Associate Programs Newsletter #119
CONTENTS:
1. ClubMom isn’t afraid to give you the numbers
2. Don’t confuse them – just get the click
3. Building a community with a sense of belonging
4. 10 essential ways to identify an excellent program
5. Business.com stands out again
6. You can earn 40 cents per subscriber
7. Uproar buys iwin for $88 million
8. PayPal doesn’t protect auction buyers
9. How to combine Britney Spears and “Survivor”
10. Top 10 best-selling associate programs
11. Thought for today: Dreams come true
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1. ClubMom isn’t afraid to give you the numbers
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ClubMom Affiliate Manager Shawn Collins says he has been seeing increasing requests for affiliate marketing data but affiliate managers are reluctant to share their results.
He says he’s willing to answer the questions which “nobody else” will answer.
Here are the commissions earned by ClubMom’s top 10 earners for June:
$6,648.75
$2,728.75
$1,705.00
$1,658.75
$1,470.00
$1,181.25
$911.25
$870.00
$658.75
$590.00
I accepted Shawn’s challenge and asked him a few questions. Here are his replies:
Q: How many affiliates do you have?
A: 5,080
Q: What percentage are active (earning something in the previous month?)
A: 2%
Q: What’s the average commission of the active affiliates?
A: $281.33
Q: What percentage of the traffic from affiliate sites results in a sign-up?
A: We’ve got a pretty nice conversion rate (from my experience): 25.75%
My summary: If you have an appropriate target audience and know how to send people to ClubMom, you should be able to earn useful money with this pay-per-lead program.
It pays $1 for every free membership you refer to ClubMom. This increases to $1.25 when you have referred 50 memberships.
You can join the program at Be Free.
[UPDATE: BeFree merged with Commission Junction.]
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2. Don’t confuse them – just get the click
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You’ve probably read this excellent advice several times: If you want visitors to your website to click on a link, DON’T confuse them by offering a lot of choices.
However, when you’re achieving sales with affiliate programs – or even if you’re not – it’s tempting to add just one more affiliate link… and then one more…
RESIST that temptation. Have faith in the experts. They really do know what they’re talking about.
Restricting a visitor’s choices WILL increase your chance of getting the click – and earning a commission.
Here’s a very simple example.
Varun Krishna runs https://www.CoolNetStuff.com . It’s basically a doorway page and there’s only ONE link on it, to Visto.com.
A visitor has only two choices – leave or click on the link.
As an experiment, for a while Varun went even further than that. He made the page automatically redirect to Visto.com.
Such a don’t-allow-them-to-think policy has potential problems:
*Many affiliate programs ban automatic redirects. Even if the agreement doesn’t mention them, beware – the merchant may not be happy if you use them.
*Search engines will penalize you for using automatic redirects.
*An automatic redirect to an affiliate merchant will definitely NOT impress GoTo.com or Sprinks.
*Your visitors will probably feel deceived, unless the site presents them with exactly what they were trying to find.
However, the technique has worked well for Varun.
“Around 60% of people wait and proceed to Visto.com and a lot of them sign up since they came to my page looking for ‘free e-mail’ or ‘visto.com’ in the first place…
“If you have a site cluttered with text or banner links to similar services then it’s quite likely that the visitor will exit since he will simply not be able to figure out which service is best for him and which one should he sign up for,” Varun says. “In my case he has only two options, either to sign up or get out of there. This makes my conversion ratio quite high.”
He says his biggest mistake on www.CoolNetStuff.com is that he’s not capturing visitors’ e-mail addresses. He’s planning to change that soon.
Varun says Visto.com is an incredible free service that includes a set of PIM (personal information manager) tools such as e-mail, calendar, address book, and 15MB space for files. All these features can also be accessed through a WAP enabled mobile.
“Visto.com has a ‘groups’ feature. A member can create as many groups as he wants and each of the groups has 25MB space allotted to it. They include a message board, a section where one can store photos etc.”
Successful affiliates often use in-context advertising to yield the most effective results. Visto.com goes further, Varun says. With a little bit of effort you can create a community of similar minded individuals and earn from it as well.
Varun gives these ideas on how virtually anyone with a web page can be a successful Visto.com affiliate:
*Every site has a theme which can be based on anything from music to geometry. The site’s owner is an expert in that particular area. The owner can share his or her knowledge with like minded visitors through Visto groups and profit from it.
*If the site owner offers downloads such as MP3s, MPEGS, games etc then he can store them in his Visto group. Visitors will not mind since they get to download what you’re offering and they also sign up for a great service – all free.
