Last week, I was checking my stats for some offers I was promoting via AffiliateFuel, and I noticed that one of my steady performing offers had simply stopped converting. I contacted my affiliate manager immediately and explained to I expected to generate 40 leads with the number of clicks I sent to the offer.

My affiliate manager did a great job looking into the situation,  and determining that the offer landing page was messed up. Within a few days, I was credited with the 40 leads. I know that all affiliate networks should work this way, but I am always impressed to have a situation like this handled without any major headaches.

I have been working with HydraMedia for a few months now, and my experience so far has been very positive. Their biggest selling point in my mind has been their strong affiliate support. My affiliate manager April is very easy to get a hold of via email or IM and she always has been able to answer my questions. The support at some of the other affiliate networks has paled in comparison to Hydra.

Positives

• Affiliate Support. My affiliate manager is in regular contact via email and IM, and she has been very proactive about suggesting offers that will work well for my methods of offer promotion.

The holidays are a great time to sit back and relax with family and of course catch up on the latest monetization ideas floating around the web.

I’ll be spending some time in the air as I head from Charlotte, NC to see my family in Connecticut, and I have downloaded a few shows from WebmasterRadio.fm that look interesting. WebmasterRadio has weekly shows hosted by some of the big players in the affiliate marketing/SEO/web business game. I have only listened to the SEORockstars and Net Income shows so far, and I always feel like I learn at least one thing from each show. You can download mp3s, so it will be perfect to fill up my ipod for the trip.

Have you ever wanted to give a domain a test drive before you sunk $9 into buying it for a year? Pool.com just released a new service allowing you to do just that. With their new Catch & Release program, you can register a domain name for 4.5 days to test it out for $.20. A $250 deposit is required to use the service.

With Text Link Ads recent acquisition by MediaWhiz, I thought that it would be a good time to revisit my initial Text Link Ads review. As I have used the program more and more, I have a few additional observations. Initially, I made four text links spots available for Text Link Ads to sell. All four slots are full now, and I just chose to make two additional text links spots available.

Google recently announced their coop program. Coop lets you create your own vertical search engine and monetize the search through adsense ads on the result pages.

In addition to my experiments with AdBrite and YPN, I have been running a trial of Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads is different than Adsense. Instead of showing ads based on the content of your site, Text Link Ads brokers text ads on your site for a flat monthly rate. They serve the ads on your site without redirects, so the advertiers can receive some search engine optimization (SEO) benefit from the pagerank of the your site.
After completing a brief application, my site was auto-approved by Text Link Ads. There are a few different ways to integrate the ad code onto your site. I chose to use the PHP method which required me to install an xml file on my server and include an xml parsing function in my code. Although posting the ads in more complicated than putting up Adsense, it only took me a few minutes to get everything up and running. The extra complexity is so that the ads can be shown without using redirects.

In my efforts to test a wide variety of advertising programs, I gave Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) a try. YPN is Yahoo’s answer to Google Adsense. YPN provides contextual ads based on the content of your website.

A few days after applying on the site, I was accepted to the program. Getting the code to place on your site is very easy, and the interface is similar to Google Adsense. One interesting wrinkle that distinguishes YPN from Adsense is that they also allow you to select ad categories for the ads to show on your website.

After having one of my sites banned from AdSense, I decided to test a number of alternate advertising programs. AdBrite (aff link) was the first program that I tried. AdBrite sign up is quick and painless. As soon as you are accepted to the program and place the code on your site, you can start displaying run on network ads. You can also enter tags to your site, which will help advertisers find your site. The run of network ads were acceptable, but not great. Ads relating to MySpace and educational sites performed best on my site.