Shawn Collins' Blog

Affiliate marketing and other stuff from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Archives for January 2006

The State of Affiliate Marketing: Internet Retailer

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Internet Retailer has published some figures from my AffStat 2006 Report…

Affiliate marketing—using one site to drive traffic to another site—is becoming more complex, to judge by consultant Shawn Collins’ annual survey of marketers who use affiliates.

His latest report—AffStat 2006—shows an increase in the number of affiliates in the mid range—23% of this year’s respondents report 5,001-10,000 affiliates vs. 13% a year ago, yet 18% report they have too many affiliates to manage effectively.

A year ago, 26% of respondents had 5,000 or more affiliates; this year, it’s 29%. A year ago, 16% of respondents had 2,001 to 5,000 affiliates; today it’s 23%.

Another interesting bit of information from the survey: nearly two-thirds of in-house affiliate managers earn $40,000 to $80,000 a year.

Ask Shawn Collins: Deadbeat Merchants That Don’t Pay Commissions

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Q: One of my merchants, which I sold over $6,000 of products, ignores my e-mails about paying my commissions. They owe me about over $1,400 of commissions. What recourse do I have toward this situation? Any bright idea or experience you may have yourself encounter which could help me?

Shawn CollinsA: One thing you should do, if you haven’t done so already, is to review the affiliate agreement for this affiliate program. Check whether the manner in which you promoted the affiliate program is forbidden in their agreement.

For instance, many affiliate programs forbid affiliates bidding on their company name in pay per click search engines. If you violated one of the aspects of the agreement, then you are going to have a tough time getting those commissions, as the agreement may well state that such activity results in forfeited commissions.

Assuming you abided by all of their rules, try the following.

If the affiliate program in question is part of an affiliate network, my first suggestion would be to contact the network and share your story with them. Check whether they have some sort of arbitration procedure in place for cases like yours.

In the event the affiliate program is an independent program, do some research and find out the name and contact information for the CEO. Don’t just settle for e-mail – trying reaching them via snail mail and or phone with your story.

If this does not provide any resolution, consider bringing the issue to a local attorney. Ask them what their rates would be to take action against the company. It may be effective for them to send a letter on their letterhead to the merchant.

However, given the total outstanding balance is $1,400, you may find that a good portion of the outstanding commission is vaporized in legal fees. Bear in mind, there is no guarantee that they lawyer will get a positive result for you, but they can better determine this, since I don’t have all of the facts and IANAL (I am not a lawyer).

I’ve come across an “affiliate collection agency,” but I wouldn’t personally recommend this avenue. They ask for a 50/50 split of outstanding commission payments, and claim 100% success, but there is nothing to back up that claim.

Further, I contacted them to get more information, and requested an NDA before handing over my personal, sensitive information. They didn’t have an NDA, which is a big, red flag. Stay away from this sort of service.

Looking to the future, I’d encourage you to perform due diligence on any affiliate programs you promote. It may sound like a hassle to do five minutes of research on any affiliate program you want to join, but it’s a lot better than driving yourself crazy trying to collect commissions from them later on.

ATHENA, Affiliates Had No Idea How Much They’d Need Her

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LinkShare recently sent out an update regarding the ATHENA registration system. ATHENA, which launched in March 2005, is about to institute some improvements to the system based on feedback from affiliate marketers.

Below are the improvements being made to ATHENA per the announcement from LinkShare:

Legal Name based on Entity Type
We have changed the way we collect the Legal Name. It is now based on the chosen entity type. So if you choose an entity type of Individual or Sole Proprietorship then the Legal Name will now be collected in two fields – First Name and Last Name. If however, you choose an entity type such as an LLC, Corporation, LLP, Partnership, Non-Profit, Other, or Foreign then the Legal Name will continue to be a Single Field for the Legal Name. We request that all affiliates check their profile to ensure their Legal Name is recorded correctly. If your Legal Name is not correct, please update your profile with the appropriate information.

Tax Forms
The various tax forms have been updated to ensure that your information is appropriately captured and the tax forms we create for you are accurate.

  • W-9
    Based on the needs of Affiliates that are American Citizens residing outside the United States of America, we have updated the W-9 forms to be accessible to affiliates that have a Legal Entity Country other than the United States of America.

  • W-8 BEN, W-8 ECI, W-8 EXP, and W-8 IMY
    We have updated these forms and the information these forms require. If you are an Affiliate that does not reside in the United States and have used one of these forms, please check and ensure that all the required fields are populated. Please note that the failure to do so could result in actions by IRS, require us to withhold further payment of commissions and/or lead to termination of your continued participations in the network.

Channel Type Management
With the ATHENA registration system we established a new concept called the “Channel”, and we required you to select the channel types that you wanted to use. We have now enhanced this feature to allow you to manage your channel types. With the new functionality you can Add/Delete channel types as needed.

In other LinkShare news, they recently held their LinkShare Partnership Summit 2006 in San Francisco. Check out the Revenue Magazine blog for coverage on the event.

Find Out the AdSense Code in Joel Comm’s 8-part Telecourse Series

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Joel “Dr. AdSense” Comm is at it again with another product for the AdSense hungry public. He’s going to run an AdSense telecourse series, “The AdSense Code”.

adsense-code.jpgRetailing for $497, this 8-part series will feature live interviews with seven of the Internet’s leading marketers and experts, including:

  • Brad Fallon
  • Alex Mandossian
  • Tim Carter
  • Craig Perrine
  • Mark Widawer
  • Christopher Knight
  • Yours Truly

This offer will close on February 2nd – more details at http://www.theadsensecode.com/

Badware Under Seige by Google, Sun Microsystems and Others

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Affiliates are rejoicing over a new group, the Stop Badware Coalition, whose stated goal is to “spotlight companies that make millions of dollars by tricking Web users into putting spyware, adware or other deceptive software on their machines.”

