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.

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?