your sites and who they're aimed at?

A: Ball Four Book is aimed at baseball fans – the site is based entirely around the book, "Ball Four", which is the best-selling baseball book of all time – over 5 million sold and the 30th anniversary edition is coming out next month.

BabyLounge is geared towards pregnant women and new parents.

Q: How simple/complex was it to set up the Nexchange links and maintain them?

A: It requires competence in HTML - simple for anybody who designs their own site. But probably not an option for the free site (Homestead, Geocities, etc.) webmasters.

Very little time to maintain - the customization is based on my navigation bars and footers, which do not change very often. When they do, I simply paste the appropriate pieces of code into the Nexchange "Design Your Storefront" wizard.

Q: How much time did it take?

A: Just minutes for the code implementation. And the code placement was assisted by the Nexchange merchandising team, because they actually went through my site and suggested lots of contextual linking spots within my content.

Q: What Nexchange booksellers are you using and what percentage commission are they paying you?

A: Books for Cooks - 10%
Hastings - 8%

Q: Is one achieving better results than the other?

A: I've had Hastings up for a couple of months and Books for Cooks for only a week or so, so it's not a fair comparison. That said, Hastings has been performing very well.

Q: How does this compare with other booksellers you've tried?

I've tried Amazon, BN and Borders, and Nexchange is better than all of them for conversion. Also, there was a special running through Hastings for a time where they paid 16%. Even with Anaconda, I generally saw only about a quarter of my Amazon sales come through at 15% and the rest were 5% or nothing.

(Anaconda! from http://www.Anaconda.net is a script which increases commissions paid by Amazon.com.)

Q: What's so good about the customization?

A: The users do not feel as though they have left your site, so there's a comfort level and an affinity that stay intact. Also, if the visitor decides not to buy, it's a lot more likely for them to return to the affiliate's site.

Q: How much traffic do your sites get?

A: BabyLounge: ~ 110,000 page views/month
Ball Four Book: 10,600

Q: Can you give me any examples of click-throughs, conversion ratios, or similar useful figures?

A: BabyLounge: the links are all very new, so I haven't tracked the stats yet.

Ball Four Book: 7% conversion from clicks on 1990 printing (they will have the 2000 edition available soon - published later this month). The site was made to capitalize on the new edition, and Hastings is not taking pre-orders - so Amazon is getting that business at a 3% conversion.

Q: How much money a month do you earn from the Nexchange links?

A: Sorry, but the earnings are the one thing I don't share, except to say that we used to live paycheck to paycheck on two salaries, but we had a baby in May 1999 and have since lived on my regular job salary and our affiliate income - things have been more comfortable since then! :-)

Q: Any special challenges you faced with the Nexchange links that you had to overcome?

A: The only one was that Hastings doesn't have everything - they mostly carry best sellers, so I still have some books on BabyLounge going through Amazon.

Q: Any special hints you can give website owners who are planning to use Nexchange?

A: Let them help you, because they are great at what they do - like many people, I am too busy to fully and properly merchandise my sites and Nexchange provides great assistance for merchandising and contextual selling.

Nexchange also has lots of great merchants, including eBags and ProFlowers.

[UPDATE: Nexchange shut down because it was unable to get funding.]

=========================================
4. Simple, FREE affiliate tracking system
=========================================

Shawn Collins' http://www.ballfourbook.com/ has signed up to use J.B. McKee's new FreeFiliate system to attract visitors to his site.

It's a remarkably simple, free affiliate tracking system, fully automated.

J.B. hopes to earn money by selling advertising on his site and on e-mails sent, for example, when a sale is made.

FreeFiliate uses PayPal's batch processing to pay affiliates.

The system is all web-based. There's no download required. Once or twice a month when you want to pay your affiliates, you just use the web-based system to send a batch of payments to PayPal, the online payment service.

Shawn joined two weeks ago as FreeFiliate's second merchant.

"It was a very quick setup and it seems like a fine system," Shawn says.

"However, it seems a little buggy. I keep getting e-mails telling me I've received a new lead, and the stats page says there have been 6 leads and only 2 clicks (one a test by me, the other a test by J.B. McKee)."

It can be used to set up pay-per-click, pay-per-lead and pay-per-sale programs.

FreeFiliate began when J.B. wanted an affiliate program for his wife's business, Bows By Tonya.

If you are considering using FreeFiliate, be sure to read the Terms of Use.

[UPDATE: FreeFiliate became FusionQuest.]

________________________________________SPONSOR___________
How to earn LIFETIME commissions
Your customers are yours FOR LIFE.
You don't just earn a commission on the first sale -
you earn a commission on EVERY subsequent sale.
Great products.
High quality FREE and nearly free software.
Join the affiliate program now:
[UPDATE: This link no longer works.]
___________________________________________________________

=========================================
5. How to build a website in a day for $5
=========================================

I don't recommend using free web hosts because I think it's bad for your image, but it is one way to dip your toe in the Internet marketing waters.

If you want to build a website for almost nothing, doing all the work yourself, this Webmonkey article will help. One or two of the links in the article no longer work, but there's still plenty of helpful advice and a bit humor.

One Site, One Day, Five Bucks
http://go.hotwired.com/webmonkey/98/49/index2a.html/eg20000601

========================================
6. Useful resources for website builders
========================================

The Spot for Web Site Builders.
Learn the secrets to building a better web site
http://thespot.i-depth.com/

========================================
7. Thought for today: I don't do fantasy
========================================

"You should unsubscribe if you think you can make a living
online without an investment of both work and money. (This
can be an entertaining read, but I don't do fantasy.)"

– the outspoken, original thinking Paul Myers.

 

All the best

Allan Gardyne