No, they didn't get rid of it completely but they sure took a few whacks at it to beat it into something a little less pretty. A friend mentioned this to me earlier as I didn't catch it in my email box because I was insanely busy today, but it's true. CPA Affiliates blog also posted about this and xboxundone posted about it on Digital Point Forums.

Here's the actual email-

Dear Publisher,
Thank you for participating in the AzoogleAds Publisher Referral Program, and for connecting us to your friends, family, and acquaintances.

Starting February 1, 2008, we are introducing some changes to our current Referral Program which may affect you:

• Referral commission will continue to be 2% of referred publishers’ revenue but will now expire after 6 months.
• Start date is the day first penny is earned, and expiration date is 6 months after first penny is earned.
• You must maintain a minimum revenue level of $1,000 in your primary account on a monthly basis in order to receive any referral payouts for that month.
• If you earn less than $1,000 in any given month, you will not qualify for a referral payment that month. However, you will be eligible for any month thereafter, up to the 6 month cutoff date.
• $1,000 threshold must be for revenues that you have earned from regular offer promotion, not referred sales.
• You may not refer another account belonging to you.
• When the 6 month expiration date has ended, you cannot refer the same publisher again.
• Referral payments will be on net 60 terms
• Referral payments will be paid out to parent accounts, not children accounts
These conditions will be listed under our FAQ section starting February 1st 2008.

Thanks again for your support and keep spreading the good word about AzoogleAds!

As always, we’d love to hear any questions or comments that you have; please send us your thoughts at AZreferral@AzoogleAds.com.
Sincerely,
Mitchell Richler
Vice President of Network Distribution

Well, Mitchell, that blows and here's why.

Just last night I wrote up a nice little post on how my affiliates can essentially refer people for a living and let their income roll in on auto-pilot. That is no longer the case, at least as far as Azoogle is concerned.

If I'm interpreting the e-mail correctly, you have to earn $1000 within 6 months to qualify for a referral payment or you will LOSE all referral moneys accrued. But it's not even that simple. They want you to maintain a minimum of $1000 a month in your Azoogle account in order to qualify for referral payouts. Yikes.

On the flip side, I can completely understand this notion. First of all, it doesn't take much to do $1000 in a month's time; it's pretty negligible if you're earning the numbers discussed in my previous post. Second, if you look at it from Azoogle's perspective, they are saving money that can be used elsewhere (like their pockets). These new rules guarantee that all people receiving a payout will be earning Azoogle money while they do so, while people who may have referred internet marketing giants while doing nothing will wallow in a pit of nothingness.

There is a bright side to all this though. If you keep reading this blog, you will never have to worry about not making enough to qualify for the minimum referral payout, so stay tuned and you'll be happy.

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Despite the cheesy title, I am dead serious about this. What I'm talking about is doing your best on a daily basis to refer new people to affiliate networks and giving them a hand at getting started.

Your immediate thought might be that this is just creating competition for yourself and in a way, you're completely right. But the flip-side to that is if you successfully create a worthy opponent for yourself from someone you referred, you will earn around 2% for that person's sales whether they profit or not (as long as they stay on that network).

The idea is to refer someone to several big networks and hopefully create a few super affiliates. Just imagine if you referred one or two super affiliates who did $15k to $30k per day.

Now I was able to sit for a while with my phone today, so I was wondering just how much it would take to live comfortably off of other people's success based on a 2% referral base. Using $6,000.00 as a baseline for what most younger people would consider a good replacement for a job, you can divide that amount by .02 and you come up with $300,000.00 (per month).

While this might sound like a large number, it works out to around $9900/day in sales and depending on how many decent affiliates you refer, that's not completely impossible to do. I know I sound like a referral program in action, but if you were to refer just five decent affiliates within a year's time, they'd each have to do around $2000/day in sales for you to earn $72k/year without lifting a finger. Or ten affiliates doing $1000/day would suffice, or twenty doing $500/day ... you get the picture. Did I mention you get paid whether or not they profit? That's right, they lose money, you still make money.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a true auto-pilot income. You literally do not have to do anything but continue referring people (if you want) to increase your monthly income. Networks like Azoogle, Neverblue, Copeac, etc. will do direct deposit straight into your account, so you don't even have to deposit any checks.

Affiliate marketing itself still requires plenty of work and should be run like a business, if done properly. That means long hours and continuous monitoring and adjustment to keep it working right. While you might make a ton of money doing it, it's still a risky business that is definitely far from auto-pilot (other than the fact that your ads will run 24x7).

All I'm saying is-- what makes more sense in the long run? You working your ass off for a year to make $75k profit or you working your ass off for six months referring people to make $75k profit?

Bingo.

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Click on the image to the left to get a close-up of my first $1600 day as an affiliate back at the end of November 2007. Not bad for a day's work and I ended up profiting more than 50% that day. This is an example of what can be done when you start using the tactics discussed in this blog.

