Associate Programs Newsletter #144

NEWSFLASH: A rapidly improving site worth keeping an eye on is Joel Gehman's AffiliateHandbook.com

His new Affiliate Handbook Newsletter has just been turned into a "carefully moderated" e-mail list. So far it contains up-to-date affiliate marketing news but no outside input. If you're looking for a serious affiliate forum, try this one:

[UPDATE: Affiliatehandbook.com has disappeared.]

CONTENTS:

1. No newsletter for two weeks
2. "Affiliate Marketing 101" comprehensive introduction
3. PlugInGo deals look good for affiliates and merchants
4. FindWhat partner Advertising.com admits error
5. More evidence of bogus clicks from FindWhat
6. FindWhat complaints pile up
7. Lisa Irby uses screensaver as viral marketing tool
8. GoTo's policy upsets affiliate
9. Do-it-yourself works best at GoTo
10. Google drops affiliate program
11. Netwhistle affiliate programs ends
12. Thought for today: Powerful aphrodisiac

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1. No newsletter for two weeks
==============================

I'm taking a break for health reasons so the Associate Programs Newsletter won't be published for the next two weeks.

Also, I'm very sorry to announce that I won't be a presenter at the E-Commerce conference in Hawaii. (I'm sure you'll all have a wonderful time without me, learning from John Audette of I-Sales fame, "Mr Branding" Rob Frankel, and a whole lot of other experts - http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/hawaii )

I was stupid enough to go more than four years with no vacation and very little exercise. Now my cranky body has cried enough, and so I'm lessening the workload as much as possible to give my tired body a chance to recover.

This really will be the year I work smarter instead of harder.

Joanna and I are heading to Cromwell, a peaceful little town first settled in the gold-rush days, in the lake district of New Zealand's South Island.

Thanks again for all your messages of support. My wonky heart appreciates them.

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2. "Affiliate Marketing 101" comprehensive introduction
=======================================================

Wayne and Kim Porter give a good solid introduction to affiliate marketing in their new book, "Affiliate Marketing 101: A Start-Up Guide For Serious Netpreneurs".

It describes all the basics which anyone starting out in affiliate marketing will need to know, such as what sort of merchandise you can sell, why you should be an affiliate, the difference between affiliate marketing and multi-level marketing, a personality profile of a successful affiliate, factors necessary for success in affiliate marketing, tactics to use, how to choose a merchant, what to do if the merchant breaches a contract, and a lot more.

I found the most interesting sections were the interviews with "notables" in the affiliate marketing industry, and useful links, which took me to some useful sites I didn't know about.

If you're already a "power affiliate", as Wayne calls them, you'll probably want to wait for version 102.

If you're new to affiliate marketing and want a quick, easy-to- read 108-page overview, this is the book for you.

It's very moderately priced and has a 100% no questions asked money-back guarantee.

[UPDATE: The "Affiliate Marketing 101" ebook is no longer available. For a really good, solid introduction to affiliate marketing, I recommend Rosalind Gardner's book. Read the review here: Super Affiliate Handbook review.]


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3. PlugInGo deals look good for affiliates and merchants
========================================================

Affiliate network PlugInGo has announced two business deals which will significantly increase the opportunities for affiliates and merchants.

KOZ partnership:

The first is a partnership with Koz, one of the world's largest aggregators of local community based sites on the Web.

Koz has more than 2,000 online retailers who will be joining the PlugInGo affiliate network. So PlugInGo affiliates will be able to choose from an enormous number of products and services from those additional merchants.

As well, PlugInGo's partners through buyers clubs will be able to buy Koz merchants' products at discounted prices.

"Koz' enormous merchant pool provides our affiliates with the most diverse and expansive affiliate choices within one network," says Thom Schlip, CEO of PlugInGo.

Koz affiliates and partners include KnightRidder.com, The New York Times, Tribune Interactive, Belo, Media General and FleetBoston, the nation's eighth largest bank.

FORTUNECITY agreement:

The second deal which looks good for affiliates is an agreement with FortuneCity.com, which has a large network of personal publishing, content and entertainment sites and millions of members.

FortuneCity's network is the 11th most trafficked Internet network worldwide, according to Media Metrix (October 2000).

This program will allow PlugInGo merchants to partner with FortuneCity members. In addition, FortuneCity members will be able to buy products and services from PlugInGo's merchant partners at significant savings.