This war against badware is being financially backed by Google, as well as computer makers Lenovo Group and Sun Microsystems. The effort is organized by Internet researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and the Oxford Internet Institute.

“This is mostly a highlighting and warning and education project,” said Vint Cerf, an Internet who is currently the chief Internet evangelist at Google. Cerf is also on the advisory board of the Stop Badware Coalition.

Wayne Porter, Senior Director of Greynet Research at FaceTime Security Labs, says he likes the concept so far in his blog.

Porter is a renowned anti-badware crusader whose projects and work include the popular SpywareGuide, X-RayPC Process Analyzer and working with the Federal Trade Commission to help shape spyware policy as well as the co-creation of two patent-pending technologies to contain unwanted software on corporate networks.

Affiliates are excited at the prospect of these big players banding together to eradicate badware, as it is widely considered to be the source for filched affiliate commissions.

More information at http://news.yahoo.com/

Where in the World are the Affiliate Managers?

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Successful Affiliate Marketing for MerchantsI was just reading through the monthly royalty statement for my book, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants, and thought it was interesting to see where the book is being purchased.

While the book came out in April 2001, and is admittedly outdated in a handful of areas, it’s still selling steadily

I’m wondering why nobody else has bothered to write another book (not an e-book, but a physical book) for affiliate managers in the past half decade? Lots of issues have emerged since the publication of my book, such as adware, new networks, maturation in data feeds, CAN-SPAM, etc.

Anyhow, the report breaks out the sales as follows (through 12/31/05):

  • US Regular Sales – 84%
  • Canada – 2%
  • Export – 12%
  • All Other – 2%

If this is any indicator, the bulk of affiliate managers reside in the U.S. The report doesn’t break out the countries further, and I’m not sure what constitutes “All Other”.

Ari Schwartz to FTC: Go Get 180solutions

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There’s an interesting story on CNET about 180solutions and the FTC. After efforts for online marketing to self police, it looks like the Feds are going to have to take care of things…

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based public advocacy group, filed a pair of complaints with the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. The complaints charge 180solutions and free Web hosting provider CJB.net with engaging in unfair and deceptive business practices.

180Solutions deliberately and repeatedly duped Internet users into downloading intrusive advertising software, according to a Center for Democracy and Technology complaint (download PDF). The company continued these practices even after it pledged to better itself and after receiving warnings from spyware experts and privacy advocates, the group said.

“180solutions has continually made assertions that they have improved or cleaned up their services. CDT has found those assertions to be untrue at best,” Ari Schwartz, deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a press conference call on Monday.

Continued at CNET News.com

Even My Baby Girl Knows It’s Lame to be a Copycat

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I was watching an episode of Maggie and the Ferocious Beast with my youngest daughter, Kerrigan, recently. It was an episode where one of the characters would repeat whatever anybody else said.

This character was labeled a copycat by the others. Ever since then, whenever somebody does something annoying or naughty, little Kerrigan calls them a copycat.

As I was doing a routine check of which sites were copying my content and/or images this morning, I came across CYMedia Group. They went for the trifecta – appropriating my copy, images, and bandwidth (linking to the images on my server).

While it’s flattering that somebody think’s my consulting site copy is worth copying, it’s downright galling that they would reprint my list of services offered verbatim.

Here is a screen shot of the Outsourced Affiliate Program Management services provided by CYMedia Group at http://www.cymediagroup.com/internetmarketing/18.html this morning:

https://i0.wp.com/www.affiliatetip.com/images/thief_before_thumb.jpg?resize=250%2C187
click to enlarge

Since they were linking to images on my server, I updated the files to let them know… you got served!

https://i0.wp.com/www.affiliatetip.com/images/thief_after_thumb.jpg?resize=250%2C187
click to enlarge

Kerrigan is only two and she knows it’s not cool to be a copycat. Why didn’t these guys know?

Ask Shawn Collins: Google Has Penalized My Affiliate Site

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Q: My website is positioned extremely well in every search engine except Google. Google appears to have penalized it heavily because there are too many outbound affiliate links. Apart from reducing the number of outbound links do you have any other advice to rectify this? There is a lot of high quality original content on the site which should also help. Or should I simply register a new domain name and start from scratch?

Shawn CollinsA: Back in the middle of 2005, there was news that Google was penalizing what they considered to be a thin affiliate.

So it’s possible that Google took a dislike to your site for this reason. Or maybe they delisted you due to extensive link trading, duplicate content, or any number of reasons.

Since I have no way of knowing the reason that your fell out of favor with Google, I can’t really give advice on getting the current site back into Google’s good graces.

If you truly have high quality, original content, and not some auto-generated stuff, I think it might be worth your while to use a content management program to put that content up as a new site, and then see if you can get back into Google.

Mobsters Take Down Million Dollar Homepage with Dos Attack?

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I was just checking my spam folder and came across a message from Alex Tew of Million Dollar Homepage fame. He’s the guy that sold pixels on his site and raised $1,037,100 for college in less than five months.

Anyhow, it seems the site was taken down for six days by a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack “by hackers who tried to extort $50,000” from Tew.

Could it be a digital mafia trying to shake down this crafty and innovative marketer, or another clever attention grab?