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The Google Affiliate Network announced that they have incorporated data provided by Google AdPlanner.
This weekend we introduced new site profile links in our interface to provide users with better information about the traffic profiles of their marketing partners. Advertiser and publisher users will now see “Site Profile” links in a variety of locations in our interface.
The new links will produce an overlay containing data provided by Google AdPlanner.
This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille started out with the Twitter fail whale and finished with turduckens.
The show includes talk of Lisa’s frustration over the latest Twitter outage, the latest on Affiliate Summit, cool Amazon affiliate stuff, recruiting affiliates, and Jim Kukral’s new Biz Web Coach launch.
Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.
We have thousands of affiliate programs to choose from when setting up campaigns. There are many factors to consider when selecting an affiliate program to promote, including the niche, brand, payout, conversion, etc.
But I came across a good reason for affiliates to join up and promote the Sears affiliate program on the Google Affiliate Network, thanks to a note from Alan Hamilton, Program Manager for Dreamofjewelry.com.
Sears has a policy in place where they pay the difference in salaries and maintain benefits for employees who are called up as military reservists.
Companies are legally obligated to keep jobs open for reservists when they return from duty, but nothing more.
Military Pay Differential and Benefits Continuation
In September 2004, the company extended its military pay differential (fills the gap between military pay and employer pay) and benefits continuation to 60 months for eligible employees called to duty in the Reserves or National Guard.
Previously, policy provided 36 months of coverage.
While deployed, eligible employees can:
Continue participating in SHC’s life insurance, medical and dental programs.
SHC holds a comparable position for deployed employees for up to five years.
The company has encouraged and supported employees serving in the armed forces for decades.
Records indicate that Sears provided support to employees serving in the military in 1916.
Sears’ pay differential was first instituted in 1990 for Operation Desert Shield-Storm.
It’s admirable that Sears operates this program, and with little fanfare.
The only time non-employees of Sears seem to hear about it is when they receive an email passed around to recognize what they are doing for their Reserve and National Guard employees.
So anyway, just something to consider when deciding whether to promote Sears or one of their competitors.
This session, PPC Search: Disclosure vs. Free-for-All, took place Monday, August 11, 2008 at Affiliate Summit East 2008.
Session description:
Judicious use of additional affiliate sites to buy PPC links can increase overall sales. Uncontrolled use of affiliates to buy PPC results in bid escalation. What’s the right mix?
It’s been a while since eBay made the transition from Commission Junction to an in-house affiliate program as the eBay Partner Network, so I wanted to check in for an update.
I was able to catch up with some folks from eBay at PubCon about the latest with their in-house network.
They had a two month overlap with the two platforms during April and May, and by the end of May over 90% of their active affiliates had followed them to the eBay Partner Network.
At this point, they’ve got over 100,000 affiliates on the new platform.
One of the changes they made after the transition was to implement a system where referrers of the highest quality eBay members would be compensated accordingly.
This program was announced in August where they moved to a value-based pricing plan for Active New Registered Users (ACRUs).
The intention was to better reward top affiliates, provide incentives for other affiliates to improve the quality of their traffic, and pay fair compensation for users who have low lifetime value to eBay.
In the old arrangement, they were paying $25 to $35 per new active user, and now eBay pays affiliates $1 to $50 per new user.
The new pricing structure went into effect on August 1st for new affiliates and November 1st for all existing affiliates, and so far, more than one third of their active affiliates are now earning $28 or more for every new user they drive to eBay.
Several hundred affiliates are qualifying for the new $40 and $50 tiers.
Also, they have continued to make enhancements to their platform to provide more data to affiliates.
They now have a campaign quality report that shows affiliates which of their tactics and campaigns are driving the most engaged users.
Plus, there is a new report that tells affiliates which categories of products their users convert so they can improve their targeting.
The Amazon affiliate program has released a new link for affiliates that enables shoppers to navigate through the hot toys this year by age or price.
The “Holiday Toy List” allows customers to watch hundreds of toys, video games, sporting goods, electronic gadgets, and DVDs in action with an easy-to-use video display.
Shoppers can move through the list with their cursor buttons and zoom in to specific products with the space bar.
To link directly to this page, just use the following link format and replace “YOUR_ID_HERE-20″ with your affiliate ID:
I love this Frustration-Free Packaging, since half of Christmas ends up being a mess of undoing tons of twisty ties and cutting through space-age polymers to get to the kid’s toys.
Get those pages and sites set for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the Christmas season (and then the last minute gift cards and gift card redemption).
CardOffers.com has launched BuildOffers.com, a solution for affiliates to create a turnkey site that guarantees approval by affiliate programs in the BuildOffers.com service, including American Express, Chase, and Discover.
BuildOffers.com provides pre-designed, customizable affiliate marketing websites for businesses and individuals that want to start making money from a website immediately. Clients simply select one of our customizable affiliate website templates, choose which of our pre-approved affiliate marketing programs they would like to advertise on their new website.
Everything is updated dynamically by BuildOffers.com, so affiliates don’t have to worry about compliance related aspects of the site from card issuers and other creditors.
Also, the BuildOffers.com sites are not limited to offers in their network. Affiliates can also add their own links to their site.
This is a good resource for newbie affiliates looking to get into promoting credit card offers.
I neglected to include pricing for the BuildOffers.com sites. Here is the information I received from them…
The cost for a BuildOffers.com site begins at $310 (one time). This includes the first monthly maintenance charge of $35. The monthly maintenance fee guarantees that the site is always compliant and content is always updated. I must emphasize, with a BuildOffers.com site, you do not have to wait for approval and you are automatically approved for some credit card programs that are not offered anymore, like Citibank and Bank of America. The 40% off brings the cost for a site to $200. Paying for a website might not be worth it to someone who is a novice at building sites; but it would be valuable to those just getting started (and haven’t experienced the rigidity of some affiliate programs when up for approval) and maybe someone who feels their time and the guaranteed affiliate approval is worth more than the $200. All pricing information is on the BuildOffers.com homepage.
There is a neat, new service from Pierre Far called Cligs, which not only enables affiliates to create short URLs with analytics, but also has a geo-targeting option.
Right Clig is an advanced feature of the Cligs service that allows affiliates to set alternative geo-targeted destination URLs for each short URL.
This is a particularly useful service for Twitter when including affiliate URLs in a post.
For instance, you might join the Amazon affiliate program for the U.S., U.K.. Germany. Japan, etc. and setup Right Clig rules for the respective countries, so your followers get their country specific site with your affiliate link.
Thanks to Li Evans for letting me know about Cligs.
Many of you who know me might have noticed that I have not been around much over the past six months. Prior to that, you may have seen me at various marketing conferences and events. There’s a reason I’ve pretty well disappeared from the scene. I’m living with a chronic illness that will take my life anywhere from a few months to a couple of years from now.
For those not familiar with Andy, he’s something of a legend in online media. Among his many accomplishments, Andy was co-founder, former publisher and CEO of ClickZ.
It was in that role that Andy played an instrumental role in my career. Back in 1999, I was a fan of ClickZ and I touched base with them about writing an affiliate marketing column.
This column resulted in my getting noticed by Que Publishing and a deal to write the book, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants in 2000, as well as a series of other good fortunes from the exposure.
I’ve admired Andy for years but never connected the dots about how his creation helped me so many years ago. Not until I read his post, Andy’s Health Update, and got to thinking.
