The TopRanked.io Weekly Digest: What’s Hot in Affiliate Marketing [CamSoda Affiliates Review]

Quick Disclosure: We’re about to tell you how CamSoda runs a top-notch affiliate program. And we really mean it. Just know that if you click on a CamSoda link, we may earn a small commission. Your choice.

Alright, I’ll admit it. Our weekly affiliate digest has a serious shortcoming.

While we often try to finish every week of the affiliate digest with a little “closing thought”, we don’t dedicate nearly enough time to mental health.

So let’s rectify that by opening this week’s edition with a little coverage of one of the biggest mental health epidemics going around right now. Male loneliness.

Now, all jokes aside, this is actually a thing. Here’s a short video on the topic by ShoeOnHead that caught the world’s attention last month.

In short, men have “no friends, no girlfriend.”

So what do we do in the face of such a crisis?

That’s right, we make money.

Topranked.io Affiliate Program of the Week

While it might be a recent hot topic, men seeking company on the internet isn’t anything new. Just ask this week’s affiliate partner of the week — CamSoda. They’ve been in the business of keeping men company for almost a decade.

Here’s What CamSoda Is all About

When men get lonely on the internet, one of the first places they might turn to isn’t necessarily CamSoda. First, it might be something like Omegle.

But soon, as men inevitably do, they start getting banned once they start whipping their bits out for the world to see.

CamSoda is the place they go to next. And the best part is, CamSoda lets them stick around.

And yes, that means CamSoda is an adult cam site.

Here’s What CamSoda Will Pay You to Promote It

Despite the “grand opening promo” part in the banner, the rates displayed are pretty much permanent. Here are the details lifted right from the T&Cs for the CamSoda Affiliate Program.

For regular user signups:

• CamSoda affiliates on rev share will receive 20% of all money spent by referred members.
• CamSoda affiliates on pay-per-sign (PPS) will receive $100 per new member (United States or Canada).
• CamSoda affiliates on pay-per-lead (PPL) will receive $1.50 per lead belonging to someone from the United States or Canada who signs up to the Sites, elects to receive emails, and confirms such sign-up by email.

There’s also an incentive for “broadcaster” signups.

• For each broadcaster referred to CamSoda, affiliates will receive $70 once that broadcaster receives 700 tokens.

Here’s Why We Like CamSoda

While not the oldest, CamSoda has built up a reputation as a bit of a household name over the years. It has also been at the forefront of innovation in the cam industry.

For example, CamSoda was the first camming platform to offer VR livestreams. It has also been right on the cutting edge of other innovations, like interactive toys and crypto payments.

The CamSoda commissions are also pretty reasonable. Even if you’re resorting to paid promotion, a hundred bucks a pop on PPS leaves you plenty of margin to play with if you get creative and avoid oversaturated channels.

Here’s What You Should Do Next

If you’re looking for more details, then head over to TopRanked.io for a full CamSoda affiliate program review.

If reading the terms and conditions is more your thing, then they’re available here.

Or, if you just wanna get down to business and start earning with CamSoda, you can also sign up here.

News Takeaways

WordPress Joins the Fediverse

We’ve been keeping an eye on the Fediverse for a while now, mainly starting back when rumors broke that Meta’s Threads app was coming (still code-named P92 at the time).

Then, more recently, we covered the launch of Threads, along with a bunch of other news about what was happening in the Fediverse.

Now, in for the latest installment in our Fediverse coverage, we’ve got this goodness for WordPress — Automattic (the company behind WordPress) just dropped version 1.0 of its ActivityPub plugin.

ActivityPub 1.0.0 for #WordPress is released today! Activate and your WP blog can now be followed in the fediverse, and receive replies back as comments.

Huge props to @pfefferle and all of our contributors!

— Matt Wiebe (@mattwiebe) September 13, 2023

Confused? Here’s What You’ve missed

If words like ActivityPub and Fediverse have you scratching your head, here’s what you’ve missed out on over the last few months.

• Fediverse: This is moniker given to the ‘verse’ where every decentralized social network that’s come into existence lives. Mastodon, Lemmy, BlueSky, and even Threads are all part of the Fediverse.
• ActivityPub: Part of what makes a decentralized social network decentralized is having a protocol for different servers/instances/networks to interact with each other. ActivityPub is the protocol most of the big names in the Fediverse space are using. It’s also been put forward as an official W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation, meaning it’s in with a shot of becoming an official Internet standard, right alongside HTML, CSS, and a bunch of other stuff.

