This week saw the introduction of Affiliate Window’s new payment system. Each merchant now has a payment status displayed in three places; the merchant directory, the merchant information page and on transaction reports.

The traffic light colours have the following meaning:

Green:

• Merchant has an up to date payment record and no payment restrictions.
• Affiliates will be paid for all approved commissions regardless of when the merchant pays Affiliate Window.

Note: This is the equivalent to the old payment system and the majority of merchants on the network carry this status.

Amber:

• Merchant has longer than standard payment terms, is overdue on some invoices or has little or no credit insurance limit.
• Affiliates will be paid for approved commissions only when payment for corresponding invoices has been received by Affiliate Window.
• It may take longer for affiliates to receive money from amber rated merchants.

Note: This is the equivalent to the payment system operated by the majority of Affiliate Window’s competitors.

Red:

• Merchant has no credit insurance limit, a series of overdue invoices and may be in financial difficulty.
• Approved commissions will only be paid when Affiliate Window have been paid in full for all outstanding invoices.

Note: We would advise against promoting these merchants.

The introduction of this traffic light system sooner rather than later will hopefully allow merchants to make the necessary changes that can see their ranking adjust from Amber to Green. Therefore please note that this initial ranking is likely to change over the coming months and it would be worthwhile monitoring those proactive merchants who want to enhance their programme to affiliates.

“A ship in harbor is safe – but that is not what ships are for.” – John A. Shedd

To succeed in affiliate marketing you need to have self motivation and drive to succeed. If you are the kind of person who would rather put something off if it can wait until tomorrow, you might not be best suited to working for yourself. Getting a site to bring in a small amount of money which you can use to supplement your income isn’t too hard. If you create a blog or website about a subject which interests you and gradually add a few adverts, you might find you are pleasantly surprised by the amount of extra money you have in your bank account each month. However, this is unlikely to make you super rich or be a reliable source of income that allows you to quit the day job. It is possible to make a living from affiliate marketing, but you have to be driven by the desire to succeed and not be the kind of person to give up at the first hurdle. Almost certainly, you will waste a lot of time with projects that never take off and you have to be able to cope with this without getting disheartened.

“You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” – George Horace Lorimer

One of the main mistakes people make when they first start out is in becoming obsessed with statistics. Yes only 90 people viewed your site today and it was 100 yesterday. Does that matter? Probably not if you look at the big picture! Whilst you need to keep on top of what is and what isn’t working, there is a great tendency to log into each affiliate network every 20 minutes just to see if any more sales/leads have appeared. This is similar to the problem of feeling you have to check you emails every 5 minutes in case there is anything important there and getting no work done as a result. At the start of each day you need to make a plan of what you want to achieve and if you fail to do this, you need to catch up and make more realistic targets in the future. Whilst day-to-day plans are useful you also need to have a long term aim or goal which you are striving to achieve.

Malcolm Red on self motivation.

These types of sites are not all that they appear to be. Effectively they are designed to save you money, that much is true, but there is the dark side to these sites that you simply may not know. Of course you wouldn’t know because they won’t tell you, but they are stuffing computer cookies into your system by means of ‘forced clicking’.

Many of the voucher code websites hide the voucher code behind a link, they will ask you to click the link in order to reveal the voucher code, and when the link is clicked the merchant site is opened in a new window and the code is revealed on their own site. What you may not have realised is that when this link is clicked, a special piece of code called a ‘cookie’, will be placed into your computer system without your prior knowledge.

Cookies are small pieces of code usually created to remember passwords and browser history to save you having to keep logging into sites. The cookies dropped onto your machine can also be used to track online sales. If you were to go to Amazon through a link on a voucher code website, that link will drop a cookie into your machine that will tell Amazon that you found them through the voucher code site, hence it ‘remembers’ where you came from. If you were to go on and make a purchase from Amazon, then the owner(s) of the voucher code site would get a percentage based commission on that sale.

Hopefully, new guidelines which come into effect on 1st January 2009 should help to stop legitimate affiliates losing out to cookie-dropping voucher code sites.

Authors: Terrence Burrows and Think Affiliate
Terry Burrows is the owner of Shopastop.co.uk and has been in the online shopping field for nearly 5 years.

DGM Pro Merchant Stats

I’d say it was worth signing up if there were particular merchants you wanted to promote, but I much prefer the interface with Affiliate Window.

Collaborating through the AMC, the affiliate networks who are IAB members will adhere to the following set of standards from January 1st 2009.

• - Using ‘Click to Reveal’ when there is no valid or current code present is not permitted of affiliate publishers including using ‘Click to Reveal’ to show any deals/offers/sales instead of vouchers.
• - Voucher code affiliate publishers must clearly detail the voucher offer that will be revealed by the click.
• - A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for use online. This code will have an activation date and where necessary a deactivation date.
• - Voucher code directories must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and discount codes.

The reason I am taking such a strong stance on this, is that a few months ago somebody in a poker league that I play in asked me to recommend a site for them to play on. I recommended 888.com and pointed them in the direction of a page containing my affiliate link. I could have recommended any other site just as easily as 888.com and I think they would have signed up and deposited. As such, I believe that I have provided 888.com with a new player and that I deserve to be paid a commission for this. I know that the player was legitimate and playing on the site, so when no affiliate commission appeared in my account, I contacted Affiliate Window. They asked for the details of the transaction, which I provided for them on 19/09/08. I have now just been informed that:

“The transaction was declined because our system recognized a pattern of fraud in the player’s behavior, which goes against the company’s Ts & Cs.”

