I have had several email conversations and several phone conversations lately as to why there seems to be an exodus of merchants in the affiliate marketing world. In the past few months, Vermont Country Store, Fun to Collect and several other merchants who have been in the affiliate marketing arena for some time have exited.
Some of these merchants have cited trademark abuse and their inability to control it as a reason for leaving affiliate marketing. I see this as a frightening trend that will only get worse unless this problem is brought under control.

Here is the problem as I see it. A merchant enters the space with a new affiliate program and the management of the program is placed in the lap of someone in the marketing department. This person is told to create banners, text links and other similar materials for affiliates to place on their web sites. Meanwhile, they are auto-approving affiliates because it takes too long to manually approve them and those who do nothing but bid on the merchant’s domain name show up, fleece the merchant out of thousands of dollars and the merchant never even knows what hit them. All they know is that they have this pool of affiliates now standing between them and a customer who was looking for them by name. They find one affiliate who is doing this, remove them and there are 10 more in line with their Adwords account cocked and ready to do the very same thing.

Meanwhile, the merchant might or might not have gotten a brief education on the perils of trademark abuse from the network when they signed up for their affiliate program. The merchant certainly did not enter the affiliate marketing space knowing that they would have to dedicate someone to police their affiliates. Furthermore, they probably did not bother to set terms forbidding this practice when they set up their affiliate program. Why did they not do this? Because they had no clue that it was necessary.
The bottom line is that we have networks making huge stacks of money from this valueless proposition to the merchant and affiliates who know better, but just can’t seem to stop because the money is so good. The networks and the offending affiliates are the very first people in line to blame the merchant for not disallowing the practice. My question is how did the merchant know this would be such a large problem? They signed up to have affiliates promote their products and/or services, not to have affiliates bidding on their domain name and tricking the customer in to clicking an ad to get to the merchant’s web site. It is truly a mess.

Are affiliate managers and OPMs to blame? Maybe so. If they did not take the time to educate their clients about this abuse, then they are indeed at least partially to blame. Those affiliate managers who have clients who implicitly disallow trademark bidding yet still allow it are criminal in my opinion. Most affiliate managers and OPMs seem pretty responsible, but there are a few out there that blatantly disregard the will of their client in the name of a dollar. This will stop soon enough, when their clients realize they they are being fleeced and file huge law suits against the rogue managers.

Are the networks to blame? Let’s follow the money on that one. If a network has 2000 merchant clients and 1500 of them are being abused by affiliates poaching their domain name, who is making the real money here? Yep, the networks are making huge amounts of money from this activity.

Is auto-approve to blame? In a word….YES! If an affiliate can join an affiliate program with nobody performing any vetting at all of that affiliate and their operation, auto-approve only fuels the fire. It has been my contention for some time that auto-approve is to blame for much of the abuse in the affiliate marketing industry today.

In conclusion, there is no simple answer to this problem. Merchants need to be educated. Networks need to take at least some steps to alert new merchants of the potential of abuse. Granted, if a merchant is brand new, has no traffic and an Alexa rating of 4,387,987 then their domain name will likely not be a big payday for a trademark poacher. But merchants who already have an existing base of customers and traffic need to be educated and I say that it is the network’s responsibility to do that. They are the one who profits from every single sale. They are the one who have the fiduciary duty to both the merchant and the affiliates.

By the way, kudos to the Avantlink network for recognizing this problem and addressing it in their generic affiliate terms. If the others would follow suit, the affiliate marketing industry would be a healthier place to do business for everyone.

I just ran across an article that I found very interesting. It first off says that SPAM is now 30 years old this month. I was not aware that SPAm has ben a problem for that long.
Another aspect of the article was a complete transcript of the very first spam message, along with the replies it generated. The person who sent the very first SPAM was named Gary Thuerk. Thuerk worked for the old Digital Equipment Corporation. He sent a sales-related email to 393 users on Arpanet, a U.S. government computer network and predecessor of today’s Internet (before Al Gore invented it…HaHa)
As you might expect, the solicitation caused some complaints, but it apparently generated $12M in sales. I wonder about that, being sent only to 393 people. Anyway, here is a link to the article. Read it for yourself. It is a good read.
I have posted the message along with the replies it generated, below. Visit Brad Templeton’s Web Site for more information on the transcript.

Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT
Date: 1 May 1978 1233-EDT
From: THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM
AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T
AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040
AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY
AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS
MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:

TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 - 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 - 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)

A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND,
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.

The Reaction to that First Spam

Here’s just a snippet of some of the reaction…

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,1491;000000000001
Mail-from: SRI-KA rcvd at 5-MAY-78 1203-PDT
Mail-from: SRI-KL rcvd at 5-May-78 0732-PDT
Date: 4 May 1978 1635-PDT
From: Feinler at SRI-KL (Jake Feinler)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 694 DEC Message
To: DEC-MAIL-RECIPIENTS:
Redistributed-To: [ISI]Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 5 MAY 1978

Date: 4 MAY 1978 0452-PDT
To: FEINLER at SRI-KL
From: DCACODE535 at USC-ISI

JAKE,

YOU MAY HAVE RECEIVED THE MSG SENT OUT BY DEC ON MAY 1 ABOUT WHICH I HAVE ALREADY RECEIVED SEVERAL COMPLAINTS AS YOU CAN READILY IMAGINE. CAN YOU FORWARD THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO ALL ADDRESSES OF THE SUSPECT MESSAGE PLUS ALL HOST AND TIP LIAISONS? THANKS:

NOTE: Please direct your comments, if any, directly to DCACODE535@ISI. Thanks, Jake.

ON 2 MAY 78 DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) SENT OUT AN ARPANET MESSAGE ADVERTISING THEIR NEW COMPUTER SYSTEMS. THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.

IN ENFORCEMENT OF THIS POLICY DCA IS DEPENDENT ON THE ARPANET SPONSORS, AND HOST AND TIP LIAISONS. IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU INFORM YOUR USERS AND CONTRACTORS WHO ARE PROVIDED ARPANET ACCESS THE MEANING OF THIS POLICY.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR

CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,2192;000000000001
Mail-from: SRI-KL rcvd at 7-MAY-78 1527-PDT
Date: 7 May 1978 1527-PDT
From: Feinler at SRI-KL (Jake Feinler)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 695 Personal comments on DEC message for MsgGroup
To: Stef at ISI
cc: feinler
Redistributed-To: [ISI]Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 7 MAY 1978

I was not going to comment (and add to the traffic) on the issue of the DEC message that was sent out, but after having several conversations with people about and around on this issue I think I will add what hopefully will be useful insight to the problem. NOTE: The comments are my own. They do not represent any official message from DCA or the NIC.

There are two kinds of message that have been frowned upon on the network. These are advertising of particular products and advertising for or by job applicants. I would like to point out that there are good reasons (other than taking up valuable resources and the fact that some recipients object) for not permitting these kinds of messages. There are many companies in the U.S. and abroad that would like to have access to the Arpanet. Naturally all of them cannot have this access. Consequently if the ones that do have access can advertise their products to a very select market and the others cannot, this is really an unfair advantage. Likewise, if job applicants can be selected amongst some of the best trained around, or if the applicants themselves can advertise to a very select group of prospective employers, this is an unfair advantage to other prospective employees or employers who are not on the net.

I have heard some rumblings about ‘control’ and ‘censorship’ of the net by the powers-that-be, but I feel in these two particular areas they are leaning over backwards to be fair to the big guys and the small guys alike. In addition, the official message sent out asked us (’us’ being network users) to address the issue ourselves. I personally think this is reasonable and think we should lend our support or otherwise be saddled with controls that will be a nuisance to everyone involved.

Regards,

Jake

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,3281;000000000001
Mail-from: SU-AI rcvd at 7-MAY-78 2058-PDT
Date: 7 May 1978 2057-PDT
From: MRC at SU-AI (Mark Crispin)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 696 in reply to Jake’s message about advertising
To: MsgGroup at USC-ISI
Redistributed-To: [ISI]Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 8 MAY 1978

I agree with Jake about suppressing advertising for many of the same reasons as I disagreed with suppressing subjective messages about QUASAR. The ARPAnet is not, as Jake pointed out, a public resource; it is available to pretty much a select group of people (high school kids regardless!). We are all engaged in activities relating to, or in support of, official US Government business. ARPAnet mail therefore is more of an “interoffice memo” sort of thing than a trade journal, not intended for public distribution although not “top secret” either.

