www.affiliateconfession.com

John Chow is running a contest over at his blog where you can win a free pass to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas on February 24-26. All you have to do for a chance to win this nearly $1,500 ticket is write a post on why you deserve to go and what you hope to learn by attending the conference. 

I would love to go, but because of scheduling conflicts I can’t make it, but I’m going to write a post anyway as if I were able to go, just for kicks.

Send Me To Affiliate Summit

I’m scared John, that’s why you need to send me to Affiliate Summit. Why am I scared? Because my affiliate marketing career is at a crossroads right now. With a little more knowledge of how the affiliate marketing game works, I could end up like you, making the big bucks somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 per month instead of the $2,500 I make now. Otherwise, I could end up like John Cow who is only a cartoon, doesn’t report his income and hangs out in cow pastures. That is what scares me.

Let’s compare the lives of these two bloggers and see why it is imperative that the pass to Affiliate Summit be given to me.

John Chow who makes big bucks and reports his income is able to drink fine wine and apparently John Cow drinks only milk. Milk causes mucus and makes me clear my throat with that disgusting hocking sound which my wife doesn’t like. I would like to drink fine wine instead.

John Chow also dines in some fine restaurants and is able to afford some really nice food, John Cow on the other hand appears to only be able to afford to eat McDonald’s tasty treats while sitting at his computer. I would like to eat fine food.

By picking up tips at Affiliate Summit and especially at your panel with Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta on Super Affiliate Strategies That Work, I’m sure I could translate that into dollars and afford to eat at better restaurants than Micky D’s.

Then we come to the matter of what kind of car a blogger that makes real money can afford vs a blogger who is cartoon drawing and doesn’t report his income. We see what kind of automobiles John Chow likes compared to an auto that Cow is leaning on. Cow’s kind of has a funny paint job and although the artwork is very nice, I still believe that Cow’s car would be a bit difficult to drive being that it’s really just ink. (or maybe pixels?) I would like to own and drive that ZR1 Vette one day.

Okay, I’m just going to let your imagination run wild on this one…

I’m not interested in the bar babe pirates because I’m married, but I think you get the point here.

There you have it John Chow, my affiliate career depends on you (okay, not really). I’m not going to whine, I’m not going to beg, I’m not going to cry, I’m going to let you decide based on the facts. Help me live the life of a money making blogger and affiliate marketer or treat me like a cow and send me out to pasture.

Yes John Chow, the fate of a very small part of the free world rests directly in your hands.

Alan
PS - John Cow is giving away a free pass to Affiliate Summit as well, but he isn’t going to be there. The hotel wouldn’t let him bring his cows.

Tags: john chow, affiliate summit, john cow, bloggers, affiliate marketing

This morning I walked into the kitchen to see my wife Jean making pancakes. It was a bit of a surprise to see the griddle out in the morning and her pouring batter on it because we haven’t had pancakes in probably 2 years. Jean has been telling me for the last week or so that she’s been having a hankering (that’s how we speak in the south) for some pancakes and so this morning she decided to take care of it.

Fitting as close to hour healthy diet as possible, Jean whipped up a batter of freshly ground whole wheat flour, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, cinnamon, sucanant, safflower oil and homemade rice milk and proceeded to cook away.

To make the pancakes as healthy as possible, we don’t use any butter and use 100% pure maple syrup. The brand we use is SpringTree All Natural Maple Syrup. We also had some nice fresh orange wedges to compliment the pancakes.

We usually try to eat a mostly raw diet so the pancakes were a nice treat and a diversion from my usual breakfast of homemade granola with strawberries and homemade almond milk.

It was a great way to start the blogging day.

Alan

Tags: whole grain pancakes, healthy diet, blogging, maple syrup, raw diet

I’ve been telling my wife Jean for quite some time that if we could find a nutritional supplement company that wasn’t an MLM, that had an affiliate program, that we could do via the web only, that sold organic supplements with no artificial ingredients in them, then we might check it out and join up.

In setting all those conditions I thought I’d probably never be involved with nutritional supplements again. However, I believe we’ve found such a supplement company and it’s even better than all my conditions required, because it has a multi-tiered affiliate program.

All those conditions have been met in NuBody Supplements. I first read about NuBody in a review on John Chow’s site and I was excited about them because of the completely organic and 100% natural ingredients in all of their products. I have looked at several network marketing companies’ supplements including Melaleuca and others and they contain ingredients such as silicone dioxide and titanium dioxide used as anti-caking agents that I would rather not put into my body. I don’t have to worry about NuBody because none of their nutritionals contain these ingredients.

