Swollen Pickles

A bad affiliate program is one that does everything in its power to make you feel like you've just paid a visit to an alcoholic, sausage fingered, proctologist.

In the good old days Commission Junction were quite good to me. I was doing reasonably well with them, largely on the back of their relationship with eBay. A couple of years ago, if you wanted to earn commission from eBay referrals, your only option was to go through Commission Junction.

While Commission Junction have a large number of partners, 99.9% of my revenue with them was generated via eBay. When eBay decided it was time to fly solo, and started there own publisher program, 99.9% of the money I would have made through Commission Junction was made via eBay directly instead. So, since eBay flew the Commission Junction coup, my Commission Junction earnings have been sporadic at best. Currently I'm only partnered with Musicians Friend, which generally offers high involvement, high value, products for sale. My last commission probably occurred earlier this year, and since then it's been quiet.

Last month I logged into my dashboard and noticed that my account balance had dropped from the previous month, and the month before that. Four months ago I had $47 in my account. Today I'm down to $7. Why? Here's what I found buried in the Contact Us >> Check FAQs section of the Commission Junction site.

If your account was charged a $10 fee it is because you have not generated any commissionable transactions for a six-month period. Publishers that have less than $10 in their account or a zero balance after six-months of activity automatically have their accounts deactivated. Because publishers can sign-up for a Commission Junction account for no charge, our system carries thousands of accounts that are either duplicates or never generate any activity. This makes it necessary to remove those accounts from the system so that it can work more efficiently for publishers and advertisers that are generating revenue.

So each month I'm being charged $10 for what exactly? Extra support? Help in turning around my poor performance? I'm not sure. All I do know is that I never received any correspondence from Commission Junction to tell me they were siphoning my account. Maybe it's there way of coping with the financial crisis? Whatever it is, it leaves me less than impressed.

Now, I may not be a big user of Commission Junction at the moment, but that is not to say I wont find something I want to promote in the future. With that said though, Commission Junction make it very difficult for me to want to continue on with them in the future. If I don't generate a commission this month, my account will finally reach zero, which will see my account deactivated. Surely I can do something to avoid deactivation? Lets check their FAQs some more...

How can I prevent my account from being closed for non-activity?

Commission Junction deactivates accounts for lack of performance (dormant account policy) if they have not generated any commissionable transactions for six consecutive months. To prevent your account from being deactivated, you can make a purchase from one of your advertisers to generate a commission.

So to avoid deactivation I should generate leads... from myself? Doesn't sound 100% kosher, and there's probably sub-clauses in the individual agreements you enter into with the actual advertisers that could end up seeing you booted from their programs?

Commission Junction is one of the larger affiliate programs around, which is why I guess they figure they can get away with such a dick move. For the big publishers I'm sure none of this really matters, but perhaps Commission Junction should consider that big publishers all need to start somewhere. By raising the middle finger to the minnows of today, they may pissing off the killer whales of tomorrow.

I've been a member of MoreNiche for a while now, initially drawn in due to their generous sign up bonus. A while ago I set up a poker site, to see how the MoreNiche, WassPoker, product would go. Today I officially recorded my first sale.

It may be due to the current WassPoker offer "get 100% up to $500 on your first bonus". In any case, I'm pretty happy, hopefully it's the first of many.

If you haven't heard of MoreNiche before, it's an affiliate program that is definitely worth joining. They give you money just for joining. Yup, they are giving away up to 45$ for new signups as bonuses! Money for nothing, Dire Straits style.

Here's some good news for anyone that's looking to make a little extra cash online. WidgetBucks have increased their referral payouts to 15 per cent. In other words you earn a 15 per cent referral fee based on commissions earned by the publishers that you refer. This 15 per cent referral offer runs for the first 12 months after your referred member joins.

Now's a good time to get on board WidgetBucks as the company has just launched what they are calling "YieldSense". YieldSense works behind the scenes to optimize your WidgetBucks widgets to maximizes the rate of return.

So, go join WidgetBucks now, create some groovy widgets, and start making some money.

In my eternal quest to make this site profitable I'm trialling a new program called LinkShowOff.

The LinkShowOff program allows you to run a simple javascript based widget on your site (eg. your blog's side bar) and earn money when someone purchases a link in your widget. LinkShowOff is said to be Google safe as all links sold are 'nofollow' as per Google's guidelines.

You can set the price per link to your liking, however the lowest you can set it at is $1. I've decided to leave my price at the lowest possible for the time being at least in order to gauge demand.

For bloggers, LinkShowOff is a good option as they allow all sorts of blogs, including those hosted by blogger (eg. blogspot), into their network. As they say, "as long as you can add a JavaScript widget to your website, you can use LinkShowOff".

For potential advertisers LinkShowOff is worth investigating because the system allows advertisers to buy link spots without the need to go through any sort of registration process.

Here are some of the key FAQ's from the LinkShowOff website:

How long do links stay on the widget?

Links stay on the widget forever until they are bumped off by newer links. For example, if you set a max amount of five links on your widget and you achieve that
number, the next link bought will take the place of the first link, the first link will be bumped down to the second link, and so on. The fifth link would be removed
overall from the widget.

