Welcome to the March 2007 LearnSpanishToday.com Affiliate Newsletter!

To check your affiliate commission for last month go to:
http://www.learnspanishtoday.com/cmd.php?cmd=login.

If you don't remember your username and password
E-mail me brock@learnspanishtoday.com, and I'll get them to you.

This issue:
1. Top 10
2. Affiliate Reports Updates
3. Affiliate Tip - Yahoo Title & Description Tags

The affiliate tracking software we use, 1shoppingcart.com, made a major update to their system and they have added some nice upgrades to your affiliate reports.

• Summary Report - This is a new tab added to the top of your affiliate page. By clicking on this link, you will receive a quick report on your affiliate activity. The view is defaulted to display all your clicks and sales for the current month. With the drop down menu, you can also choose to quickly view: Last Month, Yesterday and Today's reports. This report lets you find out Clicks, Conversions and Total commission for that time period. The biggest benefit of this new report is the saving of time by not having to put in the dates for a search.
• Tier 1 and Tier 2 Sales - In the past, there was no way to tell if a sale came from your website or from one of your tier 2 sites (web sites who have joined the affiliate program under you, click here for a more detailed explanation.) Now you can see in every report, the Summary Reports and the Custom Reports, if the sale that took place was tier 1 or tier 2. This will help you confirm that the commission you earned for each sale is correct.

I'm pleased with these changes, and think they will help you as our affiliate keep informed on how the program is performing on your site. They have made several other smaller changes, but these were the two that I felt were the most important to bring to your attention.

I am also very happy that we moved the commission payout dates back to the traditional First and End of each month. This makes the new Summary Report very accurate and easy to use.

If you have any questions about these changes let me know: brock@learnspanishtoday.com.

This tip is for anyone who has listings in the Yahoo Search Engine and the Yahoo Directory. In the past, listings in the Yahoo Search Engine have shown the title and description from the Yahoo Directory rather than the title and description from the meta data of that page. If you weren't happy with what was listed there was no way to change it. Today I found a posting by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land that will fix this issue. Here is it is:

"Now there's a solution. By inserting this meta tag on any page:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

You can ensure that Yahoo will not use a directory description it might have for that page. NOTE: The Yahoo Search Blog currently has a typo, saying "name=robot" rather that name="robots" that's long been used.

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

The first tag tells any spider that wants to recognize the tag not to use a Yahoo Directory title or description. Of course, no other spiders do that -- but Yahoo's just building in some protection should that come up in the future. The second tag specifically tells the Yahoo spider not to use the information."

You can read the rest of Danny's article here: http://searchengineland.com/070228-140603.php

I made this change today on my sites and am excited to see the increase in traffic from Yahoo when my listings start having good keywords in the descriptions and compelling titles that people want to click.