I LOVE the StudioPress Genesis framework and their plethora of beautiful child themes. What I HATE is seeing folks lose potential commissions because they don’t bother to change out the footer links which go straight to StudioPress!

You can make money on those links!

In the following video I show you how to change your StudioPress theme footer links to affiliate links via their affiliate program on ShareaSale.

Here is the code that I use in my footer:

<div>
<p><a href="#wrap" rel="nofollow">Return to top of page</a></p>
</div>

<div>
<p>Copyright &copy; 2010  &middot; <a href="http://rosalindgardner.com/go/studiopress" title="Genesis Theme Framework">Genesis Theme Framework</a> by <a href="http://rosalindgardner.com/go/studiopress">StudioPress</a>
</p>
</div>


Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

I love receiving affiliate commission sales notices that state how much I just earned from the sale of a product that I’ve recommended on my site.

But those that read “You have earned an affiliate fee of 0.00 USD for the sale of XYZ product on Wed Apr 6 2011 9:44:29 MST“, don’t thrill me so much.

They make me sit up and take real notice and ask “Huh, WHY???“. (Imagine a really whiny voice – especially considering I received 2 of those notices within minutes that meant a loss of more than $100 in commissions. Grrrr.)

In this particular case, the answer was pretty simple.

The merchant had moved their program to another affiliate network and was no longer paying commissions on sales generated by affiliate links from their affiliation with the previous affiliate network.

Good grief! I thought I’d changed all those links!

Sure enough, a review through my various sites led me to the errant link quickly.

I changed it even more quickly.

Just one more reason to pay attention to your merchant’s email announcements and make sure that your affiliate links are actually generating commissions!

Have you ever wondered why you haven’t sold even one of a specific product from your affiliate site in a very long time?

This video might explain the reason…

For those who have watched the video, I only have 95 more to go…

I was wondering why I hadn’t earned a commission on a particular product in quite awhile.

The merchant had given me a free domain set up to redirect to their store with my affiliate link, so I went to that URL and it was still redirecting, no problem.

However, when I clicked on “Buy Now!” and arrived on the Clickbank order page, this is what I found.

Rotten – simply ROTTEN. They apparently stripped my affiliate link from the redirect. Unbelievable. That’s the first time since 1998 – and sending a LOT of traffic to free merchant domains – that I’ve been scammed like that.

Needless to say, I’m no longer promoting their service.

Lesson – Unless you’ve worked with a merchant successfully for a long time, stay away from their offers of free domains. It’s simple enough to code your own redirect and you won’t have to worry that they’ll scam you by changing out your links.

Amazon has just made it SO much simpler to get your affiliate links from them.

With their new Site Stripe, you just navigate to the page of a product that you want to promote, click the ‘Link to this Page’ link in the Site Stripe bar (as shown in the graphic below), login (if you haven’t done so already) and voila! you’re at the Customize and Get HTML page.

To see the full size image on Flickr, click here.

I wrote a review about the Project Black Mask. Although I summarily denounced the basic tactics espoused by its authors, I commended the work on its keyword research and generation section.

Although most of the comments posted about my review were supportive, I got an earful from a few who took great exception to the fact that I linked to Project Black Mask with my affiliate link.

Ooops! I did it again!

Some suggested that despite my warnings, readers may have be persuaded by the sales letter to buy the product for the wrong reasons – and that I was wrong to facilitate their purchase through my link.

Another – apparently without access to Dictionary.com – accused me of ‘profiteering’ which is defined as ‘To make excessive profits on goods in short supply.’

Ya right.

Trust me on this – I turned far more people away from that product and saved my visitors considerably more money than I earned from that review.

THAT was my intention.

As to affiliate linking… here’s what I think about that…

1. As online content publishers and affiliate marketers, our primary responsibility is to evaluate products and give our readers our honest opinions about those products.
2. We don’t control our readers. It’s the their responsibility as consumers to do enough research to make informed and appropriate buying decisions.
3. We’re affiliate marketers, not cops. If you provide an honest evaluation and your visitor purchases a product to use it for a purpose that you recommend against – once again, that’s their responsibility.

