CPA Marketing Series - Can’t Miss Tricks from Cash Tactics

If you are new to PPC/CPA marketing and trying to figure out the best way to get started, this is a must-read. If you are an old pro I can almost guarantee you will discover some new tricks you haven’t thought of before - especially in post #4 below.

Ruck from Cash Tactics is giving a free training series that offers a very detailed explanation of how he runs successful more...

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Efficient PPC - High Speed Low Cost PPC Campaign Builder

Killer New Tool…Felix Leshno’s Efficient PPC

Efficient PPC does everything Speed PPC does plus :
1. Allow Campaign Error checking2. Ability to Add More Default Lists3. Has 8 Build in Keyword Lists4. Create Duplicate Campaigns Instantly - Useful if you want to separate Search & Content5. Break Up Huge Campaigns into Smaller Ones - Instantly6. Word List Editor
A huge complaint I’ve had about Adwords Editor, is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to load large campaigns when using the bulk add feature. Efficient PPC completely solves this headache.
With Efficient PPC the long wait times are gone, you can load a 50k keyword campaign in Adwords Editor in 1 sec instead of 15 to 30 minutes.” More…

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The Landing Page Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Tips and Resources

By Christina Laun

So your search engine optimization and carefully chosen keywords have paid off and you’ve gotten visitors to your site. This is great, but your battle is only half won if you haven’t taken the time to properly design and structure your landing page. Ideally, your landing page ...
reading more

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing — using one site to drive traffic to another — is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

The beginning

The concept of revenue sharing, paying commission for referred business, predates that of affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream ecommerce happened almost four years after the World Wide Web was born in November 1994, when CDNow launched its BuyWeb program. With its BuyWeb program, CDNow was the first non-adult site to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing.

CDNow.com had the idea that music-oriented web sites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors might be interested in purchasing and offer a link that would take the visitor directly to CDNow to purchase them. The idea for this remote purchasing originally arose because of conversations with music publisher Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists’ CDs directly from its site but did not want to do it itself. Geffen Records asked CDNow if it could design a program where CDNow would do the fulfillment. Geffen Records realized that CDNow could link directly from the artist on its Web site to Geffen’s web site, bypassing the CDNow home page and going directly to an artist’s music page.

Affiliate marketing was used on the internet by the adult industry before CDNow launched their BuyWeb program. The consensus of marketers and adult industry insiders is that Cybererotica was either the first or among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost-per-click program.

Amazon.com launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates would place banner or text links on their site for individual books or link directly to the Amazon’s home page.

When visitors clicked from the associate’s site through to Amazon.com and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon.com was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely known and served as a model for subsequent programs.

In February 2000, Amazon.com announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which was before most affiliate programs but not before PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage(April 1996), and a handful of others.

Historic development

Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the web, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, total sales generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the UK alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005. MarketingSherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned $6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing and forms of lead generation other than contextual ad networks such as Google AdSense.

Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling and retail sectors. The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance and travel sectors. Hot on the heels of these are the entertainment (particularly gaming) and internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from B2B marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix. course, this is constantly subject to change.

Web 2.0

The rise of blogging, interactive online communities and other new technologies, web sites and services based on the concepts that are now called Web 2.0 have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. The new media allowed merchants to get closer to their affiliates and improved communication between each other. New developments have made it harder for unscrupulous affiliates to make money. Emerging black sheep are detected and made known to the affiliate marketing community with much greater speed and efficiency.

Predominant compensation methods

80% of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as compensation method, 19% use cost per action (CPA) and the remaining 1% are other methods, such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).

Diminished compensation methods

The use of pay per click (PPC/CPC) and pay per impression (CPM/CPT) in traditional affiliate marketing is far less than 1% today and negligible. CPM and CPC are today still heavily used in display advertising and paid search.

Cost per mille (thousand) (CPM/CPT) requires the publisher only to load the advertising on his website and show it to his visitors in order to get paid a commission, while PPC requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher. Visitors must not only be made aware of the ad, but also pursue them to click on it and visit the advertiser's website.

Cost per click (CPC/PPC) used to be more common in the early days of affiliate marketing, but diminished over time due to click fraud issues that are very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today. Contextual advertising, such as Google AdSense are not considered in this statistic. It is not specified yet, if contextual advertising can be considered affiliate marketing or not.

CPM/CPC versus CPA/CPS (performance marketing)

In the case of CPM or CPC, the publisher does not care if the visitor is the type of audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert, because the publisher already earned his commission at this point. This leaves the greater, and, in case of CPM, the full risk and loss (if the visitor can not be converted) to the advertiser.

CPA and CPS require that referred visitors do more than visiting the advertiser's website in order for the affiliate to get paid commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first. It is in the best interest for the affiliate to send the best targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible to increase the chance of a conversion. The risk and loss is shared between the affiliate and the advertiser.

For this reason affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how employees that work in sales are typically being compensated. Employees in sales are usually getting paid sales commission for every sale they close and sometimes a performance incentives for exceeding targeted baselines. Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.

The phrase, "Affiliates are an extended sales force for your business", which is often used to explain affiliate marketing, is not 100% accurate. The main difference between the two is that affiliate marketers cannot, or not much influence a possible prospect in the conversion process, once the prospect was sent away to the advertiser's website. The sales team of the advertiser on the other hand does have the control and influence, up to the point where the prospect signs the contract or completes the purchase.

Multi tier programs

Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. In practical terms: publisher "A" signs up to the program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher "A" attracts other publishers ("B", "C", etc.) to sign up for the same program using her sign-up code all future activities by the joining publishers "B" and "C" will result in additional, lower commission for publisher "A".

Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others' existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup. This sort of structure has been successfully implemented by a company called Quixtar.com, a division of Alticor, the parent company of Amway. Quixtar has implemented a network marketing structure to implement its marketing program for major corporations such as Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, Sony Music and hundreds more.

Two-tier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond 2-tier are multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing.

