I’ve been pulled away from my usual desk for an urgent family matter, but I’m borrowing a relative’s computer tonight.

While driving to Sacramento to visit my grandfather in the hospital, my niece started complaining about a boy in her school. You see, in her school they have a “town,” and the kids are allowed to make and sell items for each other for “town dollars.” My niece has been making bead bracelets.

She was very excited about having a regular customer, one of the boys in her class, buying her bracelets all the time. Excited, that is, until she found out he was cutting them up and doing something with the parts, then selling those parts for more than he was paying her for the entire bracelet.

She was furious. After all, he’s making money from something he bought from HER, changing it, and besides, he’s bossy, extremely self confident and she just doesn’t really like him.

You can imagine her surprise when I told her he shows marks of being an excellent entrepreneur. Not at all what she wanted to hear about him. We spent some time explaining why what he was doing was entrepreneurial, not wrong. Frankly, this is all to the good because my mother has been trying to get her to understand that she hasn’t been charging enough for the bracelets in the first place, as she puts quite a large number of beads on them.

Well, my niece still isn’t too happy about all this, but I think she’ll cope. It’s a learning experience, and maybe she’ll decide that Grandma was right and she should raise her prices, or she’ll find another solution. This “town” project sounds great for encouraging kids to be entrepreneurs at her school.

Starting June 23, 2006, Commission Junction is planning on having all affiliate links be javascript, unless you had previously signed up with a particular merchant, in which case you have about a year before you must change to javascript links.

Yes, this is serious. I’ve been thinking about promoting CJ merchants more heavily… so glad I haven’t done much yet, because this is something of a deal breaker.

Why?

Javascript is turned OFF in many people’s browsers, anywhere from 3-11%, from what I’ve heard from those who checked their own stats. That’s problem #1.

Problem #2 is that it slows the website down. CJ is sometimes very slow, so requiring the links to go through their javascript is not good at all!

Problem #3 is a privacy issue. The javascript gives CJ much more access to information about my visitors. Sorry, guys, but that’s more my business than yours.

Problem #4 is a biggie. Javascript is easier for spyware to hijack, at least the way they’re talking about doing it, which is a POST method in the headers, from what I understand. Apparently that’s easy to mess with.

What are your options? Well, Linkshare is often messed up, but they’re better than being forced to use javascript links. Then there’s Shareasale, a favorite of mine. Not so many big merchants, but if enough people leave Commission Junction, maybe that will change. And, of course, there are various other affilate networks as well as independent programs to consider.

If you want to read more opinions on this, go to ABestWeb to read about it here and here.

OK, so I’m a little late on this one, as it looks to have hit in April or sometime sooner. I only noticed because this one finally impacted me.

Linkshare now requires affiliates to change their passwords every 90 days for security purposes. Please note that they didn’t tell anyone right away. It only came out in their newsletter after affiliates started complaining.

Now, you may think that changing your password every 90 days is no big deal, but you aren’t thinking Linkshare-style. If you want to run reports you need to wait about an hour after changing your password or it will ask you to do it again, then still won’t let you into your reports.

I had been thinking about doing some more site development using some of the companies that are with Linkshare, but this is making me think again. Linkshare is consistently the least affiliate friendly company out there. I have long hated their login, as they make you go through verification every time. I’ve heard nothing but complaints about their Analytics program, while I’ve stuck with their old reporting, since Analytics didn’t work on Netscape the last time I tried it.

Linkshare also has a reputation of doing a very poor job of making sure affiliates get paid. I personally have never had a problem, but I’ve read some of the complaints.

I don’t know if I’ll return to Linkshare later today to try again or not. I’m pretty tired of the games.

It always amazes me how fast some people churn out websites. Now, I know they’re using datafeeds, private label content and so forth, but still! You hear about folks churning out several sites in a day.

