Associate Programs Newsletter #86
It’s family time here in Dunedin, New Zealand. We’ve all just celebrated my mother-in-law’s 81st birthday.
Before we left for the restaurant, she proved she still has more than enough strength in her thumb to pop the cork off a bottle of bubbly.
With Christmas Day only a few days away, the glorious disruptions and interruptions have begun early. I hope you’re
enjoying yours.
Merry Christmas!
CONTENTS:
1. A newsletter from the future
2. PlugInGo pays $500 referral fee
3. Merry Christmas! FREE Ultimate Link Tracker
4. Dash.com: Revenue at YOUR expense?
5. Shopping around for domain names
6. Winners of FREE banner advertising
7. Amazon.com’s Bezos Time’s Person of the Year
8. 11-year-old teaches Waterford Crystal a lesson
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1. A newsletter from the future
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(I was lucky enough to get a shorter version of this announcement published by LinkExchange Digest, which has more than 130,000 subscribers.)
As the 1900s draw to a close, you’ll be able to witness what the New York Post calls “the dawn of a new millennium” by watching the “Year 2000 cam” at www.nypost.com/millenium/newyearseve99.htm .
However, if you do, you’ll be more than a little late.
Where I am, in New Zealand, we will have ushered in the year 2000 a full 18 hours earlier than New York, 21 hours earlier than Los Angeles, 23 hours ahead of Hawaii and 13 hours ahead of London.
To mark the occasion, I’ll publish a special two-part edition of the Associate Programs Newsletter, the first part before midnight on December 31, 1999 and the second part just after midnight.
You could describe it as a newsletter from the future.
Depending on where you live, you’ll be able to receive the newsletter almost a full day before YOUR end-of-the-1900s party begins.
Wherever you are, you won’t have to wait until the clock strikes 12 to see if the world is going to end – if you receive my newsletter, you’ll already know it didn’t. If you don’t receive it…
New Zealand is supposed to be the most Y2K-ready country in the world, but just in case the power goes off, I’ll have candles ready :-)
However, don’t panic if the newsletter arrives a little late.
Telecommunications bosses in New Zealand are already warning people that there will probably be congestion on the phone lines as “everybody” tries to phone friends and relatives at midnight.
In the United States, more than one million small and medium businesses are NOT ready for Y2K, according to several studies.
Full story:
209.239.53.216:7070/cgi-sys/php/sys/mail/act_setting.phtml
New Year’s Eve web cams around the world:
earthcam.com/newyears/index_flash.html
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2. PlugInGo pays $500 referral fee
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PlugInGo.com has boosted its efforts to attract new merchants to its affiliate network by announcing a $500 per sale “Partners in Profit Program” with lifetime residuals.
As well as the $500 fee, affiliates will receive 25% of PlugInGo’s earnings on each merchant they refer, as well as cash bonuses up to $5,000 for achieving certain sales levels, says PlugInGo.com CEO Thom Schlip.
You can expect some interesting news soon from PlugInGo.
“The shape of this industry and the metrics it is judged by will be drastically altered in the next 120 days and PlugInGo will lead the way,” says Thom.
Full details of the “Partners in Profit” program:
plugingo.com/index.cfm?Action=PipLetter
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3. Merry Christmas! FREE Ultimate Link Tracker
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Here’s a wonderful gift. (You can thank Ken Evoy for this. He bought the resell rights and organized everything.)
A few, rare affiliate program innovators such as Thomas Harpointner and Mark Joyner give affiliates the chance to track exactly which link gets the click.
If you join their programs, you can tell which of your promotional efforts work and which don’t.
Now you have the chance to learn such extremely valuable information about ALL your affiliate programs – FREE.
Ken has bought the resell rights to a nifty little piece of software, Wes Blaylock’s “The Ultimate Ad Tracker” and renamed it “The Ultimate Link Tracker” since this reflects what it does much better.
Using the Link Tracker, you can tell where those clicks you’re sending affiliate merchants are coming from:
- Which links on which pages on your site?
- Which posts to forums or mailing lists?
- Whether your sig file “gets the click”?
- Your e-book – how much is it contributing?
- Which words you bought at GoTo.com?
- Which ads?
- How much business your autoresponder promotion generates?
- Effectiveness of special promotions (for example, an article you wrote for an e-zine)?
- Double-check that each affiliate program is reporting the correct traffic.
Use Link Tracker for ANY of your affiliate programs. “You can assign one Link Tracker account to each program or slice-and- dice them as finely as you like,” Ken says.
When you know those facts, you can tweak away to your heart’s content, fine-tuning your marketing.
You can even combine Link Tracker with automatic redirections to disguise long URLs.
