Karlonia.com

Major retailer Barnes & Noble dispatched its latest newsletter to affiliates today, highlighting some “best practices” and suggestions for the upcoming holiday season. Mostly known for its brick-and-mortar bookstores, the company has recently expanded to include additional product offerings such as toys, home furnishings, games, magazines, and music. This latest guide details many of these new item categories, some of which have recently become eligible for commission payments. Meanwhile, if you would like to visit the main Barnes & Noble site for some holiday gift ideas, you can do so by clicking on the logo banner in the upper left portion of this paragraph.

It’s that time of year again, with the holiday shopping rush about to begin in earnest. To help prepare you for this busiest of seasons, we have put together a brief guide to keep you in tune with what Barnes & Noble is doing this year. Remember that you earn 6% on products purchased through your affiliate links, including PC/Video Games and even Gift Cards!

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Earlier tonight I received a pleasant surprise in my email when I received a message from Greg Wieder, Director of Publisher Relations at the Panthera Network, notifying me that I had been approved for the program and that I would be receiving an approval mail within a few minutes. He also apologized for the delay (it had been nearly a month since I originally sent in my application) and explained that he had been away at Ad Tech in New York and was also having to deal with a large backlog of fraudulent applications. A few minutes later I did receive the official approval mail:

Hello Karl,

Congratulations. We have reviewed your application and you have been approved as a Panthera Network publisher. You may now log in to our private partner area to obtain creatives to promote all of our products and offerings. To log in, please go to www.pantheranetwork.com and log in with the following:

Username: xxxxxxxx
Password: xxxxxxxx

Your unique affiliate ID will be automatically populated in the creatives.

Please feel free to send us your comments and suggestions at any time. Our goal is to be your favorite affiliate network and your first choice when it comes to running campaigns. As a welcome bonus you will earn $150 when you generate your first $1,500 in commissions. To qualify, the $1,500 must be generated within sixty (60) days of your signup date.

Thanks,
The Panthera Network Team

PS: Don’t forget our referral program. The Panthera Network offers a 5% referral fee for any publishers you send our way. That’s 5% for an entire year! So sign up friends in the industry and earn when they earn.

This is very good news because it significantly expands the opportunities and options I will have for monetizing this site and giving it the “critical mass” it needs to finally become a truly successful operation. I am already familiar with many of the offers available under the Panthera Network as I have encountered them through various get-paid-to (GPT) types of sites whose owners promoted the offers to members and kept a percentage of the revenue.

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While tracking down my affiliate link to the Amazon home page in response to a search query yesterday, I noticed that the company has redesigned our Associates Central section somewhat. Although the changes here did not seem to make much of a difference to me at first, when I went to the home page I noticed their new “site stripe” feature, which displays as a dark gray bar across the top of the screen. This bar has certain menu options that now make it much easier to create affiliate links from any page of the site. It also enables quick access to a few other things such as the latest news, earnings reports, and forum discussions.

The new quick linking feature is particularly useful because it should save me lots of time when linking to specific products. Previously when I wanted to insert a relevant link into one of my articles, for example a link to a book description product page from a book review article, I had to log into my account, use the Amazon search engine to find the specific title, and then navigate through a series of options just to extract the correct HTML text to paste into my article. Now all I need to do is go to the desired product page and click on the “Link to this page” option from the site stripe, after which the HTML code for the affiliate link to it is generated automatically.

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The popular affiliate network Clickbank released its October newsletter today, informing subscribers that the company has rolled out the second phase of its platform globalization plan. This includes support for both French and German languages on important web pages and in other types of communication involving customer service. Additionally, Clickbank is now able to handle payment transactions in 13 different currencies, which should allow for the possibility of doing more localized geo-targeting and making more sales to international markets. This edition of the newsletter also includes some informative articles about the relatively new recurring billing feature and the benefits of creating affiliate teams as a profitable marketing strategy.

ClickBank is making it even easier for your business to go global! We will soon launch additional international capabilities including the ability to sell and promote French and German language products and accept payments in 13 global currencies.

The upgraded platform will enable all interactions between the customer and ClickBank to be conducted in English, Spanish, German, or French, including the order form, confirmation page, customer service emails, phone support, and customer service pages on our Web site.

This is exciting news for ClickBank clients, because it means you can sell to more customers around the world, and convert your existing international visitors into customers.

Plus, we will further facilitate international e-commerce by accepting the following currencies:

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Last night, as I was browsing through the Entrecard forums, I ran across another blogger who was offering articles for guest posting in exchange for a link. Naturally, I was not about to pass this one up; I have been wanting people to submit articles for months but have not had any luck until now. Today’s post is from Gary R. Hess of ImpNerd.com and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of becoming an Amazon associate.

