We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Microsoft has launched the Adcenter Affiliate Program where they will pay you for new live advertising adcenter signups. The affiliate program seems to be a bit unfocused, it never states the payout, and the admin area is quite sparse. To be honest, when I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago I thought it was a joke, this affiliate program doesn’t seem to have much resources behind it.

MSN tries to get you to promote Windows Live Toolbar and Windows Live OneCare but these payout .50 for every download by customers in the US only. Forget about these and go for the gold, the AdCenter affiliate program at Microsoftaffiliates.net.

The comission rate is not listed, but I have been earning $35 per signup. Conversions are awesome, over 50% for me!

Sign in to http://www.microsoftaffiliates.net/ with your Windows Live ID or Passport account (throws a security warning screen for me in Firefox). The affiliate manager is Jessica Lee at 727-324-0185 who is really nice and answered a few questions about the program for me. The area code is 727 which is in Florida, the opposite end of the country from Redmond Washington where Microsoft is based. Is MS distancing themselves from this live affiliate program? You will need to send in a unique w-9 form.

my current adcenter December stats

adCenter is the advertising platform that enables businesses to create, manage and optimize search marketing campaigns to targeted buyers made up of 99 million search users on the MSN and Live Search Network. Search marketing is one of the most cost-effective and efficient marketing vehicles available to help small and mid-sized companies grow their business.

I just realized that MSN has unique capitalization of their advertising network. Note the lowercase A and uppercase C in adCenter. Very web 2.0 of you Microsoft, way to jump on the new internet trend that started in 2005!

To signup go to http://www.microsoftaffiliates.net/

*note you need to fax your W-9 to the microsoft affiliate manager thinkpartnership.com Think Partnership, Inc. Kowabunga! Division

fax to 313.447.2398

All you search engine optimizers and affiliate markers should use this coupon code for shopzilla to get a $20 signup bonus and $20 credit for adding content to your site. This is a total of $40 credit for Shopzilla.com publishers.
I have tried Shopzilla and the CTR is good, but actual revenue generated is a little low. Try becoming a shopzilla publisher and add ecommerce contextual ad listings to your website.

http://publisher.shopzilla.com/partner_id/40/

Drive Saver is not only the best hard drive recovery service, they also have a great affiliate program. Look at the sales material and promotional goodies they mailed me after applying to be an affiliate. They have a great affiliate manager who is very knowledgeable will actually talk with you on the phone!

The only downside to being a Drive Saver affiliate is there is no regular affiliate link, only a promotion code. Checkout DriveSavers and see how well they take care of affiliates and tell them DS19370 sent you.

 Homeagain.com created a brilliant affiliate store that seamlessly tricks users into buying from them. Home Again provides pet rescue and pet adoption services and they created a separate site full of affiliate programs and are asking users to click through to their site before making purchases. A portion of Home Again’s affiliate profits will be donated to the pet rescue service.

This is an amazing affiliate marketing strategy, similar to thehungersite.com where a charitable organization creates incentives to click on banners or purchase products for the good of the earth. This appeals to our inner humanist and generates a lot of sales for the charity. I love charities and contribute to many causes including arthritis, but every charity has to make money to cover expenses, pay employees (no one works for free), rent, etc.

Look at the affiliate marketing playbook used by charity organizations and see how they make sales naturally and effortlessly get site visitors to click their affiliate links.

The email newsletter from bringpetshome.com:

An estimated 8-12 million animals are taken in by shelters each year in the US. Providing care for these animals—including food, shelter and medical treatment—costs money, for which many shelters rely solely on donations. Shelters do not have the funds to take care of every pet that comes through their doors. Unfortunately millions of pets are euthanized each year.

BRING PETS HOME is a not-for-profit organization that raises money for animal shelters across the country. Our mission is to support shelters’ tireless efforts to provide care for pets in need—until they find loving homes or are reunited with their original owners.

100% of money raised through your purchases will go directly to provide food, shelter and medical treatment to pets in need. All operating costs of BRING PETS HOME are covered by corporate donations.

How Does The Program Work?

A portion of every purchase will be distributed by BRING PETS HOME to animal shelters across the country to help save pets’ lives and help them find loving homes. Simply click on a store link and start shopping. There is no extra cost to you.

Register – Register and select a specific animal shelter to benefit from your purchases. Or, if you use our site without registering, 100% of the donations raised through your purchases will be distributed by BRING PETS HOME to animal shelters in need across the country.
Shop – Shop at our participating online stores.
Give – A portion of every purchase aids shelters across the country-helping to save pets’ lives and adopt them into loving homes. 100% of the money raised through your purchases will go directly to care for pets in need.
Below are just a few of the many online stores where you can shop.
For a list of all of our participating online stores, click here!

