Cash for writing

Living the dream - get cash just for writing!


This is a program on a new network I've just signed up to called High Profits
They have some downloadable pdfs of information about getting traffic and building a website. That's certainly interesting!

Think Visibility

Went to see Yoast at Think Visibility 2. Was well worth the trip up the motorway and was well organised and fun.
I enjoyed Yoast's presentation and Julian's from the Telegraph and Judith Lewis's talks. The afternoon was also fun with Tom doing lots of fun graphs showing how important it is to make things easy to interact with. Then Zoe's talk was good.

You can see some pictures of the Think Visbility event here

Expired banners - things not to do

Do not send me a list of 90 numbers of expired banners and ask me to change them. It's tedious and very frustrating to waste time doing this.

Why?

Because I don't direct link to any graphic - all my banner links go through a network's database/tracking system.
So why should I need a change at my end?

Because going through 90 searches take an awful lot of my time and energy.

Because you could tell me which banners I use and on what urls and then I'd not have such a big list to go through, or at least be pinpoint accurate in what I was looking for.

I've got a useful code searcher that will go through all my sites looking for a number or url so although it's a chore it is possible. Just doing 90 is a bit silly as I know I've never used anywhere near that many banners from this merchant

Think Visibility Discount available

If you want to go to http://thinkvisibility.com/
you should see Elaine's post here
http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/affiliate-marketing-lounge/120634-help-best-inner-circle-forums-i-should-part.html#post530077
which tells you how to get 20% discount

So comon not worth mentioning the merchant

If you recognise this snippet of email, I'm not having a go specifically at that company. But more of a general go on how companies act:

The following have been removed:
• Fashion
• Toys
• Baby

To be replaced with:
• Beauty
• Men
• Women
• Baby & Child


Note the use of the "have been removed" so you need to update the links like yesterday.

Thanks for the notice and the slightly strange removal of the toy category so need Christmas. Ah well.

Things I like

Emails that say "congratulations we've approved you on this program, and to help you here's a basic text link"

This is very useful! Thank you.

Click here to find out more about a4uexpo

Ask questions

I'm going to ask every blinking question I need to in that networks section just to make it clear how much I dislike using it, how little it offers affiliates and how rubbish is it compared to places like affiliate window.


It's really frustrating having to spend time moving merchants links but is a million times worse when you have to then try and work out what to replace a really useful widget with.

long redirects drive me mad...

Because they're an abuse imo.

Are you all sitting comfortably?

Once upon a time there as a company who decided they'd not work with voucher code sites again and asked to be removed.

So all the nice little sites did this, but there was one nasty big mean site that didn't. And they put a slow redirect on. They did warn people it could take a long time and offered in the mean time lots of other links for people to click on...

And the link then doesn't work and goes back to the main page of the their site.

Sounds pretty wrong to me.

Another hate

Yes I know I mostly grumble about things ... but maybe that's I only blog when I'm remembering the bad stuff that happens?

Merchants who close. And then open on my least favourite network. I'm not going to mention my least favourite network.

It's one that is hard work, hard to find things in, and the product feeds are still a mystery to me.

I assume they have some crazy marketing ploy at the moment going on stealing other companies merchants in the promise that affiliates love them.
We don't.

And why steal an existing merchant? Sign a new one up and we'd all be happy.

Clarke has blog

I'm not sure I've mentioned it before, but Clarke - one of the people I've known longest in affiliating - has a blog - Affiliate Marketing Blog - will be a regular read for me from now on!

Things I get annoyed with

CJ. Having to agree to terms and conditions that I have already agreed to.


I don't want to sound petty but it's 3 years since equifax made their changes to their t&c ... so why am I having to repeat agree to them.

Dragons Den and websites

It makes the rest of us look cheap.
£600,000 plus 26k a month to set up and run a website called mydish. That's basically a glorified notebook with recipes.

The 600k isn't jsut for the website, no it's for staff and office costs.

Well 600k should be staff and office costs for about 30 years in my book when a site's not making any money.

This is surely a sign of a dot com bubble we've seen with friends reunited selling for less than they bought it for too.

Things I hate about affiliate marketing

Bizarre long emails listing ad numbers being removed from a sytem so I have to go through and search them all out or risk sending traffic to a dead link.
Thanks guys, I have nothing else to do with my afternoon than spend it doing this tedious and mindless work.
AND what makes it worse is they're all coded links - so they go through the networks site and get churned off to links, so there is NO NEED for this insanity.

I was going to write a similar list to Kirsty here on her affiliate marketing blog, but decided I'd only blog about it next time I got annoyed.

Other things that annoy me are on one particular network, a "I agree" click needed to terms and conditions that I've already agreed to. It drives me mad. Two clicks and a scroll of my time needed each time. Annoying as heck.

I'll add some more hates as and when I find them. But I do agree with most of Kirsty's list!