Year: 2007

I’m committing the ultimate immortal (yet most unoriginal) sin.

I’m starting a tag virus. Apologies.

But unlike the “5 things you didn’t know about me and won’t ever really remember” meme, this one is valuable… it’s about business cards.

Here is my business card…

Well, that’s not really true. I don’t have business cards. I think they are somewhat silly.

I carry around about 250 blank cards at shows and make the cards up on the spot depending on how well I like the person or how goofy they are to me (taken from one of my online heroes, Hugh McLeod). So, if you receive a flattering card from me at Affiliate Summit or in the mail, that’s good. If you receive some ironic poetry with a caustic tale, that’s probably a reflection of how I feel about your strategy or program.

For instance, here’s one I might give to Carsten Cumbrowski…

I respect him.

So, I’m going to tag 3 of you to show your business card on your blog. You know the deal after that… you have to tag 3 others and so on.

So, I tag the following to get this going:

–Loxly aka Deborah

–Jim Kukral

–Shawn Collins

Make it work, because it can be a pretty cool experience for all of us…

I’m a big fan of stats, so I get giddy around this time every year when Shawn Collins releases the annual AffStat report.

This is an industry that is constantly changing, morphing and requires a yearly update in a statistical fashion.

From the AffStat site…

Below are the questions being asked for the AffStat 2007 Report:

How does your program determine commissions? Does your program have dedicated management (no other duties for affiliate manager)? How many affiliates do you have? How many new affiliates do you acquire per month? How many click-throughs do your affiliates generate per month? What is the conversion rate for your affiliate program? What percent of your affiliates are active (defined as having generated at least one click last month)? What percent of your affiliates earned commission last month? What percent of the total transactions on your site are generated through affiliates? Do you approve affiliates automatically or manually? Which network(s), solution provider(s), or software program(s) do you use to track your affiliate program(s)? Do you have a blog for your affiliate program? What was the largest commission you paid to an individual affiliate in one month? Do you permit your affiliates to bid on your trademark name(s) in pay per click search engines? What types of rewards and/or incentives do you offer to your affiliates? What is the biggest challenge in affiliate marketing? What’s your most effective method for recruiting affiliates? Which type(s) of data feeds do you provide to affiliates? Do you provide individual affiliates with exclusive coupons (i.e. coupons in name of affiliate site)? Do you allow affiliates to promote coupon codes that were not made available through the affiliate program? Do you manage the affiliate program in-house or are you an outsourced program manager? What is your annual salary (including incentives and bonsues)? [in-house employees] Does your salary include incentives and bonuses? [in-house employees] What is your total monthly compensation for the affiliate program you manage (including percent of transactions if applicable)? [outsourced program managers] Does your compensation include performance incentives? [outsourced program managers] Questions 2-21 are broken out by affiliate program type: pay per lead and pay per sale.

2007 is a watershed year of change for affiliate marketing, so if you’re in the dark about any of those topics, I’d recommend checking out the report. We definitely need more (good) analytics in this industry, and you need hard numbers to help make things tangible in your own site, network or affiliate program.

Now if Shawn would only update his book evey once in a while…

I know Alexa is seriously flawed, but every month or so I like to check the ratings for CostPerNews to see what sort of general trends have developed in relation to other blogs in this niche.

Alexaholic is a great tool for this, of course.

In this comparison, I used the self described “community blog” ReveNews, Linda’s 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blog, Shawn’s AffiliateTip, and Scott’s Jangro.com along with CostPerNews.

Lots of jagged lines and pretty colors, but there were a few interesting trends that we should take note of. For instance, here’s the two year reach graph…

The general trend had been upwards for 5Star, AffiliateTip and ReveNews over 2005 and into 2006, with June/July of 2006 being a nice peak for everyone, especially ReveNews. However, since then there has seemed to be a steady plateau for those blogs.

Jangro’s blog (along with Jeff Molander’s ThoughtShapers.com which I didn’t include) and CPN have also found a steady position of increase since July and are approaching the big 3 listed above. Then there are the newsletters such as my old stomping ground, the Digital Moses Confidential (Hagai has definitely figured out how to get the networks to advertise!).

