Commission Junction Review – Affiliate Marketing Network

Not having a Commission Junction review on this blog is unacceptable, considering that Commission Junction (or just CJ) is one of the oldest, largest affiliate networks out there today. According to Wikipedia:

Commission Junction is an online advertising company owned by ValueClick and operating in the affiliate marketing industry. The company is the largest affiliate network in North America and operates worldwide. Among the top 500 retailers using 3rd party affiliate marketing software, 62% are powered by Commission Junction.

I’ve been an affiliate with CJ since 2001, and have been witness to their tremendous growth in the affiliate marketing industry. Since then I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs with them, the lowest point was when my account was suddenly terminated in 2001/02 and my affiliate commissions disappeared.

I hope this Commission Junction review will shed some light on how CJ works, and what to expect as a CJ affiliate.

If you’re just getting started out with affiliate marketing, then Commission Junction would be a logical place to go to. Signing up as a publisher is free and instant, without any manual approvals. Here are some reasons why you may want to try CJ:

Wide Selection of Offers – Besides having tons of merchants, CJ also offers different type of offers. Besides the typical Pay-Per-Sale deal, you can also find Pay-Per-Lead or Pay-Per-Call offers.Established Merchants – Most of the merchants in CJ tend to be of the more established, Fortune-500 type of companies. For affiliates, this means that. Transparent Performance Stats – CJ’s little green bar and 3 Month / 7 Day EPC (Earnings Per 1,000 Clicks) tells you exactly how individual merchants are doing within the CJ network. This is really useful as we only want to promote merchants who are doing justice to their affiliates.Tons of Affiliate Banners – Every merchant has tons of banners and marketing material, hosted by CJ. Each banner also displays the same.Individual Product Links – You can also link directly to individual products, although this is not true for all merchants. Linking directly to a product, as you may know, is the most effective way to make affiliate sales.  performance stats so you can choose to use only the banners that are doing well.Centralized Affiliate Payments – All commissions are paid by CJ themselves, not the individual merchants. This means that your paychecks are predictable and secured.

Although CJ is a great affiliate network, it certainly has its share of disadvantages. Here are some of the most obvious ones:

Advertiser Application Process – Unlike ClickBank where you’re free to promote any affiliate program you want, in CJ you have to manually apply to individual merchants and agree to individual terms of service.Temporary Advertiser Deactivation – Because of the billing process between CJ and its merchants, you constantly get “Advertiser Deactivated” notifications. It’s pretty annoying to know that once the advertiser has been temporarily deactivated, you no longer receive commissions for that merchant.Lack of Standardization – Each merchant has their own terms of service (TOS) and refund terms, which means that all your commissions are handled differently. What is ok with one merchant may not sit well with another, for example buying a product with your own affiliate link and using trademarks in your marketing. Keeping track of all these changing terms is a real headache.Old-School Conversion Tracking – CJ’s stats and reporting features are outdated to say the least. Their affiliate really deserve more conversion data than just commission date and TID tracking. Although they do provide an API for third-party reporting integration, it would be great if they can provide more details to the affiliates directly.Link Encryption and Protection – CJ offers the option to complete encrypt your link so that your affiliate ID is hidden and hijacking is impossible.No PayPal Payment Option – I don’t know about you, but I prefer to get my affiliate commissions directly in my PayPal account. Checks are so tedious to deal with and mess up your cash flow. Although CJ does offer an ACH (bank transfer) option, this is only for affiliates from a few countries.Reputation for Closing Accounts – CJ has a reputation for closing “inactive” affiliate accounts. In fact my account was closed a few years back even though I was making regular commissions from CJ, and they never responded to my emails as to why my account was closed.

Here’s some not-so-flattering (sometimes downright scathing) reviews of Commission Junction. I believe most are exaggerated, though there may be some underlying truth. Also, some review are much older and may no longer be applicable.

