Inspired by the Wil Reynolds keynote at Affiliate Summit as well as Eric Nagel’s custom rel=”author” coding, I convinced my husband that I needed a plugin for my sites. Most of my sites run the Thesis theme, so I asked him to make it Thesis specific. He likes to think bigger than that, so he created it to run on any WordPress blog. You can visit the Easy Rel Author plugin page for more information if you are not running Thesis. If you are running Thesis, keep reading to find out how the plugin works for you.
Do You Know What You Promote?
I’ve been watching Tweets come in this afternoon from a lot of mom bloggers and savings/deal bloggers promoting the download of various toolbars. When I check out their blogs, I notice that a lot of them have affiliate links on their sites.
I’m concerned that many affiliates do not even understand that the toolbars that they are promoting are essentially ensuring that they will no longer make any money off of the links in their blogs. Do you know which toolbars are responsible for overwriting affiliate cookies? Even if the toolbar seems like a great idea (i.e. you get cash back shopping or donations to charity), it doesn’t mean that the toolbar is not stealing from you.
One of my affiliate managers actually blogged about one particular plugin this morning (see Geno Prussakov’s post entitled Toolbars, pop-ups and parasites in Affiliate Marketing). However, there are hundreds more out there that no one is even talking about. Actually, people ARE talking about them…they are PROMOTING them!
If you are an affiliate who wants to make any kind of money off of your site or blog, it’s imperative that you check out more closely what you are promoting. You need to understand the affiliate marketing industry and what lies behind those toolbars and plugins. Otherwise, you are not only losing money yourself, but you are helping people take money out of the rest of our pockets as well.