Here are two posts on affiliate marketing that  caught my attention.

John Chow has some good ideas about the proper way to do affiliate marketing. His big empahsis is on pre-selling affiliate offers. In my mind, I view this as giving the offers context. In his example, he promoted affiilate programs as “hot deals.” This gave viewers on his technology site a reason to be more interested. On some of my sites geared towards less savy/younger internet users, I have had success positioning the offers in a free stuff or special offer section.

As a follow up to my Lazy Man’s Guide to Tracking PPC campaigns, this is a great post about using Google Analytics to track campaigns. I did not realize that you could pass information to analytics in the javascript to help it segment your traffic. This may not be helpful for tracking affiliate traffic to networks, but the idea has me thinking of some interesting applications.

Shawn Collins writes that the Attorney General of Florida is investigating deceptive practices of ringtone affiliate marketers. The part that stands out to me is when he mentions that they are concerned about people who marketed the offers as “free.” Although practices have changed recently, marketing the offers as free was a common practice. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.