Commission Junction is a Joke and a Scam – A pissed off forum user complaining that he “only accumulated $38.70 from 8,000,000 page impressions and 8000+ clicks”. Several other forum member relate similar experiences.Commission Junction Deletes Accounts And Steals Commissions – An unofficial report about CJ closing accounts and vaporizing affiliate commissions. No official rebuttals to this report.

Although I personally don’t believe that CJ has any malicious intent towards affiliates, it does seem that their arbitrary actions and lack of communication has pissed off a lot of affiliates in the past. A pissed off affiliate tends to tell whoever will listen about CJ’s faults.

I think they need to either rebrand themselves with another name, or hire a really good PR firm to clear up their increasingly bad reputation.

I hope you enjoyed this Commission Junction review, feel free share it using the links below.

Tagged as: affiliate network, cj, cj review, commission junction, commission junction review

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Amazon Affiliate Link Tracking Basics – Working With The Amazon Associates Program

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Amazon affiliate links in your LinkTrackr account to track clicks and other important data. Getting a regular HTML link should be easy if you know the basics, but since Amazon now has tons of different product widgets and links it can be pretty confusing to a beginner.

Step 1: Login to your Amazon Associates account at http://affiliate-program.amazon.com and make sure you are working with the correct account. In the example above, I am working with the ID “classicguitar-20”.

Step 2: Enter the product name or search term and click on “Go”. Amazon will return a list of related products.

Step 3: Find the product you want, and click on the highlighted icon (not on “Get Link”). This is the easiest way to get a regular HTML link.

Step 4: How just highlight the raw HTML link as per the example above, and right click to copy the link. This is how the raw link looks like:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004R7A9NU/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=classicguitar-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B004R7A9NU

All raw HTML links should start with “http://www.amazon.com/…” – these are the only type of links that will work in LinkTrackr, PPC ad networks or any other link tracking software. It should also contain your Amazon affiliate ID.

Amazon also offers a short version of the link. The get it just click on “Shorten URL with amzn.to”

The shorten link is encrypted so you will no longer see your affiliate ID or any other variable like ASIN or the product name. It’s much easier to work with and the chances of making a mistake with your links a much lower.

If you click on “Get Link” in step 3 instead of the HTML link shortcut, you will be taken to the complete linking options page filled with all type of widgets and link formats. If you are on this page, you can choose the “Text Only” tab and manually copy the required HTML by highlighting only the link as shown above. However, unless you are very careful, it’s easy to make a mistake.

So we would recommend you just right click on the link preview and choose “Copy Link Address”. This is safer and actually much easier. With either method, the actual HTML link you get is the same.

Now login to your LinkTrackr account, click on “Add New Link” and fill up the form. The example above shows you how to do it by entering only the HTML link – no widget codes, no image or pixel codes, and no iFrame codes.

After creating the Link, make sure you test it out. When you click on your tracking link, it should take you directly to a page on Amazon.com. If you do not see a complete page, you have not done it correctly.

Common mistakes:

Entering the “iFrame” code into LinkTrackr. Your link will work but you will only see the iFrame widget and not the Amazon.com pageEntering pixel image codes.Not including “http” in your link

So we hope this Amazon tutorial has helped you understand how to get a regular Amazon affiliate link and use it within your LinkTrackr account.

Tagged as: affiliate link, amazon, amazon affiliate link

View the original article here

Commission Junction Review – Affiliate Marketing Network

Not having a Commission Junction review on this blog is unacceptable, considering that Commission Junction (or just CJ) is one of the oldest, largest affiliate networks out there today. According to Wikipedia:

Commission Junction is an online advertising company owned by ValueClick and operating in the affiliate marketing industry. The company is the largest affiliate network in North America and operates worldwide. Among the top 500 retailers using 3rd party affiliate marketing software, 62% are powered by Commission Junction.

I’ve been an affiliate with CJ since 2001, and have been witness to their tremendous growth in the affiliate marketing industry. Since then I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs with them, the lowest point was when my account was suddenly terminated in 2001/02 and my affiliate commissions disappeared.

