I haven’t posted much information about the A2 Hosting Affiliate Program recently, so I figured I should just post a little recap about the program.

Commission: You earn 300% of the first month’s sales. For example, if you refer a hosting account for $7.95 that costs per month, you earn $23.85.

2^nd Tier Commission: If someone clicks on your affiliate link and signs up for the A2 Hosting affiliate program, they are put onto your second tier. For any sale that they make, you earn a 25% commission.

Cookie Life: We have a 30 day cookie. This means that when someone clicks on your affiliate link but doesn’t purchase from our site immediately, you still receive a referral commission if they come back and purchase within 30 days.

I have been in the affiliate marketing industry for just over 3 years now and I have seen my fair share of scams. The one that has bothered me the most was a company that would sell mirrored affiliate sites at extreme prices. This company purchased a domain (let’s just say as an example) abcd.com. The company would then find an affiliate marketing company that sounded very profitable ($200/sale) and make a template website for that company. Next, they would contact unwilling potential customers and tell them that they could sell them a site that needed no maintenance and could earn them $200/sale. Sounds  great, right?

It wasn’t great at all. This company would charge a ridiculous set up fee as well as a per month hosting fee of $19/month for this mirrored site. So essentially if you were their 2,000^th customer, they would be given you the same site as their first 1,999 customers, only your link would be abcd.com/2000. They would then sign you up for that lucrative program and just change the affiliate links on the template site to yours.

There are two big issues I have with this. One, you’re not going to sell anything with a template, mirrored site. Google penalizes for duplicate content and there was no way to edit the page to make your page unique. Second and most concerning, it is obviously a scam because of the huge investment needed that would never make any return.

Come to A2 Hosting for your affiliate site. We’ll hook you up with hosting for as low as $3.45/month without a setup fee. And yes, you’ll actually have control over your site.

I just wanted to post you a quick note regarding an update to A2 Hosting’s Affiliate Agreement. Because of A2 Hosting’s 30-day money back guarantee, we have decided to approve pending affiliate transactions 30 days after the date of when the affiliate sale occurred. This is just to make sure that affiliate sales are not refunded by the customer within the 30 day money back period. This policy was added on April 19^th, 2008, meaning that all affiliate transactions from then on will be subject to the new 30 day approval period.

It may be frustrating if you want to start a site and can’t think of a good name. You might think that all of the good domain names have already been taken, but this far from the truth.

Let’s take the scenario that you want to start a website specifically for the purpose of joining the A2 Hosting affiliate program. I would suggest purchasing the domain name LinuxHosting.com for SEO purposes. Unfortunately, this domain is unavailable. Don’t despair. Allow the site Domain Fellow to help you out. Enter the keyword linuxhosting in the “Enter Your Keyword” box. Choose the category of the site that you would like to create. In this instance, I would suggest the “Internet” category because that is the most closely related to web hosting and search.

You will be given 30 possible domain name suggestions. How about something like ezlinuxhosting.com? It is pretty catchy. After you have chosen the domain name that you would like to purchase, visit the A2 Hosting Domain Registration page, purchase the desired domain name, the desired level of hosting and you are ready to roll with your affiliate site.

I just wanted to post a quick note about our new affiliate coupon that you can use in order to promote A2 Hosting. The coupon code is below:

Save 10% off all A2 Hosting packages with the coupon code tenoffa2. Expires 6/30/2008.

I came across a site today that I wanted to plug both because it is unique and because it supports a good cause. The site I am referring to is Ship To Troops.

Ship To Troops is an affiliate site that promotes merchants that have great prices and discounts that ship to APO/FPO addresses. In turn, they are supporting troops and their families. Not only do they focus on merchants that ship to these particular addresses, but they also donate 20% of their commissions to Operation Homefront. This is an organization that provides emergency assistance and morale to our U.S. troops and to the families they leave behind, as well as wounded soldiers when they return home.

I logged into my Commission Junction account yesterday for the first time in a little while and I was looking at a number of programs and their statistics trying to decide if certain affiliate programs would be profitable or not. I stumbled across a phrase called Action Referral Period. I honestly had no idea what that phrase meant.

My first guess was that it referred to the amount of time it took for the company to approve a sale that was made. I was very wrong. After a bit of research, I discovered that it was just a fancy way of saying “Cookie Life”.

If you are unaware of what cookie life means, the term merely refers to the amount of time an affiliate cookie is active on a potential customer’s browser so that if something is purchased from the company via an affiliate, the affiliate still receives credit.

Here is an example. The A2 Hosting Affiliate Program has a cookie life of 30 days. Let’s say that Adventures In Hosting was an affiliate of A2 Hosting. Let’s say Joe Schmoe came to Adventures In Hosting, realizes that A2 Hosting was an amazing hosting company (which they are) and clicks on an affiliate ad for A2 Hosting. Joe doesn’t buy his hosting package immediately and instead decides to shop around a bit. Let’s say after 13 days, Mr Schmoe comes back to A2 Hosting and decides to purchase a hosting package. Adventures In Hosting would receive credit for that sale because that cookie is still active. Now let’s say Joe comes back after 31 days and purchases a hosting account. Unfortunately that cookie has expired and Joe Schmoe wouldn’t receive affiliate credit for that sale.

I just wanted to post a quick note about our new affiliate coupon you can use in order to promote A2 Hosting. The coupon code is below:

Save 10% off all A2 Hosting packages with the coupon code aff10off. Expires 3/31/2008

I am a little partial, but I think that the A2 Hosting affiliate program is one of the best affiliate programs on the web. You can make money with other ones as well. There are some sites out there that actually point some of the better programs to join. One of those sites is AffiliateGuide.com - Your guide to the best web affiliate programs. In case you were interested, A2 Hosting’s affiliate program is listed on that page.

It has been awhile since I posted about the A2 Web Hosting Affiliate Program. Just because I don’t have any major news to report, doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to say about the program. I actually have a ton to say about it. The first and most obvious topic is our 300% commission. Pick any non-dedicated package out on our page. If you refer a new customer to us that purchases that package, you earn 3 times that amount as your commission. Our program is very lucrative.

I know if I were an affiliate, I would be all over this program for a number of reasons besides our insane commission structure. One of them in particular sticks out at the moment. As an affiliate, you always want to make sure that you are joining a program that you know has a dedicated affiliate manager that will be there whenever you have questions, requests, and concerns. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I feel as though I definitely fit the bill of a dedicated affiliate manager.

Here is one such example of how I will be there for you as your affiliate manager of this program. At A2 Hosting, we understand that business moves extremely fast. I know that whenever I have a question or send an email request to another business, I hate having to wait a long time for a response. I know that affiliates feel the same way. I have a number of methods to make sure that affiliates do not have to wait an extended period of time to hear from me. Here is one such example. I have my email software set up so that I get a notification every time someone sends me an email. This means that anytime an affiliate signs up for the affiliate program or emails me with a question, I will see a notification pop up regardless of what program I am using telling me who sent the email and what the subject of that email was. As a rule of thumb, I will generally drop whatever I am doing, regardless of that tasks importance, if I see that an affiliate question or an affiliate application has just been sent my way to respond. I know our affiliates are valuable and they work hard. They should be ensured that during the work day, they will always get a prompt response from the A2 Hosting affiliate program.