Affiliate Nuts

FTC To Monitor Affiliate Marketers – Watch Out!

Posted on June 24, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

That’s right, as announed by the FTC two days ago, affiliate marketers are now going to have to disclose that they are making a profit for making suggestions to readers. This has been a call to action for the FTC to stop bloggers from receiving freebies (trips and products) and money for making a recommendation. Originally it was believed that this was only going to affect bloggers, but it has been confirmed that they intend to monitor all affiliate marketing.

To find out the entire story, I would read the CNet news and the Associated Press.

What does this mean? I have on clue what this means for the affiliate business. Honestly.

First off, the FTC is based in the USA so I am not sure how they will be monitoring. Will it be by IP address? Will other countries adopt a similar policy so this becomes something that is standard across the board? I cannot imagine the ligistical nightmares of this. Laslty, does this mean that marketers that reside outside of the USA will have a distinct advantage over their peers?

The second item that needs to be anazlyed is how they will insist we (as affiliate marketers) present this information to our readers. Will it be as simple as providing something like the privacy policy that all adsense users must have now? Or will it be much more obvious and have to be stated during the sale.

Lastly, is this going to change the face of the affiliate business and internet marketing? What is this going to mean for a booming industry that is responsible for billions of dollars in revenue.

I sure hope the FTC is prepared to hire on a few extra staffers. Let’s face it, this is going to be a very huge and daunting task and I’m curious to see how this is enforced.

Jodie

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Squidoo Marketing – Still A Worthwhile Endeavour?

Posted on June 23, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

You may or may not have heard about the recent changes
to Squidoo and how this effects your Squidoo Marketing.
If you have not heard, you can read about it in more detail
at Squidoo, but in short, Squidoo has changed some of their Terms of Use.
Some of the changes include now only allowing nine outgoing links to the same
website from a lens and banning topics such as weight loss.

At first I thought that if you had nine outgoing links to the same site,
you may be a little nuts. But then I started really thinking about it and
I realized I had been using Squidoo lenses to link to ezine articles to boost
the PR of the ezine article (it works well, just make sure you are using
the linking system that is “follow” links. Their easy linker module is in
fact “no follow” (tricky…). So, in fact I did have to modify one lens to suit
the part of this new rule.

The second part is a bit more stinky for marketers. At first I was not
terribly concerned about the change because I’m personally only
losing a few lenses that never got visitors anyway. It was from a
Strip That Fat campaign that has to this day only sold one ebook. lol
But then I grew a bit more of a heart and truly felt compassion
for those that are going to lose a lot of work. That does stink.

So what should you do? Grab some hosting and post this information
on your own site. Do you feel you aren’t ready for this? If not, then
save the information on a blog at blogger.com or perhaps on
hubpages or xomba. It may take a few hours to transfer all off the information
but if it is truly of financial value to you, then move it. If it’s of sentimental
value, then ditch it. Start brand new. The learning process is over for that
site.

I have read by a few people in Wealthy Affiliate
that they feel that this has become
an opportunity for them because they
are now realizing that they should be
doing this for themselves on their
own domain.

So is Squidoo Marketing dead? Nope, not at all. In fact,
it just got waaaaay better. In theory anyway. PR should
go up, especially with the Purple Star program they
implemented. But at the end of the day, let’s
accept that this could have been a brush stroke
and erased much of our hard work. We
should all be prepared for when that day
comes… better prepared than getting
caught with your pants down if it ever does.

Diversify. Hubpages, Ehow.com, Xomba, on and on and on… (Please comment about
your favourites so I can continue exploring more).

Cheers!
Jodie

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Where Have The Nuts Been

Posted on May 24, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

To everyone reading this and wondering why it hasnt been updated in so long well continue reading so you can get the feel of real affiliate marketers.

Well Jodie and I put our heads together to see where our careers in affiliate marketing were heading. For a couple of self trained people we actually do great but we also realized a few things.

We know the effort it takes to be successful in affiliate marketing and dont let anybody tell you this will be an easy adventure. We both work our tails off to try and stay ahead of the game. Not to mention we are very different then most other affiliate marketers.

You see we could have built the massive lists and then pepper your inbox with each and every new product that comes online. However we have choosen not to take that path. We know how much we hate it so why should we expect any of you to like it.

Right now Jodie and I are focusing on some of our rather lucrative niches as they are what pay the bills right now.

We have also been putting our heads together to decide on the future of the Affiliate Nuts. Here is our options. We can take the website down and go totally underground and just be invisible affiliates making a nice income, we can get back in full throttle and jeopradize our other dealings or we can back off a bit and work with Affiliate Nuts one day at a time.

After very careful consideration and endless hours of talking we have decided that Affiliate Nuts are not going anywhere. We are definately going to be doing some restructuring and making better use of our time.

So what does this mean to you? Well if you are patient the future holds a lot of great things for Affiliate Nuts. At the moment we will continue to put useful information on the site for everyone to use.

We ill no longer be offering the Wealthy Affiliate discount and let me tell you why. In doing so we quicky recognized that most of the people who took us up on the discount never did another thing with the site. I did say most. A few have still moved forward slowly.

Everyone needs to understand that Jodie and I are huge believers in Wealthy Affiliate and always will be. The other thing you need to understand is being a member of Wealthy Affiliate doesnt automatically make you rich. You will get every tool you need to be successful but unless you use the tools nothing will happen.

So in a nutshell the Affiliate Nuts are going no where. We are simply restructuring in order to make the site more beneficial to everyone who uses it and to ourselves.

So for now thats all Im going to write.

Keep coming back for more useful information and watch for the Affiliate Nuts to explode in the next year. You decide if you want to be a part of the ride.

The Affiliate Nuts

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