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Commission Junction is revising the minimum payout amounts for affiliates effective August 28, 2008. According to their announcement, the reason for the change is “to streamline our publisher payment process and better support environmentally conscious commerce.”

The new minimum amounts to earn a commission are as follows:

While this may be discouraging to affiliate newbies, I think it’s a good overall move for efficiency and the encouragement of being green affiliates.

Note to self - it’s a good time to move all affiliate payments to direct deposit, though it’s fun to open those commission check envelopes.

The second issue of FeedFront, the official magazine of Affiliate Summit, has been published and it will be hitting mailboxes over the coming weeks with 60 pages of affiliate marketing goodness.

Issue two will also be in the attendee bags at Affiliate Summit 2008 East.

The cover story is a profile of Haiko de Poel, Jr. of ABestWeb.

There are also articles on conference networking, diversifying affiliate revenue, perils of white hat SEO, ten affiliate manager commandments, working with video, and coupon codes in affiliate marketing.

Issue 1 of FeedFront Magazine can be downloaded as a pdf file or you can read the articles online:

• Editor’s Note: You Are What You Read
• Five Ways to Evaluate a Merchant’s Landing Page by Dan Murray
• Pros & Cons of Utilizing Multiple Networks by Brian Littleton
• Twitter Grabs Affiliate Attention by Lisa Picarille
• GTD in Affiliate Marketing with Web 2.0 by Sam Harrelson
• Affiliate Marketers Give Back by Missy Ward
• Online Video Advertising by Tim Carter
• Nobody Would Use a Search Engine with Paid Results by Dan Gray
• Three Rules for More Sales Through Email by Tom Kulzer
• Are You the Next Super Affiliate Blogger? by Zac Johnson
• Affiliate Marketers Unplugged
• Ad Networks, Vertical Ad Networks, and Affiliate Networks by Peter Figueredo
• My Favorite Search Engine Marketing Sites by Wil Reynolds
• Get Off Your Butt and Start Making Videos by Jim Kukral

Get the FeedFront RSS if you’d like to get all of the articles as they are published to the feed.

If you haven’t subscribed, you can get the magazine for free at http://feedfront.com/free-subscription/.

I just posted the auction on eBay to sponsor the educational session videos from Affiliate Summit 2008 East.

Your company logo will be featured for three seconds before and after each educational session video from Affiliate Summit 2008 East.

Videos will be made available to the general public.

All proceeds go to the official charity of Affiliate Summit 2008 East, The LEAGUE.

This sponsorship requires a high resolution logo from the sponsor prior to the conclusion of the show in Boston. Specifications: 600 dpi (dots per inch) preferred, 300 dpi acceptable; 1280×1024 minimum resolution; .TIF(preferred), .GIF, or .JPG file types.

We need the capability of zooming in 800% on the logo without any real loss of resolution. All of this will ensure that the logo will look its best on the video.

The LEAGUE is a school-based system that combines state standards-based lesson plans with community service events that teach students the value of giving and recognizes them for their efforts.

Affiliate Summit believes that The LEAGUE is a great choice for the affiliate marketing industry’s charitable efforts.

The auction ends Monday, August 4, 2008 at 13:41:25 PDT.

Bid for the Affiliate Summit Charity Video Sponsorship.

See an example of the video ads from last year at the start of the video below:

Episode 29 of GeekCast kicks off with a new theme song by GeekCaster, Jim Kukral, accompanied by his ukulele.

The conversation kicks off with a discussion of Twitter and the earthquake just outside of Los Angeles and moves on with the typical, clumsy segues into how affiliate managers can use Google Street View, the launch of cuil.com, and Scrabulous getting shut down on Facebook.

Then we got into whether it’s cool to tag old college friends with pictures of them with ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends, iPhone vs. Blackberry, and the rumor of Steve Wozniak going to Affiliate Summit.

We also get into the world of YouTube commenters, the online love life of Tara Hunt, Gary Vaynerchuk vs. Seth Godin, and the geek affliction of carpal tunnel syndrome.

There will be a live GeekCast show in Boston during Affiliate Summit complete with free GeekCast t-shirts. Listen to the next GeekCast show for details.

Subscribe to the RSS for the weekly GeekCast show, or add us on iTunes.

Listen to the show at http://geekcast.fm/archives/geekcast-29-boiled-peanuts/.

Some news about Affiliate Summit, including how to get tickets for Affiliate Summit now that it has sold out.

Buzzillions.com, an affiliate that recently received the honor of Innovative Publisher of the Year at the LinkShare Golden Link Awards, shared some stats with me about their operation.

The site provides product reviews from actual buyers and the Retailers that converted the highest from Buzzillions.com leads in June 2008 were (in order of biggest performers) OneStepAhead, BiggerBras, REI, and Overstock.

Buzzillions.com has reviews on more than 400,000 products, across dozens of retail categories. They have a total of over 2.3 million reviews are on the site currently, and they’re growing at around 8,000 reviews a day.

According to the e-tailing group customers find reviews “extremely helpful” for Toys & Video Games (69%), Sporting Goods (55%), and Gifts/Specialty Foods (54%).

Some other insights and metrics from Buzzillions.com:

• 20% of Buzzillions customers make repeat purchases within two months. “Buzzillions.com converts 300% better and consistently delivers the best ROI when compared to the top five comparison engines (Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, Nextag, Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping)” (source: Akiva Bergstrom, VP Business Development, EssentialApparel.com)
• The reason we get such great conversion is because we don’t focus on the ‘lowest price.’ We focus on “what to buy” and “the right product” vs. the cheapest price. The Full-priced and specialty merchants perform best on Buzzillions.
• “Because of Buzzillions’ ability to send large volumes of highly-qualified visitors, they have become one of our top-performing affiliates in the past six months. Buzzillions has a conversion rate that is more than twice that of some search engines…”- Mike Tran, Marketing Manager Sierra Trading Post
• Buzzillions is a Top 5% affiliate for Mountain Gear
• HSN - Top 3 performing partners in terms of conversion & ROI
• Essential Apparel - 5.8% conversion vs. 1.5% for CSE’s (3.8x!) or vs. 3.3% for SEM (~1.7x)

In addition to the award from LinkShare, Buzzillions.com has a five star out of 5 network rank at LinkConnector, 5 bars out of 5 at Commission Junction, and on the Google Affiliate Network (formerly Performics), they are at 4 bars out of 4.

In other words, this is an affiliate that is performing big in the product review space, so pay heed.

There is a new affiliate marketing forum called AffSpot with Sam Harrelson as the Admin.

The Moderators for the AffSpot forum are Ron Bechdolt, Aunesty Janssen, and Kellie Stevens.

The forum is powered by vBulletin and has a typical affiliate forum offering of general areas, tools and resources, affiliate networks, OPMs, etc.

Given that AffSpot is headed up by Sam Harrelson, I’d imagine the forum will have a heavier focus on Web 2.0 and emerging technologies than other industry forums.

One thing I am not clear about is the reasoning for how sections are listed, because it’s not alphabetical.

It doesn’t seem to be based on which section has the most posts.

Most favored nation status?

Not sure, but to me, it’s easier visually to scan alphabetically to find things.

More information at http://www.affspot.com.