The Truth About Affiliate Programs
Rich provides his commentary, personal views, gripes and 'at-a-boys.
"Should I encounter a moment of clarity, I hope to have it recorded in these journals."
4 April 2005
After discontinuing most of the CJ ads, we've found ourselves 'stuck' with a balance in our CJ account of $23.90. The frosting for our CJ cake seems to be after they stop recording sales, if your account sits inactive for 6 months they take back what is left in the account. All legal like and buried in the fine print.
Hello Rich,
As stated in the Publisher Service Agreement, any Publisher Account which does not generate any revenue within a period of six consecutive months will be charged a Dormant Account Fee of either $10 or the account balance, whichever is less. If the account balance is zero and a Publisher Account has not generated any revenue within a period of six consecutive months, the account will be deactivated.Publisher Accounts deactivated for Dormancy are not eligible for re-activation. However, there is no restriction on the individual who owned the account trying again with a new account. If you wish to do this, you will just need to sign up with a new email address.
The Dormant Account Fee or balances less than $25 cannot be paid out.
Although Commission Junction did not work for us, we continue to have a working relation with the affiliate program at Vitacost . com.
Another change we've made is to do away with all the ads for Barnes & Noble. We ran these ads side by side with amazon ads and even though the BN ads had better visibility amazon always generated sales and Barnes & Noble didn't. Funny, since the prices are very competitive. But the Barnes and Noble's program is hosted on beFree which is an affiliate service owning and operated by (guess who? ... ) Commission Junction!
In other news . . . kalyx . com sales dried up after we began promoting them heavy again. So ... the other week we took away their search box on our page footers and began taking direct links away in the body of pages. We plan to continue removing their ads.
14 Feb 2004
We received our first commission check from Commission Junction so it makes us sad to report that we are now dumping this program and removed all their ads. Suspecting there are problems with recording of sales and reporting, we've been following the threads at abestweb.com long enough to be convinced that our suspicions are well founded. As best we can tell, this network allows or maybe even encourages merchants to do business with 'parasite' firms. A parasite is a computer application that hi-jacks affiliates sales by overwriting cookies and/or modifying affiliate IDs. These applications come bundled with software that is downloaded to peoples computers, often with file sharing applications among other. The computer user is usually unaware of this spy-ware being installed on the computer.
The problem is widespread and occurs across the other networks too but appears to be worse among the programs here. We suspect there is also a problem of unreported sales and unreported leads.
Bottom line is our only recourse is to stop doing business where we think there is cheating going on, so we have removed all the ads from the CJ program. Along those lines, we've also removed ads from some other programs. These others started out with traffic being converted to sales but suddenly the sales stopped for 1-800-patches and rxmedical.
We continue to experience good results from kalyx.com, drugstore.com, vitacost.com and see some occational sales from walmart, barnes&noble and amazon. Hope it continues.
12 November 2003
It's been a long time since I thought to make an entry here and much has happened since the last entry!
What we found is that with higher volumes of traffic hitting our site,
affiliate links to individual products placed on pages with closely related
items produce some results for us. Our most productive affiliate programs
are now with Vitacost.com, drugstore.com, kalyx.com and rxmedical. Most of
the successful programs are thru LinkShare.com. Click here to become a LinkShare Affiliate!.
Since our 1st $25 check one year ago, we now collect a few hundred per month in
commissions consistently. WOOT for us!
We've also found an banner advertising program that works. They pay cash to our PayPal account for displaying banner ads. Most of the ads are high quality and we have the ability to weed out the ones that are not and the ones we just don't care for. There is also a feature that lets us set a priority and display our own ads to the affiliate programs we run. Here's the link if you're interested in joining: FastClick Ad Network
31 May 2003
Good News! We can report some progress with affiliate programs. We are now signed up with Kalyx.com, Linkshare.com and others - having some success promoting individual products on pages with similar and competing stuff.
27 October 2002
Opps! Forgot to post our first success! On 18 July we got our first check from Commission Junction, Inc. - $25.38. This month we should get another $25 check.
05 April 2002
The total line from this report kind of says is all. Its been almost a year since opening the e-shopping mall and the results have been, well . . .
| Merchant Name | Impressions | Click-Throughs | C/I(%) | # of Orders | # of Items | # of Items Canceled | O/C(%) | Sales($) | Commissions($) |
| Report Totals: | 141,373 | 1,715 | 1.21% | 4 | 4 | (1) | 0.23% | $29.97 | $1.66 |
I belong to two other services and some individual site's programs too. The results are similar. Moral to the story? Takes LOTS of traffic to make a dollar!
Opening Entry 15 May 2001
This will be a short opening entry.
I've had some of these programs linked on my home pages for years - with no results. Of course, for these same years, the only traffic I've had on the site has been the occasional head-hunter looking for resumes the the search robots.
Having begun to promote Kat's Herbs, I've started to have a small trickle of traffic and was just tickled to receive word from Amazon.com that I had earned my first $2.75 commission. Image that!
I plan to build shopping pages attached to Kat's site with the hope that as we promote Kat's Herbs it will drive traffic to the affiliate programs too.