Black Friday/CyberMonday deals from Christian merchants

Hey all – here’s a chance to get your Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday deals out there for the Christian affiliate base to see.  So – are you offering some great deals over the coming weekend?   I’ll post them here.   Please email me at wade@christianaffiliatemarketers.com and let me know what you are up to.

Please include:

• Program Name
• Description of Deal
• Coupon Code (if any) Associated
• Affiliate Payout
• Network or Software the Program runs on
• Sign up link

I’ll take a quick look and post the offers here.

God Bless,

Wade Tonkin

CAM Blog Podcast: Sam Harrelson of AffSpot

Today was a big day in the affiliate marketing industry. I posted earlier with a video from Sam Harrelson, founder of AffSpot.com talking about the launch of the new AffSpot affiliate marketing forum site.

I have known Sam for a while and respected his work and insight on his blogs CostPerNews, AffiliateFortuneCookie, and as the editor at Revenews. I bonded originally with Sam when he asked if “pinko lefties” like him were welcome at my Gospel Brunch at Affiliate Summit West a couple of years back. Come to find out that Sam is working on wrapping up his MDiv degree. I may just have to ask him to be our official CAMA Chaplain.

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Sam and some others including long time ABW’ers Billy Kay, Ron Bechtold, Kellie Stevens and Aunesty Jannsen came to the conclusion that the affiliate industry needed another place for discussion where all topics and areas of the industry (cost per sale, cost per lead, cost per action) were up for discussion and where opinions could be really freely expressed.

Sam and I chatted about the goals of AffSpot and the fact that this is not meant to be a replacement to other valued affiliate gathering spots like ABW, 5 Star Affiliate or noted “Black Hat” hangout Wickedfire.com , but another resource for people involved in all facets of the performance marketing industry.

I have launched a forum for my OPM company GTO Management as well as a forum for the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association there – I hope to see you on the threads.

God Bless,

Wade

AffSpot.com – a new forum for the affiliate marketing industry

I am really excited to be involved with the launch of a new forum for the affiliate marketing industry at www.affspot.com

Here is a video from AffSpot founder Sam Harrelson on AffSpot and what the goals of the forum are:

Forums like this are important because they are gathering places for the industry and places where people can exchange ideas in a public forum. As an affiliate, merchant, or service provider, there is much that can be learned from watching and more importantly participating in the discussion as you become comfortable and have something to share, whether this is insight on someone else’s question, or a question of your own.

You will notice that my company GTO Management and the Christian Affiliate Marketing Association have forums set up at AffSpot now. I hope you will join us there.

Talking online merchants and sales tax on the CAM Blog Podcast

I’m excited to announce that tomorrow (5/29) I am going to have the chance to sit down with John Marshall of EpiscopalBookstore.com to chat about the growing trend of states requiring online retailers to collect sales tax from shoppers. Coming July 1, 2008, this will be required of all online resellers in Washington State.

Taxation of online retailers has become a lightening rod issue with recent legal action pitting Amazon against the State of New York – with New York asserting that Amazon’s use of affiliates operating in New York (where Amazon has no offices, warehouses, etc) constitutes “Nexus” or effectively a corporate presence in state. New York argues that this entitles them to charge sales tax on Amazon transactions despite the fact that Amazon is Seattle WA based. For more coverage of this issue, I recommend following the story on the 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blog – Linda Buquet has done an awesome job of info gathering on this.

This case has caused many merchants to react (over react) and fire all of their New York based affiliates to insulate themselves from this potential issue, and affiliates that are New York based to look into incorporating and doing business from New Jersey to exempt themselves from being dropped by merchants and networks fearful of a heavy tax bill.

I’ll speak with John on the Washington specific issues (this is messy) as well as what he knows about the nationwide movement of states to aggressively pursue sales tax from online retailers. Washington is a particular mess for this as many counties and towns/cities, etc also attach their own fractions of percentages points to the state sales tax to finance projects and the state appears to be basing the sales tax that needs to be gathered on the location of the buyer.

My conversation is at noon PT and I will try to have this edited and up by 3:00 pm PT

United Sharing Network shuts down

I just got an email today that confirmed some suspicions I had after receiving emails from a few affiliates and merchants who were reporting login issues. After 2 years of making a go at running one of the first Christian focused affiliate/CPA networks in the industry, John and Jack decided to call it quits (at least temporarily) last week.

The email from John indicated that all affiliates owed $10 or more in commissions would have a check coming their way by May 31st 2008 to close out the books. He also indicated that the hope at USN would be to resume operations if enough well converting Faith and Family friendly offers were identified.

I’m sad to see this happen within 1 month of Manna Marketing also going under. John and Jack are great guys, were excellent to work for (even though things didn’t work out) and were inspirations to me in my faith walk.

Christian merchants will now need to look to the secular platforms for their affiliate programs or to self hosted software applications. My recommendations for affiliate networks of choice are Shareasale for the budget conscious merchant, or AvantLink for the really serious Christian retail merchant who is looking for advanced datafeed handling and merchandising features.

I know there is a pretty serious concentration of Christian affiliates at Shareasale that are working with IBS Direct and Faithwear as well as SinglesofFaith, and I would love to see a good core of Christian affiliates at AvantLink as well.

Any existing USN affiliates or merchants with questions should contact John Porricolo at jjp [ at ] unitedsharingnetwork.com

I am also looking into another promising affiliate/ecommerce system targeted at the faith-based market, but I have some tire kicking to do before I recommend it.

Good luck and Godspeed to John and Jack in whatever venture they decide to attack next.