This Is What the ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin Does

In its most basic usage, the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress is kinda like an RSS feed meeting a social network feed. In other words, when you publish something on your WordPress site, the ActivityPub plugin will automatically publish it people’s social media feeds on whatever Fediverse platform they’re using.

The next step after this is hinted at in the Tweet above. Replies to your automatic posts in the Fediverse will now show up directly on your WordPress site.

There are also a few built-in of WordPress “blocks” that come with the plugin, such as a “Follow Me” block to help people on your blog subscribe to you in the Fediverse. There’s also a Followers block in case you’re feeling them late-ninties-to-early-naughties vibes and feel like adding the Fediverse equivalent of a hit counter on your website.

What’s This Actually Good For?

Now, before you start frothing at the mouth at how easy it’s gonna be to spam the Fediverse with your latest sperm-egg fryer review, hold your horses.

When I compared the WordPress ActivityPub plugin to an RSS feed, that was for a reason. People actually have to follow you in the Fediverse before they’ll see your posts show up in their feed. So, no, don’t go hoping and preying for some magical algorithmic recommendations to superscale your affiliate earnings.

With that said, if you think of this like running an email list or something similar, there’s some potential here to convert some casual traffic into full-time followers of your content.

On the more spammy side of things, there might also be the potential to create a bunch of dummy accounts in the Fediverse, and then use these to interact with your own content. Then, when this shows up back on your WordPress site, it might lull some readers into thinking your content is more valuable/trustworthy than it is.

Takeaway

For a lot of readers, this little WordPress-Fediverse integration probably isn’t worth getting too excited about yet. But, if you’ve got a site that meets a couple of conditions, this might be worth investigating.

As for what those conditions are, the first is that your content will actually need to be good/valuable enough to motivate people to follow you. Remember, people have to actually follow you to see your posts in the Fediverse.

The second that your niche fits in with the usual Fediverse crowd. So, selling a SaaS subscription to a tech-savvy young’un — sure, why not? But you’re probably not going to be able to sell an electro-pulsating vibro-magical butt lift machine to Betsy at the local retirement village here. 

As for some other niche ideas for the Fediverse, there’s probably also a good chance that something addressing lonely males might work. So it might be worth giving CamSoda a try.

Meta Joins the Not-So-Metaverse

Turning our attention to the previous something-verse hype cycle now, it appears that Meta still hasn’t given up on trying to convince people to use Horizon Worlds.

In a blog post it published yesterday, Meta announced that it’s taking Horizon Worlds out of VR and onto the regular web. Basically, you’ll soon be able to use Horizon Worlds using a regular browser on a regular computer (or a regular app on a mobile).

For now, it’s only available on a limited early access basis. But it should start to “roll out more worlds over the next few months.”

Takeaway

If you’re into playing around with the “cutting edge of affiliate technology,” this might be something worth investigating. Or it might not be.

But, assuming it is, here’s one idea for something an enterprising affiliate might attempt to pull off.

• Create an AI girlfriend chatbot.
• Create a dating-oriented space on Horizon Worlds.
• Spawn a bunch of AI girls to flirt with lonely men joining your space.

Now, I don’t know how easy creating this will be. But, I reckon you’d probably find a bunch of ready-made tools you could get a dev to cobble together. I mean, it took me 5 seconds of Google to find this:

And, if you look closely, it allows ‘integrations’. So this could potentially be done with a lot less effort than you’d think.

As for what to monetize with, that’s easy. Have your AI girls tell the boys they can meet on CamSoda.

Gen Z’s Goin’ Gaga for Steam-Powered News

Alright, so maybe newspapers aren’t technically steam-powered. But it was the steam-powered press that really brought newspapers to the masses.

And, apparently (if the latest TikTok trends are any indicator of what’s hot), Gen Z now loves the humble newspaper.

This new-found love affair for newspapers seems to have started catching fire with 23-year old Kelsey Russell. She started reading the news on TikTok, all while interjecting it with a little “reacts” style commentary.

Millions of views later, and it now seems official — Gen Z loves the newspaper.

Takeaway

This is another one of those things that looks like it’s ready-made for AI. And this one I’m a lot more sure about than the Meta Horizon Worlds idea.