There are many PPA sites out there, but one of the largest and well known sites is Amazon. Although they started out as a bookstore, they now have tens of thousands of products ranging from computer accessories to t-shirts and jewelry. No matter what industry you are in, they have something your visitors will buy.

What is Amazon Associates?

Amazon Associates is Amazon’s version of an affiliate program. They have a large list of ways to advertise their products and services. As a personal favorite, I enjoy their product links. Product links are the traditional form of affiliates in which you place a link to the product allowing your visitors to buy. However, there are several others which have known to be quite successful.

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At the end of last month the LinkShare Corporation, a large affiliate network encompassing many mainstream e-commerce businesses that offer commissions to publishers who promote their products, sent out its latest newsletter. In this issue, the company describes its content and contextual ad formats, lists several companies known for being eco-friendly “green” advertisers, and provides some information about a WordPress plugin called DealFeed that makes it possible for bloggers to display RSS feeds of affiliated advertisers. If you would like to join the LinkShare network and earn commissions on sales generated from your website, simply click on the banner below to access the Publisher Signup page and fill in the required information.

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E-commerce giant Amazon.com announced to their affiliates this week that the company is launching a new section of its website called Amazon Green, a multi-category program that integrates several different kinds of environmentally friendly products into a single shopping interface. Earlier today I had a chance to check out the product listings, which feature an eclectic mix of items ranging from toilet tissue made from post-consumer recycled paper to a bicycle for commuters called “Iron Horse Transit”. Energy-related items such as compact fluorescent bulbs and relatively inexpensive solar panels are also included.

For those of us who are trying to make money from Amazon’s affiliate program, this provides us with an opportunity to showcase a pre-selected subset of their product line that can be targeted toward environmentally conscious consumers. If you would like to check out the products yourself, simply click on one of the banners in this post to view the main Amazon Green page. Meanwhile, I have reprinted the email text of the announcement to Amazon associates below.

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The popular affilate network Clickbank released its July newsletter to subscribers today. Probably the most interesting news for Internet marketers is that the company has finally implemented a direct deposit system for receiving our coveted payments. As you can read from the excerpts that I have reprinted below, there are some qualifying conditions for this, namely that you must have already received at least three standard check payments within a 90-day period. You must also reside in the selected group of countries that Clickbank has chosen to make available for this option.

This means that I will probably need to wait until my overall Clickbank income increases somewhat before using this option because I do not yet receive checks often enough with my current minimum threshold. Of course I could always lower the threshold to the minimum of $10 and receive enough checks to qualify for the direct deposit, but then I would not have the actual checks available to use for those enticing Clickbank payment proof posts like the one I published back in May.

Meanwhile, if you’re just looking to make more money from Clickbank and would like some tips and strategies for how to do this, you can read through my bum marketing methods page where I have put together some of the best advice that I have gleaned from emails, newsletters, case studies, and my own experience.

Direct Deposit is Here!

ClickBank is pleased to offer Direct Deposit (ACH & XACH) into both domestic and international bank accounts to eligible clients, at no extra charge.

Direct Deposit is a fast and reliable method for receiving your account payments. Additionally, it allows you to receive payments in your local currency, alleviating unnecessary bank fees.

To be eligible an account must have first received three paper paychecks within any 90-day period. Additionally, only accounts in the following countries are eligible at this time: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

For more information about direct deposit refer to the 2008-07-15 Release Summary.

Tools and Tips — Enabling Direct Deposit

To enable direct deposit within your account, follow the instructions below. For more detailed information, including screen shots, refer to the Direct Deposit Release Documentation.

Steps to enable Direct Deposit:

• Login to your ClickBank account.
• Click on the “Account Settings” tab.
• Click “Edit” next to “Payment Information”.
• Select the “Direct Deposit” payment method radio button.
• Add the requested data to the direct deposit information area.
• Click “Save Changes”.
• The system displays a notification in your account and sends an email to the email address you have listed as your “Account Email” with instructions for completing the enrollment process.
• Go the email account specified in your “Account Email” address.
• Locate the email recently received from “ClickBank Notifications” and follow the instructions provided in the email.

That’s it! You’ll receive a confirmation email from us that the change has been made.