Even though Quixtar compensation plan is network marketing & wouldn't be considered 'affiliate marketing', the big company partners are considered and call themselves affiliates. Therefore, you may argue that the Quixtar company is the affiliate marketer for its partner corporation.

Pros and cons

Merchants like affiliate because in most cases, it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (excluding any initial setup cost). Some businesses owe much of their success to this marketing technique, a notable example being Amazon.com. Unlike display advertising, however, affiliate marketing is not easily scalable.

Implementation options

Some merchants run their own affiliate programs (In House) while others use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates.
(see outsourced program management) Merchants can choose from two different types of affiliate management solutions, standalone software or hosted services typically called affiliate networks.

Affiliate management and program management outsourcing

Successful affiliate programs require a lot of maintenance and work. The number of affiliate programs just a few years back was much smaller than it is today. Having an affiliate program that is successful is not as easy anymore. The days when programs could generate considerable revenue for the merchant even if they were poorly or not at all managed ("auto-drive") are over (with the exception of some verticals).

Those uncontrolled programs did aid (and continue to do so today) rogue affiliates, who use spamming,^[15] trademark infringement, false advertising, "cookie cutting", typosquatting and other unethical methods that caused affiliate marketing to get a bad reputation.

The increase of number of internet businesses in combination with the increased number of people that trust the current technology enough to do shopping and business online caused and still causes a further maturing of affiliate marketing. The opportunities to generate considerable amount of profit in combination with a much more crowded marketplace filled with about equal quality and sized competitors made it harder for merchants to get noticed, but at the same time the rewards if you get noticed much larger.

Recently, the internet advertising industry has become more advanced. Online media has in some areas been rising to the sophistication of offline media, in which advertising has been largely professional and competitive for many years already. The requirements to be successful are much higher than they were in the past. Those requirements are becoming often too much of a burden for the merchant to do it successfully in-house. More and more merchants are looking for alternative options which they find in relatively new outsourced (affiliate) program management or OPM companies that were often founded by veteran affiliate managers and network program managers

The OPM are doing this highly specialized job of affiliate program management for the merchant as a service agency very much like Ad agencies are doing the job to promote a brand or product in the offline world today.

Types of affiliate websites

Affiliate sites are often categorized by merchants (advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following list is very generic but commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.

• Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers offers (search arbitrage)
• Comparison shopping sites and directories
• Loyalty sites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back or charitable donations
• Coupon and rebate sites that focus on sales promotions
• Content and niche sites, including product review sites
• Personal websites (these type of sites were the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing, but are today almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate sites)
• Blogs and RSS feeds
• Email list affiliates (owners of large opt-in email list(s))
• Registration path or Co-Registration affiliates who include offers from other companies during a registration process on their own website.
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparison and other features based on information that frequently change and require ongoing updates.
• CPA networks are top tier affiliates that expose offers from advertiser they are affiliated with to their own network of affiliates (not to confuse with 2nd tier)

Publisher recruitment

Affiliate networks that have already a number of advertisers usually also have a large number of publishers. This large pool of publishers could be potentially recruited. There is also an increased chance that publishers in the network apply to the program by themselves, without the need for any recruitment efforts by the advertiser.

Relevant sites that attract the same audiences as the advertiser is trying to attract, but are not competing with the advertiser are potential affiliate partners as well. Even vendors or existing customers could be recruited as affiliate, if it makes sense and does not violate any laws or regulations.

Almost any website could be recruited as affiliate publisher although high traffic websites are more likely interested in (for them) low risk CPM or medium risk CPC deals rather than higher risk CPA or revenue share deals.

Affiliate program detection

Affiliate programs directories are one way to find affiliate programs, another method is large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers. The third option is to check the target website itself for a reference to their affiliate program. Websites, which offer an affiliate program often, have a link titled "affiliate program", "affiliates", "referral program" or "webmasters" somewhere on their website, usually in the footer or "About" section of the site.

Even if all those methods seem to indicate that a site does not have an affiliate program, it could still be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The only way to find out for sure, is to contact the site owner directly and ask.

Past and current issues

In the early days of affiliate marketing, there was very little control over what affiliates were doing, which was abused by a large number of affiliates. Affiliates used false advertisements, forced clicks to get tracking cookies set on users' computers, and adware, which displays ads on computers. Many affiliate programs were poorly managed.

Email spam

In its early days many internet users held negative opinions of affiliate marketing due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Search engine spam / spamdexing

There used to be much debate around the affiliate practice of spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of autogenerated webpages, many-a-times, using product data-feeds provided by merchants. Each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of "SEOing" (see search engine optimization) their sites with the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google's algorithm update dubbed "BigDaddy" in February 2006 which was the final stage of Google's major update dubbed "Jagger" which started mid-summer 2005 specifically targeted this kind of spam with great success and enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer generated duplicate content from its index.

Sites made up mostly of affiliate links are usually badly regarded as they do not offer quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google whereby certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates" and were either removed from the index, or taken from the first 2 pages of the results and moved deeper within the index. In order to avoid this categorization, webmasters who are affiliate marketers must create real value within their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms with nothing but links leading to the merchant sites.

Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website. For instance, if a website is about "How to publish a website", within the content an affiliate link leading to a merchant's ISP site would be appropriate. If a website is about sports, then an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods site might work well within the content of the articles and information about sports. The idea is to publish quality information within the site, and to link "in context" to related merchant's sites.

Adware

Adware is still an issue today, but affiliate marketers have taken steps to fight it. AdWare is not the same as spyware although both often use the same methods and technologies. Merchants usually had no clue what adware was, what it did and how it was damaging their brand. Affiliate marketers became aware of the issue much more quickly, especially because they noticed that adware often overwrites their tracking cookie and results in a decline of commissions. Affiliates who do not use adware became enraged by adware, which they felt was stealing hard earned commission from them. Adware usually has no valuable purpose nor provides any useful content to the often unaware user that has the adware running on his computer. Affiliates discussed the issues in various affiliate forums and started to get organized. It became obvious that the best way to cut off adware was by discouraging merchants from advertising via adware. Merchants that did not care or even supported adware were made public by affiliates, which damaged the merchants' reputations and also hurt the merchants' general affiliate marketing efforts. Many affiliates simply "canned" the merchant or switched to a competitor's affiliate program. Eventually, affiliate networks were also forced by merchants and affiliates to take a stand and ban certain adware publishers from their network.

