Yes, barely 3 months into a year in which I vowed that all my posts would be positive, I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to share some bad news with you.

It’s what I call the “Merchant Bait and Switch” and it works like this:

• Merchant gets you interested in a product.
• You sign up for their program.
• Loving the product, you promote it in good faith.
• You discover (if you are lucky) that your affiliate links no longer produce commissions.

Fortunately, this is a relatively rare occurrence.

However, if you learn that you’ve driven thousands of visitors to a site without the hope of being paid what you are due — you might be somewhat teed off.

Especially if you learn that one merchant has done it not once, but TWICE.

Sadly, that’s the story behind my dealings with Affmeter.

When I started to promote their product, they were using one payment processor with an affiliate program.

Sometime later (read years), I discovered they’d switched to Clickbank.

Yet, despite the fact that I’d done beta testing for them to help them improve their product AND then given them a great testimonial after they’d made the changes to develop a great product — no one ever notified me of the change.

The last time I checked, my testimonial was still on their homepage (although I expect it to disappear shortly after this article is posted).

So, what did I do?

I contacted Firuze Okten Gokce, the owner (whom I knew personally from conversations over the phone and at industry conferences), to tell her that I think she’s committed a major faux pas in terms of fairness to her affiliates. I then change my links over to the new Clickbank links.

When I next met her at an industry conference, neither of us mentioned the incident and life went on.

Duh. me.

Considerable time passed and one day I’m reviewing all my affiliate links again and guess what I notice?

The Clickbank link to her product works, but when you go to the order form from the merchant page — the processor is NOT Clickbank.

Not only THAT, but the affiliate signup page on her site still gives you Clickbank links.

Here’s the video I took to show what happened.

I’d like to say this was an honest mistake, however, in this case, I know better.

The owner of this company started in this industry as an affiliate, and as an affiliate, she’d have known better. At least you’d think she’d have the integrity to contact her best affiliates to let them know of the changes… but no.

And, to prove I was a super promoter of her product, just search “Affmeter” on Google. My 4 year-old review (January 2008) still comes up 3rd in the listings. Granted – what a waste. Gotta wonder how much she owes me. I assume it is a LOT. (The listing in 2nd place doesn’t even have a link to their site… weird).

Anyway, fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me — and I should have kept a much better eye on this bad actor.

On the brighter side, it looks like Affmeter recently went out of business, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the software – which was great – but really, really bad karma on the part of its owner.

I wish I could say this was the only time I’ve seen this happen, but it’s not.

Over the years, I’ve soused out a number of links to programs and products that had been terminated and the links redirected to totally different products. The links still worked so you won’t get a broken link error notice like you would if they were a Commission Junction merchant.

In most cases, they are Clickbank merchants of products that are no longer viable (out-of-date or violated Clickbank’s terms of service) and their affiliate links redirect to a landing page with an email opt-in form.

Hopefully in the future, Clickbank will contact every affiliate who ever sold a specific product to advise them of changes to the product or terminations of the product.

Most recently, my affiliate links to Bizzites redirected to a Chinese Bee Pollen site.

Fortunately, the owner of the company had warned me that he was selling the company and that he didn’t know what they new owners would do with it — so when a subscriber informed me that the links were being re-directed, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been otherwise.

The point is — keep an eye on your affiliate promotions. Don’t just check to see that they redirect to the merchant site, but make sure you are getting credit for the sales as well, i.e. check the order page.

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

Cheers,

Here are more advanced software tools to ease your workload…

They include:

1. Article Distribution Software
2. Graphics Editor
3. HTML Editor
4. Macro Software

You can also check out the video tour of my home office. The page includes a list of 25 different hardware components that I use to make money online.

Article Distribution Software

Rather than submit articles to each individual article directory where you have to login, input all the pertinent information about the article (title, author, link, article content, resource box and more), I use Article Announcer to automate the process and increase traffic to my sites quickly.

Here’s an example of “What Happened When I Tested Article Announcer“.

Graphics Editor

I’ve used Corel’s Paint Shop Pro (PSP) graphics editor for years and it does everything I need to do with graphics — as a Windows user. Paint Shop Pro’s closest competitor is Adobe’s more robust, much more expensive Photoshop that is available to Mac users and which sits unused in my bookcase.

Rather than pay for a graphics editor, let me suggest that you try GIMP, which is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is freely distributed and used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems and in many languages.

However, if you insist on having the most robust graphics editor, Adobe’s current promotion lets you save up to $150 when you buy Photoshop Lightroom together with Photoshop CS4 or Photoshop CS4 Extended.

HTML Editor

Dreamweaver, NVU, and Coffee Cup are just a few of the HTML editors that I’ve tried and used, but I’ll stick with my copy of Homesite 5.5 until it breaks and can’t be reloaded for whatever reason or is no longer available from Macromedia.

