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.

The Amazon affiliate program now lets you create your own 'Deal of the Day' widget, that'll showcase one of their... take a guess... that's right, deals of the day. It updates itself, so it's one of those set and forget kind of things. Perfect for a lazy person.

There are a few different options and sizes you can play around with. The example below is designed to sit in a sidebar and is 160px wide and 400px high. Perfect for blogs.

If your looking for something different from the Amazon affiliate program go log in to your dashboard and give the Deal widget a look.

Looking for a way to wring a few more bucks out of your website? Here's an idea worth considering.

LinkBucks is a unique service that allows you to earn money from your out bound links. Let's face it, if a user is clicking on an outbound link on your site, they are leaving, you may as well earn a little from their departure.

Here's the LinkBucks hard sell taken from their website:

Web users: get paid to share your links

Every funny video, file, or web page that you've ever linked to is making money for someone. Linkbucks rewards the people that make the web possible by giving them a share of the advertising dollars that their links generate.

About Us

We aren't a fly-by-night or a startup -- Linkbucks was started in late 2005 and has been going strong ever since. We have never missed a payment, and have been a solid partner for our advertisers.

To be honest, I hadn't heard of them until a week ago, but sign up was quick, easy and free, so I figure they are worth a shot. I'm trialling them on a low traffic site at the moment to see how they go. In my opinion, LinkBucks would be perfect for any site that relies on outbound links for a bulk of its content. For example, imagine a web site that was basically an image gallery with thumbnail images that when users click on, are taken to the high resolution versions stored on Imagevenue or something similar.

Something like this:

...etc, etc... I'm sure you get the idea. Anyhow, LinkBucks allow you create single links (one at a time), multiple links or give you a script you can place prior to the closing body tag on your website that will automatically convert all out bound links to LinkBucks links. You can also specify URLs you want to exclude from converting which is useful if you have other forms of advertising on your site.

LinkBucks is similar to Ucash.in except that I prefer LinkBucks. One of the benefits of LinkBucks is that it features a greater number of options, however on the downside it only offers three levels of referrals as opposed to Ucash.In which goes down to 10 levels of referral.

A week ago I posted about my little Project Wonderful experiment. Basically I was wondering whether or not setting my ad spots to have a starting bid of $0.00 would have a positive impact upon my average daily bid rate.

When I started the experiment, the average bid rate for the preceding five days was $0.22. So what impact did this $0.00 experiment have on the average bid rate? Well, sadly, things dropped. For the past five days, the average bid rate per day has been $0.13. The top right hand ad spot has average over 1,600 page views per day over the same five day period. Clearly the experiment was a failure.

Sure, on the plus side it wasn't empty very often (if at all), but on the down side, sending someone away from my beautiful content rich and cognitively rewarding website for the princely sum of $0.00 is just bad for business. With that in mind, I've decided to mix things up a bit and reset the price of the ad spot. Minimum opening bid is now $1 $0.50 per day. I'll check back in seven days.

In other news, if you're an Australian, go join the Australian Survey Panel. You can get paid to do surveys and they may even send you free stuff.

Check out their site by clicking the banner below.

I have now officially made over $1,000 USD with PayPerPost. It's been quite a while since I took an opportunity on this site, largely in an effort to avoid the Google turkey slapping (which seems to have happened anyway), but I've been using it a little on a blog that I've basically just "whore'd" out to pay the bills. The irony being my "whore'd" blog got through the last page rank update unscathed, while this one took a bit of a dive.

I realised a long time ago that page rank is largely irrelevant, besides the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you see your sites page rank go up, the only other thing it's good for is that it means people are willing to pay more for a post or a text link. The idea of Google attempting to control what I do bugs me. Lets not kid ourselves, by penalising people for selling links, posts and advertising on their sites, Google are effectively attempting to control what you can and can't do. Worried about PageRank? Do what I do, switch of the little green bar in your browser and forget about it. Then carry on doing what you'd like.

Ranting aside, I thought I'd share this screen shot from my PayPerPost dashboard.

If you're scared of losing your PageRank, but want to take some paid posts either with PayPerPost or someone else like LinkWorth, I'd suggest setting up a blog that you aren't all that fussed about. Buy a cheap URL, install WordPress, and just start posting. Make it as interesting as possible, then start whacking in a few paid opportunities. Yes, most people would most probably consider it a shameful pimping of self, but unless those people can offer you a sweet $1K for very little output, then tell em' to get stuffed. If you do it right, a blog you pimp out can end up being a nice little cash cow that can help you fund a whole range of other web adventures. You've got to start somewhere.

Click here to go and join PayPerPost.

Click here to go and join LinkWorth.

Today I was searching for a way to monetize a top secret niche site that I'm setting up as a side-side project. Adsense isn't really an option, and the traffic volume isn't huge at the moment anyway, so it would be hard to make much via PPC methods. I decided to look into some affiliate programs that I hadn't previously considered. That's when I stumbled across this little gem, MoreNiche.

MoreNiche offers a range of "niche" products to promote, and might have something worth checking out if you are struggling to monetize a niche site. The major positive at the moment is the sign up bonus. Basically MoreNiche seem to be giving away a minimum of $15 for doing nothing more than signing up.

When you join you will automatically be awarded with a $15 sign up bonus. You then earn a further $30 for learning about online marketing. Why? It is all thanks to our Cash Activated Bonus System which is designed to motivate you and to provide you with starting capital to promote our merchants.

Source: MoreNiche 'join' page.

Another aspect of MoreNiche that is highlighted on the FAQ's page is that they basically approve every applicant immediately.

You will be automatically accepted into the affiliate network, so that you can promote the products straight away. You will be given unique identifer links for every merchant and product in the network - no need to wait days for your application to be approved!

Perfectly suited for the beginner!

They actually give away well over 20 eBooks devoted to a whole heap of topics that will teach you how to make money via affiliate money. These books are for real, they are free for registered affiliates and I've downloaded them personally no strings attached. If I hadn't seen it for myself I probably wouldn't have believed it. There's also a members only forum. In short, there's a butt load of free resources at your disposal, and if you can't learn something from them, then you probably already know all there is to know.

When you become a MoreNicheâ„¢ affiliate (for free) you get access to over 50,000 pages of information about marketing successfully online. You also get access to a quick start guide, which is designed to get you earning commissions within 24 hours.

Me, I can do with the $15 to put toward my goal project, so I just joined. You can call me an affiliate whore if you like, but I'm not an affiliate whore that has $15 extra in his pocket.