Even MsgGroup is in this class; however inappropriate QUASAR is to MsgGroup’s intent (and it was inappropriate) I feel that any censorship can only lead to worse things later on. I am sure that DCA realizes this also; otherwise the ARPAnet would have been curbed long ago. Whether or not QUASAR is a fake is a valid topic to be discussed among the computer science community via the ARPAnet; although it is inappropriate for MsgGroup. If there is sufficient interest, another group should be created whose purpose and interests embrace this issue.

I don’t see any place for advertising on the ARPAnet, however; certainly not the bulk advertising of that DEC message. From the address list, it seems clear to me that the people it was sent to were the Californians listed in the last ARPAnet directory. This was a clear and flagrant abuse of the directory!

I am not sure as to how far this should be carried though. I would not mind hearing from DEC about their new products via ARPAnet mail, but I would expect considerably more technical content and considerably less of a sales pitch. Where is the line to be drawn between this sort of thing (if it is to be allowed at all) and advertising? Another point Jake mentioned which concerns me is that of employment hunting (by employee or employer). Is that to be taken to mean that a person cannot establish contacts at another ARPAnet site and poke around about a possible position there? Is this really unfair to non-ARPAnet people? Allow me to point out that at times a job is created in order to have a particular person on the staff, and if that person is unavailable, the job won’t exist.

This all seems worthy of examination by the MsgGroup community, as it involves how electronic mail is to be used. Something else; I would greatly appreciate it if all comments about this make a distinction between ARPAnet mail and mail on another (possibly commercial) network. Saying that electronic junk mail is a no-no on the ARPAnet doesn’t answer the question. I shudder to think about it, but I can envision junk mail being sent to people who implement Dialnet, and no way it could be prevented or stopped. I guess the ultimate solution is the command in your mail reading subsystem which deletes an unwanted message.

– Mark

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,2250;000000000001
Mail-from: MIT-AI rcvd at 7-MAY-78 2316-PDT
Date: 8 MAY 1978 0213-EDT
From: RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 697 Some Thoughts about advertising
To: stefferud at USC-ISI
Redistributed-To: [ISI]Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 8 MAY 1978

1) I didn’t receive the DEC message, but I can’t imagine I would have been bothered if I have. I get tons of uninteresting mail, and system announcements about babies born, etc. At least a demo MIGHT have been interesting.

2) The amount of harm done by any of the cited “unfair” things the net has been used for is clearly very small. And if they have found any people any jobs, clearly they have done good. If I had a job to offer, I would offer it to my friends first. Is this “evil”? Must I advertise in a paper in every city in the US with population over 50,000 and then go to all of them to interview, all in the name of fairness? Some people, I am afraid, would think so. Such a great insistence on fairness would destort everyone’s lives and do much more harm than good. So I state unashamedly that I am in favor of seeing jobs offered via whatever.

3) It has just been suggested that we impose someone’s standards on us because otherwise he MIGHT do so. Well, if you feel that those standards are right and necessary, go right ahead and support them. But if you disagree with them, as I do, why hand your opponents the victory on a silver platter? By the suggested reasoning, we should always follow the political views that we don’t believe in, and especially those of terrorists, in anticipation of their attempts to impose them on us. If those who think that the job offers are bad are going to try to prevent them, then those of us who think they are unrepugnant should uphold our views. Besides, I doubt that anyone can successfully force a site from outside to impose censorship, if the people there don’t fundamentally agree with the desirability of it.

4) Would a dating service for people on the net be “frowned upon” by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don’t let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,685;000000000001
Mail-from: MIT-AI rcvd at 9-MAY-78 1528-PDT
Date: 9 MAY 1978 1827-EDT
From: RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 698 DEC message [VERY TASTY!]
To: Stefferud at USC-ISI
CC: Geoff at SRI-KL
Redistributed-To: [ISI]Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 9 MAY 1978

Well, Geoff forwarded me a copy of the DEC message, and I eat my words. I sure would have minded it! Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about.

Forward this if you feel like it.