Resulting from this were the Code of Conduct by Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics, LinkShare's Anti-Predatory Advertising Addendum ShareASale's complete ban of software applications as medium for affiliates to promote advertiser offers. Regardless of the progress made, adware is still an issue. This is demonstrated by the class action lawsuit against ValueClick and its daughter company Commission Junction filed on April 20, 2007.

Trademark bidding / PPC

Affiliates were among the earliest adopters of pay-per-click advertising when the first PPC search engines like Goto.com (which became later Overture.com, acquired by Yahoo! in 2003) emerged during the end of the nineteen-nineties. Later in 2000 Google launched their PPC service AdWords which is responsible for the wide spread use and acceptance of PPC as an advertising channel. More and more merchants engaged in PPC advertising, either directly or via a search marketing agency and realized that this space was already well occupied by their affiliates. Although this fact alone did create channel conflicts and hot debate between advertisers and affiliates, the biggest issue was the bidding on advertisers names, brands and trademarks by some affiliates. A larger number of advertisers started to adjust their affiliate program terms to prohibit their affiliates from bidding on those type of keywords. Some advertisers however did and still do embrace this behavior of their affiliates and allow them, even encourage them, to bid an any term they like, including the advertisers trademarks.

Lack of self regulation

Affiliate marketing is driven by entrepreneurs who are working at the forefront of internet marketing. Affiliates are the first to take advantage of new emerging trends and technologies where established advertisers do not dare to be active. Affiliates take risks and "trial and error" is probably the best way to describe how affiliate marketers are operating. This is also one of the reasons why most affiliates fail and give up before they "make it" and become "super affiliates" who generate $10,000 and more in commission (not sales) per month. This "frontier" life and the attitude that can be found in such type of communities is probably the main reason, why the affiliate marketing industry is not able to this day to self-regulate itself beyond individual contracts between advertiser and affiliate. The 10+ years history since the beginning of affiliate marketing is full of failed attempts to create an industry organization or association of some kind that could be the initiator of regulations, standards and guidelines for the industry. Some of the failed examples are the Affiliate Union and iAfma.

The only places where the different people from the industry, affiliates/publishers, merchants/advertisers, networks and 3rd party vendors and service providers like outsources program managers come together at one location are either online forums and industry trade shows. The forums are free and even small affiliates can have a big voice at places like that, which is supported by the anonymity that is provided by those platforms. Trade shows are not anonymous, but a large number, in fact the greater number (quantitative) of affiliates are not able to attend those events for financial reasons. Only performing affiliates can afford the often hefty price tags for the event passes or get it sponsored by an advertiser they promote.

Because of the anonymity of forums, the only place where you are to get the majority (quantitative) of people in the industry together, it is almost impossible to create any form of legally binding rule or regulation that must be followed by everybody in the industry. Forums had only very few successes in their role as representant of the majority in the affiliate marketing industry. The last example of such a success was the halt of the "CJ LMI" ("Commission Junction Link Management Initiative") in June/July 2006, when a single network tried to impose on their publishers/affiliates the use of Javascript tracking code as a replacement for common HTML links.

Training and certification

There are no industry standards for training and certification in affiliate marketing. There are training courses and seminars that result in certifications. Some of them are also widely accepted, which is mostly because of the reputation of the person or company who is issuing the certification. Affiliate marketing is also not a subject taught in universities. Only few college teachers work with internet marketers to introduce the concept of affiliate marketing to students

majoring in marketing for example.

Education happens mostly in "real life" by just doing it and learning the details as you go. There are a number of books available, but readers have to watch out, because some of the so-called "how-to" or "silver bullet" books teach how to manipulate holes in the Google algorithm, which can quickly become out of date or that advertisers no longer permit some of the strategies endorsed in the books.

OPM companies usually mix formal with informal training, and do a lot of their training through group collaboration and brainstorming. Companies also try to send each marketing employee to the industry conference of their choice.

Other resources used include web forums, blogs, podcasts, video seminars and specialty websites that try to teach individuals to learn affiliate marketing, such as Affiliate Classroom, whose founder Anik Singal won the first place and $15,000 in the Young Alumni Category of the University of Maryland $50K Business Plan Competition in 2006.

Affiliate Summit is the largest conference in the industry, and it is not run by any of the Affiliate networks, many of which run their own annual events.

Code of Conduct

Main article: Code of Conduct (affiliate marketing)

A Code of Conduct was released by the affiliate networks Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics on December 10, 2002. It was created to guide practices and adherence to ethical standards for online advertising.

"Threat" to traditional affiliate networks

Affiliate marketers usually avoid this topic as much as possible, but when it is being discussed, then are the debates explosive and heated to say the least. The discussion is about CPA networks (CPA = Cost per action) and their impact on "classic" affiliate marketing (traditional affiliate networks). Traditional affiliate marketing is resources intensive and requires a lot of maintenance. Most of this includes the management, monitoring and support of affiliates. Affiliate marketing is supposed to be about long-term and mutual beneficial partnerships between advertisers and affiliates. CPA networks on the other hand eliminate the need for the advertiser to build and maintain relationships to affiliates, because that task is performed by the CPA network for the advertiser. The advertiser simply puts an offer out, which is in almost every case a CPA based offer, and the CPA networks take care of the rest by mobilizing their affiliates to promote that offer. CPS or revenue share offers are rarely to be found at CPA networks, which is the main compensation model of classic affiliate marketing.

The term "affiliate marketing"

Increasingly, voices in the industry are recommending that "affiliate marketing" be substituted with an alternative name. The problem with the term affiliate marketing is that it is often confused with network-marketing or multi-level marketing. "Performance marketing" is a common alternative, but other recommendations have been made as well. A similar attempt was made to rename search engine optimization, but with little success.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing.

