Recently Scott took care of a minor issue (for some Affiliates, anyway) with the xhtml encoding in our tracking code by offering a “URLs Only (No Html)” integration option for links. Here is the response we received from Christian at CouponCraze.com, when Scott notified him of the new functionality:

Thanks for the heads up. As usual you guys are the network always pushing ahead on the big and small changes that makes lives for affiliates like myself so much easier and just allow us to focus on our job. Thanks again… keep up the great job over there!
Cheers,
Christian
CouponCraze.com

You’re welcome Christian. We’ve enjoyed a strong partnership with your company since the early days of AvantLink! Gary M

Daniel’s loving the Incremental Datafeed Download functionality from AvantLink. Check out the latest of our Affiliate testimonials below. Thanks for the kind words, and your continued support Daniel!

I’m new to the network and liking it so far.  The one feature unique to AvantLink (for which I find myself yearning whenever I use other affiliate networks) is the product data feed and, more specifically, its ability to provide incremental updates.  Being able to avoid importing the entire product database every day saves a lot of CPU cycles!

Thanks,

Daniel Green
Camel Camper

Here is another Affiliate testimonial to share. This is an excerpt of an email we received from Brian at Sure Solutions. Brian has been helping us test some new Affiliate technology…

We are somewhat new to the affiliate scene. I spent more than a month researching, reading forums, crawling the abestweb site reviewing tools and trying to choose some providers for different technologies that we wanted to implement on our website. We have been doing ecommerce for ten years and always stayed away from the affiliate side because its seemed somewhat unstable. I am very pleased that we decided to work with Avantlink first and we feel quite lucky that Brownells was in your network. The combination of quality affiliate content that is contextually correct with our published content is without a doubt a home run. Your tools are excellent and your responsiveness to our requests have exceed all my expectations.

Brian Johnson
AmmoLand.com

Thank you Brian, for your support and kind words!

The following is another Affiliate testimonial we would like to share. This time from the team at InfoGears, Inc. These guys are a true class act, and an outstanding partner for us. Thanks Craig and Rusty!

As we continue to build the Affiliate end of our business, we have quickly come to appreciate the quality of merchants on the AvantLink network, the ease of use of the Affiliate tools, the consistent and usable product data we can retrieve, and the responsiveness of the entire AvantLink team.

To sum it up we are big fans of, and benefiting financially from, a strong partnership with AvantLink.

Craig & Rusty
GearBuyer.com

We’re proud to share another Merchant testimonial, this time from Rett at Backcountry.com.

AvantLink is a true partner for innovation. Their technology is first class and their attention to detail is impressive. The interface is ultra fast and easy to navigate, which saves us valuable time every day. The standard reporting options cover the majority of our needs and customization is easy to implement. AvantLink understands the affiliate space better than most and is very accommodating when additional functionality is requested. Merchants will not be disappointed with the affiliate network provided by AvantLink.

Rett Clevenger
Online Media Manager
Backcountry.com

Thanks Rett! It’s been our pleasure to work with you, Brian and the rest of the team. Here’s to a great 2009 and beyond.

Time to expand the Testimonials category on our Affiliate Marketing Blog to include AvantLink merchants. We’ve been publishing Affiliate testimonials for a while now, but we also have a bunch of Merchant testimonials to share. To start things off, here is what Chuck Hamrick sent us recently on behalf of Affiliate Crew’s client Little Giant Ladder.

AffiliateCrew.com has been very pleased with the technology and support that AvantLink has given us on the Little Giant Ladder Affiliate program. When we wanted to test an unscrappable coupon code, AvantLink was the only network capable of giving us the tools necessary to make it work. Scott Kalbach and team are always one step ahead of our needs with new features coming out monthly. Gary Marcoccia has helped promote our program(s) and given us invaluable advise for online PR. AvantLink creates Affiliate tools that people want to make their sites convert better in these competitive times.

Chuck Hamrick
AffiliateCrew.com

Thanks Chuck! We value our partnership with Affiliate Crew, Little Giant Ladder and their fine Affiliates.

We were copied on an email today from Andy at SierraDescents.com, to a prospective AvantLink merchant. The merchant was asking him which network would be best for his store. Andy runs a great blog and resource about backcountry skiiing in the Sierra Nevada. Here’s the contents of his email…

I’m cc’ing Avantlink so they can provide you with more info from the Merchant side.

From my (Affiliate) point of view, Avantlink distinguishes itself with unbelievably good customer service & affiliate tools.

Normally I just get ignored by other networks.

With Avantlink, I get prompt responses and prompt solutions. Beyond that, I have written several times with ‘wish list’ suggestions. I continue to be astonished by the way Avantlink not only listens to these suggestions, but actually implements them, even when they require considerable programming changes. Let me say that again: Avantlink has changed how their network works so that it will better suit my needs — and I’m by no means a Big Fish in Avantlink’s pond.

That kind of attention and service just doesn’t exist anywhere else.

