Over the past few weeks the number of emails I have been getting from my affiliate networks of choice has increased. With the holiday season fast approaching, a number of vendors are stepping up their campaigns so that they can get as much of the money that will be spent by online consumers in the next few weeks.

As part of this drive, a number of them are coming up with all sorts of offerings to entice people to spend their money with them. These offerings may include percentage off discounts, free shipping, daily deals, a dollar amount discount after a certain amount spent and so on and so forth. In order to take advantage of a number of these promotions, consumers will probably need to use or apply a coupon code.

How Marketers Lose Out on Coupon Commissions

For affiliate marketers, the task of promoting an advertiser offering with a coupon code may seem as easy as placing the code up on a page. Doing this could lead to a loss in revenue if a site visitor can simply copy and paste the coupon code. This is how:

• visitor lands on your site via Google search etc.
• visitor highlights and copies coupon of interest
• visitor opens a new tab in their browser and goes to the advertiser site without clicking on an affiliate link on your site
• visitor completes a transaction on advertiser site using a coupon code that they found on your site

As you can see, if they use the coupon code in this manner, you will have lost out on a commission. Depending on how good you are at driving traffic to your site, this could mean a loss of 2,3,7…16…. who knows commissions a day. Depending on what the item is and how much the vendor pays out, you could be losing out on a substantial amount of money.

How Coupon Code Plugin Increases Click Through Rate

A way off getting around this problem is to have a system in place where visitors have to take an action such as them clicking on your affiliate link in order to copy the coupon code. Coupon Code Plugin for WordPress allows you to do just that by letting you add stylised coupon codes to posts and/or pages that visitors cannot just highlight and copy.

It comes with a range of various button options (as well as custom options) with which to display your coupons. Other features include being able to mask affiliate links, opening of the target site in a new window, a custom call to action and various button icon options such as an arrow, scissors or a + sign (just to name a few).

The stylised button also acts to draw the attention of visitors and this with an effective call to action will lead to an increase in click though rate because you are making life easy for them. With the coupon code button also taking them to the target site you the affiliate should realise an increase in commissions.

The holiday season bring with it November. November brings with it “Black Friday”, the most profitable day of the year for online sales. The following Monday, “Cyber Monday” is also a very lucrative day for online retailers. There will be all sorts of coupons on all sorts of deals that consumers want to take advantage off. All that you as an affiliate marketer needs to do is position yourself for maximum profitability. Consumers spend BILLIONS of dollars a year via coupons and if you are an affiliate marketer who is serious and wants as share of the pie, there is no better way to do this than with the use of Coupon Code Plugin.

The Holiday Season is fast approaching and with it comes the period when consumers let lose of their hard earned cash and send it in the direction of online and offline retailers. For affiliate marketers, this brings along a time when you can earn a lot more money compared to other periods of the year.

The other day I was reading through Search Engine Watch and came across an article, 3 Steps to Happy Holidays SEM Returns. One of the things that stuck out the most was the Retail Demand Curve For Holidays (2007-2010).

As you can see from the graph, there is a steady increase in impressions, clicks and revenue throughout October. As it moves into November, there is a marked increased and as it heads towards the tail end of the month, revenue shots up over 200%. According to ComScore, 2010 online retail sales for the 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion. This was a 12% increase on the previous year and some analysts are predicting that retails sales will increase by 12-14% this year. Whether or not it does increase, $32.6 billion is a lot of money that affiliate marketers can get a share of. Keep in mind that these figures as only for the U.S.

Some things that come to mind to get you thinking more about working on the holiday season include:

Marketing Plan – Put together a plan that covers the next 2-3 months and make sure that all of the important dates are on it. Upcoming dates of importance include Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course Christmas, just to name a few. You need to know what you are going to promote, how you are going to promote and when you are going to promote.

Pages – If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to get pages ready. Besides the usual to-do’s of content and keywords, one big thing that comes to mind is mobile optimised landing pages. More and more people are accessing the internet via mobile devices and if your pages aren’t mobile optimised, you could miss out on commissions.