[EDITORS NOTE: ACTUALLY, I THINK RMS@MIT-AI NEEDS SOME MORE COPIES. /STEF]

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,13632;000000000000
Mail-from: SRI-KA rcvd at 10-MAY-78 0921-PDT
Date: 10 May 1978 0910-PDT
Sender: GEOFF at SRI-KA
Subject: MSGGROUP# 699 [THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO: ADRIAN@SRI-KL]
From: Geoff at SRI-KA (Geoffrey S. Goodfellow)
To: msggroup at ISI
Message-ID: <[SRI-KA]10-May-78 09:10:14.GEOFF>

Begin forwarded message
===========================
Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT
Date: 1 May 1978 1233-EDT
From: THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO
Subject: ADRIAN@SRI-KL
To: DDAY at SRI-KL, DAY at SRI-KL, DEBOER at UCLA-CCN,

[SNIP]… [SNIP]… [SNIP]… [SNIP]… [SNIP]… [SNIP]… [SNIP]

It was several months back that I signed up for Lifelock.com, a service that is designed to protect your identity and comes with a written $1M guarantee. After hearing many commercials on XM radio and seeing their ads plastered all over TV and print, I took a closer look at Lifelock.
What LifeLock does is very simple. They issue fraud alerts in your name to all credit bureaus and they also arrange for a copy of your credit reports to sent to you on a regular basis. They readily admit on their web site that a consumer can do this on their own, but LifeLock has the process automated and also offers an undeniable $1M guarantee to cover expenses or any costs relating to the identity of any LifeLock.com customer’s identity being stolen.
In today’s world of online commerce and not always knowing who is on the other end of a given transaction, I find comfort in LifeLock’s service and it is comfort that I am very happy to pay only about 30 cents a day for.
It was well after I signed up with LifeLock and was activated and had already seen the benefits start, like a marked decrease in the amount of junk mail and credit card offers I got, that I discovered their affiliate program. The program offers a generous referral fee and they offer a great coupon. The LifeLock.com coupon offer is simple. Instead of the customer paying $10 a month for the service, they pay only $9 a month. While this is not a huge deal on the front end, it is an ongoing, recurring coupon offer you can offer your customers on the LifeLock service.
I can honestly say that I was a LifeLock customer before I was an active LifeLock affiliate and I sincerely believe in the value that LifeLock offers to both its customers and its affiliates.

I got a call from my good buddy Pat this evening. He was headed west on business with a stop in Dallas, but thanks to the American Airlines debacle, he can’t get there. He got stranded in Dallas for the rest of the week, so I picked him up and now we are hanging out for the rest of the week.
The weather is not the best for fishing, but we’ll get out if at all possible. It was only a few weeks back that we were in Florida fishing.
It’s a nice impromptu visit from my good bud.

Every day I see more and more affiliates entering or making plans to enter the ranks of Affiliate Mangers or OPMs. The trend I see is that many of these affiliates are ones who have struggled and never really were able to make ends meet in the affiliate world.
If you are a merchant or even an agency and are looking to hire someone as an AM or OPM, you need to ask yourself a few things about this individual. I have laid out some questions that I would ask this individual below, along with some of my thoughts regarding the answers you might get to these questions.
How long did you make a living as an affiliate marketer? - In my opinion, anyone who worked as an affiliate for less than a year then decided they needed to get in to management is taking too large of a step and simply following what they see as a money trail. This person likely does not have the “sticktuitiveness” to be an effective AM/OPM.
How much did you earn in profits as an affiliate? - The key word here is PROFIT. Anyone can spend a ton on PPC and make a $50 profit or even produce a $50 loss. It takes talent for someone to consistently make a decent living as an affiliate marketer. In my eyes, anyone who makes a good living as an affiliate marketer has no motivation to become an AM or OPM. I guess some people really have an innate desire to work with others and teach, but the affiliate mindset is largely one of being a lone wolf and not wanting to depend on others for a level of success. An AM or OPM depend on both merchants and affiliates for their success.
Was your affiliate marketing income your only source of income? - There is a BIG difference in making a living at affiliate marketing and working at affiliate marketing while your wife or husband is off working to support you and the family. Very few achieve the consistency in affiliate marketing that is needed to rely on it to support your family. There is a big difference in the mindset when one is doing something as a means of supporting the household and doing it for a second income.
What will you do with your affiliate ventures as an AM/OPM? - Anyone who answers this question with something like, “I will unplug those sites and let the domains expire” shows clearly that they did not build a sustainable business as an affiliate. Why on earth would an affiliate flush sites that get traffic and make money. Furthermore, be weary of an answer like, “I am going to keep them, they make too much money to stop them.” Affiliates are more and more distrustful of managers who are also affiliates…and rightly so. Managers have access to information that they can use to compete with their affiliates if the manager is also an affiliate on the side.

