It’s that time of year when we talk about who is on the “Naughty” list and who is on the “Nice” list. In the last 48 hours, I’ve decided that there are some merchants who belong on the Naughty list. Because of the nature of retaliation in affiliate marketing, I’m not going to name a lot of names. On the flip side, affiliates need to know just what is happening with certain merchants so that they don’t end up getting taken advantage of the way that I have been.

First on my naughty list, and I have no problem naming names, is Disney Movie Club through Commission Junction. I have no idea how the program is or is not actually related to Disney because it is not run by the same people as the Disney Shopping or Disney Games accounts. But to make a long story short, I had 100% of my leads reversed for October and was told that they reversed 78% across all affiliates that month. The reason wasn’t fraud or cancellation but rather that the leads “didn’t show up in their reports.” I’ve been in affiliate marketing for over 7 years, and I can’t make heads or tails of this rationale. I tried to get more information but in the end just decided to stop promoting them because clearly they don’t care about affiliates.

Next on my Naughty list is Snapfish. What better time of year to promote picture printing than December, when people actually remember to use their cameras? And yet it is during this exact time that Snapfish cut commissions on pictures in HALF out of the blue. Of course we got the same excuse that we always do about how they will be able to make their promotions more aggressive as a result of the cuts. But really what happened is that I lost half of my commissions. A friend of mine at Zumba summed it up best last night. “Isn’t Shutterfly paying 4X what Snapfish is now? Simple, I’ll shop at Shutterfly.” Thankfully in this case affiliates have a choice and can promote someone else pretty easily.

Third on my Naughty list is a satellite program on CJ that shall remain nameless. Their tracking is such that you get a placeholder credit in your account when a lead is generated and then as long as the person completes the activation and stays on for 30 days, you get paid within 60 days. 75 days passed on one of mine and I hadn’t been paid. I contacted them and, of course, they didn’t respond to my email. I checked their CJ stats and strangely enough their EPC is $0.00 for the last 7 days. Either they are supposed to be batching sales and didn’t bother to do it, or they are about to make a quick exit out of CJ without paying their bills. Either way, it stinks and is a naughty business practice. At over $100 a lead, you should pay when you say you will.

Lastly is my biggest beef right now and unfortunately a merchant that I have put so much into promoting in the last 30 days that I can’t afford to be dropped from their program. And that REALLY makes me angry because there is nothing that I can do. I had my commission dropped from 15% down to 5% today because I own a rewards site. But the site that I am heavily promoting them on is a niche site. And we had an agreement that I would promote the merchant at 15% on that site. Now that I am getting multiple sales each day, my commission is all of a sudden lowered by 2/3 with the fact that I own the rewards site being the justification for lowering it.

I’m a business owner. I understand that business decisions have to be made sometimes to keep businesses profitable. But in the cases of all of the above, the merchants just flat took advantage of me as an affiliate. And they are likely taking advantage of many other affiliates as well. Every time we open our mouths (or our blogs) to complain, we take the risk of getting dropped from programs or whole networks.

Stay tuned because you just know there’s going to be backlash on this one.

Last week we continued growing our Affiliate Summit Meetup Group in Indianapolis with a meeting held at the RAM Restaurant and Brewery in Fishers. We had about 15 attend, which was our biggest turnout so far.

Erich Stauffer Speaking

Thanks to Erich Stauffer for being our presenter. Erich runs a technology consulting business that offers marketing, web design, and computer support. He has been doing affiliate marketing since 2009. Here are some of the key takeaways from his presentation on How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business:

• Start with Keyword Research and Analysis. Narrow down your keywords and then purchase a domain, set up WordPress, install a theme, and add plugins.
• Write strong content around your keywords with at least one page and five posts. Include at least one relevant picture per post and wrap the text around the picture.
• Sign up for affiliate networks including Amazon, Linkshare, ClickBank, Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, and ShareASale.
• Find the products you want to promote relative to your keywords and start writing content around them.
• Create backlinks including through social bookmarking sites.
• Establish a social presence.
• Measure and refine your site using Google Analytics.