Are there any fees or revenue sharing?

We charge a small fixed transaction fee of $3 on every payout made monthly to our widget users, but that’s it. For example, if you earn a total sum of $100, you will be paid $97.

What are the payment methods?

All payments will be made by Paypal.

What's the minimum payout limit?

The minimum payout limit is $10.

Is there any referral system?

Yes, you will get $3 for every referral that earns $3.

Another good reason to register your blog with LinkShowOff is that upon registration you get a free link in the LinkShowOff directory. The directory is free from the 'nofollow' tag so it's a nice little bonus for those that are link obsessed.

I've only had the widget live for less than 24 hours, so it's early days at the moment. If you'd like to check out LinkShowOff, register your website here.

I've been messing around with Predictify for quite a while now, and I've found it to be an entertaining distraction. I've also made over $40 too which is an added bonus.

One of the latest features Predictify have released for their registered users is the ability to add a badge to you blog, website or social networking profile to 'brag' about your predictive powers.

Here's my little bragging rights button, I'm so proud cause it says I'm an 'Expert'. It's actually quite nice to be called an expert.

I'll be honest, when I first read about Infolinks in various forums, I was more than a little sceptical. Whenever a new advertising program kicks off, it's not unusual for discussion boards to become flooded with people spouting off about the overwhelming success they are having with the next big thing, no doubt in the hope of building a few solid referrals to their affiliate link. Never the less, I took the bait, and signed up to Infolinks, because a) these things interest me, and b) if it pays off I can use the money.

In the interests of disclosure, yes, I would love for you to join up to Infolinks using my affiliate link, but that's not the only reason I'm writing this. I'm happy to report that Infolinks has actually worked for me. It's making me money, and if it's working for me, then it can work for you too!

If you're not familiar with Infolinks, they provide 'next generation' in-text advertising. From a layman's point of view they appear similar to Kontera, however, from what I can tell, and the this is the most important point from a publishers point of view, they pay more! By way of comparison, from the 1 July 2008 - 30 November 2008 I was averaging $0.72 eCPM with Kontera. My average eCPM with Infolinks so far is $3.01.

I've implemented Infolinks here and on another site and they providing a return that puts them on a par with Google Adsense. Here's a screen shot of the last seven days.

Here's the sales pitch from InfoLinks:

Infolinks presents the next generation of In-Text Advertising, leading the industry with the most relevant in-text advertising links and the highest revenue share - guaranteed.

Quick and easy setup with no changes to your website
Ads are tightly integrated with your content - no additional space required
Free sign up with no commitments or risk
User triggered, less intrusive advertising that won’t distract from your site’s content
Highly relevant In-Text ads for your site visitors with record high conversion rates

Are you an Online Publisher? Join us now and start linking text to revenue today.

The Infolinks platform is open to any online publisher, big or small, with no sign up fees, hidden commitments or minimum requirements for page views or visitors. So it's definitely worth a look for anyone with their own blog or site, large or small. Infolinks have definitely thrown down the gauntlet, and Kontera are really going to have to step up if they want to maintain their publisher base.

Would I recommend Infolinks? At this point in time, heck yes.

As I covered yesterday, Infolinks appear to be a decent alternative to Kontera. The only problem is, their dashboard is a little light on for information, and makes it easy for people to miss some of the more useful information that they have on customizing Infolinks to get the most out of them on your site.

To find the code you need to include in the footer of your site, you need to click on 'Implementation Guide'. Once there, you have the option of copying the 'Express Installation' code, or an example of an 'Advanced Installation' code. Express is fine if you want to get things up and running and don't mind using the default parameters, but if you want to specify the number of Infolinks that will appear on a page, or help Infolinks better target ads to your content, then the 'Advanced Code' is the way to go. If you're worried about the term 'Advanced', don't be. There's nothing all that scary about it.

Here's an example of the advanced code:

As you can probably tell, this allows you to modify the link color and text color. But there are also other parameters you can modify using the same principles. Here are two of the most useful.

So you want to limit the number of Infolinks that appear on your site?

To do this you'll need to add the variable called infolink_anow. For example, if you only want a maximum of 5 infolinks to appear on a page at once you would add the following line to the advanced code just before the first closing script tag.

var infolink_anow = 5;

So that will limit the maximum number of phrases that Infolinks will underline.

So you want to specify the phrases/keywords that Infolinks will target for linking?

Same principle as above, except you'll need to add the infolink_cat variable. The infolink_cat variable can only be used/populated with the twelve categories listed below:
Adults
Arts
Automotive
Business
Computers
Games
Health
Home
Kids & Teens
News
Recreation
Reference
Science
Shopping
Society
Sports

Say, for example, you wanted to target the keywords belonging to the arts category you would use the following:

var infolink_cat = 'arts';

To summarise

If you wanted to add both the above variables, your final code would look something like this.

So that's it. Hopefully someone finds it useful. If you haven't already, go join Infolinks here.