The bottom line is that there is a plethora of people out there calling themselves an affiliate manager or an OPM who have no clue how the affiliate marketing world really works. I see them every week. It wasn’t that long ago that I spoke with someone who has a reputation as a seasoned OPM who had no idea how to calculate a conversion ratio. I was shocked to find this out, but not surprised that there are many such people who use forums and other means to make themselves look much more seasoned and generally much smarter than they really are.

Select your candidates carefully and make sure your affiliate manager understands at least moderate marketing concepts, metrics and, most importantly in my opinion, has the experience as a successful affiliate marketer to be able to connect with affiliates and understand affiliate-related issues. Your affiliate manager is the link between your business and those individuals and companies who can ad substantial results to your bottom line.

This morning I was adding a few items from my Amazon store to my Adwords account, fishing maps in particular. I did what any other marketing person would do, I came up with an attractive ad that portrayed the products with meaning and purpose, formulated a very relevant set of keywords, put it all together and stuck it all out there for the world to see.
Much to my surprise, me bidding on the phrase “map of toledo bend” and sending the traffic to this URL, was low quality in the eyes of Google. Even more to my surprise, nobody else is bidding on this term. At this moment, I am the only advertiser I see using Adwords to sell a map of Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Google insisted that I pay 40 cents for this click. In a chat session with one of their support people, I was told that the term I am bidding on is one that no advertiser has ever succeeded in using. So, Google wants to insure that advertisers are not doing poor work and that all elements of the advertising equation are relevant so the shopper is happy with their Google experience.
Below is a copy of my ad text:
********************
Map Of Toledo Bend
Laminated Map with GPS Points for
Hot Fishing Spots. Other Great Info.
********************
The traffic from this ad goes directly to my page on Amazon that offers a Laminated Topographical map of Toledo Bend for sale. It is a very cool map, it shows all of the submerged structure in the lake, boat rows, even GPS coordinates to hot fishing spots as determined by local Toledo Bend professional guides. It is priced right for the quality of the map, but Google apparently does not take anything into consideration except maximizing the price they can charge for a click by fleecing their advertisers in the name of quality.

Which Brings Me to My New Use for Google Adwords
Google Adwords Editor is a very nice tool that makes setting up and managing PPC campaigns very easy. But I am forced to ask myself what’s the use of they hammer me so hard to click pricing?
Set up all campaigns in Google, using their tool that really is very efficient. Next, use the export feature to export your campaign to a text file, then log in to Yahoo Search Marketing and you can import the Adwords campaign in minutes. Yahoo’s interface is slow and cumbersome. The Adwords Editor is a great way to build Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns.

Granted, search volume on Yahoo is less, but they don’t seem to be quite as greedy as Google is. Yahoo seems to be OK with letting the market dictate how much a click should cost.

On a final note, any of you affiliates out there with fishing traffic, please promote my maps through Amazon. At this time we are offering these high-quality laminated topo maps for:

• Lake Fork
• Toledo Bend Reservoir
• Sam Rayburn Reservoir
• Cedar Creek Lake
• Lake Ray Roberts
• Freeport
• Lower Gulf of Mexico
• Sabine/Calcasieu Lakes
• Upper Laguna Madre
• Lower Laguna Madre
• Matagorda Bay
• Galveston Bay

They are wonderful maps and your customers are sure to love them! Conversions run 5% and better.

In three words that total only 9 letters, “I THINK NOT”.
As you probably know by now, Pepperjam recently started an affiliate marketing network. Read for yourself how CJ acted terribly unprofessionally (at best) and possibly very illegally in attempting to interfere with Pepperjam and their management clients. They waited for a day when they knew PJ management would be busy for their ambush.

