Amazon Associates vs Borders vs Fishpond - Website Affiliate Programs and Commission Comparison

A few years back I began an experiment with commission based affiliate programs and began with Amazon.

I started with Amazon Associates and went to great lengths to target specific pages with specific products.  But eventually gave up having made just $3 in commissions for a product that I hadn't even advertised and never qualifying for a cheque.  The problem it seemed was that my websites had a primarily Australian focus and Australian buyers it seemed had bad experiences with Amazon's delivery prices and timeframes.  My Adsense ads were earning far more each day than Amazon Affiliates was worth for a whole six months.

I continued to experiment with other website affiliate programs including Payloadz and Commission Monster, but digital products just don't have the same effect as books and DVDs. 

Anyhow, in the last two months I have joined the affiliate program of Fishpond.com.au.  While I was a little skeptical given that I found the interface for creating ads to, it was not long before I made my first sale.  Within three weeks I qualified for my first payment.  I think they have done a lot in their marketing to make Australian consumers feel comfortable buying them and as a result my websites were a very good fit.  It is great to now see some quality affiliate programs emerging for content publishers.

I have been tempted to give Borders more of a go given its strong brand in Australia, however its commissions are relatively low and Fishpond has the advantage of being 100% Australia.  I also wish that Readings, one of my favourite booksellers would start an affiliate program.

You'll find below a brief commission comparison of the various website affiliate programs for online DVD and booksellers.

Commission Comparison

• Amazon - 4% to 15% (typically 10% for books)
  
• Borders - 5% to 8% (typically 5% for books)
• Fishpond - 10% 
  

Things that annoy me about Wordpress

As devout I am a disciple of Wordpress, I have to say there are definitely things that bug me about this publishing system / CMS. 


#1 Links in image captions - as of Wordpress 2.6, if you try to put hyperlinks in image captions, Wordpress strips them out.  Which of course means that you can't effectively credit the author of an image or photo (whether it be from Flickr or some other website) and link to the appropriate licence.  This can be frustrating and there aren't really any plugins which properly address the issue.  However I've found a couple of workarounds here and here.  However this is something essential that really shouldn't require a plugin or hack.  Memo to Wordpress ... fix this in the next version please !

More in due course

My top 10 essential Wordpress Plug-ins

Here are my top 10 essential Wordpress Plug-ins as I use Wordpress a lot. 
I manage over 100 blogs using this great software but pretty much use similar plugins on each. 
There are many plugins that do the same thing and some times it is a process of trial and error, installing, activating and deactivating until you find one that is right for you.
So I thought I'd share my list to make it easier for everyone:

1.  Wordpress Database Backup - Helps me sleep much easier at night.  Daily backups in my email what more can I say.

2. Platinum SEO Pack - Don't know what I'd do without this great plugin.  My blogs rank so much better with it running.  This plugin is highly customisable and a must have.


3. Google XML Sitemaps - Like #1, this is very handy for getting better results in Google and does all the work for you

4. Share This - Great way to generate some word-of-mouth action

5.  Feedburner Feedsmith - Feedburner helps keep an eye on who is reading your RSS feeds.

6.  Ultimate Google Analytics - Avoids your Analytics codes getting blasted away by updates and your stats stopping running

7.  Get Recent Comments - Indispensible little plugin helps other users to see which posts on your site people are talking about.

8.  Akismet - helps control that annoying comment spam.

9.  Geo Mashup Plugin - a fantastic little plugin that makes it very easy to generate Google Maps.  A little fiddly at first but once you get your head around it and get your API key it is very powerful.

10.  EasyTube or Smart Youtube - six one or half a dozen the other.  Basically easily embed YouTube into posts - only thing I hate about Wordpress is it makes it difficult to do this and Google Maps without plugins ...

Hope this helps !  Interested to hear if I've left some out that others find indispensable.

Cushy CMS vs Surreal CMS - which is the best Lightweight free CMS

I've used web content management systems for a while, but only began recently to use some lightweight web content management systems with some smaller websites - first Cushy CMS and now Surreal CMS.

A couple of free lightweight content management systems are out there that are application hosted and use FTP to hook into websites and CSS tags to define editable areas (in the case of Cushy it is class="cushycms" and in the case of Surreal it is class="editable"). They are offered free because their business model is aimed at web designers rather than end users.

One of the big limitations with these systems is that they are only really good for existing webpages, not for creating new ones. There is also the issue of FTP security when someone else is hosting your access logins.

But once you overlook these, the systems are neat, quick and (mostly) very easy for end users to pick up.

Cushy had some great design ideas, but a newcomer, Surreal gives it a real run for its money.

There are two reasons why I have switched from Cushy to Surreal:

1. A frustrating bug in Cushy resulting from when I moved my site from a staging server to a new server, I could no longer edit the pages, even if I re-added them. Resulting in me having to create a new account

2. Surreal CMS is now set up to accept Cushy's tag class="cushycms" making it easier to migrate from Cushy

3. Surreal editor is hosted off a separate purpose built domain - edit-content.com. I've found downtime on Cushy which makes Surreal more suitable for higher demand websites

While it is clear that Surreal capitalises on Cushy's mistakes to gain marketshare and I found Surreal as easy to setup as Cushy, there are However a couple of the setup things weren't quite as easy as they could be. The interface and tabs for editing different fields initially confused me and tripped me up and they quite aren't as easy as Cushy. The rich text area is also a little trickier to use, and a little difficult to find the View HTML Source option initially.

However despite these things I'm quite happy to now use Surreal.

Gmail's threaded messages system is confusing and you can't turn it off

I usually like Gmail, much better than hotmail at least for reliability.

But one thing that gets me is the threaded messaging system.

I don't mind the concept and see where it can be useful. But in practice it can be incredibly confusing and difficult to find individual email messages.

Gmail's groups functionality can be useful, however Gmail isn't a discussion forum or mailing list, it is first and foremost a personal email application. Trying to be everything isn't always the best way to go.

I've also found that it can sometimes also cause confusing situations of replying to the wrong person because you've picked a message out of a thread. I've found the confusion gets worst when you're switching from using Gmail in groups to sending and receiving individual emails.

But its not a mode and I'm yet to find a way to turn this feature off ... there is a Google groups thread about it here ... perhaps there is a better email service that is not as confusing !

Embedding Flickr into Websites - FlickrSlidr vs PictoBrowser vs Plug in

I've recently had some success embedding Flickr into websites and blogs and found that there are many ways to skin this cat.

The easiest is online services, of which there are two main ones ... FlickrSlidr and PictoBrowser. Both generate code which you can simply copy and paste into your website HTML.

FlickrSlidr is the easiest and has some basic configuration options. However its limitations is in end users browsing pictures.

PictoBrowser is more of a traditional gallery and also supports Picasa, however the builder uses Flash and although the interface looks simple it is in fact clunky and just about crashed my PC.

However there is a simple way, using a direct Flickr API and iFrames using a piece of code supplied on this site. The code can also be made to be standards compliant.

I'm not sure about slideshows though, and I'd prefer to randomise static Flickr images. There are plugins available to do that too.

Interested to hear any other ways people have been able to achieve it.

How to tell if your website is being copied

I've had several websites completely ripped off lately. I mean content design, the whole shebang. I used to only be able to find them if they slipped up and left links to my site.

But searching around, I found this great website called Copyscape. You just type in your website's URLs and it catches the culprits red handed !

So if you are concerned about copyright infringement, then visit this highly recommended service and check for yourself:

http://www.copyscape.com/