Affiliate Programs | I'm Just Sharing

Make Your Blog Available Via Kindle

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 21, 2011

I guess it was time for me to push this blog to the next level, and I owe it all to our friend Allan Douglass and his post titled Now Available on Kindle. In essence, he found out about a neat little deal where you could sign your blog up with Amazon such that people can subscribe to your blog and view it on their Kindle readers.

Volcano by Chris Leavens

I thought that was just the coolest thing, but thought about it for awhile because, well, like most minds, you sit around trying to figure out why anyone would want to pay to read your blog when they can read it for free on their computers or laptops. I waited a couple of months, pondering it all the while, until I came to this thought; it’s not up to me to determine what someone else might want to spend their money on.

Sometimes that’s a hard thing for people in business to come to grips with. It’s like a friend of mine told me many years ago when I created a product that I felt anyone else could create if they just spend some time on it, “Yeah, but you did it, and if they don’t have to think about it they just might buy it.”

And so it goes. Now, Allan sells something that will tell you how you can set it up, so I’m not going to steal his thunder there. I will say that I figured out how to set it up on my own, though it might have been easier doing it his way; I guess I’ll never know. lol

Anyway, I set this blog up and my business blog, and I have a little image there to the right offering the service, so I decided not to put the same exact image here, going with something else instead (I figured I’d add one of my Imagekind/Share-a-Sale product images up there, plus I was talking about volcanoes with some people yesterday). However, I will put the link to the Amazon page where you can find this blog if you wish to subscribe, or if anyone else wishes to subscribe.

They charge 99 cents a month; heck, for the year that’s only the cost of a small pizza (yes, I calculate things based on pizza). Unfortunately you can only read and not comment, but since the majority of folks subscribed through Feedreader are only reading anyway, here’s another way to enjoy seeing some of the goofy stuff I come up with.

As always, happy reading!

Affiliates | 19 Comments

Finish Line Steals My Money Then Cancels My Account

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 1, 2011

Wow, talk about a “nice” wake up message. Yeah, I’m lying about the nice part. I post this not only to get back at the company that has basically lied to me as an affiliate but has then decided to cancel my account. Here’s the exchange, mine first:

Greetings,

I am one of your affiliates through the Google Affiliate Network. I recently purchased something for myself through the affiliate link and I’ve yet to get credit for it. I’ve never seen anything which states that affiliates can’t purchase items through their own links and get credit for it, so I assume there’s an oversight issue somewhere. The full receipt is below; I’ve attached a pdf of the same information in case what’s below doesn’t come through to you. My publisher ID is XXXXXXXXXXXXX. This is the fourth email I’ve sent; please let me know what’s going on.

You’ll notice I wrote “fourth”; that was over a 2-week period when they were ignoring me. Here’s the response I got earlier today:

Although it is allowed for affiliates to purchase shoes for themselves, we do require a site to look up to a certain standard and we do require a certain amount of sales per month. All that being said, I have reached out to our GAN team and we are not seeing anything on your transaction which means your cookie was not activated for your transaction thus why you did not get credit for it.

In addition, your site does not go along with our theme and your 3-month EPC is $0.64 while your 7-day is $0.00. Unfortunately, since the transaction is not in the affiliate channel, I can do nothing at this time. In addition, due to your site quality and low EPC and 7-day I have to cancel our affiliate partnership.

Good luck. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Wow, really? The site has been the same since they originally approved me, even updated some, and now suddenly they don’t like my site anymore? Would they have canceled my account if I’d never written them? What the heck; how bogus can an affiliate get?

This is the downside of affiliate marketing folks. You’re at the mercy of these guys who come up with arbitrary decisions as to whether you fit what they’re hoping for. And unfortunately, it often comes up when you make a sale, even if it’s you purchasing the product. I mean, it took them two weeks to come up with a reason for not giving my my legitimately earned money, since even the guy says I’m allowed to buy from my own affiliate program, and they weaseled out like this.