*Nearly every commercial site has a FAQ page. With a Visto affiliate group, the site owner could just post all this information to his Visto group and ask his customers to join his group to access all the basic customer service functions such as questions and answers – a sort of interactive FAQ.
*You can earn $2 to $3 for every member who signs up for Visto’s free service from links on your site.
You can join the Visto program at Be Free.
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3. Building a community with a sense of belonging
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Varun Krishna’s main website is DigiTull.com – a website dedicated to the Jethro Tull band.
Varun has created a community of Tull fans called The Clasp. It has 605 members and is steadily increasing.
The biggest advantage of joining The Clasp is gaining access to 3000MB of live Tull MP3s – free.
DigiTull.com also offers a complete discography section, Tullfan mail (free e-mail), free E-Tull cards, chat room and much more. It’s a recommended site on the official Jethro Tull site at https://www.j-tull.com and is well known among the Tull community on the web and appreciated by the band members.
The Clasp has an active message board and members regularly post live uncopyrighted Tull concert MP3s at Visto.com itself, taking advantage of the 25MB of space and the facility to create an unlimited number of such “groups”. Varun has created a directory of these at Jethrotullmp3.com.
“The main purpose of a community should be that people can have a sense of belonging to the group, make great new friends and generally look forward to coming back as often as they get the opportunity,” Varun says.
This sense of belonging cannot be bought – you have to work at it. The most important factor is how much time YOU spend in your community, he says.
Varun, who is 20, lives in New Delhi, India, and is in his final year of college doing a BA in Political Science (“I just topped my college this year and last year too.”)
He did a basic course in web design a year ago.
“I’m planning to do an online course from UCLA on e-branding on the Internet and probably work on a career in e-marketing.”
At DigiTull.com he offers contests to improve participation in The Clasp and persuade more members to sign up.
“A few months back when the number of messages on the board was stagnating, I put together the ‘1000th message wins’ contest. I just spent $35 on this and got loads of free publicity and the participation in the message boards also zoomed up by nearly 150% which was quite encouraging.
“I’m currently having a contest in which the 750th member to join The Clasp will get a $50 certificate.”
DigiTull.com participates in a webring of about 90 Tull websites. Only a few of those sites provide unique benefits, Varun says.
Varun says he’s on his computer for more than 10 hours a day and he makes sure that he monitors activity on his sites as well as replying to messages on The Clasp.
DigiTull.com gets close to 200 visitors a day.
“I’m working very hard to improve its search engine positions and finally, Jethrotullmp3.com popped up #1 at AltaVista for the search term ‘jethro tull mp3’. It also has a listing at Yahoo.
“I make more than $1,000 per month from all my sites but I’m working to earn more and I’m convinced that it’s possible.”
Promotional methods which work well for DigiTull.com:
Bidding on GoTo.com for the search term ‘jethro tull mp3’
Some success with doorway pages.
Encouraging members of my community to refer their friends.
Regular contests maintain the interest in the community.
Varun says he is usually tempted by pay-per-lead affiliate programs since the conversion rate for free services is a lot higher than the pay-per-sale ones.
“In a study it was found that an average visitor returns to a site three times before he places the order and the odds of his returning to your site to place an order with your affiliated merchant are rather less. In comparison, the odds of a first time visitor signing up for a free service are high…
“Another program I’m doing well in is WebSwap. They pay $3 per lead. I’ve customized it for my site with their permission – – swap.digitull.com – and am getting a good sign-up rate.”
Varun says he is really surprised when he reads dozens of messages of frustrated site owners who aren’t able to make much money out of their sites in spite of getting tons of traffic.
“If a site like mine that gets much less traffic can make me decent money, then most site owners could be millionaires!
“They think it’s so easy. Just slap a jazzy banner on a web page, wait for someone to click through and get rich! Hey, guess what? It does not work that way!
“The only great tip I can offer is that site owners should ignore banner advertising for promoting affiliate programs. Relevant, in-context advertising is the most effective way of promoting affiliate programs and of course, try out my ‘don’t-allow-them- to-think’ principle.
“Also, try to figure out what your visitor profile is and match affiliate programs that could fit in. Experiment continuously and some day, you’ll hit the jackpot.”
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4. 10 essential ways to identify an excellent affiliate program
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Are you sure you know exactly how to maximize your income from affiliate programs?
William DeHart has identified 10 ways – including a few things you’ve probably overlooked. How do the programs you’ve joined measure up to William’s stringent tests?
How to choose an affiliate program
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5. Business.com stands out again
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Remember the company which paid an astounding $7.5 million for the domain name Business.com?
It’s still spending money – this time on a generous affiliate program.