"Merchants entering the PlugInGo Network will be able to leverage the millions of FortuneCity members to expeditiously expand their online reach and affiliate relationships," Thom says.

FortuneCity.com and PlugInGo have interwoven PlugInGo's affiliate technology within FortuneCity's page building system to ensure a seamless and integrated solution, Thom says.

"PlugInGo will make this affiliate-marketing program available to any online merchant who wishes to reach members in its growing network."

[UPDATE: PlugInGo no longer runs an affiliate network.]

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4. FindWhat partner Advertising.com admits error
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Advertising.com, which has a partnership with pay-per-click search engine FindWhat.com, has admitted that one of its host sites was responsible for sending "less than desirable" visitors to web sites via FindWhat search results.

Last week I called them bogus clicks. To me, they're junk traffic, and I'm still - after a month - awaiting FindWhat's verdict. I believe I'm owed a refund.

Advertising.com calls them "not quality visitors".

Jay Weintraub of Advertising.com explains:

"Our program, AdSearches, drives traffic to FindWhat's search results page. It does not send traffic to a particular site (on the search results page). We have no incentivized clicks (meaning we do not allow any into the program and will kick affiliates out who start incentivizing clicks), thus all traffic to the results page is unincentivized. On top of that our program only pays for traffic to the search pages not on the search, so it does not benefit any of our affiliates to incentive clicks on the search results page."

A bit later, Jay followed that up with his admission:

"I was doing some investigating today, and believe I found out what happened. We were to err in that one of ours was responsible. Fortunately, this is no longer the case, and I do feel bad for those who received less than desirable search visitors. None of the clicks were bogus - all were people, but they were not quality visitors. Again, we've made sure this isn't happening now, and feel comfortable saying it won't again."

My logs show that http://www.LifetimeCustomers.com received 5,270 visits from http://127.0.0.1/ . At the same time, my FindWhat online report showed I've received about 5,000 clicks on one normally very unpopular keyword.

However, if you try to visit http://127.0.0.1/ all you'll receive is an error message.

Jay has been very co-operative and is still investigating this for me. I'm still expecting a refund.

UPDATE:
Here's an explanation posted to the AssociatePrograms.com message board:

The IP number 127.0.0.1 is a very special IP number in that it is designated to the TCP/IP internal loop-back device in everyone's computer. It is never used to send information between machines. A well-configured router will refuse to forward packets destined for 127.0.0.1

If you have a ping utility, you can confirm this by pinging 127.0.0.1. You should get a VERY fast response time, as you are pinging yourself. When you tried to see a website at http://127.0.0.1 you received an error as you do not have a web server running on your computer. If you were running one, you would have got your home page.

So, if you see the IP number 127.0.0.1 appearing in log files, it is either from hits generated BY THE SAME COMPUTER, or coming from somewhere else that is SPOOFING its IP number. 
- Drewbert

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5. More evidence of bogus clicks from FindWhat
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Jeff Ostroff of http://www.CarBuyingTips.com has provided what he says is accurate and detailed info on Findwhat.com click fraud.

"We had a problem with FindWhat in early September where traffic increased way too fast, and we had discovered by poring through the FindWhat traffic logs that the search term 'car' was coming in about every minute for about five days straight. This made us suspicious, because hardly anyone searches using the term 'car'. The are much more likely to search using the word 'cars'," Jeff says.

"FindWhat looked into it for us and determined it came from an affiliate whom they would not name, but promised it won't happen again and they said the affiliate promised it won't happen again. We were refunded several hundred dollars."

Jeff says that affiliate must also be an affiliate of Kanoodle.com, because the exact same keyword produced the same traffic from Kanoodle at the same time. He says CarBuyingTips gets hardly any traffic from Kanoodle, "because they are a joke of a search engine".

"Even when I confronted Kanoodle with my evidence from FindWhat, and showed them that the fraud stopped on Kanoodle at the exact time stamp that it stopped on FindWhat, Kanoodle still refused to refund our money. Needless to say we immediately closed our account in Kanoodle.com, and we tell everyone we know not to do business with them."

Jeff says that with 1,500 search terms Kanoodle was able to send CarBuyingTips only one-tenth the traffic of FindWhat, which wasn't too hot either.