Kudos to bringpetshome.com for creating a great example of an affiliate program for charitable causes. This site cannot fail.

Taking a page from the Auction Ads Playbook, Bidvertiser.com has created ads displaying Ebay auction listings. The new Bidvertiser ads actually look quite good, although one drawback is there seems to be no way for publishers to easily display the ad.

From their email to me:

Drive buyers to your eBay Listings using BidVertiser!

BidVertiser now allows you to drive buyers and increase sales by
placing an ad for any of your eBay Items on thousands of relevant websites.
Your ad will include a description and an image of your item, pricing
and time left till auction closes. Your ebay ad will be created automatically,
you only need to choose your desired Item

And best of all – we now offer you $20 in Free Affiliate Clicks!

For a preview of an eBay ad click below:
http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/BidVertiser/ bdv_ebay_preview.dbm

To enjoy this free credit, simply login, create your eBay ad and
activate your account. We will immediately credit your account with $20 and
start displaying your eBay affiliate ad.

Bidvertiser looks like an interesting option for monetizing blogs and websites. I tried them on this SEO blog and am averaging .20 per click.

I was searching for information about why my AuctionAds were performing so poorly, and I came upon another ad network offering from Media Whiz, ShoppingAds. Shopping Ads uses the same basic premise as the Auction Ads network by displaying relevant ads from aggregators. The big difference is that while AuctionAds is CPA (pays per sale) and relies solely on the Ebay affiliate program, while ShoppingAds is PPC (pay per click) and uses multiple sources for the ads, similar to TTZmedia.

Use your existing auctionads login
shoppingads.com invitation code: betaluck! (note you must use the exclamation point)

Login to ShoppingAds here instantly

view the brand new ad banners from ShoppingAds

One nice thing about this ad code is that it does not contain hidden text or ridiculous legal requirements like some other monetization opportunities.

I think this has much more potential than other blog monetization schemes, and am mildly hopeful this will work. I hope Media Whiz is an honest company and records all clicks using fair and balanced recordkeeping.

Tip courtesy of the make money at home guy

There’s been a lot of talk about the WidgetBucks ad network so I thought I would signup and try it out. I believe that every affiliate program or advertising network should be tested to see if it works.

So I signed up with WidgetBucks.com and I have to say the design impressed me. In a Web 2.0 world of soft gradients, rounded corners, pastels and soft deopshadows their website is quite unique and punches your eyes out with hard edges, bold colors and strong type. It could almost be a hunting site, and if you squint your eyes while looking at the Widget homepage you can see camouflage and bullet holes (note I have a very large monitor with a lot of horizontal empty space, if you run your monitor at 1024×768px you likely won’t be able to see the army theme).

I wonder how many webmasters and blog publishers will make a killing from Widget Bucks ad payouts? They claim up to $2 per thousand impressions using pay per click ads from these sources:

* shopping.com
* wal-mart.com
* amazon.com
* target.com
* bestbuy.com
* ebay.com
* circuitcity.com
* and more

Below you can see a WidgetBucks ad unit:

There are Many bloggers are talking about Widget Bucks including an interesting post by Shoemoney who notes the draconian legal statements in the signup page:

[you cannot share] click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to by Mpire;
Client agrees that Mpire may use Client’s name and logo in presentations, marketing materials, press materials, customer lists, financial reports and Web site listings of customers and therefore grants Mpire a limited license to use Client’s logo in accordance with the foregoing.
Back-links placed by Mpire in the HTML code must not be removed.

Here is a plain text version of the HTML code that WidgetBucks autogenerated:
<!– START CUSTOM WIDGETBUCKS CODE –><script src="http://www.widgetbucks.com/script/widgetMagic.js" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="container_3DXrqR0cN8CLCUgg" class="wbtw468×60"><a href="http://www.widgetbucks.com" target="_blank">WidgetBucks – Trend Watch – WidgetBucks.com</a></div><script type="text/javascript">writeWBStyles("www.widgetbucks.com");setTimeout(function(){var day = "" + new Date().getMonth() + new Date().getDate() + new Date().getYear();var widget = new mpireWidget("http://www.widgetbucks.com/widgets/wbtw468×60.swf?uid=3DXrqR0cN8CLCUgg&apiURL=http://www.widgetbucks.com&day="+day,"3DXrqR0cN8CLCUgg");widget.write("container_3DXrqR0cN8CLCUgg");},Math.floor((Math.random() * 150) – (-(Math.random() * 150))) – (-200))</script><!– END CUSTOM WIDGETBUCKS CODE –>

It does not have hidden text links, unlike some other shady ad networks.