I have not been given any more details as to why the transaction was considered fraudulent, but have been told this information might not be available. I’m sorry, but this really isn’t acceptable. I normally hold Affiliate Window in great regards and frequently recommend them, but this time I think they should at least pressure the merchant into giving a good reason why the commission is not being paid.

I’ve made a post on affiliates4u forum, and I’ll update when any more details come through.

If a review site is funded by affiliate revenue, they expect that if any of their visitors go on to make a purchase based on their reviews, they should receive a commission. If at the point the visitor was about to make a purchase, they then went through a cashback site, the most recent cookie would be overwritten. This means that the affiliate has gone to all of the work of getting the customer to the point of sale, for the cashback site to take the credit. There is evidence to suggest that people just use cashback sites at the point of purchase. The earnings per click for some merchants is up to 5 times higher for incentivised traffic, suggesting that they only go through the cashback site when they are intending to make a purchase. Is it right that affiliates are being denied commissions because of cashback being a more attractive incentive to purchase?

The particular thing which brought all of this to my attention recently was a personal experience with Virgin Media. Having had weeks of problems with their ‘customer service’, I logged into my DGM Pro account and noticed that I was an affiliate for them. Whilst I’m not actively advertising them, it did make me think. Do I really want to be promoting a merchant that I know have treated me in such a disgraceful way? Obviously the answer to this question is no. However much money their programme is paying, I would know that I’m signing people up to a company which I have firsthand experience of being terrible! Instead, I made a review of my experiences with Virgin Media letting people know how I had been treated. When I was looking to place a few affiliate adverts on the site, I realised I had another problem. How do I find merchants that I know treat their customers better than Virgin Media? I know that I don’t want to promote a company with a bad reputation, but without firsthand experience how do I know BT, Tiscali, O2 , Eclipse, Be Broadband etc.. are not even worse? I read a number of reviews online and after much deliberation I decided that it didn’t really matter who I advertised because they couldn’t be worse than Virgin (apart from TalkTalk apparently)!

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t advertise a particular company just because a couple of people have had bad experiences, as this would rule out almost all companies! However, there are a large number of sites which deliberately set out to mislead and trick potential customers into signing up to things just so they can get affiliate commission. This doesn’t seem morally acceptable to me.

• Cost – when starting out, the price you pay for hosting is a very important deciding factor.
• Windows/Linux – Whilst they share a large number of features in common, you should research which hosting platform is most appropriate for what you want to do. This might be covered in more detail in a later post.
• Storage space – You need to have enough storage space to store all of the files your site requires. Whilst static html pages don’t take up much space, videos and audio files can be very large.
• Bandwidth – This is the amount of information which is transferred from the server to client’s browsers. If you have 250 visitors/day with an average server load of 100kb each, you would need at least 1Gb of bandwidth each month. It is advisable to have much more bandwidth than you expect you will need to ensure that your site remains live if you receive a surge of traffic.
• Reseller privileges – If you have large amount of storage space/bandwidth unused, you might want to look into whether you can sell this off and make some additional income.
• Uptime guarantee – You want your hosting provider to give some kind of guarantee that your pages will always be available. There is a very large difference between 99% and 99.999%, with the later guaranteeing that your site will not be down for more than one day every 3 years. It is worth looking at exactly what guarantee they offer as some site claim to have guarantees, but don’t provide any kind of financial recompense when they fail to deliver.
• Domain limitations – How many domains can you host on your web hosting package? Some hosting packages provide hosting for one real domain whereas others are unlimited. This is very important if you intend to host multiple domains.
• Web technologies provided – Most hosting providers come with PHP/mySQL etc… You should check that all of the technologies you need to use are available.
• RAM – if you are using a dedicated server or virtual private server (VPS), the amount of RAM available to you affects the speed your visitors get your pages displayed to them.

Depending on the above, you need to decide what kind of hosting is most appropriate to you. In order of ascending cost, the below should be considered:

• Shared hosting – You have a certain amount of bandwidth and storage space allocated to you and you share a server with a large number of other website owners. Shared hosting is available very cheaply and is suitable for some low traffic sites. Be wary of shared hosting providers offering ‘unlimited bandwidth’ – all this means is that if you use too much, they will refund you and send you elsewhere. Shared hosting can be very slow and unreliable and is often not ideal.
• Reseller hosting – This is shared hosting, but with the option of reselling any storage space/bandwidth you aren’t using.
• Virtual Private Server (VPS) – This is a very good option for many affiliate sites. You have a guaranteed amount of RAM/bandwidth/storage space and can use this how you see fit. You chose which control panel you want to use, and you have a lot of control over how you use your VPS. This is a very affordable, flexible option with few drawbacks.
• Dedicated server – you have full control over the server and how your pages are delivered. This is the most expensive option with a managed server costing hundreds of pounds each month. A dedicated server is only required for users receiving large amounts of traffic or providing hosting to many clients.

Regardless of what type of hosting you think is most appropriate to you, we recommend at least giving eUKhost a look. The prices are some of the best in the market, and the service provided is second to none. With 24 hour online chat facilities for support, problems are sorted very quickly. If you’re unsure what type of hosting you’re after, use the support chat to talk to somebody who can help you decide what would be most appropriate for you. If you are looking for shared hosting, Emase Hosting have very competitive prices.

Domain names with eUKhost are overpriced, but you can buy these from any domain name registrar and point them to your hosting. 123-REG has very competitive prices with some domains from just £0.99/year.
Once you have hosting and at least one domain name, you’re ready to get started with your affiliate marketing activities. The next few posts should help you get your first site up and running.