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

ClickBank is stepping up their business for non US-based affiliates. Beside adding more countries for affiliate publishers to join from, ClickBank is planning to allow payments from 13 different currencies. Here’s the recent message sent out by ClickBank :

Soon ClickBank will accept payments in 13 different currencies including your local currency! This new enhancement allows you to more effectively promote and sell products in your own country and around the world. Chances are good that there is less competition in your local market than in the U.S., so this represents a great opportunity to use your knowledge to quickly establish a strong presence in your local market. On a global scale, you can expand your business like never before by automatically offering international customers the ability to pay in their own currency, turning visits into purchases. The ClickBank order form will automatically display the currency based on customer location, so visitors will feel right at home ordering from ClickBank. In just a few short weeks, in addition to the U.S. dollar we will accept the: Australian dollar (AUD) Canadian dollar (CAD) Swiss franc (CHF) Danish krone (DKK) Euro (EUR) British pound (GBP) Hong Kong dollar (HKD) Japanese yen (JPY) Norwegian kroner (NOK) New Zealand dollar (NZD) Swedish krona (SEK) South African rand (ZAR) If you’re not currently selling or promoting ClickBank products locally, there’s never been a better time than now! Monitor your account home page for more information about these upcoming enhancements. Kind Regards, Dush Ramachandran Vice President - Business Development ClickBank

All of this could seriously open doors for publishers worldwide, not to mention it will definitely increase merchant sales.

         

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eBay is once again making waves in the affiliate community with the most recent tidal wave of deciet crashing on the shores of Shawn Hogan. You may know Shawn Hogan as the owner and operator of the shadowy webmaster forum DigitalPoint which boasts a dazzling array of con-artists, schemers and scammers from all over the globe. It seems Mr. Hogan himself now stands accused of taking part in an elaborate scheme to defraud eBay’s affiliate programs whilst the program was under Commission Junction’s watch. Could it be possible that there is a link between the recent class action lawsuit against Commission Junction? Could it be that a band of rouge black hat webmasters and affiliates were operating out of DigitalPoint forums and they devised a sinister plan to rip off other affiliates while ripping off the auction giant eBay?

Here’s a sampling of the buzz from around the blogosphere.

As far as I can tell, the story originated from Charles G. Mullen’s blog and he was the one who also started the thread at Shawn’s own DigitalPoint forums. Charles’ blog cited this site with a pdf file of the court documents.

Monty’s Mega Marketing hit the front of Sphinn with a regurgitation of the factual elements of the story.

The ever eloquent Linda Buquet of 5 Star Affiliate Marketing blogs added one of the most significant entries in the Shawn Hogan cookie stuffing saga with an exceptional post that takes the cheated affiliate’s perspective against the black hatters who are creating havoc in the affiliate marketing industry.

Further on the line, Zooped.com tagged the story with some heavy handed keywords such as low life, piece of sh!t, scamer, scammer, Shawn Hogan, theif. Wow, somebody else must have been banned at DigitalPoint :-) (thanks again Shoemoney)

According to Justia Federal District Court Filings and Dockets (the most reliable source I could find), the suit was filed on August 25, 2008 and a summons was issued to defendants Shawn Hogan, Brian Dunning and Kevin Dunning on August 26, 2008.

One of the defendants in the case, Brian Dunning has appeared on CNN when he was the CTO of Buylink Corporation. His website claims “I participate at whatever level you require. I’ve done everything from providing $7.5 million in venture capital, to hiring the right exec team, to sitting down and personally coding; and everything in between.”

Suprising, there’s not mention of cookie stuffing found in his resume :-)

The initial court filing claims that DigitalPoint Solutions had developed software that not only stuffed visitors browsers with eBay cookies but that they knew what they were doing was illegal because they coded the software never to stuff the same visitor’s browser more than one time to avoid detection. DPS accomplished their cookie stuffing by using a code generated image that did the dirty work before sending the image headers and displaying the 1×1 pixel image. The use of iFrames which is a traditional method for accomplishing cookie stuffing was avoided as to not arouse suspicion from eBay and Commission Junction.

Clearly this all shows a knowledgable intent to defraud eBay and Commission Junction, not to mention to steal other affiliates commissions from right under their noses.

On the funny side, here’s some of the most hilarious comments from the DigitalPoint and other threads…

joh1 - Shawn and others who took part in this, if you all did this; you all have my respect.

Tobidotman - People told me this forum was garbage, but it’s good to me, but i don’t want to be associated with a thief, yet i don’t know the full story.

edenz - Hats off…. Shawn.. Today I have become one of yours fan. I hope we could meet one day.

timsdd - maybe you could bake him a cake with a saw in it

kristeejo (at V7n)- bet they won’t have cookies like that in the ebay prison. hey - if he goes to prison wonder if ebay will let us bid on his bond?

Regardless of these two other defendants and Shawn Hogan’s efforts to stuff affiliate cookies, it is my belief that the true responsibility for tracking affiliate commissions lies with not only the affiliate management network but the actual merchant themselves. I can’t believe that eBay would be so slack that they never bothered to question commissions they paid out until now. Could it be that eBay is experiencing financial turmoil and they are clutching at straws to make ends meet? The recent events surrounding the eBay/EPN “night of the long knives” affiliate termination saga certainly paint a disturbing picture for eBay’s future.

eBay’s stock has plummeted from a 52 week high of 40.73 to barely keeping head above the 20 per share mark. That’s a decline by almost half of their value and they are keeping pace with Google to become one of the biggest tech stock disasters since the dot com bust sank many a fortune in a sea of sorrow back in the late 1990’s. If eBay were riding high like they were two years ago, they might overlook something as boring as cookie stuffing affiliates but today, eBay is out for nickles and dimes and they have shown they are ready to unleash their lawyers on black hat punks far and wide.

