Linkshare holds a fairly large number of high end companies within their program. With the likes of Western Union, Blue Nile, Fredericks of Hollywood, and many more; LinkShare has the potential to some day become a high quality affiliate management company.

Design: 7

More advanced that ShareaSale, but not even close to CJ.com, LinkShare’s “updates”, at least to me, are actually a track backwards. Still containing data from February of 2005 in their “payment reports”, is one of the huge problems I’ve had with the company. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t going to effect my publishing, but it makes the company look like they couldn’t care less.

One of the first things you need to do when beginning to promote an osCommerce website is to add your page to directories.

Here is where I plug the TopTenTshirts.com Directory

Affiliate programs in most situations are very productive ways to generate sales, while not spending much time on advertising.Setting up an osC Affiliate program is quite simple. In Version osC MS3 due to release spring or summer of ‘07, you will already have it installed. For the previous version, MS2, you will need to install the osC Affiliate contribution. It can be found by clicking this link. You may want to verify on the osCommerce forum before installing, or contact me and I can put you in touch with a coder that will do it for around $75.00

Many of the images in osCommerce are out of date and really don’t match what you might need for your cart.  You can easily find ideas through the web, and this tutorial will teach you just that.Looking at the basic cart images (shoping carts, my account, etc) you will see that they are pretty old.  Well, they were released in 1999, when osCommerce was initially released, so thats to be expected!

All you need to do to get image ideas is jump on the google image search.  http://images.google.com

in the search bar, enter: inurl:/catalog/ “header_cart.gif”

or

Right now I am working on reviews of affiliate marketing program management companies and improving adsense tips and techniques. I will be adding a new subject to this list of ongoing discussion exclusively covering osCommerce, my personal favorite when it comes to online shopping carts. I will be running over unique page titles, and other onpage optimization techniques, order processing tips, useful addons, and more. I believe this will be a series of between 30-40 posts, with more added as I come up with new enhancements or ideas.

I’d have to say that between 40 and 50% of people either have a PDA or a razr-esque phone.. And they are *always* talking, most of the time with no regard for anyone else around them… Come on people- inside voices!

CommissionJunction is undoubtably the largest network of quality websites available to Affiliate Marketers. Companies like eBay, Citibank, and many more find a home in CJ.com’s giant database of merchants.

Design: 9

Slightly more advanced than ShareaSale.com, CJ gets an edge in the layout and ease of use. Their security features are excellent, and their overall functionality is just about flawless.

Reporting: 9

CommissionJunction’s reporting features are tough to get upset about. You can track your daily stats, exact product sales (In most cases- eBay is a special situation, where they do not show what auction actually resulted in the sale.) Finding EPC, Total Commission, and Product sales is a cinch.

There are a lot of basic things people do to improve their price per click, and the CTR (click through ratio); either learned from an eBook, forum, or Google’s own adsense tips.  The thing about most of these is, its duplicated content from hundreds of different places on the internet- no quality tips.  This is the beginning of a weekly Adsense tips section.  I’ve got enough data to keep this section running for weeks.
Think about how Google’s search engine works, and create pages around that.  In other words, if you know that iPod accessories is a good keyword, but that iPod replica accessories only pays around 10 cents, refrain from using the word on the page- even if it would be to describe them for content purposes.  Some people may think this is a negative, but if you’re writing a page about iPod accessories, and only knock-offs as sub-topic, why should ads display about them anyway?

I started using ShareASale.com most recently, following CJ.com, Linkshare, Performics, Clickbank, and In-House programs. I hadn’t been in the market for anything really being pushed by ShareASale, but that all changed really fast. I started because I wanted to cross promote from our small t-shirt store to others that carry hundreds of t-shirts. The problem was, I needed to find more than just one site, and did not want to spend a lot of time looking around for a bunch of them individually. I ended up finding a t-shirt store that was using ShareASale, and decided to give it a try.

Well Kristen and I are all packed to head off for a couple of weeks to Hawaii for a vacation.  After a huge push of affiliate program additions, we are ready to take a break!  From December 1st, through Jan. 4th, we added 187 affiliate programs to our network, with 11,380 keywords in PPC engines, and 212 affiliate pages!  I will be posting my reviews of each affiliate management program starting this evening with ShareaSale.com…  Be sure to check out my in depth look at what’s good, what’s bad, and what I see around the corner!