TrendToGo Affiliate Program - Change of Affiliate Manager at AMWSO

As from 1st February 2010, Michel Gerard takes over the affiliate management of Trend To Go run on Shareasale, from Allen Miller at AMWSO. Michel has been an affiliate manager with AMWSO for 4 years and is committed to the affiliates' success.

TrendToGo.com is one of the fastest growing merchants on the Shareasale affiliate network, featuring a vast selection of sterling silver jewelry, stainless steel jewelry, authentic designer watches, authentic fragrances, Designer handbags and apparel at 30-50% discount on retail prices.

The Trend To Go Affiliate Program pays a 10% - 25% tiered commission on products sold when placing text links, banners or widgets on your website. Cookie Tracking is 120 days, which is better than most other affiliate programs in the same vertical.

Not yet an Affiliate?
Check out more information about the TrendToGo.com affiliate program right here.

Sign up for the program here.

Contact Affiliate Partner Manager: Michel Gerard

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Lions Tigers and BHOs. Oh My!

Logging on to ABW this afternoon I was greated by a thread that burst into life and racked up a mass of interest in the blink of an eye. The attention grabbing thread had the title "ShareASale and Toolbars / Call for Participation on Guidelines" . Yes Oh My indeed, the bastion of BHO free marketing is considering its' stance.

I highly recommend reading the thread and joining the discussion.

My thoughts :

A major concern I have with this idea, is that, all "BHO affiliate" tool bars, at the end of the day, do far more than just influence/decide which "BHO affiliate" gets the sale. They also canabilize merchants other sales channels, especially the ones based on loyalty, organic (direct to site/seo) and PPC. The bigger the brand the greater the the impact.

When I talk to merchants about tool bars I usually discuss the effect on the affiliate channel along side the impact to the above channels, large brand merchants (the ones that toolbars target) tend to get the majority of their traffic through the above (Toolbar targeted) channels, which ads no value and simply steals sales from the merchant.

How does SAS plan / propose to prevent toolbars that they allow on to Shareasale from cannabilizing a merchants other sales channels? If their plan is not all encompassing then they will simply be enabling tool bars to go to town on Shareasale merchants just like they do on LS, CJ and so forth, adding no value, but certainly adding to the BHO Affiliates revenue.

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Shareasale launches "Affiliate Create a video"

It was a rumour and now it's fact. And rather than repeat what's already posted in the ShareaSale forum, click here and read about the great new tool that allows affiliates to create and generate their own video creatives, and link them to multiple merchants throughout the video through the use of cue points. Meaning an affiliate can create a niche focused video covering five related products and promote five different merchants all in one video, darned cool!

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Shareasale ads Video Support

While affiliates continue to look for ways to ad value to a merchants marketing campaign, they are often hampered by a networks limitations on what linking and tracking options are available. Most affiliates find they can only innovate as fast as their network partners allow. While video has been hot for a while and some merchants have had click trackable video available for a couple of years, it's still not easy to support directly within most networks. Most solutions to date have used a work around system to avoid the complications or added expense of using an affiliate networks options.

So it's great to see Shareasale once again step into the breach and release a video tool set to help merchants create and deploy videos for their affiliates to use.

The present system provides a way for merchants to set up videos in Shareasale, but it looks like there will be a system to support affiliate created videos too!

Check out a demo of the system on the SAS Blog.

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ShareASale "Under the Stars" Party at Affiliate Summit

Here are some pictures and a clip from the awesome ShareASale "Under the Stars" party that took place on Sunday, February 24th at the 2-story Sky Villas on the top floors of the Palms Hotel "Fantasy Tower".


Mike Allen, super-affiliate of Shopping-Bargains


Brian Littleton, founder and CEO of ShareASale

Brian of ShareASale at the piano.

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Commission Junction Damaging the Future of Affiliate Marketing!

If you're an affiliate marketer or read affiliate blogs, then you must have heard that Spybot Search and Destroy is now immunizing it's users against CJ links. Any Spybot user using this immunization feature will be lead to an error page after clicking a CJ link. No chance for a sale to be made for the affiliate, no affiliate cookie is ever set.

CPA-Affiliates wrote a blog article breaking this story and Shoemoney also wrote a nice follow-up. In the comments many people call on CJ to "fight against the Spybot program" or address / correct this issue with Spybot. I suggest CJ would do much better to address the root reason why these spyware protection programs block CJ/affiliate cookies.

Anyone in the industry knows that CJ permits too many shady practice affiliates to operate on their network. Much of an affiliate manager's daily activity with a program on CJ revolves around weeding out bad affiliates. Bad affiliates that are using shady practices such as browser hijacking through toolbars, cookie stuffing, forced redirects and forced clicks. Lip-service is paid to the CJ terms of service written against these practices, but true enforcement is passive and minimal at best. The short-term benefit from the added commission revenue just seems too tempting on a broad network-wide scale. However, short-term shady profit acquisition will damage the long-term health of the affiliate industry. Affiliate marketing's reputation will further slip toward the perception of shady/bad business.

Affiliate networks need to follow the Shareasale example, and clean up their act. Networks are making a few extra dollars now, but what happens when Google / Yahoo / Firefox / Spybot etc., start using this justification to block affiliate links and cookies on a much wider scale? What happens when merchants start taking a hard look at the bottom line and realize that shady affiliates are cannibalizing other sales channels and start bailing out of their programs in droves? Poor perceptions can quickly outweigh the perception of value found from hard-working, true value adding affiliates.

Clean up your act CJ, and gain further leverage with Spybot and other spyware programs to stop blocking affiliate links. Even a small step such as providing full click source data to merchants to view and audit could carry a long way toward cleaning things up.

If you have a program on CJ that is infested with bad affiliates and poor performance / ROI, consider seeking the services of an outsourced affiliate program manager before terminating your program.

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