As I was writing this post I was emailing back and forth with customer service for some more specific information and my questions got passed on to the founder of the company. He emailed me back and this is what he said about their philosophy on those chemicals used in some other supplements:

Hi this is Ken Causey I’m the founder of NuBody Supplements, I would just like to thank you for your interest in our products.  Before I decided I am much happier being an entrepreneur, I was working on a Physics degree focusing on Nanotechnology with a minor in Biology, and while studying towards these degrees I learned a lot about titanium dioxide and other “ingredients” that are found in many major products, and what these really do to the human body. That is why we refuse to use them in any of our products…

We normally take very few supplements because we believe you should always get your nutrition from the food you eat in the form of fresh fruits and vegetables. However, we do realize that there are times such as when traveling or if you just can’t get to the store when a good nutritional supplement is the next best thing.

One of the supplements that caught my eye was NuBody’s Organic Health Mutli-Vitamin that contains a variety of vegetables, grasses, sprouted grains, herbs, anti-oxidants and more. Click on the link above and then click the link that says Click Here To View Ingredients when you get to that page to see everything that goes into these vitamins. They also have a supplement called Brain Control that can help you increase your mental activity and alertness, something I need dearly.

NuBody Affiliate Program

With NuBody you also have a chance to earn some money as an affiliate. For those of us with nutritionally based websites these supplements really are the perfect fit. As an affiliate, you receive 35% commission on the retail sale of their products, plus you get a 5% commission for any affiliates that sign up under your account. And if that’s not enough, you get a monthly commission if people are on autoship and there is a 365 day cookie for any returning visitors. I don’t know of many affiliate programs that are better than that. We are affiliate of VitaminShoppe.com and only get a 10% commission on their supplements.

NuBody Supplements is also running a contest for bloggers and affiliates. If you write a post on any of their supplements or the affiliate program you will be entered in a contest to win one of four prizes that include your choice or either a 8GB iPhone, 16GB iPod Touch, Xbox 360 Elite or a Playstation 3 80GB. You will also get a coupon to receive 50% off your first order. They are also having a contest for the affiliate who sells the highest number of units and the winner will also have their choice of one of the prizes listed above.

My Own Contest

I think this is a great opportunity for affiliates to make a nice income and I’ve already joined NuBody’s affiliate program. As soon as I get my coupon for writing this post I’m going to place an order for 2 bottles of Brain Control and give away one bottle valued at $50 to a fortunate reader of Affiliate Confession.

Also, if I were to win one of the contests Nubody is sponsoring I will choose the PlayStation 3 and give it away here on the blog. I’m not really into gaming, so I think it would be a great prize to give away to my readers.

If you are interested in making money with NuBody Supplements you can sign up as an affiliate here.

Alan

You’ve probably seen this little 125 x 125 banner almost everywhere as have I. The banner belongs to TNX.net a system that facilitates the buying and selling of text links on your blog or web site.

For webmasters, they have gone beyond just selling 1 set of links for sitewide display or only selling links on the home page, you can sell different links (up to a total of 4 at a time) on every single page of your site. It has a great advantage for bloggers or if you use a template for your site in that all you have to do is install code in your sidebar or template once and their system takes care of determining what links go on what pages.

And if you need to get links back to your site, there are great advantages to using TNX. First, the links are non-reciprocal, meaning you don’t have to do the silly my-link-for-your-link type of schemes with their system. Secondly, you can get hundreds or even thousands of one way links from relevant sites in several different categories and do it for much less than other text link brokers.

To protect the integrity of their system with search engines you can’t choose or see the exact web site your text links will appear on until after you have placed your advertising campaign. But if after placing a campaign you see a site that doesn’t fit in with how you want to advertise, you can just delete it and have points credited back to you. You also don’t have to worry about advertising on pages that aren’t indexed or don’t have visitors because the TNX system won’t place advertising on any page until it meets those criteria.

Now I keep using the term points because that’s how TNX is run rather than dealing directly with paying cash for specific advertising. You can buy points, earn points through their affiliate program or earn points by selling links on your sites. You then spend those points to to buy your advertising or if you are an affiliate, you can trade points for cash or use them for advertising.

Advertising With TNX

When I first joined up, I found figuring out the whole advertising process a little cumbersome and I think their help balloons could be better managed as they tend to close up too soon after clicking the little question marks next to specific functions. You have to keep clicking on the question marks to finish reading the pop-up help boxes. Even though the advertising process could initially be easier to grasp, once I found this little gem below that shows you how much it costs to get x number of links, it all started to come together for me.

