Wade Tonkin of Christian Affiliate Marketers (CAM) is giving away free T-shirts and stuff. All you have to do–and this is incredibly easy–is follow CAM on Twitter and answer any of the trivia questions he asks. Someone just won a copy of a book called “A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing” by Geno Prussakov by answering the first question:

“Which gospel was written first?”

The CAM site in Wades own words is:

“…a Christian community for people in the online and specifically the affiliate marketing industry.”

I’m a fan of the site and of trivia in general, so I’ll be popping in I’m sure.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Biscuits!

I had a chat with my new friend, Wade Tonkin of the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association the other day, and he filled me in on some interesting happenings at this year’s Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, February 24-26. I kept bumping in to Wade in various places on the Internet and was glad to finally get to know him a little better. Wade is a fellow Christian believer, affiliate marketer and blogger.

I’ve haven’t had the opportunity to go to an Affiliate Summit yet, but it is at the very top of my list for conferences to attend. From what I have heard from those who have attended, Affiliate Summit is a very rewarding experience. It kind of goes against what I would have thought, that affiliate marketers would be competitors and therefore suspicious about socializing and giving away secrets at conferences like Affiliate Summit. I guess I’ll find out first hand one of these days when I have a chance to attend one.

Wade has a passion for bringing Christian affiliate marketers together in fellowship. Wade told me that CAMA is organizing the second annual CAMA Gospel Brunch Sunday, February 24th from 9:15-11:30 AM at The House of Blues at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Anyone can attend (I just heard it is sold out) to share food, fun and fellowship. Wade says CAMA is “expecting 50 attendees that represent a cross section of the online marketing business: affiliates, merchants, agencies, search professionals, media will be in attendance.  We have attendees coming from as far away as Singapore and South Africa to attend.” He says the goal of the event is to “present a spiritual kick off to the Affiliate Summit event and provide a Fellowship opportunity for Christians  in the industry who are away from their home church.”

I got permission from Wade to mention that one of the high points of the event will be the unveiling of the “CAMA Certified” badge, a program that will certify merchants with legitimate Christian values, sites and offers.

The badge will serve to provide Christian marketers with a source for offers that they can be proud to promote on their sites or blogs. merchants that would like to be “CAMA Certified” will submit an application that will be reviewed by a panel of industry professionals of faith. They insure that the merchant is truely one that aims to advance the gospel with their products and services and looks to the Christian consumer as more than just “another niche to monetize” and that the structure of their offer and business practices are in keeping with Christian values (fairness, integrity). They also look to offer an  Affiliate Membership which will certify the affiliates site or sites and hopefully earn Member affiliates additional commissions and benefits from member merchants.

Sounds pretty cool, huh? Wade also said:

I am expecting great good, inspiring fellowship and networking and really incredible music that will send  all attendees - believer or non believer into the rest of the Affiliate Summit on a spiritual high note. It’s really an awesome event.

Wade said last year’s CAMA brunch was a blast. He expects to get some footage as he’s bringing his flip cam. Also, he expects Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson to have their cams with them as well–if you listen to these guys on WebmasterRadio.FM or elsewhere, you know they are great marketers and lots of fun.

I am looking forward to hearing more about the CAMA event as well as the usual Affiliate Summit goodness. Hopefully there will be a third annual CAMA Gospel Brunch and I’ll be able to attend and meet some of these interesting folks. In the mean time, I am praying that this year’s brunch is a success.

Was I being naughty to assume that I could upload a few web hosting reviews to Google Base? Most, not all of the reviews had 1 or 2 affiliate text links appearing in context. As most of you probably know, the affiliate relationship helps compensate our expenditures to hire an objective reviewer to log in and test each host and report back the findings to Clickfire visitors. The reward of making even a small profit helps justify those sunny weekend afternoons spent in front of the PC.

My bulk upload of about 10 web hosting reviews was declined and account “disabled” because my Google Base account was being used to:

direct Google users to affiliate or commission-based programs. We have therefore disabled your Google Base account. Please know that we don’t allow the promotion of affiliate products or sites.

