January 8th, 2008 by admin
I woke up today with a piece of good news and a piece of bad news. The bad news first.
I was doing affiliate recruitment on a well known webmaster forum to help promote this site, myartpassion.com. Apparently, the forum has some new rules that I didn’t know about.
The rules are meant to be in place to protect members from shady affiliate programs, and therefore require all affiliate programs to be posted openly in public, instead of taking it to the PMs (Private Messages).
However, I’m not comfortable announcing my affiliate program to the whole world just yet…for a few good reasons.
1) I can work closely with a few affiliates who message me through PM, and I can get to know them better.
2) I have more control over the promotion methods. e.g. PPC, social networks, etc.
3) I still have one more product I want to add to the site before making my affiliate program public.
4) Some traffic sources become saturated fast when opened to everyone (e.g. PPC bidding)
So I listed all the above reasons in the forum for the moderators to see. However, they weren’t the least bit interested in what I had to say…so I’ll have to play by their rules.
A couple of lessons learnt here:
1) Either be a moderator, or own your own forum so that you can promote your affiliate program without being hassled.
2) It helps to own your own group of affiliates.
So much for the bad news…I can live with that though. There are many other ways to recruit affiliates to help promote the site.
As for the good news, it doesn’t have much to do with art. My wife just sent me an email from work, saying that our flat application has been approved. Yipppeeee!
I’ve been looking forward to having our own little love nest for some time now…and it’s finally happening.
I know I’ve leaked news on the upcoming launch for MyArtPassion Home Study Course Vol.2-Drawing in Color. So it’s going to be a very busy 2-mth period for me.
If you’ve missed that email, you can join the development process by joining the email list here:
http://www.myartpassion.com/member/vol2-update.asp
That’s all I have for now. I’m actually conducting some research before taking the time to make this post. So back to work…and see you soon!
December 16th, 2007 by admin
Today marks the first sale sold by an affiliate.
A small victory worth celebrating.
December 13th, 2007 by admin
Affiliate program details have been confirmed.
This will be a 2 tier affiliate program.
The commission rate for the first premium product, MyArtPassion Home Study Course, has been set to $20 per sale.
When the affiliate sells more than 5 copies, the affiliate automatically gets moved into the VIP affiliate group, which earns $25 per copy sold. This process is completely automated.
All sales made by sub-affiliates will earn the affiliate $5 per sale.
Testing of downline signup has been completed, so this feature is working properly.
Official launch date of the affiliate program has been set to 19th Dec. 2007.
Also, I finally got my hair cut! 
December 10th, 2007 by admin
Finally, I’ve invested in an award winning affiliate program software for myartpassion.com today. The software installed without a glitch, and after playing around with it for sometime, I have to say I’m impressed with the features.
One excellent feature is that I’m able to setup special commissions for affiliate partners who reach a certain target. For example, if someone gets 5 sales, the commission gets bumped up automatically to the next level.
There’s another program that looks very interesting and exciting at first glance. It’s a systray application that allows the affiliate to get an alert whenever there’s a sale registered. I paid extra for that.
When I was installing the affiliate software, I soon found that the systray application didn’t work very well. It crashed several times. Besides, if I allow hundreds of affiliates to download the application, that would be thousands of automated queries to the servers, which could bring unwanted stress to the servers.
The affiliate software, however, was outstanding. All I did was follow the setup instructions, and everything is now working nicely.
I ran a couple of tests on the server. The first test was a simple per sale test to see if the software tracked the sale correctly. It did.
The second test was to track commissions for multiple products. That went well too.
The software has 3D graphical display for traffic and sales stats. Looks set to go live soon! I’ll post an official launch date for the affiliate program later.
