Associate Programs Newsletter #80
This week Joanna and I are in the “City of Sails”, Auckland, New Zealand – https://www.aucklandnz.com/ – where we are being spoilt rotten by my sister Liz and brother-in-law Lew – which is quite appropriate because it’s 21 years since we last stayed here.
On Sunday we all wandered around Auckland’s America’s Cup village – https://www.nzcupvillage.co.nz/ – ogled 150-foot yachts registered in the Cayman Islands and repeatedly sampled a spicy Allan Scott sauvignon blanc – https://www.winesenz.co.nz/savvy.html – in one of the new restaurants overlooking the harbor. The fact that some guy in Texas had stolen my website didn’t seem very important.
CONTENTS:
1. What I recommend for Christmas
2. Dirty Tricks Department (3)
3. How to search for thieves’ handiwork
4. How to fool a search-and-replace thief
5. How to find out who a thief is
6. How to deal with thieves
7. Don’t count on cookies forever
8. Your VStore store doesn’t need cookies?
9. @watch keeps on tracking
10. CJ.com offers 90-day cookies
11. DirectLeads.com receives boost
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1. What I recommend for Christmas
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It’s an old cliche but it’s true. If you give a man water, you quench his thirst. If you teach him how to dig a well, you give him a whole new life.
This Christmas, give a gift which will change someone’s life (and ensure that YOU will be gratefully remembered – for a long, long time).
The best gift you can give a budding Internet entrepreneur – or perhaps an entrepreneur who is struggling a little – is one which will help him or her succeed.
Ken Evoy’s incredibly useful e-book, “Make your Site SELL!” in which he describes the techniques he uses successfully, is now also available as a printed book.
If you’ve already been fortunate enough to have read the book, you’ll know that in it Ken describes the three steps to success:
STEP 1 — Develop a great product — position it for Web sales.
STEP 2 — Build a site that SELLS, really SELLS!
STEP 3 — Attract targeted traffic to the site.
Its incredibly low price is totally out of proportion to the huge value you’ll be giving.
- Electronic Version — well under US$20
- Printed Version — approx US$30 (plus S&H)
- Both Versions — approx US$40 (plus S&H)
The electronic version is great because you can click on the links, but the new printed version is wonderful, too, because you can curl up in an armchair while reading it.
I’ve bought both and learned heaps from them. I recommend giving both.
Who do you know who deserves a hand to make a better life for themselves?
Start helping them succeed now.
P.S. If you haven’t bought the book for yourself, don’t YOU deserve a decent Christmas, too?
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2. Dirty Tricks Department (3)
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For the past two weeks I’ve written about dirty tricks played on AssociatePrograms.com – including the theft of my whole website.
Dirty Tricks Department – Part 1 (See item 9)
Dirty Tricks Department – Part 2 (See item 2)
As many of you commented this week, the theft of material from our websites affects ALL of us because it threatens our businesses.
The response of the thief has been weird.
It’s probably hard to do, but try imagining that YOU had been caught stealing my website – including my “About Us” page with my name and photo on it, my “Special Friends” page containing testimonials from well known people, and even my newsletters dating back to April 4, 1998.
Wouldn’t you feel like dying from embarrassment?
Not the latest thief. He’s now publicly accusing me of unethical behavior and says he was planning to associate his business with mine!
Who said he doesn’t have an original thought in his brain?
Thank you, everyone, for all your wonderful support and suggestions on how to deal with this thief. And special thanks to those who made copies of the purloined pages before they were removed. I really appreciate your help.
Several people have written to the thief expressing their displeasure, some have contacted his web host, VServers, and one guy has even written to the Texas State Attorney’s Office.
The best suggestion I received? That the thief ought to rename his other website, BusinessIdeas.com. The suggested name?
StolenBusinessIdeas.com.
(I’m still waiting for an apology.)
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3. How to search for thieves’ handiwork
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A couple of people have asked me how they can find out if someone is stealing their web pages.
Here’s an easy way:
Find an unusual word or phrase which is used on your site and type it into a search engine. I searched for “Allan Gardyne” and “AssociatePrograms.com”, which works only if you are searching for the work of a really amateurish thief.
At AltaVista, you can refine the search by typing in:
“allan gardyne” -host:www.associateprograms.com
By doing that you would find instances of “allan gardyne” which aren’t on the AssociatePrograms.com site.
Some people include a nonsense word, unlikely to be repeated anywhere else, such as erqwthyxf, in their meta tags and do a search for that.
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4. How to fool a search-and-replace thief
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The thief who stole my site obviously used search-and-replace software to change all instances of “AssociatePrograms.com” into “AssociateMall.com”.
Dale Taylor suggests that the only defense against such search- and-replace stealing is to randomly convert letters in “AssociatePrograms” into HTML ASCII code equivalents:
AssociatePrograms and AssociatePrograms etc…
“You could write a pretty quick Perl program to scan your directory files randomly replacing characters in the phrase throughout your documents with the ASCII characters (this even works for URLs AssociatePrograms),” Dale says.
“Since the program would have too much access to leave lying around on your server, you’d need to delete it once you’ve run it. To increase the difficulty of writing a program to unencode it, you’d need to make sure you replace a random number of characters each time as well (sometimes just one, sometimes 2,3,4,5,6, etc).
“Anyone smart enough to write a program to undo that (or use a sophisticated text editor with grep search), would have better things to do than steal your site. (Let’s hope).
“And it’s a good idea to place your copyright in HTML comments on the pages with spaces between some letters. Then a search-and-replace thief will leave further evidence behind,” Dale says.
You’re probably right, Dale, but I think it would be simpler to bring back tarring and feathering.
