Aweber changes their affiliate program

February 28, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 25 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Aweber Autoresponders, email marketing 

On their blog, Aweber announced Exciting Changes to the AWeber Affiliate Program. You can visit the blog to learn all the details and read comments from other affiliates.

Here are the basic details:

Based on your feedback, we are happy to announce the following changes to the AWeber affiliate program:

1. All commissions will be raised to 30%. This includes existing 1st tier commissions of 20%.

2. Second tier commissions are being phased out to meet Paypal’s terms of service and enable paying of affiliates via Paypal.

3. Your affiliate cookie will be a 1 year, first visit cookie.

4. You will soon have the option of being paid via PayPal or postal check.

5. All affiliates will be paid once a month, on the first of every month.

6. The minimum check payout will be $30.00 for US affiliates and $50.00 for affiliates not based in the US (This applies to both PayPal Payments and postal payments)

All of these changes will be effective on April 8th, 2009. The only exception will be the PayPal payment option, which will be available in the near future.

I have mixed feelings about these changes.

Let’s start with the only real negative I see.

I don’t like that they’re using a first visit cookie. Most of the affiliate programs that pay me the most use a last visit cookie.

What’s the difference?

With a first visit cookie, a purchase will be credited to the first affiliate to introduce you to a business or product. The great majority of people do not purchase on the first visit.

With a last visit cookie, a purchase is credited to the affiliate who convinced the person to buy. Since that affiliate, the last one visited, probably is the one who actually persuaded the prospect to purchase, I believe that is the affiliate who deserves credit, and a commission, for the sales conversion.

Let’s look at an example…

Let’s say that Bob is vaguely interested in autoresponders, email marketing, newsletters, and making it easy for his readers to subscribe to his blog posts via email. He really doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do or which service is best for his needs.

Bob comes across Nancy’s website and she explains some of the benefits of using Aweber’s service, as opposed to other services that are available.

If Bob clicks Nancy’s affiliate link to visit the Aweber site, he will have a one-year cookie set in his browser that identifies Nancy as the affiliate who introduced him to the service.

If he purchases on that visit, or shortly thereafter, Nancy deserves credit for the sale and an ongoing commission.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

However, Bob probably won’t purchase immediately, or even soon. He’ll probably forget about it, get distracted, or something else will stop him from purchasing.

Later, maybe months later, he comes across Steve’s website and is reminded about Aweber.

Not only is he reminded, Steve makes a compelling argument for purchasing the services that Aweber provides. Bob’s mind is made up and he goes and subscribes to the service.

In this case, with a first visit cookie, Nancy will still get the credit and commission for the sale, even though Bob purchased as a result of Steve’s marketing, not Nancy’s.

However, with a last visit cookie, Steve would get the credit and commission for the sale.

I believe that would be appropriate since it was his efforts that finally persuaded Bob to purchase.

I don’t like first visit cookies for affiliate sales.

Regarding the other changes…

I’m always happy to hear that someone is willing to pay me more for my sales efforts. I have no argument with that. ;)

The change from a 10-year cookie to a 1-year cookie is largely irrelevant, because most cookies would not persist for ten years, anyway.

I like the option of being paid by PayPal.

Although I like two-tier affiliate programs, I don’t have any real opinion about Aweber changing to a one-tier program, especially if it makes it easier for some affiliates to be paid via PayPal.

All in all, I like the changes Aweber has made to their affiliate program, but I would really encourage them to change to a last visit cookie for determining who gets the credit for a sale.

In my opinion, Aweber offers the best services related to email marketing and I’m a happy customer and affiliate. I intend to use their services for a long, long time.

Are you an Aweber affiliate?

What do you think about these changes?

Act on your dream!

JD

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What is Site Build It?

February 11, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 21 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It, Webhosting 

This originally started out as a reply on my friend’s blog, but it was too long and it looks like the reply was not accepted. Hopefully, it won’t duplicate what may still appear on his blog.

Mitch Mitchell recently wrote an article called The Ads On This Blog and we got to talking about Site Build It.

He asked…

John, I have to admit that I kind of don’t get it then; we’re talking about Site Build It. I was under the impression that it was a program to help you build websites; that would seem to be inaccurate. I read this post of yours, I did watch the video, but I’m still missing it. Can you explain it better?

I wrote what I hoped would be a better explanation, but when I submitted the reply, the page reloaded and didn’t show the comment or state that it was awaiting moderation.

