Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

Seems more and more people are starting to make some decent money off blog reviews and sponsored posts. I’m currently signed up with Review Me (as a blogger) and listed in their directory, but I don’t push my badge on this blog for paid reviews. Should someone find me through the ReviewMe directory, that would be great, but right now I want to focus on content and helping others make money online. I heavily stress than NONE of the posts on this site have been paid for or sponsored reviews. (Should there be any in the future, they would be noted as a "paid review") You also won’t even come across Google Adsense or any other banner ads on the site. At the most, I only incorporate referral urls when talking about a new site or offer… which are all to quality companies/site I work with.

As I continually read more about paid reviews, I wonder… how much can actually be made? Well, looks like that’s next on my list of things to find out! This morning I decided to pick up a new domain and am in the process of making a new blog. This new blog will be dedicated to just paid reviews and I will track and report it’s revenue performance on this blog to keep you updated. This will pretty much be a step by step process on how to make money through "sponsored posts". This will be new to me, and to make it fair to the sites/offers I am reviewing, I will also cross promote the blog on some other sites of mine to drive some traffic through the site.

(EDIT: I will need to read the terms and policies on these networks to go over their real posts vs paid post ratios. I will also need to come up with a basic idea for the site since just reviews apparently wouldn’t fly with the networks. I am thinking of making it more of a complete review site, then just mixing paid reviews in along with it. This would also do well for search indexing and google adsense earnings!)

This should be fun and interesting! I’m planning on using the big three "paid blogger" programs at the moment, which are Review Me, PayPerPost and Sponsored Reviews. (I will soon do a network review on the three of these programs as well.) Feel free to let me know what you think about the idea, what you would like to see on the site and which networks you have made money with and why you prefer one over the others.

Now that we are a week into June, I can finally show you some numbers for AuctionAds performance this month. Last month I earned $216.27 with the program, and that was my initial testing with the program for the last 22 days of the month. May’s final earnings per click sent to AuctionAds ended just under .01 per click. As May was coming to a close and the news of eBay’s new and improved payout structure was soon to come into effect, I was quite hopeful for much higher earnings in June. From looking at this month’s stats below, it has done just that. While it took roughly 22 days last month to make $216.27, I am already at $335.29 only six days into the month. What I don’t understand is how I can be making $50 to $99 a day… then have a $2.70 day on the 4th??? I know earnings stats are delayed on AuctionAds, but some of the numbers just seem weird some times.

$335.29 in Six Days… Much Better Than May’s Performance!

As per my last post on AuctionAds, I said I would like to make at least $750 during June, with a earnings per click average of higher than .01 per click. Right now I am clearly on my way to heavily passing that $750 target, and currently seeing earnings around .02 per click. I am still targeting towards the same keywords as last month and using all of the same creatives/sizes and placement. I can only assume the new high numbers are from the new eBay payout structure. Should these numbers continue, I will gladly push this program month after month.

Your domain is a very important part of your business… heck, it is your business! Without your domain you don’t have a site! Imagine if you suddenly lost your domain? What would you do? Well, this scenario is probably all too familiar for anyone that has used RegisterFly. At one point they were my main registrar for my domain portfolio, where I had up to 120+ domains at one point. I first signed up to RegisterFly a few years ago. In the beginning all was well, but then they went to hell. They basically have no more customer support, they will not renew domains, they will not help you in any domain transfer or even acknowledge you as a member… but I’m sure they will still gladly take your money!

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now, but wanted to try and pull away all of my existing domains with RegisterFly before doing so. Let’s first take a look at their customer support section. Here you are supposed to setup "support tickets" with any questions or problems you may have with your account. I just logged into today and saw that my last two tickets were changed to "closed"… yet they were never even answered. As you can see there are several other support tickets as well… they were also unanswered and I unfortunately lost a couple domains because of them. I especially like the section that states, "Normally support issues are handled within 2-3 hours"… a complete comedy and it usually took days… or would simply just remain unanswered.