Since Widget Bucks is so paranoid about allowing us to post earnings statistics, you will only know if this is a good program if it becomes widely adopted. People have complained of slow loading times. An anchor on my site is completely unacceptable, I would rather have an ad network that paid less but seamlessly integrated into my site.

BOTW is great. I had an existing affiliate account with them that paid me 25% per signup, and then I read that Shoemoney readers could get 30% by using the coupon code shoemoney30. I logged into my BOTW account, entered the code and voila, my payouts increased to 30% instantly!

Most affiliate programs do not let you add coupons after you signup, so this is a huge compliment for the BOTW guys.

They also have generous and frequent payouts. Here is a caption from an email they sent me:

PAYMENT INFORMATION

We will credit your Paypal account within 15 days of the end of every
calendar month that your earnings amount to $50 or more. Please sign
into your BOTW account to specify check information if you would like to
be paid via Check.

Also to Shoemoney and others who create links using a metarefresh, there is a much simpler way to do this using your .htaccess file.

in the .htaccess file create this line:
Redirect 301 /m/botw http://www.botw.com

Then you can have a link like this: http://www.netpaths.net/m/botw and you will never loose your affiliate commissions if they are using a feed reader or someone syndicates your content. Also, if the company was ever to change their affiliate link code, or changed programs (such as from Commission Junction to LinkShare) you could simply update your .htaccess file and all the existing links would still work.

Even better is the $10,000.00 cash giveaway Best of the Web is giving out to all users. Just start submitting links to the BOTW directory and you have a chance at winning 10 grand. This is before taxes of course, and it is only valid for US residents.

You had better get on the BOTW bandwagon like these guys before it’s too late to get your greasy cabbage collectors on the 10K.

The secret is out: having successful e-bay auctions begins with where you end, and the magic hour is eight o’clock.

• Buyers often outbid the “Buy it now” price. For popular eBay auctions 45 to 50 percent of buyers exceeded the “buy it now” price, artificially raising the price of these goods.
• The percentage of daily bids is highest at 8pm. The percentage of closing auctions is also highest at 8pm. The study states that this may be counterproductive since it creates greater competition for bidders attention at a fixed time. So maximize your bid chances and set your auctions to close at 8 in the evening!
• Buyers seem to favor auctions with more bidders. No one wants to feel like they are bidding on unpopular/unwanted merchandise.
• comparison of music CD auctions with equal price + shipping costs, revealed that low price, high shipping cost auctions attracted more bids, more bidders, and 25 percent more money. Few people take the time to research how much shipping costs are, and sellers mercilessly use this to their advantage by padding shipping prices.
• Secret reserves turn off buyers and drastically lower sales.
• eBay attracted almost 60 percent more bidders and 30 percent higher prices than the same items on Yahoo Auctions. This is no surprise – eBay is the Microsoft Windows of auctions.

Researching the psyche of compulsive shoppers gives interesting results. This eBay study is taken from UC Berkeley and also discussed in Tech Crunch.

Looking for an eBay affiliate program? Try AuctionAds to display live eBay auctions on your website.

As Vinny Lingham says, Commission Junction now has an external advisory board. I have been using the CJ affiliate program and am generally pleased with it.

Here are my top requests:

• allow us to have affiliate links for cj.com – why are you so stingy that you won’t give your thousands of existing affiliates incentive to link to you?
• get some AJAX into your user interface. A million popup windows are totally unnecessary with slick javascript navitation
• make the data feed listings clearer and simpler to use. It would be nice if it was mandatory for all companies
• back to your user interface, some features are just too obscure. Smartlinks? I gave up trying to understand how to make these work.

The full members of the new Commission Junction board are:

Adam Viener, Imwave, Inc.
Connie Berg, FlamingoWorld.com / iShopDaily.com
Craig Cassata, MrRebates.com
Dan Murray, Ravenwood Marketing
David M. Lewis, 77Blue
Eva Klein, FatWallet
Jennifer Nissenberg, Upromise
Jeremy Palmer, QuitYourDayJob.com
Michael Coley, Amazing-Bargains.com
Paul Nichols, Ebates.com
Scott Jangro, MechMedia, Inc.
Scott Kluth, CouponCabin.com
Steve Schaffer, Vertive, Inc
Vinny Lingham, Clicks2Customers.com

If you need to generate Commission Junction links use this CJ link generator.

Help us CJ advisory board, you’re our only hope.