Why don’t I think CJ should be trusted? CJ is always the first to do something that causes affiliates problems or stress and benefits CJ. Three letters… LMI. I have been in touch with an associate affiliate manager for a major CJ merchant recently who told me “CJ put so much pressure on us to try them (speaking of parasitic adware affiliates in a program that had never allowed them in) that we gave in and tried them.” This was a program that was a haven for value-add affiliates and it has all but dried up now and the only people making money there are couponers, trademark poachers and of course the parasites. CJ got involved in managing this program less than a year ago and has already taken it from being a program where affiliates could make money to now being a program where mostly CJ makes money while the number of incremental sales to this merchant have no doubt fallen dramatically.

They have also convinced merchants to make policy changes in their programs that clearly benefit their own affiliate marketing operation. I have been told this by a merchant as well. Special deals between merchants and CJ’s affiliate marketing efforts are being made inside the company. CJ has the data to know which programs convert the best and how affiliates are maximizing their volume in a given program. What a fantastic source of information with which to fuel your own affiliate marketing efforts…unless you are supposed to be….uhhhhh….a TRUSTED THIRD PARTY!!!

Let’s talk about tools for affiliates. Linkshare, Performics, Shareasale, Avantlink, Pepperjam Network and most other affiliate networks have tools that allow affiliates to do everything from manage datafeed subscriptions, create page templates and many other tools that make affiliate marketing easy and/or productive for affiliates. CJ does not even have a consolidated way of disseminating coupons to affiliates that I am aware of. Most coupons listed in their interface are lacking an expiration date. They have no tools and offer affiliates no reason to work with them. It’s almost like they just don’t give a rat’s ass about affiliates. You have to submit their AAQ to get merchant feeds removed or added. If you are lucky enough to have an account rep, the process is still pitifully slow and subject to misinterpretation because it involves someone at CJ communicating with another on your behalf. If CJ really wanted to offer affiliates some value, they would have fixed this system long ago. It has been brought to their attention on every level by myself and hundreds of others but they lend a deaf ear to such requests.

Getting back to their assault on Pepperjam, who has been a partner with CJ for many years, is CJ trying to bully PJ’s clients any different than their program managers influencing a merchant to behave in a way that benefits CJ’s affiliate marketing operation? Not really. It is that “blind hog at the trough” mindset. Do whatever you have to do to advance yourself even if that means acting in unethical, illegal and downright crooked ways to accomplish your goal. This is a pattern that CJ has replicated over and over and over again. They fired or allowed many of their best employees to quit when they made a big deal over not wanting employees to be affiliates because it is a conflict of interest. Not two years later they purchased affiliate sites and are now aggressive in their own affiliate marketing operation and leveraging their relationship with the merchants, a relationship that gained by acting as a “Trusted Third Party”, to unfairly compete with the affiliates who are responsible for their existence.

Every affiliate I talk to, every affiliate consulting client I have, every merchant I get to have a chat with all eventually ask me about my network preference. Immediately after that they ask about a negative network preference. While the jury is still out on my favorite network, CJ has landed the latter of the two categories by a huge margin over the past two years.

“So, Scott, Pepperjam is an affiliate too. Why don’t you mention that?” Good point. It is true. Pepperjam is an affiliate, a management firm and a network, as is CJ, LinkShare, Performics and others. There are countless affiliate management firms out there who are also aggressive affiliates. This seems to be the direction the industry is going. What we must now base our opinions on are tools, visibility, reputation and the ability to contact someone at a given network who A) gives a damn and B) will actually listen and make an earnest attempt to reach a resolution…or at least offer a candid explanation as to why they think the issue you raised does not warrant such. I can reach someone at PJN who at least appears to give a damn. All I can reach at CJ is an account rep who only replies to about half of my emails and if there is ever a sense that I am upset about something, intentionally ignores me.

Is Pepperjam perfect? NO! Do they meet my needs as a network better than CJ does? Absolutely! Will they some day pull the same crap that CJ has in pushing policy changes that benefit them and hurt other affiliates? Maybe, but until then I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I suggest you check out Pepperjam Network. For a network that is less than 3 months old, they have an impressive collection of merchants, tools and support resources!