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The 60% Government Bond

Getting Started:

1.) Above, you will see your unique link. This is your customized universal link that you will use for your homepage and also to refer people. Start right now by manually changing your browser's homepage setting to this URL (eg. http://www.slashmysearch.com/earn/id/XXXX). Don't accidentally set it to the main SlashMySearch.com URL.

When you are correctly setup, a green circle will appear at the bottom of the homepage; it will not appear on any other page but you will still be tracked correctly.

2.) Click on Affiliate Tools above and use the tell a friend tool to email all of your friends. Their emails are never recorded and only used once to send your email. You get paid for three levels, meaning you get unlimited extra money from everyone you refer and another amount for each referral those people get. You never have to refer anyone, however, referring people will increase your earnings. Regardless of referrals, you will still be paid.

3.) If you have a website, blog, online profile, etc., don't forget to publicize this program with your URL so you can begin to grow your network.

4.)You earn money by actively using SlashMySearch.com. Earn money by setting SlashMySearch.com as your homepage (you can do this on more than one computer, but you must login atleast once on each new computer). Earn even more money by using SlashMySearch.com as your primary search engine, the more you search the more you make, its that simple! You will be checked for activity a few times per hour and credited for each segment. Any page on SlashMySearch.com will count towards your credit. Remember to use SlashMySearch.com every time you search and every time you are looking for anything on the internet. Be sure to also take advantage of our new Shopping and eBay Typo search types!

5.) You will see your earnings above labeled as Total Commissions. There may be a 24 hour delay in seeing your earnings. This amount includes all your earnings, including those from your referral network. You are set to earn money after you set your homepage to your link. You do not have to return to your homepage every time you begin a new search or use a new service, you can just surf normally through the site. Read more about how to use this system to promote and grow your referral network by clicking here. Total Clicks measure how many times someone you sent your link to has clicked on it. It also measures how many times you have loaded SlashMySearch.com as your homepage. This number is an approximation, however, your earnings are exact.

You may also send people to a custom URL which can be any page on SlashMySearch.com. Just use the following URL:
http://www.slashmysearch.com/earn/jrox.php?id=YOUR_ID&jxURL=URL_HERE

The best use for this is to refer people directly to the signup page, just use the following URL and enter your ID, any of these links allow us to track who you refer so we can add them to your downline:

http://www.slashmysearch.com/earn/jrox.php?id=YOUR_ID &jxURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashmysearch.com%2Fearn%2Fsignup.html

We have made a shortened form of this URL available:

http://www.slashmysearch.com/earn/signup.html?id=YOUR_ID

Make sure to visit the member forums at http://forums.slashmysearch.com/ to talk to other members, get peer support and meet new people. Your forums account has automatically been created with the same username and password you chose during signup.

Click here to read the Search N Earn Program FAQs

Click here to read a free Basics of Internet Marketing guide to learn how to get more affiliates into your downline to increase earnings potential.

After you have read all the online help documentation and still need help, you may email help@slashmysearch.com anytime with any questions, comments or suggestions.

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Get Money Blogging with SMARTY

How do you make money blogging? This is clearly only possible with traffic, so how do you get traffic for your blog?

The following steps are quick and easy but very affective. It's a simple guide to optimising your blog for the search engines and building a steady stream of interested visitors.

You will also find useful links ot other blogs recommending techniques and their experiences.

Optimizing your Blog

Blog optimization relates to the changes to wording and layout on your blog. Key changes include keyword choice, keyword density, formats, link structure and Meta tags

Find the Right Keywords
The basis of ALL search engine rankings is keywords. Users enter keyphrases in Search Engines to get information they need, It is VERY important that you optimize for such keyphrases.

When selecting your keywords, look for more specific phrases to start with rather than mainstream simple words. e.g. if a site is about mobile phones then it may be a better solution to optimise for "nokia N72 mobile phone" rather than "mobile phone". This means you will have less competition and more targeted visitors.

Now that you have a list of your main keyword phrases, you need to find all the related keywords which people are also searching for.
Use this tool to find related keywords to your main keyword. This will also show you how popular each keyword is.

You may find that the lesser searched keywords will have less competition so it will be easier to get higher search engine rankings and more visitors.

The following tool will analyze your current website to determine what keyword phrases you are optimized for, then it will list all related keywords so that you may also include these on your site. A perfect tool for broadening your websites exposure on the search engines.

Check the Density of Your Blogs Keywords
Keyword density refers to what percentage each keyword appears on a page or your entire website relevant to all other words. e.g. The Keyphrase "mobile phone" may have a density of 5% on a page relevant to the total page content.
If you are optimizing for a keyphase then it's best to have a density of between 3%-5%. Any more may be considered search engine spamming and any less may give it too lower importance for your page. The keyword density includes Alt tags on your images and text. (text appearing when you hold your cursor over an image).

Use the following tool to check the density of keywords throughout your website.

If the results show that your main keyphrase has the highest percentage but is lower than 5% then it is well optimized.

Check the Quality of Your Blogs Content

Search Engines are known to act upon websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content.

Your content may be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own blog may be similar to each other. The following tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages.

The exact percentage of similarity after which a search engine may penalize you is not known, it varies from search engine to search engine, Your aim should be to keep your page similarity as LOW as possible.

Check the Placement of your Blogs Keywords
It is vital that your keywords and phrases are prominent. This refers to the placement and format of the keywords.

You should place your main keywords as the titles of a post, this shows search engines that they are the main point of the post and the a degree, the page.

Within reason you should bold, underline, italic and hyperlink your keywords when used in a sentence to build importance. As you develop importance on a keyword throughout your blog, you will build a site-wide theme showing these as the main keywords the search engines understand your site to be about, therefore ranking you higher than other sites which are less optimized.

Write your keywords at the beginning of a sentence and at the end to show it as natural as possible. DO NOT enter your keywords separated only by a comma, it is search engine spamming and you WILL be penalized! The more natural your keywords appear the better the quality of your content.

