Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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Every day, there are stories in the headlines that can be related to a product or service that has an affiliate program. Sometimes the connections are more obvious than others.

For instance, on April 27, 2005, the Associated Press ran a story about how President Bush had just signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs.

The purpose of the bill is to give legal protection to a filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs.

Hollywood studios and directors had sued to stop the manufacture and distribution of such electronic devices for DVD players. According to the movies’ creators, changing the content, even when it is considered offensive, would violate their copyrights.

This legislation, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, creates an exemption in copyright laws to make sure companies selling filtering technology won’t get sued out of existence.

Anyhow, the technology in question with this article is called ClearPlay, and they have an affiliate program on Kolimbo.

Folks that criticized bill have argued it was aimed at helping ClearPlay, whose technology is used in some DVD players. ClearPlay sells filters for hundreds of movies that can be added to such DVD players for $4.95 each month. Hollywood executives maintain that ClearPlay should pay them licensing fees for altering their creative efforts.

Whatever side you are on with this issue, it’s been in lots of papers and gotten lots of attention. If only you mentioned the ClearPlay affiliate link in a newsletter or blog to capitalize on the news, you could have made some sales.

Keep an eye on what’s in the headlines and figure out a way to tie it into earning commissions.

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