As you might have already heard, Click2Sell will introduce many great features and changes on the 1st of November. It may seem that most of new things are dedicated to merchants, but that is not exactly true. Actually, development of Click2Sell new version began from considering on how could we help our affiliates to earn more money online and improve their experience using Click2Sell Affiliate Network.

We have received a lot of affiliates' feedback about Click2Sell system: your concerns about receiving payments from merchants, payment delay issues or simply – lack of trust of each individual merchant. We have listened to you and taken into account each and every your suggestion. Our aim was to make Click2Sell the most attractive and Affiliate-Friendly system online:

1. Provide 100% Affiliate Protection and guarantee commission payments;
2. Make frequent affiliate commission payouts;
3. Establish much more clear commission payouts schedule;
4. Increase options to receive affiliate commissions.

We are happy to say that we have achieved all of our set goals!

Let's get deeper into exact benefits of new Click2Sell system features for Affiliates:

• Click2Sell will pay all your affiliate commissions – always on time without any delay. Two out of three affiliate management systems (COMPLETE and HYBRID) have vastly improved level of commission payments and now Click2Sell will be taking care of it. Until now merchants had to pay their affiliates themselves and we did not allow them to have any single unpaid commission if they wanted to continue using Click2Sell. This ensured that 97+ % of generated commissions were paid. However, we felt that it was not enough and wanted to increase the percentage to 100%.

  Thus merchants who are using "HYBRID affiliate management system" will have to either pre-pay affiliate commissions in advance, or they will have to provide direct access to their PayPal accounts which will be charged as soon as you or any other affiliate refers a sale. In both ways money for paying your commissions will be available in your Click2Sell account immediately.

• Money for sales from merchants who are using "COMPLETE affiliate management system" are collected to Click2Sell company accounts, thus money for your commissions is available immediately as well. Possibility of losing your affiliate commission simply does not exist when promoting products of merchants using "Complete" model.

  Click2Sell marketplace will list only those products, which are sold using "Hybrid" or "Complete" affiliate management systems. Choose any product to promote from there with confidence!

• Affiliate commissions will always be paid on a certain day – Tuesday. No more situations like "a commission will be paid sometime within three weeks (maybe after 2 days or maybe after 3 weeks)". We understand that not knowing when exactly you could receive a commission is quite troublesome, thus we established clear payment schedule – you will be paid on Tuesdays.

• Increased frequency of affiliate commission payments. Earnings from promoted products listed on Click2Sell marketplace will be paid on each Tuesday. So you will be paid WEEKLY with 14 days delay (as soon as your referred transactions pass security check).

  How will it work:

  1. You refer a sale.
  2. Money is reserved for your commission immediately;
  3. Your referred sale enters clearance period of 2 weeks (mainly to see if there will be no refund for your referred sale) ;
  4. Once the period of 2 weeks finishes and your sale is not refunded, the commission will be paid on the next Tuesday.

• Better handling of reversal payments. From the 1st of November your future commissions will be automatically adjusted in cases of commission reversals and you will not need to pay reversals separately. In other words, if some of your referred sales are cancelled after some time, you will not need to manually pay back commissions for the refunded sales.

• More ways to receive your affiliate commissions. Wire-transfer payment option becomes available for affiliates earning high commissions. There will be no more troubles to receive commissions from "PayPal-only" merchant while you have just, let's say, Moneybookers account. Merchants will pay affiliate commissions to us and then we will pay you using your preferred payment option: PayPal, Moneybookers or wire-transfer. We intend to add more payment options in future.

• We added a lot of new features which will allow merchants to sell their products in a more convenient way. This means that more merchants will be able to use Click2Sell and thus more quality products will be available for you to promote!

As you can see, we have improved the most important aspects related to affiliates: commission payments, commission receiving options and variety of products to promote.

We have many more ideas of how to help you promoting products, thus Click2Sell system will keep getting better and better every day.

If you have any suggestion or need some special feature, just let us know! Your opinion is extremely important to us. Majority of our new features were developed according to Click2Sell affiliates' needs. So we would love to hear your thoughts on that!