Email Lists – If you have an email list, get holiday emails ready now so that you aren’t rushed to do so when the time comes to send them. VerticalResponse is good email marketing service that comes with a wealth of free resources to help you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Testing – A/B testing of different variations of your pages and email templates is a good idea as this will allow you to determine which one will produce the best results.

This is not a definitive list of things you can do to work on maximising affiliate commissions during the Holiday Season. The purpose of this post is to get you thinking more about what you need (if you haven’t already done so) to do to work towards a profitable season.

Apple is set to announce its eagerly awaited iPhone 5 (or maybe iPhone 4S) on October 4 at the “Lets Talk iPhone” event. Surveys show that anticipation for the next generation iPhone is high and Gazelle (a recommerce site) has noticed a marked increase in the number of iPhones being traded in over the last few days. All of this points towards a successful launch for whatever it is Apple will announce on Tuesday and with that will more than likely lead to a significant increase in revenue for them.

They won’t be the only people who will make a financial gain from the iPhone. Affiliate marketers out there may want to think about; in fact, forget thinking about, SHOULD start promoting iPhone related offers. These can include promoting various iPhone accessories such as cases, docking stations, speakers (and the list goes on) from e-tailers such as Cellular Factory and Cellphone Shop. A fact that may be of interest about Cellphone Shop is that they provide a dropshipping service so you could sell accessories on marketplaces such as eBay without having to stock up on inventory.

Something else to take into consideration as a way of making money is app development. With the release of a new iPhone, there is bound to be a new range of functionality. This may lay the foundation to new and never-before-seen apps being able to be developed. There may be people out there who have ideas for new applications but wont have a clue as to how to create them. How to Create iPhone Apps with Zero Programming Skills is a good start for people in this position.

There you have it. As far as the iPhone goes, there is no time better than the present to get yourself ready to cash in on it!!

A few hours ago MaxBounty sent out an email announcing announcing a $1000 affiliate referral contest. At the same time they also mentioned how they hoped I had already taken a look at their new site. Truth be told, I have not been over to MaxBounty in a bit of while but I like their new interface. The site looks much better than it used to and navigating around it is a lot easier.

In a nutshell, MaxBounty is a CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising affiliate network that has more than 10,000 active publishers. With more than 500 advertisers within their network you are spoilt for choice as to what campaigns to promote. Publisher payments are made on a monthly basis via cheque, PayPal or electronic transfer.

They are a network that is worth taking a look at and to help push their new interface, they are running a $1,000 affiliate referral contest:

• $650 for generating the most referral income

• $250 for generating the most approved referrals

• $100 randomly selected from all participating

Sign up to MaxBounty and be in the running to win a $1,000 bonus.

I was just over on the Clickbooth blog and saw a super sweet contest they just announced, the “Live Like A Super Affiliate Charity Contest”. It is a contest with a difference because not only does someone get to win some really good prizes, 4 charities will also get to benefit from the contest with donations from Clickbooth and how much they get is really up to you.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live like a Super Affiliate? The money, the exposure, the opportunities – it all comes along with being one of the top dogs in the industry.

While it usually takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice to be in the top 2% of affiliate marketers, Clickbooth put together this contest to not only give you a taste of what it’s like to live like a Super Affiliate, but also to provide you with some great opportunities that will help you achieve that level of success quicker.

If that wasn’t enough, you will also be helping some of your favorite bloggers raise money for their charity in the process!

So here’s how the contest works:

The contest is currently being held across four well-known blogs: JohnChow.com, IanFernando.com, ZacJohnson.com and MurrayNewlands.com and each blogger has chosen a charity that they will be representing. Clickbooth will be donating $500 to each of the charities no matter what, however YOU have the power to help each of them earn an additional $1,000 for their charity.

If all of the new affiliates that sign up to the Clickbooth network through the contest can collectively reach $100,000 in revenue within the two month period, Clickbooth will donate an additional $1,000 to each charity. Simple as that.

So if you aren’t a publisher yet, sign up and do what you do best – start making some money! The better you do, the better the charities do, and you will have a HUGE edge in winning the highly sought out Live Like A Super Affiliate Prize package!

