A close friend of mine is using Clickbank to run an affiliate program for his product, but with the upcoming arrival of a second product he wants to promote via Clickbank, he ran into a problem.

Clickbank lets you promote up to 50 products, but you only get one hoplink for your entire account… that is, no matter how many products you have, the basic hoplink your affiliates will use will always land on the same page.

The three ways to deal with this limitation are:

1. Create a new Clickbank account for each product
   However, this would mean paying a $50 setup fee for each product, and would require logging into Clickbank multiple times to check sales and stats, and worrying about multiple Clickbank cheques each month.
2. Create an intermediary page with a link to each of the products he has available.
   It isn’t necessarily a bad idea to have a page like this, but requiring all prospects coming via an affiliate to go through an extra page before seeing the offer is bound to reduce conversions and cause confusion.
3. Use a script to create custom redirection to the appropriate products.
   This was the route that offered the best potential. I found a number of scripts that did exactly this, ranging from $17 to $97.

Read more…

The state of New York just passed a bill that could cause no end of grief to marketers who use affiliates to promote products. Amazon is challenging the bill as unconstitutional, and New York based affiliate marketers should be on their knees praying Amazon wins.

In most states, a company only has to collect taxes if they have a physical presence in the state.

New York has passed legislation re-defining physical presence to mean a company has a physical presence if it has even a single affiliate based in the state, or if a New York based site “earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer.” Think Google Adwords on the New York Times?

If Amazon.com fails to defeat the state, it isn’t far fetched to suggest that Amazon might cut off all New York affiliates rather than lose sales by effectively raising prices for all the customers in that well-populated state.

And if Amazon.com does lose, look to other states to follow with a tax grab of their own, making Affiliate programs a lot less appealing for a lot of larger companies that currently run them.

Related links on:

• Slashdot
• NY Times
• News.com
• Arstechnica.com
• ValleyWag
• Gothamist

I had initially decided to use XSitePro for my new site but after beginning to read “How to Build An Affiliate Website with WordPress” I’m reconsidering that decision. After all, there are a lot of advantages to using WordPress for any site – - from RSS to built in commenting abilities, to the myriad of plug-ins that could make life and expansion much easier. Templating WordPress, though, is harder for me than making a template for XSitePro, and it’s harder for me to wrap my head around the changes that’ll need to be made to a default WordPress theme to make it work for what I’ve got planned.

Decisions, decisions….

So, I’m going to take tonight to study the WP Affiliate book, along with the free “WordPress SEO for Beginners” from Blog Oh Blog and Teli Adlam’s free “Beginner’s Guide to Using and Building Traffic with Feedburner” report.

If I feel confident and enthusiastic enough to proceed with WordPress tomorrow, I’ll set up a blog and see where it leads. Otherwise, I’ll go back to my XSitePro plan and save WordPress for a future project.

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I haven’t done anything in the field of Internet marketing since November 2006. My existing sites are still rolling, and proving the value of promoting physical and evergreen products with real, non-spammy sites, my income from those sites hasn’t diminished more than one or two percent since that date.

But now, faced with starting a new project, I feel rusty.

So, I thought I’d bone up on a bit of reading at the Warrior Forum (It seemed more helpful and interesting to me before. Not so much now. Is it just me?), pull out some old software to see if it still works, and find an interesting marketing list or two to join for ideas.

Thanks to a pointer from Belle, I downloaded Jeremy Palmer’s free High Performance Affiliate Marketing ebook, and printed it off to get me back in the ‘zone’.

Any other ideas on lists to join, software to buy, or information to scour? I’m not looking for overload, but I did notice that the keyword software and article submission software I was using two years ago no longer works, and I’m a lot behind in the web 2.0 marketing world….