From the category archives:

Affiliates

Why Search Engine Traffic Is Still King

by El Plumber (admin) on January 13, 2010

Even in the new Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/Digg/Reddit Social Media onslaught, for an ethical marketer search engine traffic is still by far the BEST source of traffic for most sites, especially newer sites.  You sometimes read other places about sites still doing fine after getting canned from Google rankings because of some grey hat (more on that later) [...]

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I’ve been an Amazon Affiliate for almost a year and a half, not on this site (although I really should add some links to books down the sidebar there someday) but on a couple of other sites.  Last year before Amazon basically killed the practice, I was doing what is generally called Affiliate Arbitrage, where [...]

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Why Your Amazon Affiliate Site Is Failing Miserably

by El Plumber (admin) on October 17, 2009

Some of the mainstays of Ethical Affiliate Marketing are always provide readers and search engines valuable content, never use any black hat techniques for driving sales or traffic, and only promoting real products that have real value. With that in mind, we’ve been part of the Amazon Affiliate program for a year now, and have [...]

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Amazon quietly rolled out a new feature to take some of the sting off 3rd party seller price gouging in the past couple of days (we’re not even exactly sure when it went live) without any announcement that we could find, then quickly removed it.  No idea why it was removed, but hopefully it will [...]

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What Is An Affiliate Cookie And Do I Care About It’s Duration?

by El Plumber (admin) on October 7, 2009

[ad] I realize recently that I was falling into the same trap that drove me crazy when I first started attempting to make money online last fall. Everywhere I went, people were talking in terms and acronyms that I did not understand in the least and had to spend tons of time researching what they [...]

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Amazon Closes All Affiliate Accounts Based In North Carolina

by El Plumber (admin) on June 26, 2009

At 4:30am this morning, all Affiliate accounts based in North Carolina were closed by Amazon.  That means no more referrals paid for anyone sending affiliate tagged links to Amazon if they are based in NC.  The affiliates received the following email: We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) [...]

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Damn you Googhydr-20!

by El Plumber (admin) on April 9, 2009

Well Mr/Mrs CoffeeResearch, it was certainly fun playing with you, but it looks like we’ve both been kicked off the playing field. I had planned out and started writing a series of articles on how to make money driving traffic from search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, etc) directly to Amazon using what some people [...]

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People do NOT Buy Stuff on Christmas

by El Plumber (admin) on December 26, 2008

Well, I suspected this.  I posted about the Alexa traffic graph for Amazon last week, and if you look closely you’ll notice a dip right around Christmas last year.  I suspected that Christmas wasn’t going to be a good conversion day, and BOY was I right. Ready for this?  Over the past 4-5 months I’ve [...]

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Amazon Affiliate Data Secrets

by El Plumber (admin) on December 22, 2008

Ok, I’m a geek at heart and love charts and graphs that actually represent data in a meaningful way.  I’m going to let you in on a couple of little secrets here using a graph I pulled up from Alexa.com: This graph represents the “Daily Reach” of Amazon and Ebay, as a function of the [...]

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Affiliate Links are NOT against the Google Adwords TOS.

by El Plumber (admin) on December 15, 2008

I’ve read a bunch of forums lately where people state that buying PPC on Google Adwords for Affiliate links is against the Google Terms of Service (TOS), and nothing could be further from the truth, at least not today.  Go check out the Google Adwords Terms of Service if you don’t believe me. It’s possible [...]

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