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.

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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.

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Market Leverage is the latest affiliate program I'm trialling in the hope of making a fortune and buying my own island. Essentially Market Leverage operates in a way similar to Commission Junction or ClickBooth, however the MAJOR POSITIVE with Market Leverage is their own affiliate/referral program!

What they offer publishers is far more than attractive. Become a Market Leverage Master Publisher using the link or banner code below, and you can make 5.00% commissions on every approved Affiliate you refer to Market Leverage!

Market Leverage - Make Money!

So far in my dealings with them they have demonstrated the utmost professionalism, and you are even assigned your own Publisher Manager that you can contact for guidance and advice on how to best get started with making money affiliate style. I'd recommend giving them a try, as my first impressions are very good.

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Browsing the web I've unearthed another affiliate program that looks to have some significant promise. ClickBooth operates in a similar way to Commission Junction, in that you join ClickBooth and then have access to a whole range of products and services you can effectively market and earn a commission from.

Affiliate programs like ClickBooth are an often overlooked way of making some additional income from your site, which is a shame because you could argue that affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online. In case you don't know, affiliate marketing refers sharing of revenue between advertisers and publishers. In other words, as a publisher, you put up a banner ad on your site, and you can get compensated for that. Compensation is based on performance from sales, clicks, registrations or a combination of such.

If you haven't joined up to an affiliate program, here are a couple of good reasons why you should sign up now.

An affiliate program does the hard work for you. Coming up with banner ads and ideas that may or may not work is a pain in the butt. By going through an affiliate program, all that hard work is done for you. You pick the ad you think will have the most success on your site and go with it. Job done.

There's no risk. As a publisher, you don't have a warehouse full of stock sitting there gathering dust if things don't work out. If an advertiser's product isn't selling, that's there problem, not yours. You can basically run a little business selling stuff, without the headaches. If it's not working, move onto something else, and you haven't lost anything.

Make a % on sales. A lot of advertiser's allow you to take a percentage commission from a sale or signup. What does that mean? An advertiser might offer a publisher a 10% commission on every sale generated via a lead from a publishers site/blog. A visitor clicks on a banner ad on your site then goes on to buy $100 worth of gear from the advertiser's site, you, as publisher, would earn $10.

Make $'s from referring other webmasters. Do you have a lot of 'webmaster' traffic? In other words, do a lot of your readers have blogs/websites of their own? ClickBooth currently offer publishers $10 for each approved referral plus a 2% recurring referral fee based on the commissions earned by that person referred. That's a freakin' good deal, and reason enough to give ClickBooth a shot.

Besides my good self, other publishers ClickBooth report to have on their books include MySpace, AOL.com, Lycos, Overture, MSN, Yahoo and Google. My theory, if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me! Join Clickbooth - Make Money!

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As I sit watching paint dry, eagerly awaiting my seven day bidvertiser experiment to reach it's conclusion I've become reflective. In the past twelve months or so, I've joined a number of programs with the intention of making some cash from them. Some have been winners, some have been stinkers. But it's always nice to log into an affiliate program after a lengthy absence to find that you've made some 'surprise' money.

The first one, is Deal Dot Com. In it's start up stage there were a few high flyers that apparently did quite well with this program targeting the "Make Money Online" market. Unfortunately I wasn't one of them. To make decent money from Deal Dot Com, you need to be good at building referrals. The cool thing about Deal Dot Com is that you can have direct referrals (tier one) but also second level referrals (tier two).

"You get paid 35% of DealDotCom’s profit for every item that they buy. If someone you referred to DealDotCom refers someone else, you get paid 15% of DealDotCom’s profit every time they buy something for the rest of your life."

Unfortunately, I've never been good at building massive referral numbers, so I haven't made my Deal Dot Com fortune. Still, I was glad to see that my single digit referral brought me in $3.50 the other day! Thanks whoever you are, it paid for my coffee! The other beauty of Deal Dot Com was that it costs nothing to join, so there's nothing to lose. Easy.