Informal Networking and Q&A

After Erich spoke I made some announcements on behalf of Affiliate Summit include the Affiliate Summit Free Webinars, registration for Affiliate Summit West, and the Affiliate Summit West Scholarship program. I was also lucky enough to give out some prizes. Through a random name draw, Erich won an Affiliate Summit Gold Pass and Blake Ensign won a set of DVDs from Affiliate Summit East (which I have on good authority he has already started watching!)

Networking continued for quite a while and I think most of the group ended up being there 3-4 hours. We are looking forward to getting together in November in Castleton.

For more information about our group, visit the Indianapolis Affiliate Summit Meetup page.

(Thanks to Blake Ensign of Blaze Communications for the pictures!)

Affiliate marketing can be lonely when you are a solo business owner spending most of your days on the computer. Social media can complicate matters when it feels like a “chicken/egg” scenario of trying to get followers by showing that you already have followers. The one thing that can help solve both of these problems is building up a “tribe” around yourself.

What is a tribe? Most people would agree that at its core a tribe is a social group that exists on the basis of shared interests to help support each other. Since Seth Godin wrote about tribes in business, the terminology has evolved from primarily anthropological terms to more colloquial.  I was reading an article today entitled “How to Build Your Tribe – Finding ‘Your People’” and it really struck me how much we use tribes as affiliate marketers and how we should use them even more.

Building tribes in affiliate marketing can happen both informally or formally. You may start to notice a core group of people who retweet your posts and +1 your sites for you without you even asking. In return, you are naturally doing the same for them without even thinking about it. Conversely, you may set out intentionally to create a group of people who chat via private forum or secret Facebook group about a specific issue such as SEO or blogging best practices.

What sets a tribe apart from a plain old group of people is that they support each other based on common interests and help propel each other forward. There aren’t any rules about how to create your tribe or how many people should be in it. You don’t have to set up meeting times or regular accountability check-ins. Instead, the tribe members are passionate enough about what they are doing to participate to their own ability levels or eventually be ignored out of the tribe. People who don’t participate as fully won’t be given as much exposure or information by the other tribe members. People who give a lot to the tribe will likely get more back out of it.

How can you use the tribe mentality in your affiliate marketing business? Do you need a group of people to help you in your social media efforts? To help you test software or plugins in return for you testing theirs? Can you build a group of followers of your brand that will work with you to grow your business? What are you passionate about that you would love to share with others and have them share back with you?

Take the lead and start building your own tribe based on what you love as well as what you need. You don’t need to create deeply personal relationships with the other tribe members. You just need a mutual respect for the purpose of the group and an eagerness to help everyone in it achieve that purpose.

This week I was lucky enough to give a webinar through Affiliate Summit entitled “Monetize Your Blogging Skills with Affiliate Marketing.” The intent of the webinar was to teach bloggers how they can easily move from blogging to affiliate marketing with a little bit of important information and some easy tools. It was not a basic seminar about what affiliate marketing is (see my Start Monetizing Your Blog video for that information). Rather, it was food for thought about disclosure statements as well as some helpful plugins and network information.

Below are some notes and links from the presentation as well as a YouTube replay of the seminar.

• Disclosure statements are necessary for any bloggers who start recommending products or merchants. The FTC requires that they be “clear and conspicuous.”
• Visit disclosurepolicy.org to help you formulate one.
• The Exec-PHP WordPress Plugin is useful for inserting php into WordPress pages and posts.
• Use it in conjunction with GoldenCan and PopShops to create SEO friendly shopping pages or coupon directories.
• The Pretty Links plugin is great for redirecting affiliate links and cloaking (if you use the old version).
• Sub-identification tracking will help you better understand your conversions. Each network does this differently.

I think this webinar will be helpful to both brand new affiliates as well as those who have been in the business for awhile because we all do things a little bit differently and have different tips and shortcuts. Thanks to Affiliate Summit for giving me this opportunity!

my philosophy

I’ve recently been talking to a number of bloggers who are having a hard time understanding the types of products that they can promote through affiliate marketing. Many of them associate affiliate marketing with either ebooks or diet pills. I decided to try a little experiment and see how many products I used in one day that I could easily blog about and include affiliate links. Some of these products I would just mention in passing in a blog post. Others could be an entire written or video review. I actually got tired of writing them down there were so many. Here’s are some of the highlights.