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Today the Linkshare Corporation released its July newsletter to publishers. The first part of the newsletter was simply a summary of the company’s recently-held 2008 symposium; it seemed to consist of little more than congratulatory corporate back patting that most of you probably don’t care about, so I see no real need to reprint it here. However, below this text there was an “Easy Links” section that may be of interest to those of us who are into affiliate marketing or who may have signed up with LinkShare as a publisher at some point.

Apparently LinkShare is finally catching up with Google and Amazon in offering contextual product links that automatically detect the main keywords used on our web pages and serve up ads based on the content of the text. In other words, it works pretty much like the ubiquitous AdSense that most aspiring bloggers are already using. This is good news for people like me who are hoping to expand our affiliate marketing endeavors beyond the confines of Clickbank and offer a wider variety of relevant products to our readers from companies that have already been vetted for legitimacy and reliability.

Here is the company’s official explanation of the new pilot program:

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Yesterday I received an email from one of my affiliate networks which seems to indicate that the merger between Google and DoubleClick is now officially complete. Back in April, Google announced that it was paying $3.1 billion for the online advertising company DoubleClick in a move that initially drew skepticism from various privacy advocates and the European Union but was eventually approved by regulators. The merger was seen by many in the business community as a strategic attempt by Google to expand beyond its core operations in search and into the market for online display advertising, something that DoubleClick had managed to do relatively well.

Meanwhile, back on May 16 I had joined the DoubleClick Performics network in order to take part in the Barnes & Noble affiliate program while also gaining access to a plethora of other high-end companies offering affiliate programs with widely varying commission incentives and qualifying criteria. Although the recent email states that the platform for our accounts will continue to be hosted at ConnectCommerce.com, DoubleClick Performics will now be officially renamed and operated as the Google Affiliate Network. There will also be changes to the user interface happening over the next few weeks that reflect the changeover to Google. Here is the full text of the email update from the new company’s Group Product Manager:

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This morning I received an email from LinkShare, a large affiliate network that I signed up with a few months ago. Apparently the company is appointing two people to act as co-presidents and has issued both an email notification to its affiliates and a press release to the media announcing the recent change in leadership.

Interestingly, I detected an English usage error in the very first sentence of their letter — they used the word “lead” where they were supposed to use “led”, which is the correct spelling for the past tense of this particular verb. I have marked the error in the reprinted copies of the letter and press release below with the strikethrough feature. This will make excellent fodder for my next English lesson post that is scheduled for the upcoming weekend.

Meanwhile, if you’re a webmaster who would like to make some extra money by adding some more affiliate marketing opportunities to your repertoire, you can sign up for LinkShare’s publisher membership by clicking through to their site from the banner below.

Dear Valued Partner,

I am pleased to announce that beginning today, LinkShare will be lead led by Jonathan Levine, who you may know is our CTO, and Yasuhisa “Yaz” Iida from Rakuten. They will be co-presidents.

Jonathan brings extensive knowledge of LinkShare’s technology and our Lead Generation, Affiliate, and Search businesses to the organization’s presidency. His appointment underscores our commitment to technological innovation and leadership.

Yaz brings deep experience in merchant services and sales from our parent company, Rakuten. As Executive Officer of Rakuten’s Ichiba Business Unit, he managed merchant services and sales during a period of great growth there. He will also help LinkShare continue to leverage Rakuten’s experience and resources as we grow and diversify our business. Yaz has lived and worked in the US and UK, and held senior management positions at Gilette, The Walt Disney Company, and Dyson Ltd.

On a personal note, while I will remain Chairman of LinkShare’s board, I will be stepping down from my executive roles at Rakuten and LinkShare on July 31.

Please join me in congratulating Yaz and Jonathan. I look forward to seeing many of you at the LinkShare Symposium in New York on June 24.

Best Regards,
John J-H Kim
Chairman
LinkShare Corporation

Here is the official press release. It seems that the lead/led error managed to slip past their proofreaders and copyeditors — oops!

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Yesterday I received a pleasant surprise in the mail when this check arrived from Clickbank. I had not logged into my account for a while to look at the actual numbers, but it seems that I managed to make enough sales to reach the default $100 minimum threshold without even realizing it.

To get a close-up view of the check, simply click on the image. Clickbank’s current check printing font is quite small, making it difficult for me to display a properly resized image that is easily legible. Fortunately, the thumbnail feature will allow you to view the image in its original full size without requiring me to display the whole thing on the home page. This is handy for keeping the overall “weight” of web pages relatively light and reducing load times.

