I have a friend who started a tooth whitening kit website and I decided to start helping him out with some of the marketing for his product with my own store peddling his goods. This has become a mainstay in my company’s existence; promoting another company’s product as good or better than they do. This marketing method, although more difficult to get into, is better for both parties.

As I was writing an email to one of my new clients, I realized this would be a good bit of information to share with anyone who runs a real world business.  This is a landscaping company, but the model, blog marketing plan, and roll out methods all work in just about every other business.

“I don’t know how into the Internet you are, or promoting your business online, but there are a lot of different approaches when dealing with a company that already exists and has a substantial revenue stream already in place.

Have you received this error, and know you didn’t do anything wrong?  Your only problem was not getting any sales, right?  Don’t worry- Commission Junction does not hate you- they simply need to have you selling things (or at the very least, sending traffic to their clients).  First, contact CJ.com to make sure that your account was simply shut down because it had not been active enough for the past 6 months, and then once you find out that is the case, sign up for an account with a different e-mail.

I found these questions posted over on Shawn Hogan’s Digitalpoint forum.   If you have questions for me, send them over and I’ll post my responses.
A) What level of traffic do you need to a site to get people clicking on the affiliate banners?

Depends on your audience, the ads category in relation to your page, the quality of the banner, and the placement of the advertisement within your website.

I just pulled up a list of around forty different article submission websites available free to the public.  This list is accurate as of this post, so don’t hate me if some of the links don’t work at some point in time.  Feel free to download the .txt file of the article submission websites.  article-submissions.txt

Let me know what you experienced, I will be adding more links to this list as time permits.

Time for everyone to think outside of the box. A lot of people don’t do this when their marketing for an affiliate program, and that is why they fail.

What I am about to tell you will give you the ability to run the gamut of affiliate programs, promoting them great, in large numbers, without spending a lot of time on each.

Why would I tell you? First, because I want to help you grow as a marketer, but also, because I love to see how people invent upon what I offer for free. So all I ask is that you let me know how you used this tip… (*Plus, I know Im better at marketing, so I don’t need to worry about someone entering my turf )

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.

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!

We hit 300 affiliate programs today, after adding 23 new programs between January 1st and January 2nd. It was our new years resolution to break the 300 mark before the first week of 2007 was finished. Many of the programs are doing very well already, before we fine tune anything. Each program has around 800 keywords we are targeting, some less, some more. You can view our current marketing plan, just as all other merchants do.

I added another 8 affiliate programs to JDSign Interactive, the growth has been amazing since starting just a few weeks ago. We are already at over 280 programs, and growing quickly. We target the programs with an array of PPC, organic search (obviously that is still catching up to the PPC), networked website referrals (We currently manage 83 sites that display ads on)

The idea has been really moving forward and a lot of our merchants are catching on to how well this works. You can check out our affiliate report and see exactly what we do.