So, since it may be too long for a comment, here’s what I tried to say in reply to Mitch’s question…

Good morning, Mitch.

I’ll try to do a better job. Sometimes I over-complicate things. I’ve been told that I could describe a pencil and make it hard to use.

Here is what I think is the central concept of SBI: the C-T-P-M process.

The idea is that people don’t search for us on the Internet. They search for information about something, a solution to a problem, or something that will scratch their particular itch.

If they knew about us, they’d come right to our site, but they don’t.

So, they go to Google and type in something they want to learn more about.

If our site offers information about that topic, we want to be on page one so the person doing the searching will find us.

To do that, we offer quality information (C = content) that the search engines rank well.

When someone finds us on the SE, that leads to free traffic to our site (T = traffic).

While the visitor is on our site on a page that is targeted to what they are looking for, we want to provide information that will help persuade them that we have something that will satisfy what they were looking for. (P = PREsell).

Then, if they decide to click on one of the links or perform an action for which we get paid, we can earn an income and build our business (M = monetize).

That’s the C-T-P-M process in a nutshell.

This may sound like common sense if you’ve been marketing on the web for any time, but it was a rather remarkable idea a few years ago when Ken Evoy introduced it.

So, our goal is to place ourselves between the person searching and the merchant from whom they can buy.

To do that, we research the keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for and compare the number of searchers to the number of competing websites.

Ken coined a term for this comparison: profitability. He probably wishes now that he had chosen to call it something different, because some people think it is some kind of absolute measure of how much money they can make. It’s not. It’s a simple comparison of Supply (website pages) versus Demand (number of searches). Still, it make it easy to find the low-hanging-fruit so we can create pages targeted to those searches.

SBI offers a bunch of integrated tools to help us make pages that rank well and get free visitors.

Brainstorm It! is the keyword research tool and I can do more research in a couple of hours with it than I can do in days with other tools I use.

As a result of using Brainstorm It!, we build a master keyword list (MKL) that is stored on the SBI servers.

All of this is done from a browser. It is not a program we buy and use locally. It is a series of integrated tools on their servers.

As we complete the process of brainstorming, following the SBI action guide, we can identify a niche that matches our interests and looks like it will be profitable based on the keyword searches and competition.

In fact, the Action Guide recommends researching three different niches and comparing them to choose one that we’ll develop into a site.

This is a radically different approach than just posting a few pages about us that nobody will find. I’m talking about the typical “brochure” website that most small businesses put up.

Now, if someone doesn’t want to use all the tools that SBI offers for less than a dollar a day, they can go watch the video version of the Action Guide or read the text version and build a site following those principles. They would not have access to Brainstorm It, the MKL, the world submitter, the ezine management module, nor any of the other integrated tools that SBI offers.

I’ve used what I learned from following the SBI method to build other static sites and write blogs. I have found, however, that they are harder to manage and don’t get results as good as I can get from using SBI and all it offers.

Site Build It! does include a simple browser-based site building module that operates similarly to posting to a blog. For anyone who does not want to master the complexities of writing HTML, it takes what we enter into the sitebuilder, parses it through a format we can select for presentation, and produces the HTML page. It then hosts that page, submits it to the major search engines automatically, and adds it to the RSS feed for the site.

It does other things in the background, as well.

Over the years, some people have complained about the templates (themes) that are available for SBI customers. I think there are a couple of dozen basic designs.

So, a few years ago, the ability to customize the themes was added.

Later, the system was upgraded so that a customer could use any design tools they preferred to build a page and could then upload the HTML to the SBI database.

One of the major differences between Site Build It! and typical hosting is that SBI is a huge, integrated database that helps us analyze what we write, preview the pages, publish them, and then hosts and serves them to our visitors.

Some people get hung up on the lack of FTP, because they’re so tied to traditional webhosting.

Lately, a lot of SBI sites have gone to three columns. I think this is partly because of WordPress blogs, but don’t know it for sure.

I choose to continue to use a simple two-column design on my SBI site that has a navigation menu in the left column and the page’s main content in the larger right column.

Let’s go back to considering the beginning webmaster for a moment.

The included sitebuilder module makes it easy to use headlines, text, graphics, links, and even tracking links, even for someone who knows practically nothing about HTML tags.

Most will learn to use simple bolding, italics, and the like. Some will progress to unordered and ordered lists.

But, they don’t have to.