For starters, there are literally dozens of tools around to create AI influencers.

As for the script part, here’s a ChatGPT prompt I prepared for you:

“I will provide you with a news article. I would like you to read it back to me. As you read it back, I want you to insert some witty “reaction” type comments (highlight these so they’re distinct from the actual article). Your reaction comments should be delivered in a humorous way, similar to a popular YouTuber or Twitch streamer.”

And here’s a sample of the output:

And here’s a link to the full chat log.

Now the only part missing is to add in a plug for something you’re promoting. Might I suggest CamSoda?

And Now For Something That’s Not Affiliate Marketing

Usually, we stick to affiliate marketing content here. But, we fully acknowledge that there are plenty of affiliates who also dabble in other online ventures. So this one’s for you.

The story we’re picking up on here comes from writer/artist Bill Willingham. He’s the creator of the Fables comic series, and he’s just ended a major spat with his publisher, DC Comics. 

Apparently, DC Comics == bad.

Now, I’ll save you the full back story (that’s available on his blog here), but the basic gist goes like this:

• Willingham used to like working with DC Comics.
• DC Comics started trying to screw Willingham around.
• Willingham’s original contract with DC Comics meant he kept ownership of all his work.
• To get back at DC Comics, Willingham just released all of his work into the public domain.

Now, as Willingham notes in his post, he can’t profit from his work independently from DC Comics. There was a non-compete-style clause in his contract preventing him from doing this.

But, as for you — he reckons you can do whatever you want with his work now.

And that includes making money.

Takeaway

If you haven’t already picked up on the $$$-making opportunity here, let me spell it out.

• People pay good money to license characters/art/etc. from popular franchises.
• This popular franchise just had its entire back catalog of work put into the public domain.
• You don’t need to pay licensing fees to use work in the public domain.

Ka-Ching.

Closing Thought

While browsing the news this week, an article titled I spent $2,580 to see Beyoncé, and it completely changed my outlook on life—a psychology expert explains why caught my attention.

Now, admittedly, it wasn’t the psychology part that caught my attention. Rather, it was the “I spent $2,580 to see Beyoncé” part I wanted to go and cringe at.

But, as is usually the case, the worst intentions often lead to some of the best outcomes. And this time, I walked away with a little lesson about motivation.

So, to catch you up to where I’m at, let’s start with a little outtake from the article:

“The night was a blur, leaving me with sore feet from endless jumping, countless videos on my phone and an unshakable sense of awe and inspiration.

Put simply: It made me want to be the best at my job, get in the best physical shape of my life, and execute my goals and passions to the best of my ability.”

The next bit is when the psychology expert steps in with some advice about how to keep this post-Queen-B motivational glow going. These tips are:

1. Commit your post-concert feelings to memory as vividly as you can, and revisit them when things get challenging.
2. Listen to the artist’s music at work, the gym, or anywhere else you might need a mental boost.
3. Repeat those steps frequently enough for them to become habits, helping your brain associate them with positive motivation

Now, I’m not about to suggest you should go out and catch Yonce live for yourself. What I will suggest though is that you adapt some of the psychologists tips to any situation that leaves you feeling “an unshakable sense of awe and inspiration” (i.e., hyper-motivated).

So here’s those same tips again, made to be a little more generic.

Step 1 — Commit the feelings to memory

This one should be easy to carry out for anything — all your doing is committing feelings to memory.

Step 2 — Revisit the thing that made you feel super motivated

Obviously, this is pretty easy to do with music. It’s also pretty easy to do if it’s a podcast or something else that’s easily packaged up into a transportable media format.

Where this gets trickier is when you can’t just revert to a screen or audio device. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

If it was a particularly inspiring conversation you had, purposefully try to have more conversations like that.

If it was skydiving or some other adrenaline-inducing thing that made you feel alive — find other ways to inject that same excitement into your life on a more regular basis.

Basically, whatever it is, work out what it was about the activity that made you feel inspired. Then find other ways to capture that same essence.

Step 3 — Rinse and repeat

If you’ve sorted out step 2, remember to follow that up by revisiting step 1 immediately after.

If this psychologist was right, this should keep the spark alive… even when you’d otherwise be in the depths of despair because you don’t know why you can’t get any traffic to your Fediverse-integrated blog site you filled up with CamSoda links.

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(Featured image by SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS via Pexels)

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