Here’s an analogy.

Let’s suppose that you run a garden variety grocery store.

You’re a smart person who knows that sugar in excessive quantities is an evil and addictive substance that depresses the immune system, causes chromium and copper deficiencies and contributes to obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, hyperactivity in children and a long list of other ailments.

So what do you do?

Well, you could sell the grocery store and open a health food store. And if you’re that staunch in your beliefs, you better make sure that none of the products you stock contains fructose or sucrose, either. Actually, it would probably be better to get rid of all the starches entirely.

Hmm… that would leave you with not a lot to sell and a very tiny market base, so now you’re looking for a job.

OK, so, let’s stick with running the grocery store.

You could leave half your shelves bare by refusing to sell white sugar, kiddie cereals, cakes, ice cream, desserts, pop, candies and other treats. But would you really make granny drive all the way across town just to get a bag of sugar for her homemade jam? What about the person whose idea of a sweet treat is having a little bowl of Hagen Daz once a week? (That would be me.) In other words, do you deprive everyone for the sake of a few – who are going to seek and find their sugar fix whether or not you sell the product?

Or, do you take a moderate approach and trust that your customers have a brain, know the risks, and that it’s up to them to use a product wisely?

The answer seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

If you care about your customers, you could offer them alternate product selections. And if you really want to add value, you could put up a rack of health brochures near the store’s entrance to inform them about good nutritional habits and disease prevention. Better yet, you could hold a baking demonstration to show people how to use Splenda as a sugar substitute.

There are so many possibilities – but NOT selling the product is not one of them.

If you’re in business to do business, you don’t choose NOT to sell (or link to) a product that you honestly think has some value just because some people will refuse to heed your warnings – or don’t think exactly as you do.

From my perspective, the vast majority of my audience is comprised of discerning, responsible individuals who appreciate my candor about doing business on the Internet.

For the few odd souls lurking about that are looking for the quick (non-existent) fix, well, they’ll read into things as they choose and find it anywhere they can – so it might as well be here.

And maybe, if they’re lucky, they’ll listen the next time around.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Cheese me. I was in the Linkshare interface the other night getting Allzine links for blog posting about on the Roamsters.com site. Thirty magazines were returned in the Travel & Leisure category. I grabbed about ten of them, creating ten draft posts with magazine pictures and titles and planned to write descriptions of them later.

Well, good thing I clicked on some of those links. More than half of them no longer exist in Allzine’s product database. Really, when I searched the Travel & Leisure category within Allzines itself, only 9 magazines were returned, meaning that 21 TWENTY-ONE!!!! of the Linkshare links were no good.

Of the nine that WERE good, some of them had broken graphics.

Lesson to affiliates: Check the merchant’s site first to see whether or not the product is still offered. It’s a hassle, I know, but better than wasting your time putting up product links that don’t work and thereby frustrating your visitors.

Suggestion to merchants: Kindly make sure your product links are up to date!

In response to one of my posts, David Lovelace sent me the following note:

Dear Rosalind, Do you have 2 minutes to confirm something for me? I just looked over your post and saw something that I had never heard or thought about before. I use (a specific product) to make sure my affiliates’ links are cloaked throughout the process. But I’ve been thinking of opening a CB account without the script. So when you said:

Hey Dave!

You got it exactly right, and thanks for spelling it out!

I created a redirect to the home page and saved it to:

http://www.superaffiliatehandbook.com/cb/index.html

Then that URL is listed as the “Hoplink target URL” in my Clickbank account.

Notice how it redirects to the homepage when you click it?

The same thing happens when someone clicks on one of my affiliate’s CB links for the Super Affiliate Handbook. The visitor doesn’t see the affiliate ID, but the cookie is preserved… which makes everyone happy! See how easy that is?

As a Clickbank affiliate, I thank all CB merchants who take the time to hide our affiliate links.