From the merchant side, I have heard that merchants value Avantlink’s commitment to partnering with ethical and professional affiliates.

Hope this info helps, and hope to see you in the backcountry this winter!

Andy
SierraDescents.com

We appreciate the kind words and encouragement, Andy! If you’re ever skiing in Utah let us know and maybe we can meet up for some resort skiing, or even a ski tour.

Here’s another Affiliate testimonial from one of our valued partners. Thanks Charlie!!

Hello Avantlink,

I wanted to share my testimonial with you about our recent experience of using your Datafeed scripts.

I have been on a quest to learn how to add product datafeeds to my site for some time now. In fact datafeeds are what brought me to Avantlink in the first place. It doesn’t take long to find out that one of the biggest industry wide problems with datafeeds is that they are not consistent or standardized from one affiliate network or merchant to another.

I am not a coder but I finally with much brain damage, figured out how to put raw datafeeds on my sites and then the first question I asked was “now how do I update the datafeed?” only to find out that was a whole other complex issue that I didn’t want to tackle. Certainly someone with the coding skills could do this but I wanted something better. So I went on a search to find a way to add dynamic datafeeds to my sites that would be auto-updating.

We joined Avantlink just over a year ago but just after joining Avantlink our online direction changed suddenly and we ended up not using the datafeeds, only some banners and coupons.  So we really did not have a clue about the power of Avantlink’s Datafeed Manager and the “custom datafeed web service script” and how this script will allow you to quickly and easily install dynamic datafeeds on your site. All I can say is I sure missed the boat on this one this last year!

This is by far one of the most powerful yet easy to implement datafeed scripts that I have personally found on the market today and it is doesn’t cost you a penny to use if you are an Avantlink affiliate. I would have purchased a script like this or paid a monthly fee to use it – it is that powerful. Avantlink’s merchant datafeeds are very consistent in quality overall and I like the new datafeed rating system that was just released.

The datafeed script is easy to use once you get the hang of it…..I say this after putting David Clark through the paces till I learned how to install and use it. See I told you that I am not much of a coder but I can usually figure something out given the time and proper guidance.  David, I can’t thank you enough for all your help setting up the Datafeed Client on our www.BarksWorld.com site. We are just really getting started building our online business and websites and have a long ways to go with adding Content, SEO and getting Traffic but we are so very excited to have this tool to so easily and quickly add the product datafeeds to our sites.

I encourage any affiliate interested in adding datafeeds to your site to explore this very powerful script. And thanks to David Clark in support I have learned a few ways to modify the script to get the most out of it for our sites. If I can do it certainly anyone can. I have been trying to figure out how I overlooked this awesome script for so long. I keep up to date and follow all the RSS feeds and emails and blog posts. I have been into the Tools section many times. I have read a few blog posts about how to tweak the datafeed script but I still just didn’t realize how powerful and easy to implement the datafeed script was and I am now on a mission to make sure that other affiliates don’t miss out on this exclusive Avantlink script.

Thanks Avantlink! We really appreciate your dedication to your affiliates by providing these quality tools and scripts. Now….what else I have been overlooking?? You bet I am going to be digging deeper into the other tools now and in fact I have been checking into the Affiliate API and trying to figure out its secrets….hey go and explore the Datafeed manager today! Don’t waste a minute!

Charlie Barks and Barbara Sandgren
BarksWorld.com (Quality Dog Supplies)

“Cultivates the serious and honest”, from the headline of this post. I love that statement pulled out of the Affiliate testimonial below. Take a look at the rest of what Blake from favorideas.com says about our partnership. Thanks for all your continued support and feedback, Blake!

Affiliate marketing is still kind of a wild west, last frontier way of making a living. For that reason there’s plenty of wildcat stuff on the fringes: cookie-stuffing affiliates, slippery merchants and sometimes, (ouch) exploitational networks. Anyone whose daily bread starts overlapping significantly with their affiliate income gets quite an education in these things. I took some lumps with various networks when my business first took off, but thanks to AvantLink’s timing in entering the marketplace, I got spoiled pretty early on. When the staff aren’t being helpful, responsive and even touchy-feely (ever get a call from a network rep when they’re actually at top of a ski slope on a holiday? Thought not!), they’re invisible. Actually, they’re better than invisible, because over the months and years I’ve developed this delightful sense that they’re battling for my rights behind the scenes. I have a lot of trust in AvantLink, something that would be naive on my part with many networks. And even when I ask for something a little out of the ordinary in terms of data to work with, they advocate for it.

I don’t cheat merchants, and all I want to do is get my business done. Because Avantlink has a value system that excludes the squirrelly and cultivates the serious and honest, I don’t worry about getting paid for the legitimate sales I send. Nor do I feel like merchants are constantly worrying about me pulling one over on them. Most of the time, I don’t think about how much I appreciate this environment until I have to do a little business somewhere else; then it all comes back.

Blake Kritzberg
www.favorideas.com