I was referred to the program policies where the only thing about affiliates that I could find was this statement:

Posting is not permitted for the promotion of affiliate sites or products sold through an affiliate marketing relationship. This includes item pages that are made up primarily of advertisements, or pages where advisements obstruct the view of the item.

While Clickfire does rely on advertising to support the site (I think most sites do), we certainly don’t have pages that are “primarily” advertisements or obstruct user views. In fact, most of our advertising is through Google AdSense (2 ads per page) at the time of this writing.

I noticed that my login still worked fine. I still have permission to post items on Base. So, I tried uploading individual reviews with no affiliate links such as the one below, but was disapproved:

Read more of this post »

I’m really excited about this new affiliate link cloaker tool because I haven’t found a tool that actually allows you to cloak an affiliate link while adding the Google nofollow attribute. So, this should be a quicker alternative to hand coding your affiliate links. I’ve tested this new link cloaker tool in both IE and Firefox with no probs. I consider the tool to be in beta, so if you find any bugs or ways to improve, please post. Read more of this post »

Single or not, you may have stumbled upon the reviews of eHarmony and PerfectMatch at Clickfire. A friend sent me this interview of Markus Frind, owner and single operator of a free online dating site called PlentyOfFish.com. What’s so special about Markus Frind? He recently caused some Internet tremors when he posted a photo of his latest Google AdSense check for nearly $1 million CAD. Don’t you just love it that it’s a free site?

read more and see the AdSense check

I decided to go public with my Chitika experience because I think it’s important for other webmasters to understand the risks of jumping on the bandwagon of a hot new web advertiser and to anyone who may consider investing time or resources in such services.

I signed up for Chitika eMinimalls contextual ad service in fall of 2005. Like many webmasters, I was attracted to the novelty of graphically appealing contextual ads featuring comparative shopping that might be a good Google AdSense alternative. After testing Chitika eMinimalls ads on a few sites, I found that their performance justified me keeping them on certain pages, mostly pages with shopping or product specific content. I grabbed my horn and jumped right onto the bandwagon. I even wrote an enthusiastic review of Chitika for Clickfire visitors. I received my first check in November. I was pulling for this little upstart, hoping they’d turn out to be a strong competitor.

I checked my stats daily with a little playful smugness. It was now coming time to receive my first big payment from Chitika. I will not publish the email that I received from Chitika Customer Service as I don’t like to make the contents of private emails public without permission. But, one can imagine the let down I felt when I saw the title: Chitika Account Suspension Notice. Chitika suspended my account due to their belief that fraudulent traffic activities were taking place. My immediate response was:

Dear Chitika Customer Service,

I’ve removed all Chitika ads from my site as requested. Please indicate what is causing the concern in your analysis so I can investigate my server logs and take appropriate steps to prevent recurrence.

After waiting some time and receiving no response, I tried again:

Dear Chitika Customer Service,

I’m writing to inquire about the suspension of my Chitika eMinimalls account. I am not aware of any fraudulent activity on the account and would like to know what is causing Chitika the concern. I am especially vexed about this development because I take great pains to conduct business in an ethical manner. I am eagar to determine how the problem can be corrected and especially when the suspension may be lifted. Please respond and advise me of next steps.

Read more of this post »

There is an interesting thread started by Mook-Jon on the SitePoint.com Advertising Sales & Affiliate Programs forum entitled “Screenshot: My CJ Stats.” The thread has now been removed, I see, but the post was intended by the author to “show people what can be accomplished with the right amount of work and research in specific markets to make what I do.”

Why has the thread generated so much controversy? The screen shot of Mook-Jon’s CJ stats for the two month period show $81,332.78. Some webmasters are cheering Mook-Jon’s openess as motivational and others are questioning the screen shot’s authenticity (he isn’t stating what sites he owns but others are busily trying to investigate and publicize them).

Mook-Jon is generously answering questions and giving advice on how he achieved this figure using the Commission Junction affiliate network. Seeming to be more of a marketer than a developer or content writer, some of his statements are provocative and seem outside the typical webmaster box of thinking. The main thrust of the questions is:

“How did you do it?”