The last domain that I had to pull from RegisterFly was an important one and I was desperately working with GoDaddy and eNom to have either of them pick the domain up anyway possible. GoDaddy was able to do so, and I praise them for it. When I logged into my RegisterFly account today to pull more information for this post, I also noticed a new update to in the "Customer Service Center". A screenshot from the customer service center is shown below, along with the notice that was on the following page.

Looks like RegisterFly is getting enough complaints to actually do something for their customers. (By the way… good luck trying to conact them through their support system!) RegisterFly had recently become their own registrar and was no longer a reseller of domain registration to other networks. Everyone on RegisterFly has had problems and the other domain registrars were also well aware. Even GoDaddy and some of the other networks were running promotions specifically targeted towards unhappy RegisterFly customers. You can do a simply google search for "RegisterFly Sucks" and you’ll see over 27,900 pages come up. Just type in "RegisterFly" into the search and the adwords advertisers are well aware of the frustration on RegisterFly customers.

For a while GoDaddy was a big boaster of getting RegisterFly users to move over and had a special promotion on their site. I went to the site just now, planning to show you the ad copy, but they have already adjusted to the new transfer flow of RegisterFly users onto their network. Right on the main page at the top it shows "Welcome RegisterFly Users! Your domains are safe with us."… Never did I think I would see "RegisterFly" and "Safe" used together and actually believe it! I have been using GoDaddy for a while now and have no complaints with them, they actually call you weeks before a domain is expiring, so you can renew! RegisterFly customers will think they died and gone to heaven with the new support offered by GoDaddy. (eNom has also been a great help during the domain process and I highly recommend them as well!)

In the end, after months and month of stresss and the loss of a few domains, I now have my remaining domains safe and secure with GoDaddy and eNom. (GoDaddy even has an affiliate program through Commission Junction if you want to promote their service and make some money.) Domains are precious and if lost can turn a company from making millions per day, to nothing the next. Make sure you track and renew all of your domains cautiously and keep them with a well known host. As for the future of RegisterFly?… it will be hard for them to re-brand themselves as a reliable company with such a horrid reputation from past customers.

I received an email from "Yahoo Publisher Network" with their announcement to start implementing "Quality Based Pricing". This looks to be their version of Google’s Smart Pricing. Below is the email sent out from Yahoo.

So what is this new "Quality Based Pricing" and how will it affect Yahoo’s Publishers and Advertisers? As taken from Yahoo’s Quality Based Pricing FAQ:

Unfortunately, this likely means most publishers will see a decrease in the amount of earnings they earn per click. I have been a member of the Yahoo Publisher Network almost since it first went live. The earnings from the program during the end of 2005 were simply the most amazing payouts I have seen, and have made Yahoo my largest earning program to date. Over the past year, Yahoo Publisher’s have seen a dramatic decline in earnings and now it looks like we are possibly headed to even further declines. Nothing great lasts forever, but this can be compared to the same process we saw with Google Adsense when it first went live.

I use Mozilla FireFox nearly 90% of the time now when browsing sites, but most people are still using Internet Explorer. For quite some time now I’ve been having some issues with this blog when you would visit the individual post pages using Internet Explorer. Sometimes you would get an annoying "Stack Overflow Error: Line #" error popup window and they were very annoying, as many of you have also pointed out. Nice4Rice.com was nice enough to spend some time to write up a review of this blog for the "Review Me & Make Money" promotion. In addition to writing up a great review, this one was really helpful because he pointed out the "Stack Overflow" problem I had been having with the blog. I have been looking all over for a fix on this and couldn’t find it anywhere, and I’m sure many other sites out there have had the same problem. I made the necessary changes and the problem is now fixed! To show my appreciation, I wanted to make sure to post about his site and let all other site’s having the same problem, know that they can find the fix on his MyAvatars Stack Overflow Error page. Thanks again!