So, I’m done with Finish Line. I will obviously continue wearing the sneakers I ordered from them, but I’m cutting up my Finish Line card and I’m never giving them any more of my local business, which is close to $400 a year; they could care less. I can buy sneakers anywhere, and I’m sure I’ll find better loyalty, honesty and dignity from someone else.

All this for maybe $12 or so; wow…

Follow up: I have now been threatened by Finish Line for this post, and I have the email to prove it. I’m not removing it, but I have removed the guy’s email address and added this statement here:

“All personal messages express views only of the sender, which are not to be attributed to Finish Line and/or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates, and may not be copied or distributed without this statement.”

Affiliates | 32 Comments

How Do You Market Short Sales Products?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 23, 2010

I’m actually putting a real question out to the masses (yup, y’all get to be the masses today) because I honestly don’t know what I could possibly do with this particular situation.

Most of you know that I’m hooked up with Commission Junction. The ads at the top and on the left side are CJ ads, and they rotate the banners each time someone stops by. And when you see products at the bottom of each post, most of them come from CJ as well.

One thing about some of the affiliate programs I participate with is that they send out regular emails talking about some of their promotions. Those that have a one month promotion are easy to deal with, because I have that sales page you see to the right with me holding the parrot that I update every couple of weeks with those types of things as they come. Those are fairly easy to handle.

The ones I’m having an issue with, and that I’m asking y’all how you’d handle them, are the advertisers that have sales that last anywhere from 24 to 72 hours only. These things come fast and furious, and sometimes the deals are pretty sweet. However, I do have other things to do, and having to go through all those emails every day, set up the code on the site, then go back and remove it during the same time period is overly cumbersome.

I had thought about popping those things onto this blog quickly, but my mind says that would degrade the quality of the blog, as who’d really want to see a post with only sales ads in it? I don’t think I’d want those things popping up in my reader all the time, even with big sales, because I doubt I’d be interested in every one of those products. I know some people might be, but I’m thinking that’s a bad way of handling things.

So, my issue is what to do with those things. Do I just ignore them and move on with my life? Do I create a blog where I can just pop those links in and go about my business? Do I try to find an hour every day to either pop new links in or remove old ones? How would you handle it?

Affiliates | 5 Comments

Is Your Blog Successful? My Version

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 2, 2010

I’ve often said that you can get inspiration for writing blog posts from anywhere. In this case, I got the inspiration for this post from a blog called One Cool Site Blogging Tips (not to be confused with Sire’s blog tracking site Cool Blog Links, and this post titled Is Your Blog A Failure Or A Success? The conversation on that post wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be based on the title, yet it made me want to throw the question out to everyone else, so it did its job.

How does one decide to measure success? I think that’s the most important question for everyone to answer for themselves. It all depends on the reason you continue to write your blog. I say that because I started this blog for a much different reason than why I write it now, and as those parameters have changed, so have my expectations for it.

My original reason for creating this blog was so I could say whatever I wanted to say without worrying about being filtered or worried about how it might impact my business. I also had high hopes that I would make some money from it. So, when I first started writing it, half of the posts were geared towards talking about something that I thought I’d make money from, and the other half talking about some things that were on my mind, though not necessarily personal.

At some point, the blog focus changed to talking about affiliate programs, blogging, and writing for the most part. That was fun to a degree, but there wasn’t anything personal in it. Well, I have my writing style, so I guess that was personal, but I almost never talked about anything I was feeling, never taking a real stand on anything, just doing reviews. The thing is, to do a legitimate review takes some time to investigate, and, well, like everyone else I needed to make money, thus I was draining the bank account while doing a lot of that stuff.

Then in September, I changed once more. I decided I was going to start talking about a few more personal issues, more of my beliefs and the like, while still keeping up with some of what I’d talked about in the past. Though I’d still like to make money with this blog, the focus definitely moved from that direction a long time ago. I still put up products and the like, just in case someone has an interest, but mainly I just like to write, share my thoughts, and see how others respond.