You could disguise a tracking URL to look as simple as this:
https://www.associateprograms.com/affiliates
“In a nutshell? Link Tracker will keep you from wasting your efforts, time, and money, allowing you to focus your resources into what REALLY works,” says Ken.
For more info about Link Tracker, you can see the website of its creator, Wes Blaylock:
https://www.cgitoolbox.com
As you’ll see, Wes sells it for $49. Don’t pay that – the same program is available free from Ken’s 5 Pillar Download Page.
To get it, all you have to do is join the 5 Pillar Program to sell Ken’s book “Make you Site SELL!” (MYSS!), the best-value marketing book on the Net.
When you sign up, another bonus you’ll receive is Ken’s excellent free manual for affiliates.
“Sure, some will join just to skim a freebie,” Ken says. “After all, this is not some widely available public domain script. It’s a proprietary script that solves every affiliate’s problem.
“I don’t mind if they come just for the free eats. Because some, once they see the quality of what we’re doing, will stick around, buy MYSS! and become active.
“And even more important, as we launch each new unique and high- value product, more and more of them will become active, earning you income,” Ken says.
(It’s a two-tier program, paying fair commissions for lifetime customers.)
To get your FREE Ultimate Link Tracker, just join Ken’s free-to- join 5 Pillar Program here:
https://www.associateprograms.com/affiliates
Enjoy your gift. Merry Christmas! (And thank Ken, not me.)
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4. Dash.com: Revenue at YOUR expense?
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Touted as one of the greatest shopping agents for consumers on the Net, Dash.com may be putting cash back into the pockets of consumers at your expense.
Alexis Gutzman discusses what this affiliate program means for affiliates and merchants, and how you can fight to keep that affiliate program-generated revenue stream flowing.
ecommerce.internet.com
Here are two message boards which are discussing how Dash is unfair to affiliates, and a response from Dash:
revenews.com/discuss-dash.cgi
pluto.beseen.com/boardroom/x/44769
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5. Shopping around for domain names
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Like the people who paid $7.5 million for “Business.com”, I believe that a memorable domain name is an extremely valuable marketing tool. That’s why I write about them.
A few readers wrote to me in obvious disbelief after I said it’s possible to buy a domain name for only $35 for TWO years from https://www.totalNIC.net . They thought I was trying to con them into paying $35 and they would then have to pay another $70 to InterNIC.
For those of you who are new to the Internet and obviously haven’t discovered the excellent I-Sales e-mail discussion list – https://www.adventive.com/lists/isales/summary.html – which keeps you up to date on important trends in marketing on the Internet, here’s the background:
The domain name business has been deregulated. InterNIC (Network Solutions) is no longer the only registrar of com-net-org names. Domain names can now be bought from many different companies.
You can do some comparison shopping here:
https://www.domain-price-wars.com/
And . . .
Yes-You-Can-Register-Keyword-Stuffed-Domain-Names-This-Long.com
I’ve joined the gold rush and grabbed a few more. One day I’ll make the time to cross-link them all, as described in “Nothing But ‘Net”.
[UPDATE: This product is no longer being sold.]Background reading:
Registrars race to profit from longer domain names
news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1500987.html
More Net name choices, but glitches abound
news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1501719.html
Was $7.5 million too much to pay for Business.com? Maybe not. The owners of America.com have rejected a similar offer.
business.com/news.html
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6. Winners of FREE banner advertising
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I’ve just drawn the latest lucky winners of free banner advertising for a year on AssociatePrograms.com.
The winners are:
Howard Berenbon
KDF Water Filters
https://www.software-exchange.com/wfilter.html
Ola Lofven
Station4.com
Would you like a chance to win free banner advertising for a year? It’s easy. All you have to do is provide a link to AssociatePrograms.com. Thank you!
[UPDATE: This offer has closed.]===============================================
7. Amazon.com’s Bezos Time’s Person of the Year
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Jeff Bezos, the online retailer who is teaching everyone how to be a success online – while accumulating $550 million in losses – has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
He succeeds by instilling six core values in his team: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Bias for Action, Frugality, High Hiring Bar and Innovation.
pathfinder.com/time/poy/index.html
Two writers who aren’t impressed:
Amazon to world: We control how many times you must click!
salon.com/tech/log/1999/12/21/bezos/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=110
Should Amazon’s Bezos Be Person Of the Year?
ecommercetimes.com/news/viewpoint/view-991221-1.shtml
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8. 11-year-old teaches Waterford Crystal a lesson
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An 11-year-old English boy who recognizes the value of a good domain name grabbed the name WaterfordCrystal.com and put up a site which wasn’t much more than an e-mail address.
His non-authorized site quickly accumulated $64,210 in orders.
wired.com/news/business/0,1367,33117,00.html
All the best
Allan Gardyne