Check your page links: How many links on a page, linking to bad neighborhoods
Search engines pay attention to the first 100 links on a page, these are the ones they follow first and give the most importance to if placed on a keyword.

Try to keep your links to less than 100 and only link out to quality websites which are also listed in search engines. If you link to websites not listed and that also link to other bad websites, you can be de-listed from search engines. These may include directories which asked you to link back to them as a requirement to be included.

Broken Link Checker
Use the following tool to check your site for broken links. These are links in your website which no longer go to the correct page (possibly if a page was removed)

META Tags
The META descriptions and keywords are one of the most important aspects of building a keyword theme within your website.

Most blogs and independent websites allow you to change all Meta tags. Start with the site Title, this is often the name of your site. It is the first line of text generally in blue which appear in the search engine listings. It's the single most important line of wording to describe your site. Be short (about 6-8 words), include your main keywords and try not to use stop words (and, by, the). A good example may be "Discount Mobile phones online store".

The Meta description, sometimes known as the site description, is the second most important text within your website. Try to use all your keywords in a clear sentence with the most important keywords at the beginning of the description or at the start of a sentence. A good example may be "Buy discount mobile phones including brands like Nokia and Motorola. Best sellers include the Nokia N72 and Motorola Razor mobile phone". Keep the description to less than 200 words. .

Try to include keywords for every category or page you create. There is generally a section on all the blog softwares to place keywords for a post or page. Use the most important keywords at the start of the list and don't use any which are not written in the content of your website.

Building Inbound links

The best kind of inbound links are from sites with related information to yours, high Google Page Rank and lots of unique content. The older the inbound link and the more natural it looks to search engines, the more importance it will be given.

Inbound link Checker

As inbound links account for half the optimization process, it is important that you build as many quality inbound links as possible. Search engines see inbound links as a vote for a blog, the more votes a blog receives and the more important the person voting, the better the receiving blog ranks.
If the inbound link is on a keyword, then you are also receiving a higher search engine rank for that keyword.

Use the following tools to analyze which websites are linking to you and on what keyword the link is from.

Click to use Anchor Text Analysis Tool

Click to use Backlink Summary Tool

Submit Your blog to Search Engines and Directories.

Use the following links to Get listed and build inbound links from search engines and directories. DO NOT link back to any of these directories and DO NOT pay for a listing. Only list your site with free ones which are easy to do.

Search Google for directories that you can use to build inbound links "blog directories)

Smorty blog advertising is the most useful tool for building quality inbound links.

www.dmoz.org This is the most important directory in the world to get listed in for a good inbound link.
http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html Submits your URL to all major search engines

Blog URL
The domain name of a blog is also very important. e.g. www.politicalblog.com is very well optimised for the keyphrase political blog, which may be a term many people specifically search for. Your blog will be well rewarded in rankings for this keyphrase.

Subdomains e.g. http://www.politialblog.blogspot.com/ are free and also well optimised however it is showen that the root domain is far better rewarded so it's best to buy a domain name for your blog.

Useful links

http://www.problogger.com Professional blogger writing about his experiences and how to best get the results from blogging that you need.

10 things I wish I had known 6 months ago Lists 10 things she wish she knew about blogging and how to make money.

How to make money from your blog Article about a bloggers experience in making money from his blog.

RSS Feeds Feedburner is the worlds most popular RSS feed service. Place your URL in their system to send your blog to thousands of other websites looking for content.Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

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Advertlets - Bloggers Make Money doing what they love

Introduction

Need your message to go out and reach the right people? Current methods of advertising getting boring? Advertise on a network where you can target the right demographics - and reap the benefits.We’ve got more than a few good reasons tell you why advertising on blogs through Advertlets.com is better:

Some Points For Your Consideration

We Deliver your Audience
Online diaries, better known as blogs, are gaining popularity in the online community. These virtual spaces could very well be your new advertising portal. Unlike traditional media, you are advertising in a personal space—where bloggers and their readers share a connection based on mutual interests and experiences. With Advertlets, you make your advertising message count. Unlike large web portals which attract a large, varied audience - individual blogs usually have an audience that is more focused in terms of gender, age group, idealogy, and location.

Here’s how:

Knock, Knock, Who’s There?
You want to know who you are reaching. Through Advertlets, you get a demographic breakdown of each blog—know what kind of visitors each blog attracts. You view statistics such as gender breakdown, profession, age range, and whether or not visitors are bloggers themselves.

Position Yourself Where They Are
There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a seemingly relevant ad, only to realise that the product or service is only available in another state or country. Ads mean more when they are relevant to the geographical location of the consumer. Advertlets makes sure your ad budget is spent on the people and places that matter.

Know Your Visitors
Advertlets allows you to reach a wide audience without the distribution cost associated with printed and outdoor media. Find out which blog brings you the largest and relevant audience by looking at the traffic generated. See how many people have viewed your ad through our impression/ click tracking facilities.

The Advertlets Experience

• Through Advertlets, you get a demographics breakdown of each blog - this way you know what kind of visitors each blog attracts. You can view statistics such as gender breakdown, profession, age range, and also whether or not visitors are bloggers themselves.
• You can view which country your visitors are coming from (Coming Q3 2007: View by State - eg, Selangor, Pahang, Johor)
• You know which blog brings you the most traffic
• You know what your click to impression ratio is
• You can measure the effectiveness of your campaign through our impression/click tracking facilities
• We will give you the best recommendation on which blogs are suitable for your message to go on
• We can put together a custom campaign for your brand - giving you more exposure than just advertising. Have a sponsored post (sort of like advertorials for blogs - subject to consent from individual bloggers), or even run sponsored polls (customize your own questions!) where you can find out what blog visitors think. Run a contest. Reward visitors who click, or recommend their product to a friend
• You support a system which rewards local micro-content publishers, and benefit from the positive brand association

Sponsored Posts (Blogvertorials)

Are you a new business? Get great instant exposure by inviting bloggers to review your product, service or event! Sponsored blog posts are a great way to get honest feedback on your service, as well as get word of mouth publicity. Pay bloggers to write an in-depth review, give a free sampling, or better yet - both! Here are some scenarios that are likely to benefit from a buzz in the blogosphere through Advertlets Blogvertorials:

• You’re a new restaurant, and you’ll like more people to know about your restaurant and try out your food
• You’re organizing an event/party, and you’ll like to generate some pre-event buzz to encourage people to come
• You have a new product to sell - And you’ll like to promote it further
• You provide services, such as design or decoration, and you’ll like people to know

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How to suggest a site to the Open Directory

The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources. A web directory is something akin to a huge reference library. The directory is hierarchically arranged by subject - from broad to specific. The ODP is maintained by community editors who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. They are our experts, and all submissions are subject to editor evaluation.