Anyone who wants to concentrate on writing quality content around their topic of choice can do so easily using the sitebuilder.

I did that for years with good results.

Eventually, instead of using many different modules per page, I started dumping all the content I wrote into a text module. I wrote my own HTML and used the sitebuilder in a way in which it wasn’t designed, but still worked.

When Mom went into the nursing home last year, I spent about six weeks reprogramming the Radio Userland database I use to build all my other large sites so that I could write HTML pages that would work properly with the SBI database.

The reason I did this is because I’ve spent years programming my system to make it particularly easy to include links, navigation bread crumbs, and other things that I’ve grown used to using.

Now, I have rewritten my SBI site and put it into my own database. This allows me to make major changes to an entire site, or section of a site, very easily.

It took a lot of work and a lot of time to make this an easy process, but I believe it was worth the effort. Most people would never approach building a site as I have.

So, with SBI, you have your choice of tools on how you’re going to create a page. You can fill in the blanks using the sitebuilder; write your code in a text editor; use a WYSIWYG HTML editor; or even do something like I did.

If you use the sitebuilder, it’s as easy as filling in the blanks and pressing a button.

If you upload your own HTML, it’s a simple matter of creating the page using the tools you prefer and then uploading the page to SBI. This is similar to uploading a photo to a blog or photo hosting site. Browse on your computer, select the file, click upload.

The difference is that, once your page is in the SBI database, you have access to the analyze it module that helps you optimize the page using common SEO techniques, coupled with advice from the system on how you can make it better.

Then, you click publish, and SBI does its behind-the-scenes work helping you promote the page.

The majority of people I talk to get hung up on one of two things: (1) the sitebuilder and its lack of the options they want, or (2) the lack of FTP.

The actual process of creating the page is not the important part of SBI. What is important is the process of planning, researching, and presenting a well-organized site related to a single theme, with each page being written and optimized to rank well in the search engines for a particular (usually long-tail) keyword phrase.

By creating quality content that people are searching for, and then following the steps to help the site rank well, the site starts getting visitors. Once that is accomplished, and relatively late in the process, we can start monetizing the site.

Most people want to start with monetizing as the first step, before they have created the information that leads to free traffic, and that doesn’t work nearly as well.

If you read the Action Guide, you can learn the SBI systematic approach to building a site – for free.

You won’t have access to all the tools, support, and forum, however.

There is no magic in Site Build It! It’s just a systematic process for building a tightly-focused site on a particular topic of your choice, coupled with a lot of tools that makes the process easier and/or more effective.

Does that explain it better?

Act on your dream!

JD

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I now have three primary blogs

February 10, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, John Dilbeck, Western North Carolina 

If you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you know that I’ve been struggling with my blogs and websites and how I’m going to focus my efforts more in 2009.

You’ve also noted, I suspect, that some of the posts I have here don’t really relate to affiliate marketing.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve created a new blog and resurrected another one, and now I have my three primary blogs set up for real work. There are a few more things I need to do, but they are ready to go.

21st Century Affiliate Marketing

This blog will be focused more tightly on affiliate marketing. I won’t be talking as much about Twitter tools, social networking, and similar topics, unless they can be tied directly to being a more effective affiliate marketer.

John Dilbeck And Friends

I’ve moved my John Dilbeck And Friends blog from it’s former home at johndilbeck.editthispage.com to it’s new home at JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com and now it is powered by WordPress.

This is the blog where I’ll be talking about social networking and other things in which I’m interested. It will be a general purpose blog, but I don’t plan on talking about politics or what I had for breakfast! ;)

Murphy, NC 28906

Finally, I’ve resurrected my Murphy NC 28906 blog, updated it to WordPress version 2.7, changed the theme, and added some bells and whistles. It will be used exclusively for talking about people, events, organizations, businesses, and things related specifically to Murphy, NC.

Because of more pressing issues, I neglected that blog for most of 2008, but it will be much more important to me in 2009 and in future years.

Before too long, I’ll be reintroducing my Murphy NC community and a announcing a brand-new website for promoting local businesses on the Internet.

More focused on my two primary goals in 2009

With these changes, I think I’ll be able to segment my efforts and focus on my two primary goals for 2009:

1. Continuing to build my affiliate marketing business and making it more profitable.

2. Promoting local brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC. I’ll also be doing much more offline marketing consulting with local business owners.

I hope this will make this blog more interesting to those of you who are interested in affiliate marketing.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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