I hope this Commission Junction review will shed some light on how CJ works, and what to expect as a CJ affiliate.

If you’re just getting started out with affiliate marketing, then Commission Junction would be a logical place to go to. Signing up as a publisher is free and instant, without any manual approvals. Here are some reasons why you may want to try CJ:

Wide Selection of Offers – Besides having tons of merchants, CJ also offers different type of offers. Besides the typical Pay-Per-Sale deal, you can also find Pay-Per-Lead or Pay-Per-Call offers.Established Merchants – Most of the merchants in CJ tend to be of the more established, Fortune-500 type of companies. For affiliates, this means that. Transparent Performance Stats – CJ’s little green bar and 3 Month / 7 Day EPC (Earnings Per 1,000 Clicks) tells you exactly how individual merchants are doing within the CJ network. This is really useful as we only want to promote merchants who are doing justice to their affiliates.Tons of Affiliate Banners – Every merchant has tons of banners and marketing material, hosted by CJ. Each banner also displays the same.Individual Product Links – You can also link directly to individual products, although this is not true for all merchants. Linking directly to a product, as you may know, is the most effective way to make affiliate sales.  performance stats so you can choose to use only the banners that are doing well.Centralized Affiliate Payments – All commissions are paid by CJ themselves, not the individual merchants. This means that your paychecks are predictable and secured.

Although CJ is a great affiliate network, it certainly has its share of disadvantages. Here are some of the most obvious ones:

Advertiser Application Process – Unlike ClickBank where you’re free to promote any affiliate program you want, in CJ you have to manually apply to individual merchants and agree to individual terms of service.Temporary Advertiser Deactivation – Because of the billing process between CJ and its merchants, you constantly get “Advertiser Deactivated” notifications. It’s pretty annoying to know that once the advertiser has been temporarily deactivated, you no longer receive commissions for that merchant.Lack of Standardization – Each merchant has their own terms of service (TOS) and refund terms, which means that all your commissions are handled differently. What is ok with one merchant may not sit well with another, for example buying a product with your own affiliate link and using trademarks in your marketing. Keeping track of all these changing terms is a real headache.Old-School Conversion Tracking – CJ’s stats and reporting features are outdated to say the least. Their affiliate really deserve more conversion data than just commission date and TID tracking. Although they do provide an API for third-party reporting integration, it would be great if they can provide more details to the affiliates directly.Link Encryption and Protection – CJ offers the option to complete encrypt your link so that your affiliate ID is hidden and hijacking is impossible.No PayPal Payment Option – I don’t know about you, but I prefer to get my affiliate commissions directly in my PayPal account. Checks are so tedious to deal with and mess up your cash flow. Although CJ does offer an ACH (bank transfer) option, this is only for affiliates from a few countries.Reputation for Closing Accounts – CJ has a reputation for closing “inactive” affiliate accounts. In fact my account was closed a few years back even though I was making regular commissions from CJ, and they never responded to my emails as to why my account was closed.

Here’s some not-so-flattering (sometimes downright scathing) reviews of Commission Junction. I believe most are exaggerated, though there may be some underlying truth. Also, some review are much older and may no longer be applicable.

Commission Junction is a Joke and a Scam – A pissed off forum user complaining that he “only accumulated $38.70 from 8,000,000 page impressions and 8000+ clicks”. Several other forum member relate similar experiences.Commission Junction Deletes Accounts And Steals Commissions – An unofficial report about CJ closing accounts and vaporizing affiliate commissions. No official rebuttals to this report.

Although I personally don’t believe that CJ has any malicious intent towards affiliates, it does seem that their arbitrary actions and lack of communication has pissed off a lot of affiliates in the past. A pissed off affiliate tends to tell whoever will listen about CJ’s faults.

I think they need to either rebrand themselves with another name, or hire a really good PR firm to clear up their increasingly bad reputation.

I hope you enjoyed this Commission Junction review, feel free share it using the links below.

Tagged as: affiliate network, cj, cj review, commission junction, commission junction review

View the original article here