We care a great deal about the quality of the ODP. We aren't a search engine and pride ourselves on being highly selective. We don't accept all sites, so please don't take it personally should your site not be accepted. Our goal is to make the directory as useful as possible for our users, not to have the directory include all (or even most) of the sites that could possibly be listed or serve as a promotional tool for the entities listed.

To keep the ODP running smoothly and to assist us in exercising our editorial discretion, we have set up policies for submitting sites for our consideration. We may reject, delete, or edit submissions that violate these policies or that we otherwise believe, in our sole discretion, should not be included in the directory. We may also reject, delete, or block other sites that we believe to be associated with a user who has violated these policies.

You should take a few moments to understand these policies and the steps to submit a site before you begin. Failure to understand and follow these instructions generally will result in the rejection of a submission.

Step One

Determine whether a site is appropriate for submission to the ODP:

• Do not submit mirror sites. Mirror sites are sites that contain identical content, but have altogether different URLs.
• Do not submit URLs that contain only the same or similar content as other sites you may have listed in the directory. Sites with overlapping and repetitive content are not helpful to users of the directory. Multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.
• Do not disguise your submission and submit the same URL more than once.
  Example: http://www.dmoz.org and http://www.dmoz.org/index.html
• Do not submit any site with an address that redirects to another address.
• The Open Directory has a policy against the inclusion of sites with illegal content. Examples of illegal material include child pornography; libel; material that infringes any intellectual property right; and material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence).
• Do not submit sites "under construction." Wait until a site is complete before submitting it. Sites that are incomplete, contain "Under Construction" notices, or contain broken graphics or links aren't good candidates for the directory.
• Submit pornographic sites to the appropriate category under Adult.
• Submit non-English sites to the appropriate category under World.
• Don't submit sites consisting largely of affiliate links.

Step Two

Do a quick search in the directory at dmoz.org (the home of the Open Directory) to be sure your site isn't already listed. This saves everyone time.

Step Three

Identify the single best category for your site. The Open Directory has an enormous array of subjects to choose from. You should submit a site to the single most relevant category. Sites submitted to inappropriate or unrelated categories may be rejected or removed.

Note: Some categories do not have "suggest URL" or "update URL" links. These categories don't accept submissions, so you should find a more specific category for your site.

Step Four

Once you've selected the best category for your site, go directly to that category on dmoz.org and then click "suggest URL." Follow the instructions on the submission form carefully. Descriptions of sites should describe the content of the site concisely and accurately. They should not be promotional in nature. Submitting a promotional description rather than an objective, well written description may significantly delay your site from being listed or prevent your site from being listed at all. Auto-submission software is (and always has been) a violation of this procedure. Sites submitted automatically are flagged and deleted after the submission is accepted, without notification to you. Persistent automatic submission may force us to ban you from the dmoz site, so we can provide resources to real human beings.

Procedure After Your Site is Submitted

An ODP editor will review your submission to determine whether to include it in the directory. Depending on factors such as the volume of submissions to the particular category, it may take several weeks or more before your submission is reviewed. Please only submit a URL to the Open Directory once. Again, multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites. Disguising your submission and submitting the same URL more than once is not permitted.

Updating Your Site

If a site has been accepted for inclusion in the directory but you are dissatisfied with how the site is described or titled, you may go to the category where it is listed, and fill out the "update URL" form. If you are dissatisfied with the category in which your site is listed, you may send an e-mail to an editor for the category explaining your disagreement. Be polite and civil -- threatening or abusive behavior will not be tolerated.

If (but only if) you are dissatisfied with the editor's response, you may then use the "Feedback" link at the top of the page to "appeal" the editor's decision. Be specific concerning your disagreement (including why you believe the editor's response is inadequate). Comments made through the feedback link are reviewed by the ODP staff, who will make the final decision. Please do NOT send correspondence to Netscape, as that will only slow down and complicate the process. We take all feedback seriously and give it our thoughtful consideration. But please remember that we must exercise our discretion and make numerous judgment calls as to how to make the ODP as useful as possible -- no matter what decision we make, we may not always satisfy everyone.

Getting Your Site Into Portals and Search Engines Using ODP Data

If your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites. We make updates of the data available weekly, but each partner has their own update schedule.

Editorial Discretion

Please recognize that making the ODP a useful resource requires us to exercise broad editorial discretion in determining the content and structure of the directory. That discretion extends (but is not limited) to what sites to include, where in the directory sites are placed, whether and when to include more than one link to a site, when deep linking is appropriate, and the content of the title and description of the site. In addition, a site's placement in the directory is subject to change or deletion at any time at our sole discretion. You should not rely on any aspect of a site's inclusion in the directory. Please understand that an editor's exercise of discretion may not always treat all submissions equally. You may not always agree with our choices, but we hope you recognize that we do our best to make fair and reasonable decisions.

The Open Directory team welcomes comments and feedback about the directory generally. Please let us know what you think, and how we can improve the service. Thanks!

Proceed to the Open Directory home at dmoz.org - Start here to find a category to submit to.

http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

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LOOKSMART - Publisher Solutions

How the LookSmart AdCenter Works for YOU

Your LookSmart AdCenter brings control and visibility to your advertising revenue like no other product in the marketplace. See why this breakthrough collaborative platform makes “competition” a thing of the past.