In late November, early December on FindWhat Jeff saw sudden huge increases in the search terms "Christmas","PlayStation 2", "book", "books", "autos", "cars", and many, many others.

"It affected several of our sites across the board . . .

"Suddenly our FindWhat account drained at five times the normal rate. By poring through the FindWhat logs we were able to determine that many of these words seemed to be periodic in nature, like every three minutes, and we were getting clicks from all over the world, that I doubt were legit. Do you really think someone in Russia, Latvia, Turkey, China, etc, really cares about CarBuyingTips.com? Course not.

"Now I know that 'Christmas' will get lots of traffic anyway, and 'cars' and 'autos' also, but not tons more than normal. Even stranger, we dropped these terms to position 26, putting them off the first page of search results, and the clicks DID NOT CHANGE!

(I had the same experience with traffic on one of my keywords.)

"We knew that was garbage, as position 1 gets 5 times the traffic of position 5, so position 26 on the second page should receive no traffic."

"We took our accounts offline for several days while FindWhat investigated with our help and tips on Internet search traffic probabilities, and normal flow. They found out who was doing it, would not tell us who it was, refunded us $900 and said they were working with this affiliate to 'improve the quality of the traffic they are sending us'. In my opinion, they owe us hundreds more . . .

This affiliate was cheating not only him, but hundreds of other sites, and should be prosecuted," Jeff says.

Other people he knew also had their FindWhat accounts drained and ended up off line. "Cars" went from $.40 down to $.11, so it was obvious other people had dropped out.

"I can only hope other people got their money back, but it shows that FindWhat needs improvement in their fraud tracking. Anyone can write a script that sends in the word "cars" and clicks on all the sites listed, and change the IP address on each search so that it can sneak past under the radar.

"My advice to everyone is to dump Kanoodle, their interface sucks anyway, and we don't think they care about you.

"You should always know the normal flow of traffic from your keywords. If there are huge spikes of traffic from day to day, you need to be suspicious. Use WebTrends, or your hosting company's server logs to show where your traffic is coming from, and the referrer links as well. Always read your reports from GoTo, FindWhat, and the others very carefully and look for day- to-day differences in certain search terms."

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6. FindWhat complaints pile up
==============================

FindWhat is apparently so busy investigating complaints that it says its "normal" time to review a case is 14 days - and it's taking much longer than that.

So if you're waiting for a reply, be patient.

Doug Archell of http://www.netcent.com isn't happy with FindWhat.

"On December 21 I was checking the stats for one of our accounts and noticed that reported click-throughs from FindWhat.com over the two to three days prior were more than four times the average clicks they been sending us. This really stuck out like a sore thumb, so I wrote to FindWhat asking them to review.

"I finally received a reply from them on January 3, telling me that the note has been sent to their 'traffic department' for 'research'."

The note said "The normal turn around time is 14 business days."

Here are two message boards which have been discussing apparently bogus clicks from FindWhat:

webmasterworld.com/forum33/108.htm/forum.cgi?forum=33
searchengineforums.com/Forum34/HTML/000011.html

Warning: Some of the language used on these message boards is, um, intemperate.

The Silicon Alley Daily report on allegations about FindWhat:
siliconalleydaily.com/issues/sar01082001.html

Don't be too tough on FindWhat.
It IS investigating complaints and, in at least some cases, it is refunding money.

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7. Lisa Irby uses screensaver as viral marketing tool
=====================================================

Lisa Irby is using a viral marketing tool to spread the word about her newest "and most successful" web site, DaysHumor.com.

So far, her site is about the soap opera, "Days of Our Lives".

Can you adapt her idea to suit your site?

"I bought CustomSavers.com's Commercial Edition screensaver at CustomerSavers.com and so far it works perfectly," Lisa says. "It allows you to create your own screensaver (add as many pictures as you'd like) and distribute it from your web site as an .exe or .zip file. You can even put the screensaver on a CD."

Lisa says she benefits from viral marketing in two ways:

One of the pictures in the screensaver is a jpeg graphic which she created. It's basically a mini-advertisement for DaysHumor and it briefly lists what you can find at the site. This graphic comes up in the rotation along with the other pictures which she chose for screensaver. "So hopefully, in due time, thousands of PCs will be flashing DaysHumor.com across their screen."

