Affiliate marketing used to be nice little sideline getting lots of people into web development who would have never considered it otherwise. Anyone could just setup the most basic of sites, add a few links and Google would come along love what you did and start pointing people at your little site/blog.

That is how it used to be, but now it only seems to be that way for the likes of HotUKDeals who are the big players in making commissions from links (added by other people…). What with Google getting all stuffy over its search algorithms and only sending traffic to blogs who add to its $100 MILLION a day adwords revenues and an overwhelmingly obvious amount of commissions no longer being tracked by networks like affiliate window (who through the power of their tools and signup sweeteners) managed to nick merchants from almost all of the other affiliate networks quite a lot of whom seemed to play the game more fairly, one of ones I remember most fondly was smart quotes who handled financial products.

Even Amazon associates seem to have a “screw you over” policy I found today. I used to naturally use my own link when making a purchase from amazon, then had a commission cancelled for that and enquired why.. they said they knew what I had done and cancelled it – from then I never really seemed to get much from Amazon associates but due to becoming a dad I didn’t really pay so much attention to affiliate issues anymore.

This week I sent a link for a camera to someone and put my tracking code at the end of it though, and saw the sale count in the Amazon associates orders report, he got the camera delivered, but no earnings report entry which naturally I sent them an email to find out what was going on. They used the same reasoning as a couple of years ago although the only connection between that sale and me was my affiliate id.. so they ripped me off to the tune of £25 on that sale alone.. there have been a few in the past like that I can see.. Their actual response is below

Dear Associate,

Thank you for contacting the Amazon Associates Programme.

I have checked your account and found that you have not received advertising fees for the order not appearing on your reports as a result of personal orders being placed through your Associates links.

Due to the proprietary nature of the process, we will not share with you the criteria by which we detect personal orders placed by an Associate. Please know that we are able to determine when an order has been placed by an Associate via their Associates links.

Associates do not receive payment for advertising fees on any personal orders placed. This is because the Associates Programme places certain restrictions on the types of orders that may be placed through an Associate’s web site.

Here’s how our Operating Agreement explains it:
7. Advertising Fees
Qualifying Purchases exclude, and we will not pay advertising fees on any of, the following:
any Product purchased by you or on your behalf through a Special Link (e.g., personal orders, orders for your own use, and orders placed by you for or on behalf of any other person or entity).

Given the relatively slim retail margins on our products and our strong discount pricing, the advertising fees we offer to our Associates can only be sustained by meeting new customers through our Associates. These customers may return to us in the future for items unrelated to the topics served by the Associate web site, and this future business helps to offset the advertising fees we pay. If an Associate orders for their own use, even if they plan to sell the items to customers who cannot order online, it can’t lead to this kind of future business. This is why we can’t afford to offer advertising fees on such orders, as we want to keep the program viable for the long term.

We understand that some orders may unintentionally be tagged to Associates accounts as you are updating your site(s) and checking links. However, we do request that you place all personal orders directly at http://www.amazon.co.uk through sessions not tagged to your Associates account.

If you require any additional assistance or information please use the following link to contact us again:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/contact/

Thank you for participating in the Amazon Associate Programme.

Warmest regards,

Samuel
Amazon.co.uk

So it seems in the worldwide recession, affiliate marketing companies / networks are just being complete cocks to personal web publishers ripping us off left right and centre, I think I’ll just shut down all my affiliate sites and save on hosting costs given the people higher up the chain have lost the capacity to play reasonably.

This is a little test to see if my iPad will successfully post to my blog!.

Today creatively started with me building a solution in visual studio 2010 that had projects for…

• Downloading an affiliate window product feed
• Unzipping the file to the local file system
• Scraping content from the merchant site using the deeplinks in the feed to have a more comprehensive end result to this whole concept
• Using the parsed content via an agile xpath project reference to build a SQL compact DB
• Building an MVC3 c# site from the database and a theme based on an existing competitor that I know is doing well
• Automating all the above on a daily schedule…. I can see that my more appropriate, memorable domain name would do better, and the site has several obvious improvements that could be made.. Even things as basic as sorting the drop down list items..

However the usual daily drag got in the way and my after was wasted doing…

• Emails through a messy ticketing system clarifying what someone wanted until I got him to admit he didn’t even want the report in the first place…
• Working out why an access 97 DB is misbehaving… Yes.. Access 97 by a wannabe developer
• Being asked to fix something I fixed in the morning..but didn’t get told it was fixed and they had infact started talking about someone completely separate which they did not test when asked to do so a month ago….

There’s a big gap between what I want to do with my days and what I end up having to do…. Very frustrating…. If you read this.. And are based in London doing the kinds of things that are mentioned in the first half… PLEASE hire me!!!!!!!

P.s. iPad2 seems surprisingly fast to type on!

What challenges will tomorrow bring….

Might start throwing tips into this blog from time to time, here’s a quicky…

In programs such as a web browser where you type something into a textbox and it lists all the things you have typed before, if you are like me and actually use those to save you typing what you are looking for in full this is for you.

To remove stored entries in almost any of them just highlight them using the arrow keys and press the delete key to remove them from the history of that individual textbox so you have less crap to scroll through as you use your computer efficiently.

This probably works on mac and linux computers too, logically it would but I only have time to use one PC OS.

I got my first computer when I was around 10, or earlier… can’t remember exactly – I had two Commodore VIC 20 computers, and two Commodore C64′s, around that time in the mid-80s there was a weekly magazine that came out and had 5 bigass binders that held all 52 editions together. I couldn’t remember the name of it and it’s so obvious… just found it now on wikipedia here. You got little computer programs that took ages to put in to those first generation home PCs and inevitably you would make loads of typos that would take so long to debug you would just give up.

But sometimes they worked, and I guess that has a lot to do with why computers have been such a massive part of my life.

I had a massive purge of facebook friends to strictly people I know, and changed the RSS feeds import to just posts from this blog rather than my network of sites, I’ll keep stuff like Bingo for by bingo facebook alter-ego marketing login etc which makes far more sense all round.

Only a couple of days left until we are all off to Turkey – and me and Natasa got the sneezes… had the doctor check us out this morning and we are not growing pig snouts… just a bit of a cold which will hopefully disappear before we fly out.