The only merchants links I will be now updating is the ones who inform me they have completely cleaned up all their old links and now have a new set of links available.

I urge all other affiliates to do the same and make sure the merchants clean up their old links before going to the trouble of adding links that on the surface say they are active but are really several years old and expired years ago. The worse thing you can do to your visitors and your website is to offer them a great promotion but for them to only find it does not exist anymore. Although LS's idea to enforce an expiry date is the right and very overdue one, the way they have just made all expired links with 2012 is nearly as bad as what CJ done to us with the whole LMI disaster. Obviously they also never consulted their affiliates about this and someone at LS has absolutely no idea of how affiliate marketing works in the real world. Sometimes I just don't understand where these companies get these idiots who make these incredibly stupid decisions from?

Affiliates aren't here to help the merchants in the SERPS. If you want that, you pay for it. You can read how it turns out:

<a href="http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=68106&highlight=link+connector&quot; rel="nofollow"&gt <a href="http://;http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=68106&highlight=link+connector” target=”_blank”>;http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=68106&highlight=link+connector

"Put a tie on or go back to pumping gas."

Lounge gear

Battle stations affiliates! All while CJ, LS, Performics et al buddy up with Kris Jones and the few others that understand the game: business. Put a tie on or go back to pumping gas.

Just so you know, on the whole that doesn't fly with affiliates. So you're going to be hearing a lot more about that when it starts to come out or you can just check out past Link Connector threads.

I have had almost 3 years experience with dealing with the Linkshare back end for merchants. Before I would just put the coupon offers on my email to my affiliates with start and end dates. I am correcting now for the past so I hope that my affiliates do not get weird dates as of 27-Feb-2007 – 01-Mar-2012

I have never seen the Linkshare interface from the Merchant side. Did they have the ability to enter an expiration date before the change, but the date was not visible to affiliates? If they didn't, some improvement should come out of this over the coming weeks and months.

It's hilarious how even the most brand protective merchants tend to forget to notify you about exiting promotions sometimes. Upper management of advertiser are concerned about reports of affiliate sites promoting expired coupons and customer complains that come with it (if the coupon is not being honored). That happens on a higher level.

They believe that the fault is on the side of the affiliate … "Don't they check if a promotion is still valid?". They have no idea that this is a two way thing. Affiliates are no fortune tellers. I bet connie is by now something that comes close to that, because of years of experience with those issues.

It's an educational issue. Some program managers are still not aware of the existence of a problem here and why. About a year ago did I have a great discussion with some other affiliates and merchants as well. The result of this was an article about promotions and coupons for your affiliate marketing channel.

It is directed to affiliate managers and account reps at networks. You might find it to be useful as well. The Article.

Cheers!

Check this out.

Jeff

Plus, as I understand things, an expired link no longer goes to the landing page specified for that link but defaults to the home page or default page. So, for example, if an Overstock.com coupon link (link is required since no coupon code is provided) is scheduled to expire on a specific date then it will deactivate 6 hours and 59 minutes ahead of the usual 10:59 PM MST expiration time stated at Overstock.com.

I guess the only workaround for Overstock.com would be to manually adjust the expiration date with LinkShare to correspond to the real time but that would be confusing because it would look like the link expires a day later unless someone thought about the time zone implications — that's even hard to write.

I like clear-cut expiration dates but they need to be clean and in U.S. time zones if it's for a U.S. merchant.

http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=86465

And the example I gave was:

Gardener's Supply Company – Save 10% on orders of $75 or more!
(10% off $75 – expires 52705)Valid between 27-Feb-2007 – 01-Mar-2012

They are putting valid dates on expired links. Expired links in the creative being one of my biggest pet peeves. Now putting valid dates on them. Makes no sense.