Regards,
Click2Sell team

Some good news for affiliates who use Moneybookers, but are indirectly paid by merchants who use only PayPal.

First of all, I would like to remind everyone that even if an affiliate has only Moneybookers account and a merchant whose product the affiliate wants to promote can pay only via PayPal, we can help them: merchants will just send affiliate payments to Click2Sell and we will pay their affiliates via their used payment system. If there is an inverse scenario (an affiliate has PayPal, but merchant has only Moneybookers account), the same applies.

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Did you know that there is a new wave of marketing called social decision marketing? Basically this involves a way of influencing the customer mindset so that they are compelled to purchase the products you sell. In affiliate marketing the best way to achieve this is to review affiliate products and create affiliate products review.

Here are the 8 steps you have to take in order to start your own affiliate product review website and earn much higher affiliate commissions:

1. Find out your high-selling niche first
The first step before even proceeding to create affiliate products review is knowing what items customers buy the most. You can get this information by searching Google for the ‘most searched keywords’ or just go to Yahoo! And they wil list the hottest searches today. Do some keyword research to find out which keywords are searched the most today – are on demand, so you could get a better idea of what’s hot today and which products (that can be sold) are the most popular now. Once you know the list of these affiliate products, you will also know which niches do well and sell more.

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One of the most powerful features of Click2Sell system is – Tracking channels. Briefly put, this feature allows you to measure your various promotion campaigns with surgical accuracy.

So, what exactly are those magic "tracking channels"? Technically speaking, it is just an upgraded link which leads your customer to your product’s sales-page. It works exactly in the same way as a normal Buy or Affiliate link for your customer. However, it is "upgraded" in that way that all visitors through the link are calculated in separate statistics. This allows you to divide your bulk traffic into many separate "channels" and thus you can see how many visitors, views and sales you get from each of channels.

Using just one tracking channel won’t give you much benefits. The strength of tracking channels lie in quantity: the more you have, the better analysis you can do. So, what you can do with them?

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Affiliates work hard to promote a product or service, thinking that they will earn commission for that. But it is a soar fact that part of the money can be easily lost by affiliates, so it’s very important to know how to protect affiliate commissions?

One of the easiest way to lose an affiliate commission is to advertise plain affiliate links that have a product’s website embedded: the most simple example is the affiliate program with such link like:

http://www.products-page.com/aff.php?affiliate-name

Let’s say an affiliate promotes his/her affiliate links using an article marketing. Visitors will read the review of the article written by the affiliate and if they like the product they will try to directly buy the product from the product’s site instead of clicking the link provided by the affiliate. So, after all the hard work affiliates get nothing.

Some of the most common problems faced by the affiliates are affiliate link hijacking where another unfair affiliate could easily modify the affiliate code and buy the product via own affiliate link i.e., if a visitor decides to buy the product he will become an affiliate of that product and will purchase the product using his own affiliate link so that he can buy the product and can also get some discount in the form of commission.

Another major problem is affiliate link bypassing where visitor will delete the affiliate’s reference in the link and buy products directly, it is just because some people don’t wish to buy the product by being referred by someone.

This article will explain how to protect affiliate commissions from unfair people and maximize your affiliate profits:

• Link Cloakers can solve some of these problems. It is a special script or software program that directs the user from the entered URL to your desired page.

  For instance, if visitor clicks the link:

  www.website.com/product

  the web browser automatically redirects to:

  www.website.com/product?id=affilate_name

  So, your visitor will not know whether it is a direct link or affiliate link, hence you will be protected from the unfair affiliates.
   

• Use Html Unicode format. Instead of providing the affiliate link in the readable format you can encrypt the affiliate URL with Html Unicode like:

  www.website.com/product?id=-m&#116

  so your visitor can’t understand what it means, he will think that it is the code of the product. If you wish to make this even more effective you can encrypt the entire affiliate URL and place it in the anchor tag of the link and place some image or meaningfull text as the visible link. You can use the text like “Click here to order” or use the Buy Now button but always try to keep your link search engine friendly like:

  website.com/product-name-with-keyword

  as much as possible because it can help you to easily gain more visitors. This way you are assured that the visitor can’t predict the URL of your original affiliate link and you can reap the full benefits of affiliating the products.
   

