Here we are with another Monday Tips posts.  These aren’t strictly tips today but 3 things you should know that might change the way you do business. As with all good things I’ll save the best until last and trust me you will want to see that.

The first thing you need to know is that Amazon have changed their TOS and they are now stopping anyone from using PPC to drive traffic to Amazon sales pages.  In the space of a few minutes people who have built their business on this model are without an income unless they have been sensible and diversified.

On the other hand those of us who use article marketing are possibily looking at an increase in income over the coming months.

The email they sent out says…

“After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.”

The second this thats worth know is all about Twollars 

Twollars is an online currency set up for twitter users , the idea is to help charities raise income. How it works is as follows. If someone makes an interesting tweet or makes a useful tweet, you can give them some of your twollars  (50 free with every account) . They can then pass these on to companies who will sponsor a charity and match Twollars for Dollars.  So for example if Sony wanted to attract twitter users they could agree to give $1 for ever twollar donated at their site.  Everyone wins.  The Company, The Charity and Twitter users.

Twollars is the idea of a very good friend of mine  Eiso Kant who I’ve know for as long as I’ve been marketing online. He was the programmer behind RSSG and several of my early sites.  At 18 years of age he is one of the most farsighted internet Entrprenures that i’ve ever met.  Check out twollars and send me some if you like it!!

Now for the big one.

One of the problems we all have is keeping people on our sites long enough, with google measuring how long people stay on your site as one indicator of the value of your site the longer people stay the better.

Let me now introduct Apture to you.  Apture is a plugin that does some awesome stuff That will keep people on your site. I am still working out a way to monetize it , videos will be one method and i am sure that I can think of some more over the next few days. So lets have a quick look at apture in action. 

In front of the highlighted words below you’ll see some symbols click on them to see what i’ve linked to..You can then click on related links within the boxes that come up for more info.

My Name Is Mark Thompson and I am The Author of Wordpress Goldmine 

Now imagine the potential of this at the moment you can link to videos, documents, sites like techcrunch twitter scribd etc with no doubt more to come…lets hope ezinearticles are one such addition. Using Videos and sales pages and you could have a great way to make money online.

As With Twollars this really could herald the start of something big.

Check out apture today at www.apture.com

One of the most common questions I get asked I what affiliate martketing program is the best.  The first thing to keep in mind is that there are thousands of affiliate programs and hundreds of affiliate networks. They all have their pro’s and cons.

For the purposes of this post I will focus on the big 3 programs , Clickbank, eBay and Amazon. Between those 3 there is nothing you can’t sell and personally i much prefer to have my comissions spread among a number of large programs than several small ones .  In the past I have lost commissions because I promoted a program and didn’t make the $100 minimum for payment.

First up Clickbank.

Over the past year clickbank have been making lots of changes that have made them a much more viable proposition for internet marketers. Weekly payments, Direct deposits and multi language products mean that affiliate in most countries can enjoy regular payments.

Income from clickbank tends to be steady unless you start a sucessful campaign the sales will stay similar month after month.

There are a few things that go against Clickbank, they only sell digital products and they are very quick to issue refunds. They actually issued a refund to someone who claimed that their credit card was stoled despite the fact that i provided them with a full list of IP addresses and email conversations that proved they were lying.

eBay, I have to declare now that I love eBays affiliate program. Yes there are occasional tracking problems and they can make stupud decisions like expiring loads of accounts for no aparrant reason but if you can accept these as just teething problems with a new network the results are excellent.  I recently switched a site from adsense which was making about $50 per month , It immediatly started earning me around $300 a month with EPN (ebay partner network).

In the past month i’ve had simple sites with just an article or two and a few eBay listings earning me over $150 a day.. Unlike Clickbank eBay can be seasonal, I know that in November or December I’ll earn 5 times as much than I will in April, but I quite like that as it comes at an expensive time of the year.  Last years Christmas eBbay earnings bought me a Jeep Grand Cherokee, This years should pay my Housing costs for a year.

I am currently working on a new system to help me produce good quality profitable ebay affiliate sites and I fully intend to build an extra 20 or 30 eBay sites and make it my major income stream in the coming year.

Finally Amazon, I have a love hate relationship with amazon. I love that a customer usually goes from my sites to amazon and not only buys the product that I was promoting but 3 or 4 others that are unrelated and I still get commission for them.  I also love the wide range of products available.

 I hate that the commission is so low 4% - 7% usually depending on how many products you sell each month, (mine is usually 6.5%) but the extra sales tends to make up for that. I hate that they won’t do direct deposits into my bank account as i don’t live in the US. I have to get a cheque/check sent to me and then paid in to my bank and wait 4 weeks for it to be credited to my account .

Lastly I hate that I have to wait so long for payment, I’ve just received septembers finalised details a few days ago.  Compare that to Clickbank and ebay who will both have paid me what I earned in November before Christmas. With Amazon i’ll be lucky to have a credit in my bank before April. If I lived within the US it would be much better I could also concentrate on Amazon UK which I do for some sites and many of the payment issues would disapear.

So thats a brief round up of the big 3 affiliate programs , I am sure you can tell that eBay is by far my favorite at the moment. Throught out next year I’ll be keeping you up to date with how my new ebay sites are going and if I make my targets.

Right I am now off to move house….