CostPerNews officially launched on November 1, so I’ve been happy with the growth of the community, comments and maturity of my thought processing (blogging 4-5 times a day about online and affiliate marketing ain’t that easy, folks) in just a couple of months.

However, what do all these stats mean? Can you really quantify a blog’s impact on a community based on numbers? Is CostPerNews comparable to ReveNews? No… and to use a silly metric such as reach, rank or page view to try to compare any of these blogs with each other is just silly.

That’s easy to say, but when I’m trying to justify the time and energy put into this blog, saying page views and impressions don’t matter still doesn’t pay the bills (which looks like a rumbling Mt. Vesuvius on the kitchen counter).

So, when I’m meeting with potential sponsors or on the phone with merchants interested in possibly figuring out an advertising deal, how should I respond to the page view question? Normally, my response to such a question is:

“Well, if you have to ask that question, you probably don’t want to advertise on CostPerNews.”

Then we trade niceties and hang up.

These are also the same potential advertisers who ask questions such as:

• “So, what kind of stuff do you cover on the blog?”
• “Do you cover CPA Networks?”
• “Are you going to Vegas, dude?”
• “Can you do a post about our new programs if we sponsor you?”
• “Could you put a few affiliate links in the posts?”
• “So what’s the difference between your blog and advertising in Revenue Magazine?”
• “Can we preview your posts before you put them up so that our legal can approve them?”
• “Can we do a pay per post arrangement?”
• “What do you think is the future of affiliate marketing?”

Those are actual questions I’ve gotten in the last few weeks from potential advertisers who have contacted me. I keep a notebook for the good ones.

So, my point is that you can’t measure blogs with things such as page views or ranks. Especially in a niche industry. Read the Long Tail people… it’s a good quick read. If you are thinking about advertising here, please please please at least read the blog (or at least a few posts) before contacting me. This is not a splog and I don’t care to dilute the content just to get a few dollars from people who don’t take the time to either click around here or at least google my name.

Take the time to get to know your audiences and take the time to get to know the places where you might be placing your brand.

Interesting times, my friends.

The Affiliate Blog List has morphed into BUMPzee! (complete with exclamation point). This all came out of a blog post a few months back.

Scott Jangro, the brains behind the project and nominee for Best Blogger (I can’t wait to see who wins in all of the areas…pretty stacked competition in every category) at this month’s Affiliate Summit in Vegas, writes:

What’s with that name? I decided to go broader than affiliate marketing in the name, though that’s all there is on the site right now. Personally, I belong to a few other communities and I can see the same sort of thing developing, but they wouldn’t mix with the affiliate stuff very well. So, with future growth in mind, I went with a silly web 2.0 type name.

So, affiliate marketers, this is your website. Create an account, spiff up your profile, keep up with industry news, and create your own. Pretty soon, I’m hoping this will be a place to connect with other affiliate marketers all over the world. Personally, in a very short time it’s been responsible for my own meeting of several new people. And that’s pretty cool.

That is pretty cool, Scott.

This is exactly the type of tool our industry needs to use since we’re not adapting to the notion of RSS on a mass level. Instead, BUMPzee! offers a chance to aggregrate the content from lots of sites, see what others are finding relevant, and communicate in a social atmposphere.

The idea is that there are lots of affiliate marketing blogs to go through. We all have our feed readers, but may miss a really good entry. If you find a blog entry that you like, come here an give it a bump.

Say what you want about web2.0, but this is going to connect people, help people be discovered, allow the cream to rise to the top, and elevate the nature of discourse in the industry.

Great job, Scott. Keep it coming.

That’s a “we” in the sense of all of us and a “you” in the sense of someone doing something without much help or expectation of help/community from others.

Take the new open source alternative to the iPhone.

Completely open Linux base and you can customize to your hearts delight. No contract, no proprietary code to keep you out (except for the GPS but that’s hackable… and the iPhone doesn’t even have GPS as Scoble has pointed out).

