Great Networks for Software Affiliates and Vendors

MK — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:48:07 +0000

If you’re looking for software that you can promote as an affiliate or if you’re a software vendor looking for a good affiliate network through which you can distribute and market your product, here’s a list of networks that will interest you:

Avangate

Avangate is an affiliate network and an ecommerce management company helping connect affiliates and vendors.

For vendors, Avangate offers an ecommerce platform where they help increase the website visibility, process payments and software delivery. When a vendor signs up with Avangate, they get access to Avangate registered affiliates and resellers.

For affiliates, Avangate offers high quality software with generous commissions.

Visit Avangate

share-it!

share-it! is very similar to Avangate in the services they offer to vendors and affiliates. I, however, found commissions on share-it! to be lower than Avangate.

Visit share-it!

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is the biggest global affiliate network. It doesn’t specialize in software, so I don’t think they help software vendors setup their ecommerce process. But if you have an ecommerce process in place, you can probably integrate it with Commission Junction.

As an affiliate, you don’t have a big selection of software to choose from. At the time of this writing, there is approximately 130 items listed on Commission Junction under the Computer Software category.

Visit Commission Junction

ClickBank

ClickBank is another huge global network of affiliates. Getting registered with ClickBank as a vendor or affiliate is extremely easy. ClickBank doesn’t offer ecommerce services. Though, by registering with ClickBank, a software vendor could get access to a huge network of very competitive affiliates.

If you’re an affiliate marketer and looking for software to promote, you can find plenty of high quality software in ClickBank’s marketplace. But at the time of this writing, ClickBank’s marketplace doesn’t have a “software” category. In January of ’10, though, they will launch a new marketplace that has a dedicated software category.

Visit ClickBank

Other Software Vendors with In-House Affiliate Programs

Not all software vendors register with an affiliate management network. Some manage their affiliates in-house. If you’re an affiliate, you should not neglect these kinds of vendors. Finding them is quite easy. Here are a few tips on finding these kinds of affiliate programs:

Search Google

Simply search Google for software.

When you find a software that you’re interested in promoting, find out if the vendor offers an affiliate program by entering the following in Google:

(affiliates OR associates OR partners OR referral) site:domainname.com

Search Software Web Directories

There are some very well-maintained web directories that host hundreds of great software. For example, if you want to promote Web software, you can find lots on HotScripts.com. Or if you want to promote smart phone software, you can find plenty on Handango.com.

Many vendors in these directories have an affiliate program that you can sign up for.

Do you know Any Other Networks?

If you know other great networks that offer software as one of their categories, let us know in the comments!

Happy promoting and selling!

Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress

MK — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:09:17 +0000

If you currently have or plan to have plenty of affiliate links on your WordPress based website, you should have a way to easily track and manage these affiliate links. You want to know how many clicks each link received and you want to be able to edit and change the affiliate link without having to revisit and change old content.

And to keep your website clean and organized in the eyes of search engines, there are a few things that will need tweaking.

Here’s how I create, manage and cloak my affiliate links.

Using Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that is made by John Godley, who works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Redirection helps you manage your blog URLs. Using Redirection, you could create a link like http://msafi.com/gotogoogle/ and set that link to forward to http://google.com. Similarly, you could put all your affiliate forwarders in a virtual directory like:

http://msafi.com/affiliate/product1/
http://msafi.com/affiliate/product2/
http://msafi.com/affiliate/product3/
and so on…

Most people don’t use affiliate for the directory name, though. They use goto or visit. Or like on this website, I simply use a.

Redirection also allows you to group related URL redirections together. So, you could create a group, name it Affiliate Links and put all your affiliate links there.

Create an affiliate link in Redirection

Once you have Redirection installed

Click on Groups in the top left corner
At the bottom of the page, you’ll see Add Group. Enter Affiliate Links in the textbox, and click Add.
Click on your newly added group, Affiliate Links
In the source URL, put something like /visit/product-xyz/ (don’t include your domain name, http://ursite.com)
For Match, select URL only
For Action, select Redirect to URL
Leave Regular expression unchecked
In Target URL, put your affiliate link

That’s it. You’ve added your first affiliate link to Redirection.

Now whenever you want to link to Product XYZ, use http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/. It’s even easier to remember.

Redirection also gives you the number of hits each link received. So, if you’re putting your links in relevant places and getting huge volumes of clicks but maybe no sales, you’ll know something is going on…

Cool tip: get Redirection to automatically create ClickBank affiliate links for you!

If you promote products for ClickBank, here’s a cool tip that you’ll find very useful.

All of ClickBank’s links have the following structure

http://YourClickBankID.VendorClickBankID.hop.clickbank.net

You can tell Redirection to automatically fill in the VendorClickBankID field for you based on a value that you provide in your URL. Like:

http://ursite.com/cb/vendorx311/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.vendorx311.hop.clickbank.net

and

http://ursite.com/cb/sumvendor2/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.sumvendor2.hop.clickbank.net

…and so on…

Here’s how you do this in Redirection:

In the Source URL, enter /cb/([^/]*)
In Target URL, enter http://yourClickBankID.$1.hop.clickbank.net
Make sure Regular expression is checked
Match should be set to URL only
Action should be set to Redirect URL

I have done this on my website here at msafi.com. So, now I can simply give out a link like http://msafi.com/cb/4idiots/. This will redirect to http://mksafi.4idiots.clickbank.net, which is the landing sales page for the product sold by 4idiots ClickBank vendor. You can replace 4idiots with any ClickBank vendor ID and it will still work.

Pretty cool isn’t it?

Perhaps a similar trick can be done to automate link cloaking and management for Amazon and Commission Junction, but I’ll have to look into that.

For now, let’s look into optimizing your affiliate links so that Google will not have trouble with them…

Helping Google not trip over your affiliate links

Now that you have a convenient and easy way to create and organize affiliate links, I’m gonna show you how to make sure that Google will not discriminate against your blog as a result of affiliate links.

First, whenever you add an affiliate link as anchor text make sure that you include a rel=”nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag. That is

Bad: Product XYZ

Good: Product XYZ

If you want to automate the creation of anchor text links in WordPress, check out the plugin I created: Word 2 Cash.

Second, use robots.txt to disallow Google (and other search engines) from accessing your virtual affiliate links URL directories. Your affiliate link directories are /visit/, /cb/ and whatever else you may have created.

In your robots.txt file add lines like:

Disallow: /visit/* Disallow: /cb/*

Do the same for any other affiliate link directory you have.

This will help Google index your website in a clean way and hopefully minimize discrimination against your outbound links.

That’s all there is to it. You now have a great way to create and manage your affiliate links. Just one last thing before you go.

Reducing Redirection database size

Redirection keeps a record of every redirect it makes. It stores these records in your database. If you’re gonna be using the plugin the way I described in this post, your records can build up and take a lot of space pretty quickly. What you want to do is set the records to expire after some time, say 30 days. To do that:

go to Redirection’s admin page
Click on Options
In the Expire Logs field, enter 30 and click Save.

Aaaaaaand you’re done!

msafi.com » ClickBank