• Took a shower using philosophy senorita margarita shampoo, shower gel, and bubble bath
• Got dressed in my favorite jeans-1969 long and lean from Gap (which also happen to be on sale as part of their Columbus Day Sale)
• Straightened my hair with my Sedu Ionic Ceramic Pro Flat Iron that I got from Ulta
• Put on my favorite perfume, Pink Sugar by Aquolina (purchased from different places depending on who had it on sale, usually Sephora)
• Made a cup of tea using my Teavana Perfect TeaMaker
• Got some work done on my Dell computer with my two Dell monitors
• Listened to music I had downloaded from Amazon and iTunes
• Opened some packages with my Slice Box Cutter
• Read some of The Iron Witch by Karen Mahoney
• Got dressed for Zumba in my Tek Gear shirt and pants (from Kohls) and my Saucony running shoes (from Shoebuy)
• Spruced up with Black Candy Apple body lotion from Bath and Body Works
• Watched recorded movies on my DirecTV DVR with my husband

I could go on and on. But the point is that these are all products that I really use and could easily write about. They fit into niches like beauty, moms, home, reading, entertainment, exercise, food, etc. And this was only about half of what I even wrote down. In a given week I would also have affiliate marketing recommendations for travel sites, kids’ clothes, toys, gardening, football, cooking, finance, and more. It’s all about looking at your site and figuring what fits into it and then where to find those links.

If you need more help making that transition from blogger to affiliate marketing, I’m doing a webinar for Affiliate Summit on October 19th, 2011, at 12pm EST entitled Monetize Your Blogging Skills with Affiliate Marketing. It is free but there are limited spots available. I also did a webinar as part of the Blogging ABCs entitled 5 Affiliate Marketing Benefits for Bloggers that you can view on replay.

I was recently fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to speak at the Business Strategy and Technology Forum in Indianapolis. It’s a great group of professionals in our community who come together for educational and networking purposes. I had 15 minutes to give my background, explain affiliate marketing, and relate to the audience how they could use affiliate marketing and related concepts like SEO and social media. A daunting task! It was followed by a Q&A period with the audience where I really got to connect with them and share.

Below is the video from the initial presentation. If you are the least bit interested in learning the very basics of affiliate marketing, this video might help you out. Whether you are an insurance agent, a new blogger, or an attorney, you will hopefully find something in this video that you can relate to. If you are local and interested in learning even more, we are having an Indianapolis Affiliate Summit Meetup later this month.

Some of the things I discuss in the video:

• My journey from attorney to affiliate marketer
• How my affiliate business is similar to traditional businesses
• Basics of affiliate marketing
• How to get started in affiliate marketing
• PR ideas for your site
• Free affiliate marketing resources

Thanks so much to Blake Ensign from Blaze Communications for organizing everything as well as producing the video.

Be an Angel Affiliate (or close)

I have written and spoken several times about what affiliates want from affiliate managers and merchants but have never flipped the coin over to see what is on the other side.  Thinking about the topic and talking to others, here are some suggestions about how we can all be better affiliates.

Be honest about volume: If you make promises that you know you cannot keep, you will not only burn a bridge but word will eventually get around. Be optimistic in your projections but not unrealistic.

Don’t violate terms: It should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t. Read the affiliate agreement before you bid on trademarks, offer incentives, or anything else that might be in question. When in doubt, ask the affiliate manager for clarification. We have only ourselves to blame when we get busted.

Follow through on deals: If a merchant gives you something in return for exclusive placement, give the exclusive placement. If they send you a product to give away, give away the product. If they send you something to review, do the review. And timely.

Give contact information: No matter what your preferred method of contact is, you should at least give them one way to get a hold of you quickly in case a promotion ends, the site is broken, etc. Using one email address that you know you never check isn’t fair.

Understand their role: We may not always like when we are told “no” or have to explain something, but we have to understand the position of the person we are working with. There is a difference between a merchant who can make decisions on the fly and an OPM who might need to wait a couple of hours or days for approval on something. An OPM should know industry terminology but you might have to explain a particular traffic method to a new merchant. Be patient and don’t assume that they are stupid or incompetent just because they don’t know everything we know or can’t act on something immediately.

