SEO Book Temporarily Closing

[Clinton]

Aaron Wall announced today that SEOBook is temporarily closing to new members. This means that if you're an affiliate of his, you won't get any commission for the 2 months (or more) that they're doing this software upgrade or whatever.

This is one of the problems with affiliate programs - you're at the mercy of the merchant. I've had cases where merchants kept constantly changing the ads and banners, where they kept revising their terms every few weeks and you had to read detailed legalese on a frequent basis (unless you're the type who just trusts everyone and clicks Accept), where the pricing structure, commissions and incentives kept changing ..... it's a pain. The smaller the program earnings for you the more of a nuisance all these little changes are.

What's your bug bear with merchants?

[rmills]

Merchants decreasing the tracking cookie lifetime. Like Amazon did a couple of years ago changing it from 30 days to 24 hours.

[Clinton]

Talking about Amazon, they've sent out an email today with new terms. Have a look at the sheer length of it! Just the What's Changed runs into several A4s. Note the URI/page name - it's what'schangedNov.

If you're earning the odd $20 from the program here and there it's not worth pouring through their lawyer speak every few weeks. Maybe the message is to not bother with these programs unless you stand to make substantial sums with them.

[Kay]

My biggest bug bear with merchants is that they want you to sell their goods and services but don't make it easy for you to do so. They don't provide the right 'creatives' - buttons and banners etc in the required size, or only very specific ones when you need a generic, or they'll still pushing Valentine's Day in April.

If you don't know what I mean, just wait until January/February and see how many merchants are still pushing Christmas offers.

[ScottJ]

url's that change really suck, I want to set something up and forget about it if I want instead of baby-sitting sites keeping check that aff links resolve and as Kay said the creatives look like some just don't give a damn at times.

[Kay]

Yeah, I agree ScottJ. It can be a nightmare trying to keep up with all the constant changes. I can see benefits from having an offer of the week or whatever, and I like when the merchant automatically replaces last week's creative with the new one. Some merchants change their offers more often than most people change their underwear. That's absolutely fine - as long as they don't require their affiliate to change all their links. Sometimes I think that some merchants really just don't 'get' it.