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5. How to find out who a thief is
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To discover who owns a website and the name of the web host go to
https://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois/
or the more comprehensive
https://www.betterwhois.com
and type in the domain name of the offending website, such as AssociateMall.com.
Sometimes you’ll find a person’s name, sometimes just a company name.
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6. How to deal with thieves
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I-Sales HelpDesk #176 has excellent articles on copyright theft.
As I said back in February, when large chunks of my website were stolen:
One of the first things to do in a case of theft is to copy the offending site – the web pages and the source code.
In my experience – and I’ve had quite a bit – web hosts are usually very helpful at removing thieves’ sites, as long as you give them proof of the theft.
Here are lots of helpful tips on dealing with thieves:
list.adventive.com/archives/i-helpdesk.html
NEXT WEEK: More dirty tricks
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7. Don’t count on cookies forever
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Last week I wrote about merchants such as Toy”R”Us which have cookies set for only five days. (If the potential customer you refer returns and buys on the sixth day, you won’t earn a commission.) Other merchants offer much longer return periods.
Jim Connelly of https://www.cedarock.com says that three-year or lifetime return policies sound great, “but keep in mind that many things can and do happen to disable that”.
Browsers can hold only a certain number of cookies, Jim says. Netscape’s cookie limit is 300, and IE’s limit is variable (default is 2% of hard drive space).
“Thus, a three-year program is probably not really going to last three years. It’s only going to last until the browser purges your cookie. And with the abundance of cookies associated with advertising and affiliate programs online, a browser will collect 300 cookies pretty quickly. Also, users can delete their cookie files on their own. Others have cookies disabled altogether.
“I just looked at my cookie file,” Jim says. “The oldest cookie was set on October 26 1999. Admittedly, I’m online more than the average user, but even after I adjust this unscientific study I think the average user would fill their cookie bin in a matter of 3 or 4 months. Thus, the longest a ‘lifetime’ can be is 3 or 4 months.
“Cookies are good in the sense that they don’t require the user to do anything (as opposed to a login/password combination that users would have to register for). But unless the user is registered in a database at the merchant with a login/password, there really is no guarantee that your affiliate referral will be tracked in the weeks/months/years to come.
“Personally, I’m attracted to programs that offer long return features. But I don’t count on them to work for indefinite periods,” Jim says.
You can find more info on cookie limits at
https://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/#2.5
Netscape limits your total cookie count to 300. If you exceed this, the browser will discard your least-used cookies to make room for the new ones.
If your potential customer is using Internet Explorer, you may have better luck. Microsoft saves cookies into the “Temporary Internet Files” folder, a system folder of which you can set the maximum size (the default is 2% of your hard drive).
“You would need about 20 million cookies to fill up a 2GB drive,” CookieCentral.com says.
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8. Your VStore store doesn’t need cookies?
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Marcia Coffey of The J&M Group – https://www.jmgroup.net/ – asks if co-branded sites like VStore completely eliminate the problem of merchants not tracking return visits.
“It would seem to me they do, and thus make them more attractive than ever,” she says.
I think the answer is “Yes, but . . .”
If your loyal customer keeps returning to your VStore, yes, you’ll earn a commission every time the customer buys something.
However, if you send a potential customer to ToysRus.com or Amazon.com those are much easier URLs to remember than thejmgroup.vstore.com or thejmgroup.affinia.com or whatever your URL would be. Also, if you’re hoping the customer will bookmark your Vstore site and return that way, I think you’re an optimist. You would have to make it really special before someone would bookmark it.
So I think it’s important that merchants track return visits for their associates.
Your best hope may be to aim to get your customer to remember your main URL – and have a prominent link to your VStore or Affinia from it. Affinia has an attractive graphic you can use to attract traffic to your Affinia gift shop.
And if you don’t have a memorable main URL . . . it’s time to get one.
Good luck.
[UPDATE: Affinia and Vstore have closed.]===========================
9. @watch keeps on tracking
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Sometimes good companies track customers for affiliates using more than just cookies – the more methods used, the better.
Last week I published a list of LinkShare affiliate programs and their return day/cookie features. While the list was accurate, it was a bit misleading.
Elizabeth Baron of @watch, which alerts you if your site is down or broken, explains:
“You are correct in that our cookies are ‘set’ at zero in
LinkShare. That is because we don’t use LinkShare’s return day
feature, but our own internal @watch one. Our internal return
day/cookie is set at 10 days.
“. . . our biggest concern has been the customers who sign up
for our free trial from affiliates’ sites and then purchase
once the trial has ended. We are set up to continue to track
that customer, so that even if they first choose our free
service, if they ever become a paying customer the affiliate
still receives credit. And we recognize the long-term value of
our affiliate sites by compensating them the commission for up
to 12 months of fees that customer might pay,” Elizabeth says.
https://www.atwatch.com
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10. CJ.com offers 90-day cookies
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Todd Crawford of Commission Junction says that all merchants in the Commission Junction Network offer a 90-day return feature (the first sale or 90 days, whichever comes first).
“We feel that this adds continuity for affiliates when managing multiple merchant relationships (one less thing to remember),” Todd says.
You can choose from hundreds of CJ.com programs here:
https://www.associateprograms.com/cj
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11. DirectLeads.com receives boost
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Internet.com has invested a substantial sum in pay-per-lead network DirectLeads.com.
“This will enable us to grow way beyond where we currently are, and provide affiliates with more tools to make their dealings with advertisers in our network simpler and more effective,” says Jason Wolfe of DirectLeads.com.
DirectLeads.com will be worth keeping an eye on.
https://www.associateprograms.com/dl
All the best,
Allan Gardyne
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