I am sure most people who read this already know about RoboForm. If you use it for work or personally, RoboForm is no doubt the best password and logon management tool available for your PC or Palm. I started using it a few years back and I can’t imagine life without it. I log in to no less that 20 different sites in a day of work and I can honestly say RoboForm saves me 20 minutes a day, maybe more. I’ve never measured it.

In a nutshell, RoboForm lives in your browser and supplies login information to sites you visit with a single click. You log in once, save it to RoboForm and you can now log in with a single click. Before you know it you will have hundreds of sites saved where you can log in with a single click and you will never again scramble for a password. You will also never again have to use those same, simple and memorable passwords. This will help prevent others from accessing your accounts. Because RoboForm also saves the URL of the target site, you will bypass the ‘phishermen’ becuase you have your site saved and there is no chance of mistyping it and no need to click on a link elsewhere.

Once you get your main computer all set up with RoboForm you will love it. But what about your laptop? OOPS! No, no oops. You get a second free license of RoboForm with your single license purchase. One for the desktop, one for the laptop and done! If you have many computers, there are other options available.

You have one master password that runs RoboForm and no more. We can all remember one strong password that will save us a lot of time and make life easier in general.

If I have convinced you to buy RoboForm, please show me some love and click the banner below. I’ll get a few bucks, you will have a much better life and all will be good. Thanks!

Five years ago I would have sworn this day would never come, but with the new version of Windows (Vista) now the only game in town for my PC and the option of upgrading PCs forced to include Vista, it is time to leave the PC all together and use a Mac. I have used Vista to some degree and I just don’t like it.

I have spent countless hours reading, researching and learning all I can about the Mac and its OS. The nuances and quirks of the Mac seem manageable and the upside of making this switch is that I will not have to deal with new operating systems from MS that complicate things and force me to upgrade nor will I be a slave to McAfee and Norton et al in that I am forced to buy their products or face the wrath of viruses and spyware. The rogue software has spawned its own protection racket and MS doesn’t appear to be worried about it.

After a bad experience with the Apple store at Northpark Mall in Dallas, I have decided to purchase my Macbook and my iMac from Vanns.com. Vanns is a great electronics store. They have good prices, charge no sales tax at all and from the affiliate side, their tracking works like a charm. I have worked with the Vanns.com Affiliate Program for a few years now and it is one of my favorites. I know the people who run it and they are top notch. I am happy anytime I am able to buy from Vanns.

Look for more details and information about the switch from PC to Mac on my new blog (launching soon) FromPCtoMac.com.

What I’m Getting:
The main work computer will be a 24″ iMac 2.4 ghz. From what I have read online, the increase in the processor to the 2.8 model is only realized under intensive CPU usage such as gaming or running Autocad or similar applications. I think for my videos and web design purposes the 2.4 will do.
The mobile machine is going to be the base model Macbook. My PC laptop is similar in specs. I don’t require much from the laptop. I can always upgrade RAM on these machines later if needed.

Remember the days when you could upload content that was spidered and getting great traffic in a fews days time? As Carol Oconnor and Jean Stapleton sang “Those were the days!” A few sites still enjoy that kind of status these days, but not many.

I got an email recently from an affiliate manager speaking of “hitting the ground running.” I didn’t say it but my first thought was that hitting the ground running is pretty much not possible in the affiliate marketing world. SERPS take time to gain steam. Even a thorough PPC campaign is an ongoing project for months (for large projects) sometimes before optimization can be achieved on a large scale. To me, hitting the ground running makes me think of hours or a day at most before results start rolling in.

While there have been projects in the past with small numbers of keywords for PPC, the majority of my PPC campaigns took some time before the keywords, both positive and negative, and ad copy were what I call completely in sync and reaching who they need to reach. Some of these campaigns I have been tweaking for a year or more. We all find the gem now and then that is a really cool site that sells one thing in one color and has little or no competition. The market dictates that such an occurrence will not last long.

Don’t sell yourself short on your ability to produce results quickly if you are a PPC marketer. But at the same time don’t think you are killin’ it if you start making positive results right off the bat. Well targeted PPC can drive instant results. On items where search volume is low and margins are good, it often takes time to find a way to make it work but it can be done.

This particular manager was not pushing, they were only using a phrase we all use. It just made me think about how things are and how they once were.