Multidimensional Ad Network – Capitalize on several, diverse sources of advertisers with LookSmart’s innovative and groundbreaking white label ad platform.

Industry Standard Yield-Ranked Optimizing Auction – Optimize Revenue Per Thousand Page Views (RPM) with an auction that always presents the most relevant, highest-yielding advertisements.

Distribution Marketplace – Increase your revenue and meet more demand through your 2nd party distribution partners. Your collaborative partnerships with other publishers and distribution networks allow you to offer more distribution to your advertisers and fulfill your own page inventory through backfill relationships.

Feed Optimization – Maintain ad revenue from your 3rd party feed providers. Grow that revenue by adding 1st party direct relationships and interconnecting your AdCenter with other quality publishers through 2nd party distribution relationships.

Direct Advertiser Partnerships – Ramp up revenue share by dealing directly with your advertisers. Decrease your dependency on your mainstream feed providers over time without risking your established monetization level.

Greater Margin of CPC Revenue – Know your Cost-Per-Clicks (CPCs) - which feeds will give you the best yield - and maximize the ROI of your inventory through direct relationships with advertisers and indirect relationships through other publishers.

PDF view

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SEO DIRECT NEWS

How to Keep Your Best Employees

by Michael Masterson

I have often talked about how important "superstar" employees are to the success of any business. And I have encouraged you to find as many of these rare individuals as you can and groom them to take over critical aspects of your operation.

But once you've found them . . . what do you have to do to keep them?

Glad you asked.

In past messages, I've made the following points:

* Money is not the biggest motivator for most people, but it can't be ignored either. Pay your superstars at least 10% more than market, but don't overpay them in the false belief that doing so will keep them loyal.

* Without being foolhardy, give them authority. Achievement-oriented people enjoy freedom, power, prestige, and a good challenge. Give them enough rope to hang themselves but not so much that they can hang you too.

* Mix the positive and the negative. Praise your good people, yes. And praise them publicly when it's appropriate. But don't do so programmatically. And don't be afraid to criticize them either.

Most of the best leaders I know violate all of the prescribed rules about treating people. They are demanding, insensitive, critical, and sometimes overbearing. They get away with it because they are also spirited, engaging, charismatic, and determined. Superstars don't need to be coddled, manipulated, or managed. They need a challenge -- and they are willing to accept criticism for their handling of it so long as the criticism is fair.

* Most importantly, give your best people good work to do and a lot of it. The ultimate reward for a superstar is the pleasure he gets from doing a good job. Make his work interesting, complex, and difficult -- and he will stick with it.

I don't think it's necessary to make partners out of your superstars, but it sometimes helps. You have to be cautious here. My tendency in the past was to offer equity too soon, and I've often regretted doing so. The last thing you need is a partner who is no more than another pretty-good employee.

Start by giving phantom shares or profit deals. Then, as the relationship matures and your superstar brings more to the table (including loyalty and potential), add equity -- but a little at a time.

http://www.seodirect.net/tipsNov.html

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Get LINKS from 5,000 quality websites for FREE!

TNX Affiliate Program
We are aware of main shortcomings of affiliate programs that exist on the Internet:

- Confusing rules that make it unlikely to receive your earnings by imposing various restrictions, such as the minimum amount of payment, restrictions on the sites' subjects, etc.

- The risk to be banned for a slightest violation of the confusing rules. For example, for an incorrect, in the administration's view, placement of the ad block. In reality the administration might be just trying to find a way not to pay the partner.

- Requirement to have special ref. links that make it difficult to attract partners from sites, blogs and forums.

- Restriction of the amount paid for each attracted partner.

- Low commissions. Usually partner programs share only 5-20% of the system's commission. Can you really call this equal partnership?

- Difficulties with use/withdrawal of the accumulated commission.

We have 7 years of experience in development of online partner programs, and tried to create an ideal partner program - a program that is free from the shortcomings that are common for typical partner programs.

Forget about the so called ref-links so hated by many! New technologies made them optional (although we also use them, for example, to attract partners through mailing lists or ICQ). Forget about minimal payments - we don't have such thing in our partner program!

The purpose of any partner program is to attract new participants and advertisers to the system. When you bring a new webmaster to the system, you will receive 13.3% of all "TNX-points", he/she will earn in the future (a reward for referring an advertiser is also available). This amounts to almost half of the system's comission! Interest is paid for the lifetime.

Example: When you refer a webmaster to TNX and advertiser pays 100 TNX-Points for a link on your referral's website, your referral (webmaster) gets 75 points and you get 10 points which is 13.3% of his income.

The rules are absolutely simple - no bans, no possible overcharges, no restrictions.

What can a partner do with earned "TNX-points" ? There are several options:

1. Use them to advertise his or her own websites to improve traffic and search engine rating.

2. Accumulate "TNX-points" on the account and observe how they grow in value as the system becomes more efficient due to increasing number of participating websites.

3. Sell "TNX-points" to the system, or send them to another participant of the TNX network, who will use it to promote his projects. Each participant has the right to transfer its "TNX-points" to any other participant (without comission) and set his own price.You will find how the referral program works in the user interface.

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Affiliate Reseller Program - FREE Registration

Would you like to make $500 or even $1,000 or more every month from selling our high impulse spy and security products? Our affiliate program will allow you to do this. We have some affiliates making $3,000+ per month selling our products. Its easy, sell a $600 gps system and automatically make between $60 & $120!!. You promote the products and we do everything else. No experience, no problem - we will help you. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain because the program is FREE.

If you would like to earn between 10% and 20% on sales made through a link to us from your site, it's as easy as filling out a simple form, setting up the link and hopefully sitting back to watch the sales come in. Use BANNERS, TEXT, or a LANDING PAGE to generate sales.

program features:

* 10% of all sales that are generated from your link to start

* Sale more and make more - earn between 10% and 20% plus monthly bonuses

* Instant notification by email of a sale through your account
* FREE sign-up
* Password protected page to check sales and update account info
* Link to specific sections of the site or to our home page
* Automatic sales reports from your account
* Automatic code and banner generation for your website
* Custom Affiliate site with co-branding
* Full technical support
* 90 day active cookie
* Receive payments via Paypal.
* Payments made by the 2nd week of the following month.

program requirements:

* You must place a link on your site to generate affiliate sales
* Spamming to your is not permitted under any circumstance
* No adult porn sites are allowed
* You may use our screenshots but they must be stored on your server

* You may use our technical information to better explain the product details but please in paraphrased form

* Payments are made monthly via PayPal following the second affiliate generated sale within the same 12 month period.