I can’t proclaim to always do everything above, but I should. We all should. Our industry is only as good as the people in it.

Affiliate managers, merchants, OPMs…anything you would like to add that you want from us?

(Image courtesy of acclaimclipart.com)

As part of my presentation for Affiliate Summit East 2011, I have prepared an Editorial Calendar (“editorial calender” for those of you with spelling issues) to help bloggers, affiliates, and merchants take advantage of Seasonality in Affiliate Marketing. The calendar is basically a listing of different holidays, events, and seasons that you might want to write about or monetize in some way. While it certainly is not an exhaustive list, it should give you a good start on your planning as well as get your creative juices flowing about other similar events. Understand that some events change dates from year to year and that you need to be looking at least a month in advance to plan for many of the events.

You can download the calendar by clicking on this link: Seasonality Calendar. Use it however you like but please link back to me if you decide to post it on your own site.

Hopefully those of you in attendance enjoy the presentation and those who download the calendar find it helpful! Let me know if I missed anything major and I may revise the calendar as necessary.

I have been waiting for my copy of It’s All About the Cookies to get here and when it did I got so excited that I grabbed the video camera and made a quick video review. (You know I’m telling the truth because my hair is in a ponytail and my office is a mess). I don’t care because the video isn’t about me, it’s about this awesome cookbook. What makes it so awesome?

First and foremost, the proceeds from the book go to Affiliate Marketers Give Back, which raises money for breast cancer research, treatment, and awareness. If you haven’t been touched in some way by breast cancer, you must not live on this planet.

Second, the book combines recipes from my very favorite people with tips about work, life, and even drinking rum (I’m looking at you on that one, Kristen Grace). The recipes are pretty easy and the kind that you could whip up without too much mess or advance planning. Those are my types of recipes.

I couldn’t be more proud of the affiliate marketing community for coming together on this. Missy Ward, Mary Poiley, and Jen Goode did a fabulous job of compiling it in such a way that it is both useful and fun.

Did I mention that the book is only $19.99 and if you buy one, you can get a free gold pass to Affiliate Summit West in January? At that price, these would make great gifts for teachers, friends, and anyone else who likes cookies. And who doesn’t? If they don’t, they really need the book to see what they are missing.

Check out my video review below and find the book at www.allaboutthecookies.com or here at Amazon.

Last month I blogged about The Ugly Side of Affiliate Marketing and described some major issues that I was having with, among other things, with my Google Adsense Account and the eBay Partner Network. I’m happy to report that all of the problems have been resolved. However, it wasn’t without a lot of help and a lot of lessons learned–lessons that can apply whether you get hit with the nexus tax, unexpectedly dropped by merchants, or even dropped from entire networks.

I took the opportunity to discuss it with my Blogging ABCs co-hosts Deborah Carney and Liz Fogg. Here are some of the things that we talked about in the podcast that I learned from this debacle:

1) Diversify. Have different types of sites in different niches. Work with different merchants across different networks. This saved me because I still had other revenue streams even when two of them were down.

2) Separate Accounts. Use separate network accounts when you have multiple sites or especially different types of sites (incentives, coupons, gambling, etc). It will come in handy if one of your sites gets flagged or if you decide to sell a site. If I had done this with both Adsense and eBay, I likely would not have run into either problem that I had.

3) Use link redirecting. Redirecting will help you change out links quickly if you need to. In addition, you can use shorteners so that your domain shows up instead of someone else’s when you post your links in other places. In some cases where I did this, I was able to change out my links quickly. Where I didn’t, I will probably have a lot of dead links and lost revenue opportunities.

4) Network. Meet in person with as many people as possible. Further, after you connect with them, follow up, reinforcing your connection. When you need help, those connections may be the difference between keeping and losing your business.  I can honestly say that without my network I may not have ever gotten these problems solved.

Some Resources we mention:

Pretty Link Lite
YourLS Open Source shortener that you can install on your own website

In the end there was a silver lining; my sites are back to normal and I’ve learned some valuable lessons that I need to share with everyone else so that this doesn’t happen to them. You just knew with a nickname like “Sunshine” it would have to end like this, right?