Here’s a chart comparing the iPhone with the OpenMoko…

http://www.linuxtogo.org/gowiki/OpenMoko/iPhone

Interesting stuff.

So it has far less memory and no camera. You can add an SD card for up to 2 gigs and the camera… well… yeah, that’s a bummer. But, I’d rather have my soul than a camera on my phone.

I’m buying one, and you should too. Tell Jobs and AT&T where to stick their DRM. Stand up for your right to own what’s yours.

Who wants to help me build an open source CPA network?

I’m starting tomorrow. Let me know if you’re interested.

Yes, I’m dead serious!

Other networks, affiliates, merchants, tech guys, Firefox programmers, Linux programmers, consultants, Partner Makers, Affiliate Things, speakers of Porter-ese, guys with guylights and even SEO’ers are welcome to join the construction crew. Completely open source code and transparency from top to bottom. You can even take the code and start our own flavor of network.

It’s going to change the world (or at least what we’ve thought of as “affiliate marketing“) … why wouldn’t you want to help? Life’s too short not to dream big and work for good. This is the ultimate form of that good for our industry.

Open it up, distrubute the tools, encourage the debate and the mashing of teeth and watch the spirit of human ingenuity do the rest. Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. So are you!

1) Court only large publishers, affiliates and partners who can drive demand and make you “the big bucks.”

2) Have “brand loyalty” to one particular network based on their payout structure and refuse to work with anyone else.

3) Ignore CJ, Zanox, ShareASale, Linkshare because you work in “the performance marketing side of things” and don’t care to sift through all the ads in those places.

4) Ignore Azoogle, Market Leverage, AdDrive, XY7, Hydra, or RocketProfits because they “work with spammers and emailers.”

5) Trade in your morals and ethics (and those are relative, of course) in exchange for short term profit. You’ll wreck your program, network or affiliate site if you do.

6) Don’t read blogs, listen to podcasts, read books or think deep thoughts because you are interested in “practical” tips rather than theoretical ones.

7) Read an e-book by a self-professed expert, think “I can do that too!” and set up an affiliate link farm to rake in the AdSense dollars.

8) Go to bed at 11pm and not wonder how your program, network, site or affiliate link did that day in terms fo revenue, reach and relevancy.

9) Tell people you work in affiliate marketing because you like to work from home.

10) Don’t attend conferences, participate on forums such as ABW, WickedFire or AffiliatePrograms, and don’t try to make friends because this is all about the money.

The thing CJ has done right (and most CPA networks have done wrong) is to provide access, energy and opportunities to the smaller affiliates. These are affiliates who aren’t providing thousands of dollars in sells or leads every month. Instead, they are consistently providing a few hundred dollars every month.

If you include smaller affiliates in your network and offer them the chance to find their niche and provide consistent revenue for themselves and your network, you’ll find the revenues add up quickly.

So, stop attempting to woo just the “super affiliates” or the large publishers. Give the smaller affiliates a chance. Even if they are producing small amounts of money compared to an A List affiliate, there are still a good number of them. A small number multiplied by a large number is still a large number in economics.

So, don’t ignore them in your network or merchant program.

That’s “quantum marketing.”

The amount of inventory in ad networks created by publishers and affiliates is too high to sustain any sort of scarcity that could drive cpm prices higher for publishers or affiliates. However, this abundance of inventory creates a viable and incredibly valuable chunk of potential revenue for both the network and the partnering publisher or affiliate.

So, the affiliate marketplace is no longer constrained by a macro supply and demand metric. That is the key problem that many large scale merchants have been grappling with in their attempts to use the affiliate channel with any degree of success.

The limitless digital reservoir of content and inventory located in the existing ad networks will only grow exponentially as the web continues to expand more into our lives and subsumes every channel of offline content. Entertainment (mp3’s and torrented movies) and comparison shopping (Amazon, eBay) have already created a sustainable paradigm shift and every market will undergo these sorts of tectonic movements – and soon.

This includes the marketing market, which seems to be an illogical oxymoron, but in reality is a marketplace just as real as entertainment or shopping. Marketing offline has translated itself online in the form of our metrics (CPA, CPM) and business plans. However, that will change and online marketing (especially affiliate marketing) will begin to create new paradigms and languages which will prove much more profitable and effective for both advertiser and advertisee.