Note: When you sign up as a publisher, you MUST input the word “LiveContest” in the comments section of the sign up form. If you don’t input the code, you WILL NOT be entered in the contest and will be ineligible to win any of the prizes.

Now comes the fun part, The Ultimate Live Like A Super Affiliate Prize Package!

One lucky winner will win the following:

• Weekend Trip to Sarasota, Florida (Hang out with Clickbooth for the weekend and receive the ultimate Super Affiliate treatment!)
• 125×125 ad on JohnChow.com for 1 Month
• Guest Post or Product/Service Review on JohnChow.com
• 30 Minute Consulting Call with Super Affiliate Zac Johnson
• Guest Post on ZacJohnson.com
• 1 Ticket to Leads Con in Vegas
• 1 Platinum Pass to Affiliate Summit West
• An Interview on MurrayNewlands.com
• Product/Service Review on IanFernando.com
• Membership to Twit Sniper

So what does it take to win this awesome prize package? It all comes down to a point system:

• Most Revenue During 2 Months of Contest: 40pts
• Write a post about the contest with a link back to this post: 10pts
• Video of why you should win the live like a Super Affiliate package: 15pts
• Follow each Super Affiliate and Clickbooth on Twitter: 5pts (John Chow, Ian Fernando, Zac Johnson, Murray Newlands, Clickbooth.
• Tweet about contest using the following Tweet: 5pts

I just entered @Clickbooth’s new contest for a chance to Live Like A Super Affiliate! Check it out! http://xr.com/fstd

• Become a Facebook Fan of each blogger and Clickbooth: 5pts
• Subscribe to CB Blog: 5pts
• Stumble this post: 5pts

You will need to send an email to Eric@clickbooth.com by December 10th, stating your FULL NAME, as well as which of the above tasks you completed with a link to each (for tracking purposes). Make the subject of the email “Live Like A Super Affiliate”.

If there is a tie in points, a winner will be randomly drawn from the participants that tied. However, if you don’t send an email, your points WILL NOT be counted. Also, this contest is only open to NEW affiliates that have not signed up with Clickbooth before.

There will also be prizes given out to 2 random winners. Prizes are:

• Affiliate Theme by, Unique Blog Designs (1 winner)
• 1 Month Featured Blog or a 468×60 Ad on AffBuzz.com (1 winner)

Winners of the random prizes will be announced December 18, 2009.

So there you have it. Head over Clickbooth and sign up to  Live Like A Super Affiliate! This is a great opportunity to not only help four amazing charities, but also win a prize package that will help take your success to a new level!

If you have any feedback or questions about the contest, email Eric at anytime! For a complete list of Rules and Regulations of this contest, go here.

Good Luck!

Eric Schechter from Clickbooth recently interviewed Kris Trujillo of CashTactics.net – Interview with Kris Trujillo of CashTactics.net. Kris is an internet marketer and blogger who provides a wealth of knowledge for people looking to get into internet marketing. If you are thinking of getting into affiliate marketing and haven’t already seen the interview, I recommend that you do watch it. It gives a lot of food for thought and you will be happy that you took a few minutes of your time to watch it. Here you go:

Sign up to Clickbooth and start making money!

As an affiliate marketer one thing that happens as time goes by is that you sign up to a number of programs which presents the issue of how to keep track of and organise all of your affiliate links. I was over at FresheVenture.com and came across a video that Keller put together that provides a very simple solution on how to organise your affiliate links. If you have been struggling to organise or keep track of all your links, this video is worth a watch:

If you take out the time and put your mind to it, you could setup and have a niche store up and running in no time at all but wouldn’t it be nice if you were given a site that was all setup and ready to go? The Nice Store Builder author Mark Hansen is going to build a site following the steps laid out in the recently released guide by Adam and kelvin, ‘The Number 1 Way to Make Money Online’. Once he has completed building the site, he is going to give it away to one of his readers.