If that happens, I’ll switch to using Coffee Cup full-time (I use it on my laptop now). The Coffee Cup HTML editor is similar to Homesite with both a code editor and a drag and drop WYSIWYG editor.
 
CoffeeCup comes with more than 100 DHTML & JavaScripts, a DHTML Menu wizard, 25,000 graphics and photos including over 1,000 XP style Icons. It also has Built-in FTP Uploading and easy to use Table, Frame, Font, and Form Designers. Preview your work in any browser or use the exclusive Split Screen preview.

CoffeeCup offers their HTML Editor as a as a free trial download.

Macro Software

If you type the same signature line, sentence, or URL’s on a repeated basis, you really should use macro software that can reduces each of those to just one or two keystrokes. I’ve written about macros and the macro software that I use. Check out the Auto Macro Recorder.

Check your affiliate commissions faster…

How much time do you spend logging into Commission Junction, Peformics, Clickbank, Clixgalore and other affiliate networks to check your stats everyday? What about your Google Adsense and Adwords accounts? An hour? Maybe more?

I know ‘stats junkies’ who check their affiliate commission stats and Google Adwords expenses every single hour — and when I first started affiliate marketing, I used to do it too.

Having to remember all the different network / affiliate program logins used to drive me nuts, especially when I was a newbie and just getting familiar with the different network interfaces and nomenclature was enough of a chore.

Firuze Gokce, who is also an affiliate marketer, felt the same frustration… and she did something about it.

She and her team created Affmeter, a very powerful piece of software that I’ve been using since early September 2007. What Affmeter does is allow you to collect and compare your affiliate revenue, Google Adsense data and Google Adwords expenditures all in one place. (I forgot to load AffMeter on my laptop and really missed it during my trip to AdTech New York).

A number of us who used and tested the BETA version of Affmeter recommended changes that we wanted to see incorporated in the program, and the recently released easy-to-use Affmeter 2.0 is the result. The new navigation and sorting tools are absolutely terrific… you can check and compare your stats every which way to Sunday.

Shown above left is a small representation of the Revenue Overview portion of the software (larger screenshots are available on the Affmeter site). In the top left you can quickly check your daily earnings, while in the middle section bar graphs indicate your earnings for each day of the current month. Click a button and you can scroll back to see previous months earnings quickly.

Just click on any one of the bars and you’ll see the daily breakdown below the monthly revenue chart where earnings from individual networks and campaigns are displayed in the main section, with Top and Poor Merchants are displayed in 2 separate sections on the right.

You can sort any one of those overviews by column, e.g. Network, Merchant Name, Income Share, EPC, Clicks and of course, Commission.

My favorite Affmeter feature is the revenue notification window (screenshot below) that I’ve set to pop once per hour. It shows up discretely in the lower right hand of your screen, lingers for a few seconds and then disappears again. I think of it as a little ego-boost once an hour… or, notification that it’s time to get to work!

Statistics from 35 networks (including Adsense) are currently supported and Firuze advises that they plan to integrate more affiliate networks over time. Right now, Linkconnector, Shareasale and Incentaclick are on track for inclusion in the near future. The following networks are now on board:

1. Affili.net
2. Affiliate Future
3. Affiliate Window
4. Amazon.co.uk
5. Amazon.com
6. AvantLink
7. Buy.at
8. CPA Empire
9. Canadian Sponsors
10. Clickbank
11. Clixgalore
12. Commission Junction
13. DGM-UK Affiliates
14. DGM-AU Affiliates
15. Forex Affiliate
16. Google Adsense
17. Google Adwords
18. Kolimbo
19. LinkConnector
20. LinkMo
21. Linkshare
22. Linktrust
23. Market Health
24. OnenetworkDirect
25. Paid on Results
26. PepperJam Network
27. Performics
28. Reporting.net
29. Share Results
30. Silvertap
31. Tradedoubler
32. Trienta
33. Webgains
34. Zanox
35. Zzounds

Online help and Live Support are both available from the Affmeter interface — and having worked with them for several months, I can report that Firuze and her team are very quick to respond to requests.

According to a press release dated January 14th, 2008, Affmet now comes with the following new and useful functions:

• Google Adwords account set up into Affmeter is smarter. Setting up an Adwords Account and creating different PPC campaigns underneath the same account is an automatic procedure now and saves the affiliate a lot of time
• A “Comparison Tool” has been created to help affiliates to compare their performances in between different periods.
• The user interface has been redesigned with more navigational capabilities.
• Affmeter’s capacity to quickly fetch the data has been increased tremendously.
• Affmeter’s website design has been improved with fresh content and more video tutorials and a ‘frequently asked questions‘ section to help affiliates.
• A “Merchant Monitor Tool” in which affiliates can monitor selected merchants’ performances has been improved with easier account setup features.

Start consolidating your revenue data with Affmeter today. Comes with a 30 day money-back guarantee.