Back To School Post

Just a friendly reminder to all you affiliates out there. Now is a great time to focus on back to school. Go through your list of advertisers, make a quick list of those who sell items that you believe can be promoted for back to school.

Start putting up your links as soon as possible. Consider the following list of items which most middle to college age students might need.

If need be, break your "back to school" post up into several versions. One for elementary school students and one for middle school and higher students.

Some items you might want to consider;

1. Backpacks, book bags
2. Lap Top computers
3. Desk Top computers
4. Media players
5. Cell phones
6. All in one fax/printer machines
7. USB Portable Hard Drives
8. Flat Screen Computer Monitors
9. George Formen Grill
10. USB Thumb Drives

Affiliate programs to join to sell these items;

Amazon.com
eBay
LinkShare.com
Buy.com
AllPosters.com

eBay Announces Changes to Affiliate Program

According to an email that I received yesterday eBay plans to change its Affiliate Program.

From the email;

We are excited to announce eBay’s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.

All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same – access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. In addition, the eBay partner network will provide several new features:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

ITworld.com has the following article; EBay to take over affiliate program's management

"ValueClick's Commission Junction does a fairly good job, but the product over the years has grown a bit stagnant and hasn't been keeping up with the demands affiliates have had," said Ron Stewart, GetItNext's CEO.

For example, GetItNext routinely has to manually "dig out" data it feels is essential about its referrals, sales and commissions from the ValueClick reports, Stewart said.