About The Number 1 Way to Make Money Online

In a nutshell, it is a newbie/intermediate affiliate marketers guide to making money by building affiliate websites via the following steps:

• Step 1, will help you pick your markets.
• Step 2, will help you research that market and plan a website.
• Step 3 will help you create the content for that site.
• Step 4 will help you build that site.
• Step 5 will help you market that site.
• Step 6 will help you manage that site over the longer term.
• Step 7 will illustrate to you how easy it is to build 10 once you’ve built one.
• Step 8 will introduce you to the concept and value of “outsourcing”.
• Step 9 will introduce you to useful tools and resources related to this model.

Back to the contest

Mark will be awarding the site to the winner on October 15th, 2009.
The entry deadline is August 31, 2009.
Details on how to enter the contest can be found here: Build a Niche Store Guide Contest

Terms

• Enter the code CBReferral – Gerri in the comments section of your Clickbooth application.
• Meet the $1000 minimum tier to be guaranteed a prize.
• Winners may swap their prizes for a PayPal payment of equal value before the prize is sent.
• Current Clickbooth publisher will receive appropriate prize level award for first month and then 2% of lifetime earnings for referred pubs every month after that.- For international publishers (residing outside of the US), in the event that we cannot find a company that ships your prize internationally to your country, Clickbooth will compensate by sending a PayPal payment or bank wire payment (depending on the prize value) for the value of the prize.
• Any publisher caught doing illegal measures such as fraud or being in violation of the affiliate network’s Terms of Service will not be eligible for a prize.

So go on, get going, sign up to Clickbooth, make yourself some money and win something whilst you are at it.

The webinar touched on a number of topics which included

• Knowing the product
• Marketing
• Who you are marketing to
• What sort of thing to take into consideration in your marketing efforts
• Paid search and creating Box.net paid search campaigns

What are your thoughts on the presentation.

Maximize your marketing ROI with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit.

No matter where you go you are bound to come across something being sold using sexually suggestive images. In this day in age, it is a fact of life that sex sells but not everyone is okay with the whole idea. Just this past week, there was a new article about a billboard in Auckland with the words ‘Want Longer Lasting Sex?’ that people from Auckland’s Pacific Island community found inappropriate. The billboard was targeted towards people with erectile dysfunction and provided them with a number to get more information. But, the use of the word sex in big bold red print ruffled a few feathers. This is just an example of how sensitive the whole issue can be.

People around the world are making huge profits by marketing their products using suggestive images or phrases. Some are indirectly profiting from it and others are directly profiting from it. Last month, Girls Gone Wild founder and CEO Joe Francis who by the way makes an estimated $29 million a year announced the launch of an affiliate program which offers payouts of up to $35 per sign-up. The launch of this program offers yet another channel through which webmasters could earn revenue. But, because of the type of content you will be promoting it is something that could make or break a site. People have varying opinions on selling sex and to find out what people thought I started a discussion on Blogcatalog about the topic and here are some of the comments that members left:

daniel23
“Under capitalism, everything and everyone is a commodity, we all have our market price. And whether by selling our labour power as workers, or by buying things necessary (and some things not so necessary) as consumers, we all exist as part and parcel of the commodity system, of world capitalism.

“Sex then, is no different and is something that is not only marketable but aggressively marketed under capitalism (as we all know, sex sells). However, when sex is bought and sold – whether via pornography, prostitution, etc. – the left, pro-censorship feminists and some anarchists have a tendency to see this trade as somehow worse than many other forms of capitalist exploitation.”
libcom.org/library/anarchism-and-sex
I’m not sure I agree with it, but it’s an interesting perspective…

MadameX
For me it would. Given I’m not the average blog reader in many ways, but I would not visit, click ads on, link to, Digg, or in any way otherwise support a blog with that kind of affiliation.

Donlewis
Heavens! Sex in blogs??? I would immediately boycott any blog that would sink so low. And I’d return time and time again to see how the boycott is doing.

Sylvia
I have no problem with sex related topics and sites, as long as they promoted that way.

LoveCollective
Selling sex is worst of the worst. It is inhumane and cruel and animalistic.

With men being men and being easily drawn to sexually suggestive images and vice versa for women because they do it too (but maybe to a lesser extent?) it shouldn’t be that hard to try and make money from sex. You could stand to make a lot of money but at the same time could go bust as you may leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths if you weren’t previously involved in profiting from it. Depending on your moral fibre it could be a hard or easy decision for you to make to promote such material. This is something that is not for me because I feel uncomfortable about promoting sex and will loose a part of myself in doing so.