If you sign up before September 14 and post a Business.com search box on your site, you’ll be paid 10 cents each time a user performs a Business.com search from your site. After the special promotional period ending December 31, the payout will be 4 cents, which is still more than the 3 cents which most search engines pay.
The Business.com directory and search engine lists nearly 25,000 business categories and hundreds of thousands of business- oriented websites. It also offers a summary of the top business stories of the day. Improvements are planned.
You can join at Commission Junction:
https://www.associateprograms.com/cj
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6. You can earn 40 cents per subscriber
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Internet Business Forum (IBF) is paying 40 cents for each new subscriber to its free high-quality business-oriented newsletters.
If you have a website aimed at Internet businesses I imagine you’ll be able to achieve a high sign-up ratio of visitors you send to the Internet Business Forum.
It provides simple, to-the-point text and banner/button ads for affiliates to use in promoting the program.
“We’re running it under both ClickTrade and ClickXChange so that affiliates can choose which provider they feel more comfortable with – and we’ll be looking to expand this roster further to other affiliate providers in the near future,” says Edwin Hayward, Vice-President of Technology.
The IBF team will be watching closely for fraud.
“We’re very strict about who we will accept and we will also be watching the behavior pattern of the subscribers each affiliate refers to us over time,” Edwin says.
“If an affiliate has a much higher than average number of ‘bounce’ or ‘unsubscribe’ subscriptions then we will probably terminate our association with them. Unless it’s very widespread fraud, we probably wouldn’t bother to go after them for the few dollars they managed to get out of us, but we sure won’t be giving them any more opportunities to cheat!”
If you run a banner farm using a free web host, don’t bother applying to join this program. Edwin says they expect to reject about 50% of all affiliates.
“Mark Brownlow or I manually visit each site and look at a lot of things, for instance where it is situated (we won’t touch sites in ‘danger’ areas such as Rumania which are notorious for cheating) and we also look at its past statistics and the percentage of unique clicks it generated during other promotions (even though we’re using pay-per-lead, it’s reassuring to see a site produced 1,000 clicks in the past with only 1% of clicks maximum coming from a single location, for example).
“Finally, we try to make an educated guess (we’re educated – we guess ;-) ) as to how much traffic the site is getting and we reject sites where it’s clear they will NEVER earn the minimum check from ClickXChange or ClickTrade – we don’t feel it’s right to take unfair advantage of these smaller website owners.
“In summary, I think we have the strongest possible approach to fraud in the form of very careful HUMAN filtering and monitoring.”
The IBF newsletters cover: marketing and advertising,website management and design, website promotion and revenue building, interviews, e-mail tips and techniques, tools and services, business resources, and home office tips.
More newsletters are planned.
You earn a commission when someone signs up for at least one of the newsletters.
The full details are at:
ibizhome.com/affiliate.htm
[UPDATE: Internet Business Forum faded away.]===================================
7. Uproar buys iwin for $88 million
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Uproar – https://www.Uproar.com – the popular games site which runs the Trivia Blitz associate program, has bought fun and games site iwin.com – https://www.iwin.com – for $88 million, the Silicon Alley Daily reported.
Uproar CEO and Chairman Kenneth Cron says his company chose to absorb iwin.com to extend its reach, increase its unique-user base, beef up inventory, and capitalize on greater marketing and advertising opportunities, both from a revenue-generating and brand-development standpoint.
It was an all-stock deal.
More details:
techweb.com/wire/finance/story/INV20000726S0006
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8. PayPal doesn’t protect auction buyers
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Dozens of Yahoo! auction customers were cheated of at least $100 each by a scam artist selling computer hard drives. Most had used online payments system PayPal, which advertises itself as the safe and secure way to make payments in online auctions.
So the victims were shocked to learn that PayPal didn’t offer them built-in consumer protection familiar to credit card users.
The company makes clear in its terms of service that it’s not a bank or escrow service and has no legal obligation to help users who are cheated out of money.
Full story:
zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2605840,00.html
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9. How to combine Britney Spears and “Survivor”
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When two search terms are hot, what do unscrupulous copywriters do to attract even more clicks? Combine them, of course.
Here’s a headline I saw at https://www.iwin.com today:
“How Long Would Britney Spears Last On Survivor?”
Just in case you’re curious, the link takes you to a page which doesn’t even mention the “Survivor” TV program.
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10. Top 10 best-selling associate programs
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Here are the top 10 best-sellers – the associate programs which are earning the most income for AssociatePrograms.com:
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11. Thought for today: Dreams come true
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Dreams come true for those who work while they dream.
All the best
Allan Gardyne