Quite honestly, that just isn’t my style. Even when I’m using a datafeed or private label content it takes me a long time to get a new site going. I tend to think quite a bit about how I want the site to look, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t resist adding my own content. It’s rare for me to launch a site in under a week.

Now, I don’t think this is a bad thing at all. It gives even my lesser quality sites something for the search engines to see as unique. On the other hand, it can get quite frustrating when I think about what I would like to be earning versus what I am earning. For those who are wondering, no, I don’t need to be rich. But I would like to earn enough to put a nice down payment on a house and let my husband come home to work with me.

Now this looks interesting, and I think there is some potential for this one. Google has just launched Google Trends. As with pretty much any Google product launch, it’s in beta.

It gives you data from about the start of 2004 to what I assume is the present. It’s not necessarily precise, as Google says in the About section, but it’s a good way to get an idea of how things go. You can also choose a particular year or month to look at to get a better feel for things.

I can especially see uses for this in looking at seasonal trends. Just think of all the things that tend to be searched for seasonally. This could be a way to decide what kind of website to launch or product pages to develop.

Another possibility is to keep an eye on what you think might be a new trend you want to work with. Think you’ve spotted something good? Take a look and see what the overall trend is.

This tool isn’t going to solve all your questions about which site to develop, but it has already given me something to think about on some sites I’m in the process of developing. Just add it to your research arsenal.

This should be interesting. I finally got my invitation to Google Analytics, which is just one of those things I’ve been waiting to try.

I’ve heard both good and bad about it. Some webmasters have concerns about what Google will use the data for.

Of course, just my luck that the site I choose is giving me trouble today. Went to confirm the code was working, and nothing came up. Well, at least now I know there’s a problem. Hope it hasn’t been around too long. It’s run using Joomla, and somehow the entire HTML template file vanished on me…eek! I should be able to recover it, I hope. Not quite sure how that happened. I think something deleted that shouldn’t have when I decided to clean out the unused templates at the same time.

I got a tip from Lynn Terry’s blog about the discussion board at eWealth.com. It’s not the busiest affiliate discussion board I’ve seen, but they’re working hard at growing it, so I joined.

I’ve made a couple posts. I like ShareaSale pretty well, but it seems there aren’t too many people there familiar with it, so I discussed what you want to look for there. Always fun to have an area where I know something.

I know they’re serious about building the site because they’re paying for leads. In other words, yes, I do earn from that link up above. You can join the affiliate program too through this link.

This should be a fun site to watch over the next few months.

I’ve been working on the affiliate links on one of my sites, which got me thinking about what makes an affiliate program worth my time.

First is a quality product. If the product is going to get me a lot of complaints (and people do complain to the affiliate sometimes), I don’t want to deal with it. Along with this goes quality customer service.

Next comes a great sales page. If my preselling efforts are good but the landing page is terrible my efforts will be wasted.

You can’t forget an appropriate payout. It amazes me how little some people want to pay out. I expect higher rates for electronic goods than physical goods; after all, your costs are very low with downloadable products. However, many companies offer a just about insulting level for either kind of product. Anything under 5% for physical products I’m really going to look and decide if the product is going to make conversions worthy of so little money per sale. Anything under 50% on electronic products gets a similar review.

I also like to see high quality promotional material. If you don’t know how your products should be promoted, I might have more doubts about promoting you. I may or may not use the provided material, but it gives me some guidelines and inspiration.

Keep your promotional material up to date too. On sites such as Commission Junction, companies are allowed to post coupon and promotional codes. You don’t want to know how often I’ll see a great deal to promote, but realize it has expired. That’s very annoying.

All of the above could look great, but sometimes for one reason or another a program just doesn’t work for me. That’s just life as an affiliate. Maybe my style isn’t right for the program. Depending on results and interest, I’ll either try someone else or drop it entirely.

Even though affiliate programs are free to join, it pays to think about which ones you sign up with and promote. Quality at all levels of your business can really help you in the long run.