After I received the payment, I logged into my account so that I could find out where the sales had been made. I was pleased to see that most of the sales were coming from my pages on bum marketing techniques and how to fix the computer CPU speed. This confirms that my overall strategy of combining bum marketing methods with targeted long tail SEO is actually working, even with Karlonia playing the role of the article directory. Now I just need to find a way to scale it up so that Karlonia will finally have a respectable income and I won’t have to worry about moving to a place like Malawi and subsisting on nsima just to be able to afford basic living expenses.

One of the biggest challenges with using this strategy is that in order for the traffic to actually convert into sales, the article page needs to provide information that helps the visitors solve a real problem that they are struggling with, and then suggest a product that can help them with the solution. I have found that it is not enough to just do the SEO and throw in an affiliate link or two as an afterthought. The product(s) that are linked to from the page must match up exactly with whatever the visitors are searching for as a solution to their problems. Otherwise the page will receive traffic but will not convert.

I still have many pages that are receiving a reasonable amount of traffic but are not yet monetized. Most of them are keyword-targeted articles that have been moderately successful in terms of SEO, but the topics do not match up well with any available Clickbank products. Recently I have signed up with Amazon and Barnes & Noble as possible alternatives, but their commission rates are generally much lower than those found at Clickbank. They do have a much greater selection of products, however, and even a small commission is better than nothing.

Another alternative that I have discovered recently is PayDotCom. This program uses PayPal and works much like Clickbank in terms of offering a variety of digital products with relatively high commissions for affiliates. They also have the advantage of being available to people in countries like the Philippines that are still not allowed to sign up with Clickbank. Moreover, they pay bonuses for referring affiliates who either become vendors and sell their own products or purchase the account upgrade that is offered to new affiliates. After catching up on the posting, I will browse through their marketplace and see if I can find some relevant products to include on my currently unmonetized pages.

Last week I reported that this site had been approved for the Barnes & Noble affiliate program and that they offered commissions of 5% for most item categories. Earlier today, I received more good news in the form of an email announcing that the overall commission rate is being increased to 6% for all items:

Dear Valued Affiliate,

Great news! We are pleased to announce an exciting change to the Barnes & Noble affiliate program. Effective June 1st, all products sold on BN.com will earn a flat commission rate of 6%. That means that you will earn industry-leading payments on all of our exciting products including:

1. New & Used Books
2. DVDs
3. Music
4. Print & Digital Magazines (New!)
5. New & Used Textbooks
6. Video Games
7. Gift Cards
8. Toys
9. Home & Gift
10. B&N Membership

Now, earn our best commission from dollar one on every product we sell - there are no more product exclusions or confusing bonus tiers. As always, thank you for your feedback and continued support of our program.

Regards,

The Barnes & Noble Affiliate Team

Note: The quarterly bonus on books will no longer continue after the second quarter, but we will track and pay bonus commissions through June 30th, 2008.

This means that the items in the PC and video game categories, which had formerly earned only 2%, will now get a significant boost, and there will be no more tiered structures with regard to sales volume. The only caveat is that B&N is also phasing out the quarterly bonuses. However, in order to earn enough bonus commissions to exceed the current flat rate of 6% under the old system, I would need to make several thousand dollars in monthly sales, which is a very difficult feat for most bloggers. In effect, the new changes are like getting a 1% raise (4% for video games). For once, it is nice to see a change in terms from a large company that actually benefits the “little guy”!

Some encouraging news arrived in my email this afternoon when I received two approval notifications from affiliate programs that I applied for almost two weeks ago. One was from Barnes & Noble, the bookstore that I had mentioned briefly in yesterday’s post about shopping for books online. The other was from DoubleClick Performics, an affiliate network that includes the Barnes & Noble program along with many other advertisers. Here is the approval letter from B&N:

Dear Karlonia,

Congratulations and welcome to the Barnes & Noble.com Program. Your application has been approved.

BN.com will be using house links, for more information please click here:
http://www.performics.com/publishers/houselinksfaq-bn.pdf

How to get banners & links:

1) Click here to get creative assets: http://www.connectcommerce.com
/partner/view_related_clients.html?reltype=A&primary=getlinks

2) Once you find the advertiser, select Available Links from the Action menu, and click the Go button. The system takes you to the All Available Links page.

3) You can refine the list of links you would like to view by selecting advanced search and selecting links that meet your needs. You can search by link category, size, type and duration.

4) Once you have found a link, select the checkbox next to the desired link and click the Generate and Add to My Links button. You may select multiple links if you wish.

5) For each link, copy and paste the HTML code into your site to begin tracking. Do not click Duplicate Link unless you want to create a second instance of the link.