         

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  The eBay Partner Network forums are buzzing with angry affiliates following the latest wave of expiration notices that were sent to members last night. It seems eBay has terminated a large number of affiliates from their program and this has caused a great deal of controversy amongst some of the upper echelon who have been earning in upwards of thousands of dollars per month using eBay’s lucrative affiliate program. An semi-formal announcement was made by eBay representative SteveH regarding the mass terminations which has not been very well received by the majority of affiliates and promoters who are voicing their opinions regarding this statement :

I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night. These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we’ve been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there’s an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can’t go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we’ve done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources. Our responsibility in the affiliate marketing channel is to allocate our resources to best drive incremental demand to our sellers. To that end, we need to focus on partners who have had the most success in engaging users who become some of our best buyers on eBay. I understand that these actions do have a very real impact on some of our affiliates who have been working with us over the years. For that, I sincerely apologize, but these decisions are made in the best interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of our affiliate program. We want to be very clear. Affiliates who received these messages of expiration last night are not being asked to stop sending traffic to us due to fraudulent activity or violations of the terms of service. For those of you who received the message, commissions are not being reversed, and you will be paid for all valid traffic you have sent to us to date, and for the next 7 days. Sincerely, Steve

I have a guess as to what SteveH is alluding to by the statement “we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity”

Actually, it’s not a guess, what he’s saying is that there is rampant cookie stuffing going on and that EPN has devised some algorithm (metrics) to mass detect apparent black hat sites which game eBay’s tracking cookies. While I personally applaud EPN for taking action against black hatters who make a living by cheating, my concern is with sincere, white hat publishers who may come under scrutiny due to false positives revealed by EPN’s untested metrics and fraud detection algorithms.

Undertandably, the portion of SteveH’s statement in regards to how engaged visitors are when they land on eBay from an affilaite link shows that EPN’s staff must be thinking anybody who clicks an affiliate link and lands on eBay should stay there for a certain amount of time before “bouncing”. In reality, high bounce rates are not indicative of an affiliate site engaging in cookie stuffing or tricking visitors to visit eBay. Quite possibly, a high bounce rate could be indicative of a visitor’s lack of interest in eBay itself and never had the intention of engaging with eBay for any reason other than to see the item listing they clicked on.

One such case that causes alarm for me as an affiliate - I have routinely used high priced items in a particular collectible niche as a lure to entice my website visitors to click on the eBay affiliate links to see these expensive items. While my thinking is that someone might click through to see the $500K Lambroughini and end up bidding on a pair of fuzzy dice, it nonetheless discredits my use of human nature to transfer visitors from my site to eBays. I routinely click on eBay auction listings from third party sites if my interest is peaked but in my case, after being ripped off several times on eBay years ago, I would never consider bidding or buying anything on eBay ever again. So I am a chronic eBay “bouncer” who has no interest in “engaging” with eBay and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Another scenario I’ve seen successfully used to lead visitors to eBay through affiliate links is by linking to strange, bizzare auctions or controversial items that might resolve a click out of curiosity. This technique has served many bloggers and forum owners well to generate eBay affilaite commissions. However, there is a guaranteed high bounce rate when leading people to eBay to see something shocking.

Regardless of whatever EPN is doing to limit cookie stuffing and other fraudulent commission generation, I do not believe their method of handling affiliates in such an unprofessional manner is making EPN a trustworthy program for most affiliates to spend their time and money promoting. In the end, handling affiliates (even the black hat ones) en masse and making giant waves in the community has made EPN one of the most unprofessionally managed affiliate programs available to publishers and the biggest bomb I’ve ever seen in my 10+ years of affiliate marketing.

In my humble opinion, cheaters should be handled one by one in private. Light should not be shed on the termination of affiliates in such a wide scope because the overall effect is disconcerting to honest promoters who become filled with fear over having their accounts terminated. Perhaps EPN is taking a page from the Google Adsense playbook and using scare tactics in a vain attempt to keep affiliates in line? Either way, it’s their loss at the end of the day because the migration from programs such as EPN and Adsense is already coming full circle.

What do you think? Are you happy with eBay/EPN and their decisions to do mass affiliate slapping in front of everybody ??

         

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I was browsing around some blogs that had dropped Entrecards on me this morning and I can across this interesting article about a search engine that pays you to search at Online Presence blog and I decided to check out this new search engine that claims to pay you for searching.

On first impression, the interface is very clean and presentable, score a couple of points for that. However, the real question I had was exactly how useful are the search resuts? Score another point for Sour because their search results are excellent. While Scour’s results are not generated from their own engine, they do culminate the results from Google, Yahoo and MSN into a cross platform search which is actually very refreshing. Unlike the recently released and ill-fated Cuil search, where search results were absolutely horrible, Scour’s results are what make it useful and worthy of using it for searches even if they didn’t give you points for searching that you can convert into a $25 Visa gift card.

Yes, you heard that right. Scour will give you a $25 Visa gift card if you earn 6500 points in the system. Points can be earned by searching, voting for websites in the search results as well as commenting on sites in the listings. Yes, they have voting and comments for search results which is an added feature sure to make Scour the most interesting aggregate search engine on the planet.

If you use search regularly, why not give Scour a try and who knows, maybe you’ll get one of those $25 Visa gift cards.

Join Scour and Earn From Searching

         

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