• URL Redirect. Redirecting is one of the easiest and very secure ways to protect your affiliate commission. To successfully redirect your visitors you have to make some changes to the .htaccess file in the public_html or www directory on your web hosting account. Just include the following line to the .htaccess file to enable redirection:
  
  Redirect /product/ http://affiliate-name.product-id.click2sell.eu

  It is obvious that /product/ is a directory created on your web hosting account. Now, when someone tries to access:

  website.com/product/

  it automatically redirects the visitor to your affiliate link:

  http://affiliate-name.product-id.click2sell.eu .

  So, you will surely get an affiliate commission.
   

• Long Period Cookie Tracking System. Usually what happens is that the visitor may not buy the product immediately after reading about it on your site. He may take the buying decision after some hours or days. When he decides to buy he will only remember the name of the product and will not come back to your site (affiliate link) to buy the product instead he will search for the product on a search engine and buy the product directly from the seller. So, you won’t be getting anything for such purchases. To avoid this situation you can use the cookies which will store your affiliate link on the visitor’s computer and when he visits the sales page of the product your affiliate link will be activated and you will get the profit. Affiliate marketing systems such as Click2Sell.EU automatically places 180 day period cookies, so you can be sure that even if buyer doesn’t buy your promoted product immediately, you will still get an affiliate commission if he/she comes back later and orders the product.

These techniques mentioned so far, can protect affiliate commissions from the unfair affiliates successfully to great extent.

(this post is useful not only for affiliates, but also for merchants/vendors)

One of the common concerns of affiliates is how quickly they will get their payments for their referred sales. It is a very natural question as nowadays incredibly a lot of product promotion is done by Pay Per Click campaigns. PPC campaigns require some budget and many affiliates simply reinvest their earned money back to PPC in order to make even more sales.

Now there’s a problem that money for PPC campaigns run out quite quickly while payments are paid out monthly or bi-weekly in many networks. That means that affiliates have to limit themselves in their PPC advertising, because they have to wait for their money which they could reinvest.

Here is a solution for such problem. And it really works as I have already seen great results from such solution which resulted in improved income for both of merchant and affiliate.

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In previous post I wrote about direct affiliate linking to checkout page. It’s time for another new feature in our recent Click2Sell version.

It is now possible to make-up your own affiliate links without having to login into your Click2Sell account and click on "Promote" link. This little nice thing allows:

For merchant: offer potential affiliates an easy way to signup to his/her affiliate program and start promotion in a second. It is especially useful when you have some different products as you can list all your products’ links in one place. Then your potential affiliates could start promoting all your products in a few seconds.

For affiliate: quickly start certain product’s promotion without making some clicks (go to Click2Sell, login, get affiliate link).

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Recently we had been working heavily on new Click2Sell system version which included many tweaks, fixes and some new features.

In this post I will speak about one new feature which is really beneficial to affiliates as it provides them some new opportunities.

Until now affiliate links pointed to merchant’s provided products sales-pages. This saved affiliates from having to create their own webpages for affiliated product.

However, more and more affiliates use the method of creating entire blogs with rich content dedicated to their promoted products and then put "buy-now" buttons with their affiliate links there.

The problem is that when an interested-to-buy reader clicks on this affiliate link, in most cases, he/she is redirected to the product’s sales page, where all the ‘story’ about the product is provided again. Some potential buyers might loose the interest in product just because of… well… poor salesletter or any other reasons.

But… wouldn’t it be great if you (affiliate) could create your own  landing page for your promoted product and then place your affiliate link as a direct buy now button? 

This would forward all potential buyers directly to checkout page from your landing page. When you have a great landing page and an ability to forward the buyers straight to the checkout page, the poor merchant’s sales pages won’t affect your promoted product’s conversion rates. 

When you have a total control over presented content on your landing page, you can easily tweak it to increase sales conversions, get better PPC campaigns scores, create a feeling that you’re a direct seller of a product.

I think that you already have an idea what feature we have just implemented.

From now all Click2Sell.EU affiliates can just add a certain variable in to their standard affiliate link and make it pointing directly to promoted product’s checkout page.

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