Merchants Limiting Their Blog Exposure?

I was surprised when I heard about this at first but a major credit card company has announced that their affiliates are now not allowed to put links inside their blog posts. I do not have the liberty to discuss which company has mentioned this new rule, but the fact is, if you are a credit card blogger, you are pretty much not allowed to provide a link to credit card X even if you are reviewing the card X.

I understand that the financial industry is highly regulated. But what I don’t understand is why merchants shoot themselves in the foot by penalizing their best bloggers. Do I think blogging is the best way to run an affiliate marketing business? Not really! But there are decent bloggers out there who attract decent traffic to their websites. And these guys who are in authority position can actually sell anything on their blog, so to ask them not to put affiliate links inside blog posts is just baffling. I guess the industry is becoming even more regulated…

Amazon Re-Designs Its Affiliate Portal

For those of you not familiar with Amazon associates program, it is one of the most successful and best converting affiliate programs on the Internet. There is no question that when it comes to running a super affiliate program, Amazon folks know how to do it. Now they have re-designed their affiliate portal.

Amazon has some of the best affiliate tools on the Web. Video widgets, astore, recommended pages, and many more tools offered by Amazon are one of the reasons Amazon affiliates have so much success with the program. I personally thought that Amazon’s associate portal was getting stale as far as the design was concerned, but with the revamp that Amazon has done with their portal, they can now add many more features to help affiliates convert better.

Google Knol Launched, Another Avenue for Marketers?

Google Knol’s social knowledge network is finally open to public. You can basically use your gmail user and password and login. Then you can write a Knol (article), and you are even allowed to use adsense ads on your pages. I do like Aaron Wall’s talke on the whole issue, but I still feel that many of us affiliate marketers will use Knol just like Squidoo to increase our income. I believe as long as people don’t spam Knol and write truly useful articles, using it as an avenue for promoting other’s items is completely acceptable.

Credit Card Affiliates To Suffer Due to the State of Economy

Credit Card industry has always been a very attractive market for affiliates. People are always looking for credit cards and the pay outs are very good. The market is pretty much saturated in a sense that there are just too many sites competing against each other. Having said that, most affiliates have tried the credit card market at least once in their lives.

But the news is not good if you are in this market. Advanta, which in my book, has the best converting affiliate program has just announced that affiliates can expect to take a hit in approvals due to a change in underwriting. The reason for change? The state of economy! Basically it means that if your CPA is $140, you can expect it to go to $200 or more depending on how tough the new underwriting will be. First the NY State Fiasco and now this. Not a good couple of months for affiliates. Here is an excerpt from Advanta’s e-mail:

As you know, the current economic environment has forced a number of issuers to establish stricter lending criteria. To date Advanta has chosen not to do the same as our focus on high credit quality small business customers has allowed us to maintain the same underwriting standards in recent years. However, as a result of a recent analysis we have decided to make minor underwriting adjustments at this time. The impact of these changes on overall account approval results should be minimal and consistent with typical month-to-month fluctuations.