What would you do?

eBay has just launched their new global affiliate platform, the eBay Partner Network. I was an eBay affiliate through Commission Junction (CJ) and that particular partnership has treated me very well over the months. A few people have signed up for eBay.com via links on my blogs and I have been paid which has earned me $25 per active registered user. On top of that, I have earned a share of eBay’s revenue on winning bids.

With the launch of the partner network, affiliates signed up through CJ are being asked to migrate to the eBay Partner Network by May 1st. I just signed up to their network and am in the process of migrating links and I like the feel and look of their network. For a start, you have access to all number of global affiliate programs supported on the network which includes eBay USA, Australia, Belgium, India, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and the Netherlands which means you will be able to cater to a number of peoples needs. They also have a geo-targeting feature which identifies the location of a reader and redirects them to a page based on their location so lets for example someone in Australia clicks on a link they will be redirected to an eBay.com.au page. This is just one of a few points of difference to being an affiliate through CJ where you had to apply to each on individually.

Once you are signed up, getting started with promoting eBay is pretty simple. From the tools section you have access to text links, banners, logos and configurable widgets. A nice feature with the text link option is that you can put in whatever link text you want which makes it easier to integrate links into sites.

Payouts are made at the end of each month and depending on your location you will have the option of being paid out via direct deposit or PayPal or both. Payout rates in the case of eBay.com are the same as they were through CJ and are as follows (please note that they will differ between the various country programs):

Revenue Share Compensation
eBay Revenue – Compensation
$0 to $99.99 – 50%
$100.00 to $4,999.99 – 55%
$5,000.00 to $199,999.99 – 60%
$200,000.00 to $699,999.99 – 65%
$700,000.00 to $2,999,999.99 – 70%
$3,000,000.00 + – 75%

Active Registered User (ACRU)
ACRUs – Compensation
1 to 49 – $25.00
50 to 1,999 – $28.00
2,000 to 29,999 – $31.00
30,000 + – $35.00

If you haven’t already put up eBay links and find that they may be a good fit for your site it could be worth your while signing up, putting up links and wait for the money to come in.

The relevance of your advertiser’s ads in relation to your site content can play a big part in your commission earnings. It is important to place ads, text links, or product links that are relevant to your site/blog’s content. Contextual banners, buttons, embedded text links etc. related to your site/blog’s content are more likely to be noticed by readers.

Items out of context are most likely to be ignored. These ads end up taking up space that you could use and in some cases puts off readers who really don’t want to see irrelevant ads plastered all over the page.

In the case of text links a good thing to do is that every time you mention the name of an advertiser within your articles, add it in as a text link.

There is a lot more to learn when it comes to affiliate marketing and I’m still very much in the process of learning. For some really good information on affiliate marketing it would pay to invest in Quit Your Day Job by Jeremy Palmer (Click Here!) which is a very good resource on affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing? It’s basically you advertising products and/or services and getting paid a commission on any sales or leads eventuating from your visitors. Commission rates vary and are set by the publisher of the product and/or service you have chosen to advertise.

If you do a search for Affiliate Networks/Programs you’ll find that there are so many out there to choose from; some are free to join and others charge a small fee.

As with most things online it always pays to do a bit of research. There might be people out there who are trying to scam you or you may sign up to a particular network that does not suit your needs.

As a start, you could take a look at the bigger players such as Commission Junction, Clickbank and Linkshare – Click here for free LinkShare Membership. These three networks all have a lot of programs to offer that will suit a wide variety of websites/blogs.

Signing up is quick and easy. Once that is done the next step is applying to be an affiliate for a particular merchant and when approved you are all set to go. You are provided with an HTML code that you just have to copy and paste onto your website/blog.

Commissions are paid out differently and you can get this information from each networks website. From what I have seen so far they are usually paid out via cheque or an electronic payment into your bank account or PayPal.

If you haven’t already taken a look at this or tried it out, why not go ahead and do so!