Today Tikkler, a German Twitter clone, launched an affiliate program with zanox. On the bottom of their homepage they implemented Googe AdSense. Now my questions is, if you’re a professional affiliate, would you seriously send users to a site where they can click on ads and leave the site? I’ve also seen many advertiser landing pages with toll-free phone numbers and that kind of stuff. I doubt that the sales coming over the phone will be tracked correctly.

So if you’re an affiliate, don’t send traffic to landing pages with any type of distraction. Whether it be phone numbers, email addresses, links to other sites, or ads, they all kill your conversion. These advertisers either try to rip you off or they have no clue about online marketing. In any case, you lose! Just some random thoughts before leaving for the weekend …

If you’re not familiar with Google Trends yet, you better check it out. This free tool shows you the search volume for a given set of keywords in a defined region. I’ve been using it for keyword research for quite some time already.

Affiliate marketers can use it to find hot trends, promising niches, but also diminishing markets. Let me show you some examples (all data for the United Kingdom):

“presents” and “gifts”:

It’s no surprise that people look for these terms in December.

Facebook vs. MySpace:

Facebook is extremely hot in the UK at the minute whereas MySpace is becoming old.

The fall of “ringtones”:

Mobile content is not nearly as popular as it used to be.

So if you’re thinking about a new project, do your research on Google Trends. I’m not saying that you can’t be successful in declining markets. However, if you want to create something really big, you need to create something that people are interested in.

Sometimes it is necessary to create offline versions of a page or a complete website. For example you might want to put an offline version of a site on your USB stick for a presentation. Or perhaps you need to create static backups of your site.

Today I’m going to describe how to download pages and/or complete sites onto your linux server or desktop computer. wget is the Linux command you’re looking for and here is how to use it:

Downloading a single file (without linked elements such as images):
wget http://www.google.com

Downloading a complete page (including linked elements such as images):
wget -p http://www.google.com

Downloading multiple complete pages (up to 7 levels):
wget -rkpl 7 http://www.google.com

Downloading (mirroring) a whole site (up to 10 levels):
wget -m 10 http://www.google.com

I just got back from the opening event for zanox’ new Global Alliance Partners Campus. It’s an office space right next to the zanox headquarters serving as an incubator for new publishers. As far as I understand affiliates can use the zanox premises to work on their projects for using zanox as their affiliate and tracking network in exchange.

At the event zanox also promised the development of various APIs in order to let advertisers and publishers access as much information as possible without the usual web interface. In theory developers would then be able to create as much as their own sub-affiliate networks.

All this is a great step forward and convinced me that they are Germany’s most relevant affiliate network. They may not be the number one in terms of traffic yet, but they will be. Competitors are too far behind and way too slow to catch up. Good stuff, guys.

I will be attending the Mobile Internet World Europe Summit and the Mobile Monday on Monday. Both events take place at the same venue. Let me know in case you want to meet me there.

My former affiliatetracking.de site has become peterglaeser.com!

I killed my old personal blog because I hardly found enough time to publish anything there. And it also makes a lot more sense to publish English content on a .com instead of a .de domain.

I put a 301 redirect to the new domain. But just to be sure, please update your bookmarks and feed URLs.

Germany’s leading affiliate network affilinet is expanding to another neighboring country: the Netherlands.
They have just launched the Dutch version of their site. Too bad that the domain affilinet.nl belongs to GSMPlaza, a Dutch vendor of mobile phones and contracts.

Zanox doesn’t want any new affiliates, it seems. At least they don’t want to pay for them.

Zanox used to run a a snowball system as you might know it from multi-level marketing. Existing affiliates that acquired new affiliates received a percentage of the new affiliates’ regular commissions on top of their own direct commissions. So if you focused on bringing quality affiliates to zanox regularly, your monthly income would grow steadily. Some of the pioneers of affiliate marketing made a real fortune out of this and made their personal dreams come true.

Now zanox have decided that these alpha affiliates that continuously bring in new affiliates aren’t good enough for them anymore. They’re getting rid of the lifetime payout and now pay you a lousy 6 to 8 euros. Also these leads are not confirmed for payout unless the newly acquired affiliate generates at least 50 euros worth of commissions.

Let’s have a closer look at this: If an affiliate earns the threshold of 50 euros from an advertiser, zanox is earning somewhere between 10 and 15 euros from that advertiser already. That is their agency fee, so to say the cost for using the affiliate network, which is usually between 20 and 30 percent of the rewarded affiliate commissions. What are they giving to the affiliate? 6 to 8 euros. Now you figure out why that is!

If you want to read a success story of a retired alpha affiliate, visit Stefan Zwanzger at affiliate.de.