www.affiliateconfession.com

The prizes are starting to come in from the Webmaster Talk contest and yesterday I received the Nintendo DS Lite from RevResponse. The DS Lite is a pretty cool little game console that you can use an included touch stylus on and has some very good graphics for something as small as it is. It also came bundled with 2 games including the Cartoon Network Racing game and How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

I messed around with Cartoon Network Racing yesterday evening and kind of got into it, but I’m not really into games, so more than likely, I will probably give the Nintendo DS Lite away here on Affiliate Confession. I already have a contest going on so it won’t be for a few weeks. I almost hate to give it away, but I’m sure someone else would be more into it than me. This may be a contest where you have to do a little more than just leave a comment.

I also got a nice letter from Karen at RevResponse congratulating me for being one of the winners at the Webmaster Talk contest. Karen also pointed out that RevResponse has a great referral system when affiliates sign up under you, you can earn 20% of their commissions for the first 6 months. If you don’t know about RevResponse it’s a bit different than your traditional affiliate program. Believe it or not, you actually get paid from $2 to $20 per action for giving stuff away for free. Sounds like a pretty easy way to make money, doesn’t it?

I haven’t had time to take a real close look at how things work with RevResponse, but you basically can recommend free resources to your readers such as magazine subscriptions, white papers, podcasts, software trials and more and earn when someone takes an action. You can’t just had these things out on the street and get paid for it, you do have to find quality prospects that would really be interested in the stuff you are offering. However, I have read in some forums of people making more than $1,000 per month through RevResponse, so it definitely sounds like something that’s worth taking a serious look at.

You can get more info on RevResponse here.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new link at the top of Affiliate Confession leading to my Make Money Online page. This page covers nearly every affiliate program, affiliate network and even some individual systems I use to make money on the web. I don’t go into every individual affiliate program, because there are several in a few networks such as CJ. In fact, there are 27 different merchants I’m an affiliate of through CJ and at one time or another I’ve probably made a little money with roughly 75% of them.

I get several questions asking me what I do, or how I make money, or what affiliate programs I’m a part of, so to hopefully alleviate some of those questions I decided to put up the new page. I go into a little explanation of most of the programs I’m involved with and provide a link to that merchant. Unfortunately, one of my better merchants, TripAdvisor.com, no longer is accepting new affiliates. A couple of months ago they must have increased their payout because I started earning nearly double what I had previously earned without actually doing any more work or getting that much more traffic. Maybe they decided to pay their present affiliates more and not take on additional ones for right now.

It will be interesting to see what happens to my CJ income since eBay has switched over to the eBay Partner Network and now runs their own program. eBay was my biggest earner at Commission Junction to the tune of about 60% of my earnings there. But the EPN is looking real good at the present time and I’m seeing some very nice commissions reported so far. I also like that EPN is updating commissions early in the morning for the previous day rather than CJ taking 1 or 2 days at times for an update.

Anyway, check out the money makers page to see the merchants and affiliate programs that have been working for me. I’ll keep the page updated as I add new ones.

I just got an email from support at ShoppingAds.com  and there’s great news for all ShoppingAds / AuctionAds affiliates, you won’t need to do anything to your widgets, code or links for the big eBay affiliate program changeover. Apparently everything will be switched over on their end so their affiliates can rest easy. Support said that there might be a slight reporting delay, but other than that you probably won’t notice anything.

I can’t tell you how happy that makes me because I have tons of links in USFreeAds.com classifieds, on blog posts and other web sites and I was dreading the switch. This should be quite reassuring for all eBay affiliates and stem the worldwide panic just a bit. If ShoppingAds will smoothly get through the eBay affiliate transition, then we as individuals shouldn’t have too much to worry about. All your present eBay affiliate links go through a redirected eBay domain anyway so I’m guessing all we will have to do is possibly change our affiliate codes in all of our links, but it might even be simpler than that and only require signing up for the eBay Partner Network. Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I received a rather nasty comment just yesterday (which I deleted) making fun of BANS users in regards to the switchover from CJ to the eBay Partner Network. The writer thought Build A Niche Store would now be rendered useless. All I can do is laugh at that kind of thinking because the BANS developers have everything under control and will issue a quick fix probably sometime tomorrow after they sign up for the new eBay affiliate program. The fix shouldn’t consist of more than 2 or 3 files that will just need to be ftp’d to your BANS directories.

I’m kind of looking forward to the change and anxious to see how eBay is going to enhance their already incredible affiliate program. It’s nice to know at least ShoppingAds and BANS will require little to no effort to make the switch. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Sometimes it can be a difficult decision to think about what affiliate programs you should join. If you are like me, you may get several emails or few phone calls a day alerting you to the latest merchant offering an affiliate venture. Out of those many emails, one landed in my inbox the other day that really piqued my interest.

The email was about the new Telescopes.com affiliate program and came from one affiliate company, but after checking into the program, specifics of linking and payouts, I decided to join through another company. Why was I interested in this program? It’s a good lesson for finding those possibly hidden affiliate gems when you don’t really know what programs to join.

Astronomy has always been an interest of mine, I took 2 semesters of astronomy in school and even though I haven’t looked through a telescope in years, every time I see a nice telescope I wish I had the money for one and time to enjoy it. The thought of looking at something up close and in great detail, that may be millions or billions of light years away, brings up an incredible sense of amazement in me.

I ended up joining the Telescopes.com affiliate program through NetShopsAffiliates  instead of PepperJam Management because with NetShopsAffiliates you can link to any individual page on the Telescopes.com web site, with PepperJam you can only link to the home page. It is absolutely essential to be able to deep link with any merchant’s affiliate program. If you are going to blog or write a page on your web site about a certain class of telescopes or even a specific telescope, you need to be able to link directly to that item. Sending visitors to a merchants home page drastically cuts down on conversion rates so much that I normally don’t join any affiliate program I can’t deep link with.

If you are interested in astronomy like I am, Telescopes.com is a very cool web site. They have every kind of telescope and optical magnifier you can imagine from simple spotting scopes and binoculars costing less than $100 up to large Mead 16 inch advanced coma free reflecting telescopes costing in excess of $13,000. And with an initial payout of 5% you can earn some pretty decent commissions on the sale of these optics. Telescopes and binoculars are a perfect fit for an outdoors or hobbies type web site, a camping web site or a science and astronomy website.

It’s interests you may have like this in your past that you haven’t been into for some time, that make you wonder what you could to with such an affiliate venture given the chance. It may be something entirely different that commands your attention instead of telescopes, but I’m sure there are several experiences in each of us that could turn from just an interest into a money making venture.

What’s cooking on the back burner of your life experience?

You can join the Telescopes.com affiliate program and may others through NetShopsAffiliates.