If you order the commercial version ($90) you can incorporate your own affiliate links into the setting/control panel of the screensaver. So every time someone goes to the Properties/ Screensaver control panel on their PC to adjust the settings (speed, effects, etc.), your clickable links are listed right in the control panel for easy access.

"They also have an affiliate program (which I haven't joined yet. I want to make sure this product does what it's supposed to) and you earn 25% for each person you refer. I plan on joining and putting my affiliate links in the control panel of the screensaver so I can get sales from people who download and use my 'Days of Our Lives' screensaver," she says.

Lisa's screensaver is made up of pictures of cast members from the show.

"Probably the hardest part of it all was finding pictures and making sure I had permission to use them first.

"Their software is very easy to use. All you do is put all the graphics you want in a folder on your hard drive, tell the program which folder the graphics are in, and it makes the screensaver.

You can see the screensaver which Lisa made at
DaysHumor.com/screensaver.html .

Customsavers offers a trial download. In it, the "commercial version" features are turned off but you can still see what the program does.

"My traffic has increased by about 25 to 30 uniques per day since I launched it, but it hasn't even been a week yet so hopefully over time when more people start referring others, I'll see an even greater increase," Lisa says.

"I have a 'recommend-it' CGI script on my site and I get carbon copies of the messages people send to their friends and many are telling them, 'Download the screensaver!'

"But what surprised me even more is that on the settings/control panel, I put an affiliate link to a 'Days of Our Lives' book from Amazon.com and for the last few days I've sent 10 to 15 more people to that link. So I plan to keep experimenting with various affiliate links."

Lisa says there's also an option when creating the screensaver to have the program automatically place an icon/shortcut back to your site on the person's desktop. "I wish I had done that when I first launched it because my traffic might have increased even more."

Lisa, who also owns AffiliateBlunders.com, says that to join the CustomSavers affiliate program, you must go through Commission Junction.

[UPDATE: DaysHumor.com and CustomSavers.com are no longer online.]

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8. GoTo's policy upsets affiliate
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Unhappy with GoTo's rules for affiliates is Evelyn Perkins of iAffiliatesGroup.com.

Last week, she submitted some keywords featuring SiteSell's Site Build It! and Newbie Club's products, which she had written about.

"A couple of days later, I received a letter from a Tom Maul, Content Editor of GoTo, declining all of my listings," Evelyn says.

"That letter was an exact copy of the one in your newsletter ( Overture special affiliate rules ) with the exception of the last sentence. They advised me to do the changing and resubmit.

"Now, I may be a stubborn lady. I have to be to stay in this business for very little so far, but I deeply resent GoTo telling me that I could simply add a line to the top of my pages stating 'Brought to you by (client name)'.

"I very much doubt that whoever put this letter together for GoTo ever had a web site, at least not with content that he sweated over. If they had, they certainly would not want someone telling them that their content was done by their merchant," Evelyn says.

"The next thing we know GoTo will be asking for $199 to look a site over with no guarantee of a listing."

[UPDATE: GoTo is now Yahoo! Search Marketing.]

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9. Do-it-yourself works best at GoTo
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Last week I described how GoTo.com is changing descriptions submitted to it by affiliates in ways you may not like.

Here's an anonymous tip which will help you improve your chance of getting the description worded the way YOU choose:

"I was able to adjust my own descriptions (after their threat of taking my listings offline) to which I added the word 'Affiliate' at the end of my descriptions. That way, I don't give focus to another brand in my description (for example 'Amazon.com Affiliate') and I get the click, while adhering to their policy."

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10. Google drops affiliate program
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Google, which reduced the payout on its search box from 3 cents to 1 cent, says it will discontinue the program on February 1.

"We want to assure you that you will be fully compensated for the amount you have earned if you surpassed the minimum payment level of $15," Google has told affiliates. "We have lowered the minimum for compensation from our previous $25 level in partial recognition of the inconvenience this change may cause you."

Google says it plans to focus on what it does best - providing a powerful search service.

http://www.Google.com

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11. Netwhistle affiliate programs ends
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Netwhistle.com has decided to discontinue its affiliate program on January 19 and "focus our efforts in other areas of our business".

"You will receive commission for all referrals up until this date and in accordance with our terms of service," affiliates have been told.

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12. Thought for today: Powerful aphrodisiac
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"Money is a powerful aphrodisiac. But flowers work almost as well." - Robert Heinlein.

All the best

Allan Gardyne