I am transparent about most tactics and speak from experience when giving you advice on affiliate marketing. That's why I wanted to show you a screen shot from my stats I had in my documents folder just sitting.

In fact, I challenge you to compete with me and outdo me. If you do surpass me, please let me know!

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Just a quick note, for those of you who want to get in touch with an affiliate manager at any popular affiliate marketing company, check out the Affiliate AIM List (www.affaimlist.com). My Azoogle affiliate manager is listed on there along with some of the other best in the industry.

Incidentally, you can also view the Skype list, which as you might guess, lists all the affiliate managers who use Skype.

I've noticed a lot of people asking how to get ahold of someone at X company as they are trying to get approved. Well people, here's your chance.

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I don't know why, but my Azoogle Toolbar hasn't worked in the past couple of weeks at work or at home. How am I supposed to track my every lead without my precious toolbar? Now before you go saying I'm technologically impaired, remember I am a web developer and a Cisco Certified Network Associate so I should be slightly less retarded than your average user, but hey-- anything's possible.

For anyone that wants to shoot me down, I'm running the latest version of Firefox on Windows Vista. My best guess is the latter, but I've been wrong before.

But seriously, is anyone else experiencing this problem or is it just me?

Popularity: 4% [?]

In both my own experience and the experience of others, I have not found one successful example of Ask.com working for affiliate marketers. In fact, having spent over $500.00 with these guys, I am sad to report that I have made a big fat zero back on my investment.

Just doing a small search yields some very interesting finds, such as this or this. I'm not normally the one to yell about the sky falling, but damn -- it's not just me saying this.

All anger aside, it seems the problem is the way in which they send traffic to their sites. Even their 'search' network is mainly content-network-based. And in general, it's known that content networks (ads on websites) deliver a lower quality click than those generated on a search engine. This is due to the fact that there are tons of websites out there that attempt to trick users into clicking on their ads for obvious reasons, while search engines don't allow such tom-foolery.

Perhaps when Ask.com alters their PPC (Pay Per Click) engine to include only traffic from its search engine, we'll have a winner but until then, suck eggs Ask!

Now of course I'm not out to bash a company if they aren't sucking, but to the best of my knowledge, Ask.com is hoovering BUT if you've had a different experience, please let me know.

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To build on three previous posts Why Use Tracking Code, How To Put Tracking Code On Your Landing Page and How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links, the intention of this post is to inform you on how to track the keyword someone used to get to your site from a PPC (Pay Per Click) Ad, no matter which page they come in from.

The problem that people have that made this post necessary is losing the keyword when someone comes in either from a different page or visits the page, leaves and then comes back. Without knowing which keyword got the person there in the first place, marketers like you and me are lost on how to properly spend our money and on which keywords are terrible at converting. We definitely need that information, so we must make sure to do our best to track it.

Now going into this post, I have to assume three things: you can follow instructions, you are using one of the major search engines for your CPC ads and you are using PHP for your web pages. With that out of the way, let's proceed..

In the header of your PHP files, you'll want to include the following code-

keyword_tracking_php.txt

Once you've placed your keyword tracking code in your header(s), you'll need code in place to pass the captured keyword to your hop-link. If you aren't familiar with hop links and passing information using them, please read How To Put Tracking Code On Your Landing Page.

Additionally, if you'd like to learn about cloaking your hop links, please read How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links.

Now to extend the post on cloaking, you can modify your jump.php file with the following code-

jump_php2.txt

It's really as simple as that. The first page captures the keywords and feeds them into the jump.php for Azoogle (or whichever network you're using) to track. What's more is that you can track additional information just by doing the same thing with other information you pass (such as the name of the ad group, specific ad, etc.) in other cookies. Then, you can just append that to the actual jump link's 'sub' tracking variable using a pipe (|) to separate the different variables, respectively.

So there you have it, proper keyword/ad tracking with cloaked links.

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It's no secret that the playing field for ring tones is being re-turfed and the new grass ain't so green. Search engines are locking down on what qualifies as a ring tone-related keyword and affiliate networks are beginning to enforce an extra step in the confirmation process.

So what does this mean for affiliates? Well, essentially, it means that competition is about to get much fiercer.

Read More »

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Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, affiliate marketing gurus are telling you what you should do to make it big in the business. They tell you what types of products to sell, how to sell them and where. Well, today I'm in an anti-mood so I'm going to go over what you should definitely never do if you want to be successful. Read More »

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You knew I had to do it sooner or later. That's right, I'm going to give you my personal best five tips for success in affiliate marketing. Only, these aren't just random useless tips- these are what make or break you as an affiliate. Okay, maybe it won't break you if you don't use them but they will make the moneys flow your way with the greatest of ease. Read More »

Popularity: 7% [?]