* Once you are accepted into our program, you'll be able to log into your account and receive your reports. Here you can see how much you've earned. There are no invoices to send and no data to track - all payments are taken care of by SpyGear4U.com. For those affiliates earning over $600 in a year, 1099's will be issued for IRS Tax reporting purposes.

* You may not frame our site or claim it (or copy it) to be any other than spygear4u.com

how it works:

It's pretty simple. We provide you with pre-made banners and text that are already pre-coded (see below) - just replace affiliateid with your actual id in the banner code. You may also request custom banners be made to match your site. By adding your unique affiliate code to the end of each link, you will receive 10% of sales that are generated through your site. Payments are made by the 2nd week of the following month via Paypal and you are notified by email of each order that is processed. Starting out you will receive 10% commission but the more you generate in sales the more you will make in commission. After 5 total sales, you will earn 12%, after 10 total sales you will earn 15% and after 20 total sales you will earn 20% commission. The sales are cumulative within one calendar year. Once you reach 20% you stay there for life! - no starting over. Our new bonus program will also allow you to make even more money. You will be emailed at the 1st of every month about the monthly quota for total sales and or product specific sales. For example, during the month a quota may be to sell 2 SLIMTRAK GPS units and receive an extra bonus of $35.00 in addition to your commission check!. No other affiliate program offers these incentives!. Meeting the sales quota you would make as much as $354.60 for doing nothing!!. Our INCENTIVE AFFILIATE program is a win-win for everyone!.

Testimonials:

"The SpyGear4u.com Affiliate Program is our top performing affiliate relationship month after month. In the past, we participated in several other spy equipment affiliate programs and SpyGear4u.com has outperformed them all. Now we participate exclusively in the SpyGear4u affiliate program. They carry an extensive catalog of quality, affordable spy gear and provide excellent service to their clientel. The bottom line is - their product SELL, which creates a steady revenue stream for affiliates."

eInvestigator.com

http://www.einvestigator.com

"SpyGear4U products sell very well and they compliment by investigation business. I get many repeat customers. The SPY GEAR team always pays on time via paypal and if there is a problem they are quick to resolve it. Their range of products gives us the ability to increase our daily affiliate sales. Thank You Spy Gear".

FloridaInvestigators.com - West Palm Beach, FL

LEGAL STATUS OF PRODUCTS: It is the responsibility of the Buyer (not the distributor, SPYGEAR4U.com), to ascertain and obey all applicable local, state and federal laws in regard to possession and use of any items listed on this web site. Consult an attorney or law enforcement professional, regarding local, state and federal laws before ordering. By placing an order, the Buyer represents that he/she is of legal age and that the products will be used only in a lawful manner. When applicable, equipment sold may be subject to Public Law 90-351, Title 111 18 U.S.C., Section 2511. IT IS THE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE BUYER TO CONSULT LEGAL COUNSEL FOR THE INTERPRETATION OF ANY LAWS APPLICABLE TO THE AREA OF INTENDED USE OF THESE PRODUCTS.

what to do:

* The first thing to do is sign up for the affiliate program so you have your own unique code that allows us to track your commission.

* If setting up your own links to our main site page then Add your affiliate code at the end of each link, so you have something like this: http://www.spygear4u.com/index.asp?PARTNER=affiliateid

* If using our links - The banners and text links below are already manually coded - just replace affiliateid with your affiliate id

* If you would like to link to specific products then use the following code at the end of the product URL:

&PARTNER=affiliateid

Make sure you replace affiliateid with your actual affiliate id

Example: http://www.spygear4u.com/proddetail.asp?prod=SG-GEM01&PARTNER=affiliateid

You may also login to your account and have the system auto generate banners with your affiliate code - just copy and paste to your website!

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Articel by: http://widgetbucks.blogspot.com

Tip of the Day: PPC + CPM = Total Impressions

Over the last couple of weeks, we've responded to a number of publishers asking about impressions that are apparently uncounted or underrepresented. As we've dug more deeply into these inquiries and communicated with these publishers, we've discovered the issue is largely due to the fact that only PPC (pay-per-click) impressions are shown on the MyWidgets page’s default (“Widgets”) view. To get a full picture of total impressions, you will need to also look at the “CPM Ad” tab. The Widgets tab displays PPC impressions, while the CPM Ads tab shows CPM impressions. Click on the screenshot at right to see examples of the two tabs.

Starting mid next week, we've decided to improve this display by showing a roll-up of Widget/PPC and CPM impressions and revenue to complement the existing tabbed information. Additionally, impressions, revenue and other related info will be totaled at the bottom of each each tabbed page. This screenshot gives an early sneak peek of what publishers can expect to see on their MyWidgets pages when this rolls out (the red boxes show the affected areas). NOTE: the figures displayed are for mock-up purposes only.

Here is a summary of the upcoming MyWidget page updates:

• A "roll-up" view of Widget/PPC and CPM impressions and revenue, including their pie chart equivalents
• Column totals for all relevant columns in the Widgets and CPM tab views
• The default date range upon login will be set to "This Month." This eliminates the need for publishers to adjust the date range during each visit, while still giving flexibility to manually select dates.
• A "notes" feature will be added (along with a corresponding entry field in the New/Edit Widget pages). For each widget, we are providing publishers with the ability to add internal notes that won't appear on the widget itself. For instance, a publisher can note a particular ad position (i.e. "right sidebar above About Me") or any info on recent adjustments (i.e. "changed to blue 1/28/07") in order to better keep track of their changes. Site visitors will still see the main widget "Name" assigned by the publisher.

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