My life has always been full of burstiness. I sometimes read an authors entire collection in a short period, I go on fasts, immerse myself in learning a new instrument, take up the study of religions, take spontaneous vacations, join a band… once I even grew a full 12″ in fifth grade. Maybe it’s my addictive personality or maybe I enjoy new things or maybe both, but there is nothing like a new idea or a fresh start to invigorate me. It’s like any baseball team during spring training.
The past few months I have been through a burst of website development for both old and new sites. With changing or new websites, I typically end up considering new ways to monetize future traffic. So with my burst of development, came a burst of filling out new affiliate agreements. Along the way I was somewhat amazed at the number and scope of new affiliate opportunities.
I’m going to run down the list in my Firefox favorites folder named “Affiliate” and offer a thumbnail review of my experience. For a couple, my experience goes not much further than signing up, but there are just so many of them now!
LinkShare
I’ve been with them for a few years but haven’t seriously promoted other than using specific banners for an article now and then. I’m reluctant in part due to some negative feedback I’ve seen in affiliate forums regarding parasites, cookie cannons, and lack of access, but I really don’t think they are that bad. They have a group of merchants with high standards regarding what affiliates they will work with; and others that take more of the mass quantity approach. I imagine many budding affiliate marketers apply for the very attractive blue ribbon merchants like American Express and Office Depot, they get a generic no thanks, and then no response to their pleading emails. But there are plenty of great merchants there that likely will accept you and LinkShare has some pretty good features, most notably their Media Links that send fresh offers, often changing weekly. They have made some improvements of late with a new easier to navigate publisher dashboard.
Shareasale
My all-time favorite network. Shareasale keeps things simple and clean. Plenty of merchants to choose from that approve quickly so you can get back to work. Plus their premier area is product only, with catalogs available via ftp datafeeds. Lots of potential using Webmerge.
Kolimbo
The whole myap, kolimbo, kowabunga family has always been a little puzzling for me, but I’ve had a couple good runs with certain merchants and no real problems.
Clickbank
Clickbank is a pretty popular way to make money on the net. Not only as an affiliate, but by writing and selling e-books and other digital products. I checked it out and was interested for a day or two. I suppose I have some links up somewhere still…
Golden Can
Javascript stores that hook into your affiliate relationship with many merchants. It’s pretty nifty, but you need traffic and other content first, since the javascript won’t get indexed on it’s own.
AllPosters
I had fun 3 years ago building special niche pages for a few sites, and those pages still look great and get some traffic. Never made a dime.
Chitika
I know Chitika minimalls has been a great tool for certain types of sites, but it didn’t live up to the hype for me; though I love ideas like this. Comparative shopping for products relevant to your pages.
BettyMills
Betty Mills uses an in-house affiliate program with an enormous office products datafeed. I did pretty well with a the gigantic site you can crank out with the datafeed and Webmerge. For a while it was a good way to get weight for the coop network, but that was a few years ago…
Amazon
Used to be you could slap up an Amazon store with an easy tool and watch the money roll in. Of course that good a thing was bound to become flooded quickly, and it wasn’t long before the search engines began filtering out “thin affiliates.” I’ve removed most of those old stores. I’ve had very little luck with various single product links or banners, but that is true for most programs. There are new tools out now, that help you individualize your SEO, but I haven’t messed with them. And there is an API if you care to roll your own tools. The usual knock you hear on Amazon is about the short cookie length.
Performics
Well, now they are DoubleClick/Performics… powered by CollectCommerce. Another big network, but there is something intimidating about them. I could never get a real head of steam up with them. Bad reports from others about zero communication has left me lukewarm. They do have some appealing merchants though.
Commission Junction
I’ve always done well with CJ. There have been periods when tracking was messed up, or the affiliate interface would grind to a halt, but even then, they made me money.
AdBrite
I’ve done okay recently with some ppc offers at AdBrite, but I can’t bring them up without recounting a disastrous run with them as an advertiser. The exact details are a little fuzzy, but I tried a 7 day ad for $500 on a high traffic site. After finishing the purchase, I backspaced to the page that showed my ad and details in a grid. There were a lot of details, when the ad would end, some stats etc. so I bookmarked that page for later. The ad brought traffic, but did not convert for even one sale. I double checked at the end of the week and again the next week, yep…just the ad there and it shows the end date… no problem, I’m done. Well I had a lot going on that month personally and I was basically out of town for the next month. 3 or 4 weeks later I discover my bank account has been ransacked! I check the page again, still shows just the one week and the end date. Well that saved page was not the right place to see autorenewals! Okay, it was really my fault, trying to do something quickly when I was home for a few hours. But damn I hate auto-renewals that aren’t done with a big red freaking flag!
MAXBounty
MaxBounty brags about having the highest paying CPA rates. This is one of those networks you need to be “hands on” with. Deals come and go. I’m always testing new offers by rotating them in OpenAds, a free open source php script that works as your own ad distribution network. Oh wait, now they are called OpenX (they were PhpAds even earlier). If you want a way to manage ad zones across several sites, this is the best free tool I know of.
MILLNIC MEDIA
It’s worth the trouble of signing up with this guys just to get their irreverent email updates. They have lots of email submit offers, and incentivizable offers. I had a nice run with a hot offer on a certain social network before that method was shut down. Violet there will help with monetizing facebook applications.
AuctionAds now Shopping Ads
Shoemoney’s reputation went a long way in promoting Auction Ads. Really a great idea, an EBay sub-affiliate system serving ads based on your keywords. Performance was inconsistent, and early on there were periods of lost tracking. Many had lost faith and pulled ads by the time Shoemoney cashed out with a sale to ShoppingAds. Shopping Ads has added other products to the ad serving, but I haven’t played around with it lately. It still is a tempting tool, fun to make customized product ads for specific pages.
Moola
Okay, this one is almost silly, but I’ve killed a few hours playing games and trying to boost my cash total there.
NeverblueAds™
A new network for me. Slick affiliate interface, great communication, unique offers. Haven’t used them for long, but I like so far.
WidgetBucks
A product widget ad network. Signed up, but haven’t tested.
COPEAC
Another intriguing new network for me. They are ready to work with affiliates one on one and through webinars. They have promotion suggestions for different verticals like Email, Search, Incentivized sites, International with click through rates and conversions for top performing offers in that vertical.
These are just my experiences. I know there are success stories and failures with all these affiliate programs. I’ve probably signed up with a dozen smaller networks as well in the past few months, but the real burst has been in adding hundreds of merchants at affiliate networks. I’ll save my review of some individual merchants till later, since this is getting a bit long! And then maybe I’ll look at the long list of reputable networks that I have yet to contact. But that could be dangerous… I need to be wary of diluting my efforts.
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