A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

It’s no secret that the credit card niche has always been one of the most lucrative yet most competitive niches for affiliate marketers. The only problem lies in finding legitimate credit card offers to promote. CJ, PepperJam, Linkshare and the rest have few if any credit card offers in their program list. The few they do have require an affiliate manager’s approval which can be difficult if you don’t have a proven history. So what is a potential affiliate to do?

I’ve been successfully using CardOffers.com for almost two years now and the platform has been very solid, their publisher support is unprecedented and best of all, it’s free to sign up. You don’t even need a website to get started and you can earn up to $40 per approved credit card or $20 for each referred friend who is approved. Here’s an example blog post about prepaid credit cards that has CardOffers affiliate embedded in the post.

CardOffers.com has credit card offerings from Discover, Citi, American Express, MBNA, MetaBank and more. They go out of their way to make sure affiliates have the widest array of tools for promotion. Here’s a screenshot of the content delivery formats…

Included are Templates, Search Forms, Spreadsheets, Javascript code, search forms, XML and just about any other format you can think of to deliver the correct and up-to-date marketing data. Sub-tracking is enabled for affiliates to view the performance of specific ad-campaigns they may have running or to further analyze where approvals are generated from within a site. If you’re only interested in displaying specific credit cards to your visitors and only require the advertising links, and not any content delivery formats, then you can obtain raw links that can be placed directly on your site.

If you’ve been looking for a good credit card affiliate program, check out CardOffers FAQ and see what they have to offer.

If you’re ready to signup click Here To Join CardOffers.com

         

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Twitter is everywhere in the media. You can’t avoid it. More often than not, it’s a casual mention or a shameless plug to get more followers. Bloggers have been at the forefront of the Twitter onslaught with literally thousands of Twitter articles being churned out every day. It can be time consuming to weed out the legitimate blog posts from splogs (spam blogs) but with a little work, you can find interesting Twitter related blog posts such as these :

• Christian Science Monitor Nominates Twitter For Nobel Peace Prize

This article from SearchEngineWatch.com explains how Mark Pfeifle, a Christian Science Monitor opinion columnist, believes that Twitter should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. hmmmm….


• Twitter Gets In Your Face About Upgrading to Firefox 3.5

OK, so we all know that TechCrunch.com can’t go a single day without a Twitter-related article but the comments are usually the funniest part of the article.


• Murdoch: No Interest in Twitter

Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, has some interesting comments about Twitter. Not only does he state he has no interest in purchasing Twitter, he flat out warns investors to beware because it hasn’t figured out a way to make money


• Wal-Mart’s Twitter Account Comes with a 3,379-word Terms of Use Agreement

Some companies just don’t get it, or maybe their lawyers don’t get it, or maybe the authors of this article don’t get it. Read the comments for a laugh.


• How to Handle Post-Divorce Tweeting: Beware Of the Bitter Twitters

I was saving the best for last. Here’s a handy guide on how to keep yourself out of trouble if you’re in the middle of a divorce and your ex is on Twitter. This could come in handy for some of those high profile affiliate marketers.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is here to stay and bloggers will continue to cast their pearls of Twitter wisdom into the pool, hoping to get some coveted traffic or a few votes on social media sites and a trickle down of traffic. If you have a solid Twitter article that you’d like to have listed in my next installment, leave a comment below.




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Yesterday on the Wordpress blog, Matt Mullenweg created quite a stir amongst the wordpress developer community with his post Themes are GPL, too. Matt called in the help of the Software Freedom Law Center, experts on the GPL, to analyze the Wordpress software and it’s relationship to components and they responded with this…

PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

That’s a hefty blow to commercial Wordpress plugin developers because the inclusive nature of the GPL in relationship to Wordpress as a core software prevents developers from commercially licensing their work. For those who have been developing Wordpress hacks and plugins as “open source” to benefit the community without personal profit, it’s business as usual.

As with the Linux OS, lines are drawn between commercial and open source developers. Some bloggers like Jon Stahl and Hacker Visions agree with Wordpress and Mullenweg’s stance while others such as Jeffery McManus and Sadish Balla feel Wordpress should have some sort of framework in place to support commercial developers.

The folks at ThemLab made light that the Commercial WordPress Theme Directory Launches and provided a link to the directory where the following blurb can be found :

While our directory is full of fantastic themes, sometimes people want to use something that they know has support behind it, and don’t mind paying for that. Contrary to popular belief, GPL doesn’t say that everything must be zero-cost, just that when you receive the software or theme that it not restrict your freedoms in how you use it.

That statement does rub me the wrong way because it essentially reduces developers to support staff over licensing issues, particularly GPL vs. commercial. However, as far as Wordpress is concerned, I would never bother to write commercial add-ons for any GPL software in the first place. Free software is meant to be free.

That’s just my opinion - What’s yours ?

         

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A few months ago, the web information company Alexa redesigned their website and since then I’ve been noticing these incredibly distasteful advertisements pitching weight loss products, wrinkle removers and suspicious get rich quick schemes. While these type of advertisments are nothing new on the internet, what stood out to me was each advertisement appears to be placed by a person who is located in the same city as myself. I captured a few screenshots seen below…

When you click on any of the ads, you’re taken to different blogs that appear to be authored by a real person who resides in your home town. Some of the blogs in question are:

mywrinklesarecured.com
dianeswrinklecure.com
daily-job-news.com
rachelrayblogs.com

If you look up any of these blogs in Google, there are numerous bloggers warning that these flogs (as Jay Weintraub calls them)are blatant scams by scum of the earth affiliate marketers (Lincoln Adams’s affectionate term for the unethical blackhat set).

There have already been a few ongoing discussions about the legality of affiliate marketers using IP2Location or hostip.info databases to translate a visitor’s IP into a physical location to make it look as if the flog is authored by someone local. Some say it’s just a blackhat trick while others such as myself realize this type dishonest endorsement from non-existent consumers is in direct violation of the FTC’s “Truth in Advertising” laws designed to protect consumers from fraud.

If you have a look at the FTC Guide Concerning Use of Testimonials in Advertising, it clearly states :

§255.2 Consumer endorsements. (b) Advertisements presenting endorsements by what are represented, directly or by implication, to be “actual consumers” should utilize actual consumers, in both the audio and video or clearly and conspicuously disclose that the persons in such advertisements are not actual consumers of the advertised product.

So I have to ask myself if anybody at Alexa has ever heard of the FTC? Maybe they think it’s not their problem because the actual ads are being served through Pulse360.com which makes the following claims :

Whether you are interested in creating a campaign for ContextTarget, LocalTarget, BehaviorTarget - or any combination of the three - it all starts here. The sign-up process is simple, and before you know it your Pulse 360 campaign will be up and running. The company started as the new business name for the content-targeted sponsored links business, previously part of Kanoodle, which has been around since 1999. Pulse 360 is now a unit of Seevast, an operating company created by industry-recognized professionals to provide innovative Web-based marketing services.

OK, so Pulse360.com has a technology called “LocalTarget” that evidently thumbs it’s nose at FTC guidelines by using IP translation and phony testimonials to dupe consumers into believing they are being marketed to by somebody local. It’s also strange that the whois record for Pulse360.com clearly designates Kanoodle.com, Inc. as the owner and both sites are even on the same IP address.

What do you think? Should marketers be allowed to use these deceptive practices to dupe consumers?

         

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