Should you have any questions, please take the time to review the online FAQ at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/affiliate/faq.asp . If your question is not answered in our FAQ, contact us at BarnesandNoble(at)publisher.performics.com for further assistance.

We are pleased to have Karlonia as part of the Affiliate Network and look forward to building a lasting and profitable relationship. As a Barnes&Noble.com Affiliate, you’ll enjoy the benefits of partnering with the world’s premier bookseller and a recognized leader in e-commerce.

Sincerely,

DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Program
Powered by ConnectCommerce…www.performics.com

B&N pays 5% commissions on most categories of items including books, textbooks, memberships, gift cards, music, DVD/Videos, calendars, and toys. For PC and video games the commission rate is 2%. They also offer the possibility of collecting a bonus commission of 1%-3.5% per calendar quarter (3 months) if the total sales volume generated exceeds $5,000. While this seems like a pretty high figure, at the rate my mother (and many others, judging by the crowds that I have seen at our local B&N store) buys books from these guys, it may not be too far out of reach. Meanwhile, here is the approval letter from DoubleClick Performics:

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Today I received an unexpected email from MySurvey.com saying that I have been “ReApproved” for their affiliate program. I’m not sure exactly what triggered this - I have been an affiliate for several months and was not aware of any issues going on with the program. It’s possible that there has been some slight change in the rules, or perhaps they are simply reviewing the websites of affiliates periodically to make sure they are still extant and complying with their terms.

Nevertheless, MySurvey is a good program to have in your money making repertoire because it is free to join, easy to use, confirmed as paying, and does not waste your time with overly long surveys or pointless offers like many other survey companies do. If you’re a webmaster and want to join as an affiliate, you’ll need to join the panel as a member if you have not done so already. You can then apply for the affliate program after you log in to your Member Center. The approval process may take a few days, but as long as your website complies with their terms (most of our websites probably do), it will be approved for at least 6 months and you will have access to the promotional materials.

Since it is free to register with the program, referrals are relatively easy to come by. As my re-approval email text below states, there may be somewhat of a delay between the time that referrals sign up and the actual crediting of points to your member account. If you are also taking surveys as a member, any points earned from referrals are simply added to your regular survey points. Once your aggregate total reaches at least $10, you can request a check.

Hello KARL,

We have reviewed your website at Karlonia.com and are pleased to let you know you that you’ve been re-approved as an MySurvey.com website affiliate in good standing. Thank you for your continued interest in the program. You’ll earn 150 Reward Points for every eligible household referred from your site that joins the MySurvey.com interactive panel.

For banners, text ads, logos and links to use on your website,

1. Log into http://www.mysurvey.com with your username and password
2. Go to the Referral section and click on Website Affiliate Program (left menu).
3. Banners, text ads and logos will appear on the website affiliate page along with the appropriate links.
4. Please use these links to ensure you get credit for your referrals.

If you wish to recruit new members via email, instructions are also provided on this page. Due to recent and ongoing legislation governing email, you must following the instructions provided on the Website Affiliate Program page to include the MySurvey.com offer in any emails.

We provide new banners & other media periodically for our affiliates so be sure to check back. Please use only the creative materials (banners, graphics, logos, text links) that we provide.

There are three other important things to keep in mind as an affiliate:

• You must be an active member of the MySurvey.com interactive panel to continue as an affiliate. That means that you need to take surveys occasionally - at least 5 surveys in any 6 month time period. Surveys are generally short (10 minutes or less).
• If/when you earn close to 60,000 reward points, we’ll contact you to ask for your social security number. The IRS considers anything over $600 earned from one source as taxable income and requires that we send you (and them) a tax form for each tax year, with social security number referenced.
• There is a delay between the time your referral joins and crediting of points to your account to allow us to determine new member eligibility. Please see the Referral Program rules in the Referral section of MySurvey.com for details about eligibility. (You must log in to access the Referral section of the website.)

Just a reminder: As an affiliate you have agreed to abide by all the MySurvey.com Referral Program Rules and the Affiliate Program Terms of Service. Our rules periodically change; please check the Referral section of the MySurvey.com website routinely for any changes. If the Terms of Service change, we will notify you via email about the changes, where to find a copy of the new Terms of Service and indicating whether recertification is necessary. Your continued membership and affiliate status depends on your adherence to the most recent version of the rules and Terms of Service.

Like your membership, your participation in the website affiliate program is always voluntary. If you have any questions about the affiliate program, please contact our tech support staff via email affiliates(at)mysurvey.com or by calling our toll-free number 1-800-537-4097.

Many thanks for participating in our website affiliate program.

Carol Adams
Director of Member Services