Shoemoney

Okay. I went through some of my favorite sites and tried to make a good list of decent affiliate marketing resources.

Notice: feel free to check out all of the links, or ignore them all. I have nothing to gain either way. :)

Recommended forums:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

http://www.wickedfire.com/ (not for the easily offended)

http://www.quityourdayjob.com/forum/

http://forum.abestweb.com/

Recommended blogs:

http://www.shoemoney.com

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/

http://www.quityourdayjob.com/

http://zacjohnson.com

http://uberaffiliate.com/

Great articles worth reading:

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-much-money-have-you-spend-so-far-on-ppc/

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/04/08/the-1000000-experiment-with-ppc-part-1/

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/04/13/10k-ppc-experiment-part2/

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/09/24/pwning-facebook-how-to-think-like-an-uber-affiliate/

http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/05/16/as-success-grows-opportunities-shrink/

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/11/04/the-adsense-check-for-13299497/

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/theres-a-secret-to-every-affiliate-niche/

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-to-properly-setup-an-adwords-campaignpart-i/

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-to-properly-setup-an-adwords-campaignpart-ii/

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-to-properly-setup-an-adwords-campaignpart-iii/

Great free learning materials:

http://www.quityourdayjob.com/learning (he used to charge…

So what else is new.

If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today.

Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1).

Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel" that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there. (2)

Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined $500,000,000.00. Google was. (3)

50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least they keep good company.

(1) http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percent-of-facebooks-revenues-in-q1/

(2) http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-of-a-con-man-in-the-affiliate-industry/ & http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in-affiliate-marketing-is-starting-to-sound-a-lot-like-me/ & http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/

(3)…

What you're looking at is a fake blog or "flog" and the FTC in the US is starting to zero in on this type of testimonial.

http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/03/26/bullshit-acai-berry-weightloss-blogs-under-fire-from-ftc/

Not to mention the lawsuit and Oprah and "Dr. Oz" have taken against diet supplement makers for using their names without permission.

The Obama Administration has also targeted flogs that used the president's name to hook people into "stimulus" check scams.

http://www.financialreflections.com/beware-of-economic-stimulus-scams/847

The flogs may go away eventually, but these sort of scams all rely on one thing: the ability to hook a consumer into a regular billing agreement while making it look like they are making a one time purchase+. Ringtones, diet pills, teeth whitening, government grant searches and more rely on that to make huge profits.

+ or enough consumers learning how to spot that type of scam (i.e. reading the fine print).

Just make sure something like this does not happen:

"9 – BabyCalc.com – If you were about to have a baby you could go on this site and punch in some numbers then it would email you as your baby was growing and let you know what was going on… “like 10 days until you should be able to tell the sex of your baby!” or “Babys heart beat starts today” ect.. stuff like that.. I paid to have the backend developed and the site was about 95% completed (about a 1500$ investment).
Then a very close friend of the family had a miscarriage about 15 weeks into her pregnancy and told us about how she had signed up for all these baby websites and now they keep emailing her stuff and she breaks down and cries every time…. I just wanted no part of that…"

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/04/my-top-10-worst-ideas-to-make-money/

Your landing page is not good enough. What does the map have to do with anything? What about opendoorio implies medical scanning? I probably wouldn't go get medical imaging from a company called opendoorio. Maybe Open Door Imaging. I also think you should list the type of scans you can help with (this helps with SEO and also give customers an idea what you're talking about) My first question was do you mean xrays or MRIs? If you actually have some customers that were quoted $X price and you got it to them for less than $X price use that as a case study (*results not typical). Have you looked into adwords?

What you're doing is actually fairly common (http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/11/04/making-money-with-local-affiliate-programs)