Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing and WordPress Plugins

I’ve read many articles and forum posts about WordPress plugins that can make your life as an affiliate marketer easier. Most of them are really useful but it’s possible that some of them can harm your Google PR and maybe even your SERP positions. What I mean?
I made an experiment with two of our WP blogs – Cooksites and Photoaccent installing Alinks. Last several months everything was fine from affiliate point of view (the blogs generated nice number of Amazon sales) and Google “Judged” strong PR2 for both blogs. But after the last Google PR update (from the previous week) the page rank was dicreased to N.A. for Photoaccent and to PR0 for Cooksites. The only two blogs of all our blogs with dicreased PR were exactly these two blogs where Alinks plugin was installed. Of course I need more time to analyse to make sure that that’s exactly the reason for the page rank loss. But having in mind the widely recently discussed rumour that Google announced unofficially “war” to websites that have a large number of paid links then there is some logic that using Alinks can affect your Google PR.

Edit: Please, note that I’m not against adding paid links on your blogs/websites at ALL! We’ve got many paid / affiliates links added on our websites and all of them have “nofollow” attribute added – don’t see any problem with Google in this case!

I would like to hear your comments.

Below is a list with several WordPress Plugins that we often use on many of our blogs:

Adsense-Deluxe

aLinks (deactivated for now)

Bad Behavior

Executable PHP widget

PHP Exec

Sidebar Widgets

SimplePie for WordPress

Ultimate Tag Warrior

… many other plugins.

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Which affiliate network?

Each one affiliate has “prefered” or say “favourite” affiliate network.
How do you choose which affiliate network to work mainly with?

For me personaly there are few main requirements/criteria that are
important when choosing an affiliate network:

Sales tracking
Good stats tools
Affiliates tools (especially SEF and content rich ones)
Direct deposit or PayPal Commission payment options
Fast and helpful support
Fast approval (at some networks it can take months you to be approved/rejected)
2nd Tier Commissions
Well Converting merchants
Free Feeds

You may think too many requirements!? Well, there are many affiliate networks that
cover most of them. I’ll write a separate article about it within the
next days.

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Commission Junction (CJ) – Payment via direct deposit …

Commission Junction (CJ) – Payment via direct deposit in 9 new banking countries

First post in the blog with good news.
Commission Junction (CJ) has updated their payment method options. Publishers are now able to choose to receive payment via direct deposit in nine new banking countries.

CJ currently supports direct deposit payment in the following countries and currencies:

U.S.A. (USD)
Canada (CAD)
UK (EUR, GBP)
Germany (EUR)
Sweden (SEK)

From this month (October), direct deposit payment will be available in the following
additional banking countries and currencies:

Australia (AUD)
Austria (EUR)
Belgium (EUR)
Canada (USD)
France (EUR)
Ireland (EUR)
Netherlands (EUR)
New Zealand (NZD)
Spain (EUR)
Switzerland (CHF)

Direct deposit offers fast and free delivery of your commissions earned through Commission Junction. You can edit your payment settings in CJ Account manager.
I’d like to see more affiliate networks (especially in the UK) offering their publishers international direct deposits (or at least PayPal).

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