Seriously though, if you've go a large network that's interested in making money online (and the associated products) you should give Deal Dot Com a look, they have a facebook plugin now as well, which makes it even easier for you.

The one that has really surprised me though is the phpBay Pro affiliate program. phpBay Pro is an awesome piece of programming, so I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to anyone looking to integrate eBay auction into their site. I use phpBay Pro three sites, and it's the best $49 I've spent. To give you an idea, in this month alone, I've passed the $170 mark (see requisite screen shot below). That's $170 from very little effort. I'm guessing that's why phpBay Pro is an easy sell, and explains why I've made $90 from affiliate sales in the last 6 weeks.

The phpBay Pro affiliate program is a good one because it pays $14.70 for every $49 sale. That's a pretty decent cut if you ask me! What's been my strategy? Buying phpBay Pro, using it, proving it works, and then telling people how good it is. I should write a book!

Not an affiliate program as such, but I made a nice buck from picking the 2008 NBA Champions over at Predictify. I gazed into the crystal ball and picked the Boston Celtics a month or two back, and they got over the line, and helped me buy another coffee. I'm glad I couldn't disagree with Boston fan boy Blankshooting.

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I've been using Commission Junction for a while now, and it's been good to me, but I'm always looking to find new programs to see if there's something that'll work better for me. That's how I found 'Share-A-Sale', which operates much like Commission Junction however seems to have a wider range of niche type affiliate programs to join.

I only learned about Share-A-Sale through clicking on one of my Project Wonderful advertisers 'Tshirtbordello.com', as Tshirtbordello.com currently use Share-A-Sale to manage their affiliate program. You want a Flint Tropics No. 33 shirt? Give 'em a look, as they are currently offering a 'Buy 3, get 1 free' deal [follow the link] Cool Shirts! Buy 3 and get 1 Free!.

I'm distracted now, anyway, Share-A-Sale is looking to be a solid alternative to Commission Junction, if you are looking for something a little different.

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The ebay affiliate program is currently making the transition from Commission Junction to its own newly launched eBay Partner Network. For anyone using Commission Junction based eBay affiliate links, this means you will have to join up to the eBay Partner Network and then, once approved, go through and update all your links.

I only realised that this was going to affect me on Monday. I was thrown into mini turmoil. I use phpBay Pro on a few of my blogs to plug some eBay auctions into posts, and it's proven to be quite profitable, however I was worried. Would this new change mean that I could no longer use phpBay Pro? Would I have to buy a new version? Would I even be able to do everything need to make the transition?

As it turns out, I was worrying about nothing. I visited the phpBay Pro forum, learnt that the developer, a guy called Wade, had already developed a new version of phpBay Pro designed to work with the eBay Partner Network, and that it was available to customers that had already purchased a previous version. So I sent off a quick message to Wade, got an almost instant reply, containing details of how to get the upgrade, and I was up and running again. I upgraded five blogs in under an hour, in between working on a flash game.

So to summarise, the transition was smooth and didn't cost me a thing!

I have to say that the customer service that Wade has provided has been beyond anything that I ever expected. I'm not sure how the guy finds the time to develop programs and then provide the level of support that he does, but somehow he seems to manage! phpBay Pro is clearly the real deal and it's good to see that he stands by his product.

Up until this point, phpBay Pro is the only money I've spent on any of my sites, besides money spent on hosting and domain names. If you have a WordPress blog and you want to include some eBay auction to generate some extra revenue, then I highly recommend picking up phpBay Pro. I use it most on my latest pet project guitar effects site. I made the $49 it cost me back in less than three weeks, and since then I've hit the $250 mark. It's paid for itself five times over in a couple of months. Not a bad return for a $49 investment!

UPDATE: In the three days since I made the change to the eBay Partner Network I've made $24.41. At that rate phpBay Pro pays for itself in 6 days!

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