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.

For those of us unable to make it to Germany for Oktoberfest I may have stumbled across the next best thing... Brewfest. One minor problem though, it's in Azeroth, so you're going to need a World of Warcraft account.

Once you've got that sorted, head to the beer garden outside the dwarven capital city Iron Forge. Then, drink up until your computer generated you cant walk straight anymore. Brewfest began on the 20th of September and will finish up on the 4th of October.

Besides the opportunity to get your geek drink on, Brewfest also opens up a heap of Brewfest related quests that will see you drawing your sword against the nefarious Coren Direbrew, leader of the Dark Iron dwarves. Defeat Direbrew and he drops a heaps of cool stuff at random, including some weapons and trinkets, as well as a couple of Brewfest mounts, the Great Brewfest Kodo or the Swift Brewfest Ram. Personally I'm after the Kodo, cause it looks cooler, but as of writing this, I've paid Direbrew five visits, for a total of 25 drops, and neither the Kodo or Ram have dropped once. With a couple of days left my luck might change.

I've also got four days left to complete two of the final achievements in order to take the title of Brewmaster. I have Drunken Stupor (basically getting sh!t faced and surviving a 65 yard fall) and Disturbing the Peace (While wearing 3 pieces of Brewfest clothing, get completely smashed and /dance in Dalaran) left to complete.

Not surprisingly the event has spawned a range of real world merchandise including the "Tankard O' Terror", that can hold close to 2 litres of your preferred beverage. Personally, I'm feeling more than a little include to pick up one of the groovy Brewfest t-shirts. I'm sure chicks dig dudes in World of Warcraft apparel.

A week ago I wrote about how to improve your Technorati ranking. At the time of writing that post, the Technorati rank for SwollenPickles.com was 91,357.

Since then, I've taken a couple of measures outlined in that post, but to be honest, spent very little time working on it. In that time, my Technorati rank has jumped up by close to 30,000. As of writing this, my Technorati rank is 61,742. In short, something seems to have worked.

Here's a quick follow up to yesterdays post "How To Improve Your Technorati Rank".

Yesterday my Technorati rank was 91,357, as of writing this it is 88,547.

Another interesting point is that yesterday if you'd search Google for "improve your technorati rank", there would have been no sign of SwollenPickles.com. Run that same search today and SwollenPickles.com is currently sitting at the top of the search results list. Incredible. Maybe it's time I wrote an eBook and sold it for $9.98 Recommended Retail...

Are you looking to improve your Technorati rank?

A bold experiment

I read an article on Untwisted Vortex detailing how to improve your Technorati rank. RT is conducting an ongoing experiment to determine if blogs participating in the project will experience and improvement in their Technorati ranking as a result.

As RT rightly points out, a blogs Technorati rank is not based on how many "Fans" your blog has.

Your Technorati ranking is basically calculated on the number of incoming links to your blog, whilst the 'Authority' rating is based on the number of blogs that have linked to your blog.

Technorati rank explained

If you're new to blogging and/or haven't heard of Technorati before today then it's time to get yourself acquainted. Technorati can basically be thought of as a tracker of the blogosphere, keeping track of over 50 million blogs. Technorati keeps a track of who is linking to who in the blogging world, and builds rankings in a similar fashion to how Google rank their search engine results.

So basically Technorati gives you something else to worry about in addition to the mythical Google Page Rank. Just as backlinks can improve your ranking in Google search results, backlinks from other blogs increase your overall Technorati rank (which compares your blog to all the others listed in the Technorati index).

For the record, my Technorati rank at the time of writing this is 91,357. Ideally I'd like it to be less than 50,000 by the end of 2008.

Long time pickle pal David Rader has painstakingly put together a list of ASCII codes for those hard core geeks out there looking to create some "ASCII Art".

I was a little shocked to find out that ASCII art is still out there, as I thought it'd died out following the age of the Commodore 64.

I was wrong.

Another surprise was that ASCII art is no longer just about naked ladies!

Here's an example of an iPod ASCII style:

Getting a little 1990's style retro, here's Beavis:

But here's my personal favourite, Sponge Bob:

Proving that ASCII is for everyone, here's what a swollen pickles logo might look like had I decided to go in a different direction with my theme:

Now, if that has given you the motivation to go all out art school ASCII style I don't know what will!

P.S.
If you are disappointed that there were no ASCII naked ladies then check out this link (some artworks more detailed than others. Viewer discretion advised).

Home WALL Charger for iPod nano 4th Gen Apple 8GB 16GB

1 Bid

US $5.39

15m

Apple iPhone 2G 3G 3GS 30 iPod Touch Unlock SOFTWARE

0 Bid

US $9.95

15m