This tool is at the bottom of the advertising interface and shows you approximately how many links you will get back to your site by the criteria you have chosen via the overall advertising interface.

Making Money With TNX

As I mentioned earlier, there are 2 ways to make money with TNX. You can either put their code on your web site and sell links to advertisers or you can make money with their affiliate program.

If you decide to sell links you can’t use a free hosted web site and your host must support php (you shouldn’t be hosting with a company if they don’t). Their system completely hides the code from search engines and all your visitors and search bots see is real text links with real PR juice going to real websites.

They even have a handy little tool that you can use as a webmaster to figure out how much money you can make with your site. Obviously the higher PR your site has and the more pages you have with a high PR on them, the more money you are going to make.

When you log in as a member of TNX you will see an interface like the one to the left where you can choose to do any of the operations available through the system. For Webmasters you can get the code to put on your site, add a new site to place the code on and sell points to other TNX users. As an Advertiser you can create new campaigns, check your stats and check your balance of points.  As an Affiliate you can see how many referrals you have and pick up banners and your affiliate link to place on your web sites.

And if this is all a bit confusing to you, TNX is offering 2,000 points for a limited time to all new sign-ups so you can test out their system before you spend any of your own money. And if you join as a Webmaster and put the TNX code on your site you can get 5,000 points to start your own advertising. Read more about getting your free points here. Even after you spend your initial points, buying more points is relatively inexpensive allowing you to get incoming links to your sites for much less than their competitors. For example, you can get 17,000+ points for $25 and 40,000+ points for only $50. With 40,000 points you can get around 62 PR1 and 2 links or 6 PR4 and 5 links for a month.

Also, don’t think for a minute a good strategy would be to buy thousands of high PR links into your site all at once. That would be a sure sign to Google your site is up to something. TNX offers great advice on their forum at DigitalPoint that tells you how to use their system to have your site rise in the SE rankings and get on top.

Lots of people are using TNX as I found out when I logged in for the first time. As of Sunday when I wrote this post there were more than 41,000 users, 31 million links in the system and 20 million pages indexed by their system. Sounds like it’s pretty popular to me.

Just to let you know, I had been looking at TNX, but never signed up. They approached me to do a review of their system. However, I did receive my 2,000 free points in about 24 hours from notifying TNX so I’m ready to start advertising. I’ll let you know how it goes.

You can sign up for TNX here.

Alan

Tags: tnx, text links, make money, inbound links, search engines

Sunday’s are pretty much a leisurely time around our home, especially in the evenings. We usually are finishing off our homemade pizza from Saturday night and watch some TV such as Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Masterminds.

This Sunday evening we had our leftover pizza with chocolate beer. Occasionally I try an exotic beer, or stout as it is properly called, that we get at Downtown Produce in the beer and wine section. This store sells not much more than produce, meat and beer and wine from all over the world. As I was perusing the beer section one day I happened to find a chocolate beer and decided to give it a try. It turned out to be absolutely delicious and is somewhat of a treat for us since it costs about $3.69 for a 17 ounce bottle.

The beer is known as Young’s Double Chocolate Stout and gets rave reviews over at BeerAdvocate.com except for an occasional weirdo that doesn’t like chocolate. Now, if you’re thinking chocolate beer would be gross, this isn’t. It doesn’t taste like chocolate milk or a candy bar, it’s more like a bitter coffee flavor with a hint of chocolate. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at first, thinking it would be sweeter, but it turned out to be very good.

As you can see below it has a nice dark rich look and the flavor is as heavy as it looks.

I like my beer ice cold (cold enough to make your teeth hurt) so we usually put it in the freezer along with a couple of heavy glasses 30 minutes before it is to be consumed. Unfortunately this time the beer only got about 5 minutes in the freezer because I was busy writing another blog post and forgot about it before the pizza was being heated up. It was still delicious though.

We’ve tried other chocolate beers before, but Young’s Double Chocolate Stout is definitely the best. I don’t remember what the other one was, but the flavor was wimpy compared to this. If you find this anywhere or get a chance to try it in a restaurant you should. Make sure you ask for a frosty mug.

Cheers!

Alan
PS - This hardly fits in the Healthy Dining category, but I didn’t know where else to put it.

Tags: chocolate beer, beeradvocate, pizza, stout