Offline content (whether music, movie, clothes, beer or marketing campaign) was easily proprietary in nature. You could easily set up walled garens to limit access (and distribution) of the “good stuff” to select customers willing to exchange a certain commodity of currency or attention. However, the digital nature of the web transforms that because what was once a tangible product are now digital H₂0 molecules in a rushing river or digital content (and that river always leads to a vast ocean).

Scarcity placed limits on choices for networks and for affiliates in the traditional economic setup. Now, those limits are rapidly vanishing. Affiliate marketing is in a very good place to help create the marketing equivalent of bittorrent technology.

Marketers discuss the term “audience” a great deal, but what does “audience” really mean? I’d aruge it doesn’t mean anything. It is undefinable and therefore cannot adequately be contained within a box. Audiences are the electrons of online marketing.

Both Jeff and Shawn/Lisa have podcasts that tend to cover similar topics, yet their audiences are different. Zanox and Commission Junction are both affiliate networks with reach in the US and Europe, yet the audiences are different. Market Leverage and Azoogle are both CPA networks, but have different audiences. CPN and ReveNews are both blogs about the world of online and affiliate marketing, yet we have different audiences.

How well do we all know our audiences?

In the blogosphere, we use tools such as MyBlogLog, Google Analytics and Feedburner to find out more about who’s visiting our blogs and where they are coming from. However, those tools don’t tell me much besides quantitative numbers. Numbers are wonderful and can be put together and taken apart in fantastic OpenOffice Spreadsheets (use open source!). But numbers don’t tell me much about the actual visitor. They don’t give me the kind of data that I’d love to have on who you are, what you like, what you don’t like and how I can get you to do something.

So when I write a blog post, am I writing to or for my audience or am I writing to or for myself? When Shawn or Jeff does a podcast, are they doing it for themselves (and their contributors) or are they doing it for the audience. When Market Leverage finds a great new offer from Dreammates, do they help construct the payout structure and creative details to fit their own vision or do they have their network publishers in mind?

How much of an impact should our audiences have upon the nature of our marketing efforts? Think about that before you make a decision. Is playing to your audience a measurable value and an quantifiable metric? Is there a way to measure the value of audience impact over and against your (or your network’s or your affiliate program’s or your podcast’s) own voice?

There’s grand money in a solution like that. Am I trying to build one? Yes. Can you use it? No. It is completely subjective and it’s called intuition. Some marketers have it and some don’t. It’s a skill, but it does require a working knowledge of ajax empathy coding with a little python powered gut feeling. Truly, the singularity is upon us.

The truth (and that’s a relative term as well) is that you can never fully “know” your audience. To know something is to fully understand it. You can describe the basic characteristics of your audience, and you can come close to making a definitive statement about how they behave and how they respond to your offers, podcasts or blog posts… but you should give up on any attempts to “know them.” Your audience is a misty fog that can’t be contained or defined.

Better yet, your audience is like the thousands of stars in the night sky. You can see the stars and point to them, but what you are seeing, pointing to and describing are those stars (or your audience) as they existed in the past. There is a distance between every podcast/network/offer/blog and audience. The stars you see and the audiences you want to reach vary in distance from you, and that distance affects how you perceive both stars and audiences.

The electron is the best example. We can see the trail left by the subatomic particle, but we can never see the electron itself. We know where it might be located (hence quantum theory and the term ‘electron clouds’) but we can’t positively define their location.

Even if you are within touching distance, you’ll never be able to put them under your thumb because what we see, and what we perceive, are always actions from the past.

So, learn to see the trails left by your constellations of quantum audiences. But don’t ever try to define them, and don’t get frustrated when you can’t completely reach them because your audience is constantly changing, and constantly moving. Such is the nature of all things… even affiliates, publishers, listeners and readers.

Do datafeeds have a future?

Will the micro-fication and niche-ification of the web render them useless or cause even more adoption of them?

Why don’t CPA networks use datafeeds?