ScratchBackThe Fun Way To Do Online Advertising

We’ve been conducting a little experiment over the past month or so. We wanted to see how/if tipping ScratchBack users with a direct link to an affiliate site would drive conversions and sales for a product. So here’s what we did.

Over the past month, we’ve tipped close to $200 across a few hundred ScratchBack widgets all together. Some were $1.00, some were more, and we didn’t care what type of site of blog it was we tipped. Tip: Using the ScratchBack directory is a good place to look for blogs to tip.

The site we promoted was www.buytheflip.com, which has affiliate links on it to Buy.com. The payout from Buy.com is 3% of a sale, and the typical purchase price of a Flip camera is about $150. So selling one camera earns about $4.50 in commission.

So in return for our tips, we put up links that looked like this example image below. You can see one live here.

Did it work? Yes! Here’s how the numbers crunched for us.

Tips given to promote affiliate site = $200
Sales of product through Buy.com = 62
Commission earned for sales = $279
Profit = $79

Essentially, this proves that you can use ScratchBack to drive affiliate sales, if you’re smart about it.

We’re seeing a LOT of people doing this, promoting all kinds of offers like ebooks and mastermind courses. Give it a try. Try the directory to find some good places to tip!

Are you experiencing the same kind of luck we had? Contact us because we’d love to feature your story!

I’m literally getting on a plane to the BlogWorldExpo in Las Vegas in a few hours, but I wanted to talk about ScratchBack’s plans for an affiliate/referral program.

We have a pretty solid background in Affiliate marketing here in the halls of ScratchBack. So it’s just a natural thing to put an affiliate program in place for the system. But how would it payout? What would the details of it be? Tough questions that need to be thought out and done right, the first time.

To payout straight up on signups would entice massive fraud, so we’re not going to do that. However, what we might do is payout a % on earnings for “users who signup under you”. This is pretty much how the WidgetBucks program was created (which we helped design).

You can see, it worked out pretty good for them eh? 30k publishers signed up in 30-days and 200 million impressions served across the network. Wow.

What’s your thoughts on an affiliate program for ScratchBack? We like feedback, so keep it coming.

Shawn Collins of the Affiliate Tip blog is promoting his ScratchBack TopSpots pretty smart. Here’s how he did it.

1. He made a page on his blog talking about the widget. There’s even a video on the page where he explains how it works and he asks for your tip.

Shawn’s Affiliate Marketing blog now has an opportunity for you to give back.

If you look to your left, there is a thing that says “Are You in My TopSpots?” and there are a bunch of spots where you can buy a text link for one week for just $10.

This link will show on all pages of my blog.

2. Shawn smartly puts a link at the bottom of every blog entry that says “Tip Shawn and Get an Ad” and links it to the page listed above. So rather than simply just putting the TopSpot widget in place, Shawn proactively tells his reader what it is, and promotes it as something special.

Guess what? It works. Shawn is consistently one of the ScratchBack top tip getter since beta started.

It’s early in the beta launch, but I thought I’d give you an indication of the types of links that people are listing from their tips. To do so, I’ve taken a look at the TopSpot widget that is running on the ScratchBack home page and website. Here’s how it breaks down. You’ll see the “type” of link as I’ve classified it next to each link.

Out of the 15 tips given, 5 were affiliate links, 4 were links to websites, 4 were links to blogs, 1 was a link to a product page and the other was just a simple “shout out”.

I’m pleased to see that the marketers in the bunch are tipping with their affiliate link. I’m also pleased to see that people are linking back to their blogs and website.

This is what ScratchBack was made for!!!!!!!!!

Looks like word is spreading from our soft launch of the beta. Shawn Collins from the Affiliate Tip blog posts up a nice blog review and video of ScratchBack in action.

It’s basically an online tip jar where friends and fans of a blog or site can make a donation, and in addition to good karma, they get a text or image ad that appears in the widget.

The pricing varies depending on the person featuring the TopSpot widget on their site or blog - it can be anywhere from $1 and up per ad slot.

The ad period is determined by the site or blog owner and it can be 24 hours, 1 week or 30 days. And the number of ads in the widget can be 5, 10, 15 or 20.

It’s a cool way for somebody to show their appreciation for a blog they read, and you could use it to advertise an affiliate link, too.

Just pick an affiliate program with the same target audience as the site or blog with the TopSpot widget. It’s a quick, cheap and easy way to test, and you might come up with a big money maker.

A smart friend of mine brought up a good point to me today. If you’re an affiliate, you could purchase TopSpots on someone’s site or blog and use your affiliate link and drive sales. Heck, you could even use it to recruit affiliates into your program.

For example, if you bought a TopSpot on on Shawn’s AffiliateTip blog, you could use it to promote your affiliate link to your landing page, or you could use to to drive new affiliates to your program.

That’s why ScratchBack is so very powerful. The possibilities are endless in terms of what you can do with it. Everyone wins.