So, based on all of that, how successful do I view this blog, which certainly can’t be called a niche blog? Overall I think it’s a fairly successful blog for what it is. I’m certainly not at guru status when it comes to internet sales, but I think I have a nice loyal group of folks I get to interact with here and there. And it’s changed a lot; the people I was talking to a lot between the middle of 2008 through the middle of 2009 has drastically changed. Many of those folks either stopped blogging or their priorities changed.

New folks have come along, in higher numbers yet, and that’s pretty neat. And I know when people comment here, they’re not doing it just to get a link onto a popular blog that offers them nothing except an opportunity to maybe steer people to their blogs by kissing up to the owner of the blog, who most of the time doesn’t even see their responses. Oops, let’s not get into that discussion again!

Yes, I think this blog is a success, and I’m happy with it. What say you about your blog?

Blogging | 22 Comments

Why I Show Products At The End Of Posts

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 20, 2010

Here’s the questions. How often do you go to the store and end up buying things you didn’t initially go there for? How many times have you been looking through a catalog or advertisement, saw something that interested you, then decided to check it out and saw something else you liked instead?

I belong to a lot of affiliate marketing programs and advertisers. Most of you know that I’m a member of Commission Junction. They have almost 3,000 different advertisers that you can choose from, some big names, some not so big. Every time you see an individual post on this blog, at the top you see a Commission Junction banner, via one of their rotating banners programs. I’m also running one of their little applets on the left side.

Many of the advertisers allow you to post their products on your websites as well. The template you see below is their template, which I kind of use for other things, such as my book and webinar there at the top left. That’s just standard HTML, which I already knew, but their version was just so clean I’ve co-opted it. Some of the advertisers don’t have specific products you can purchase, but have services instead. So, when you see a banner, those are usually companies that offer services.

Sales Manager

But not always. I also participate in the Linkshare affiliate program, which also has some advertisers like Commission Junction, just not as many. The same goes for ShareASale, but I’ve only hooked up with a couple of those. Most of the pictures you see on this site in a post are actually images you can purchase in some form from them. I also always have at least one image to the left side. I could do it more often, but I don’t always think images fit my posts, though some people swear by them.

And many other affiliate programs I’m associated with also don’t have products I can specifically hawk, but I still want you to know about them. So, I’ll throw those banners on here every once in awhile as well. Just so you know, I didn’t join all those programs because of this blog, but since I still belong to them, it makes sense for me to cycle them in here from time to time.

Here’s the thing. If I highlight something like the rowing machine below, what I’m showing is a sample of the types of things you can find at that particular site, which in this case is called BigFitness. Now, you can go directly to the site and purchase it and cut out the middleman, but if you’re nice ( ) and want to help a brotha out, you’ll buy it from me. But maybe you’ll go to the site and see something else you like instead. No matter what you buy, if you buy something from the site, I’ll get credit for it. And suddenly it’s just like the flat screen TV you saw in the Sunday flyer that got you to the store, and instead you walked out with a GPS unit. The store only hopes you bought something; kind of what I’m hoping as well.

There you go. And sometimes, if you find something on another site that you want, if you come back and ask me about it I might have a coupon that will get you a discount of some kind, even if it’s only free shipping. Hey, saving money never hurts either, right? If that’s what happens, just go to my contact link above, see my email address there and write me.

It’s a very passive form of marketing, I know. Does it work? Well, in two years I think I’ve made two sales for CJ stuff and a couple for other products. So yes, I’ve made some sales. Not a lot, but that’s okay. You make no sales for any products you don’t try to market, right?

I’ve been asked often over the years why I have any products on my site that aren’t just making money things; that’s why. And that’s why I never beat up on anyone who’s marketing anything on their site. Sometimes I even take a quick look at it. Never hurts to look.