Year: 2007

At the hipster coffee shop across the street from the university where I teach (and where I have my “office” for office hours, advisees and pontificating about online marketing), I got the following cup wrapper on my daily cafe mocha this morning…

Interesting.

It’s an ad for NyQuil and DayQuil from Proctor&Gamble on a coffee cup. I understand advertising such things in heavy rotation during this time of the year (Affiliate Summit will also be Affiliate Flu Summit, I’m sure… that’s why I’m staying out in the desert at night!). I also get the reference of “… Keeps You Going” to caffeine.

However, this must be a branding attempt rather than an advertising attempt. Having a cold and needing NyQuil is not an emotional experience that I share with being at a hipster organic coffee shop. Branding yourself as relevant to the audience of such a coffee shop (where the slogan is “Community in a Cup”) is a smart move, though.

Who you are is partially defined by who you associate with.

The company behind the ad placement is BriteVision.

Who you work with, what offers you run and what networks you are a part of has a great deal of importance to how people perceive your brand.  Short term monetary gains are nice, but you can’t buy a good brand.  Keep that in mind when the payout might be higher and the grass might be greener in a less reputable field. That is especially true in the CPA Network affiliate/publisher bidding wars!

My first job in this industry was in the email marketing side of things, so I’m constantly thinking about that sphere and playing with tools to improve its efficiency, relevance and overall karma. Let’s face it… email marketing has a black eye (or two).

However, I still keep in touch with many of my contacts from that side of things, and they are telling me more and more everyday how hot list management and email marketing is becoming again. If you were involved in either of those markets in 2001-2003 (or BCS as some of us call it… “Before Can-Spam“), you know the serious amounts of money that were flowing in from large advertisers and networks and out the other way towards anyone with a few thousand names and emails. That money brought even more blood hungry sharks into an already vulnerable situation and eventually brought the house down.

However, email is coming back in a big way largely due to social media such as RSS, blogs, and emerging media (or “web2.0” for lack of a better term) sites. It’s ironic because RSS was to be the savior of the inbox and cause all of us to re-examine how we consume data. That is true in some circles, but for the vast majority of individuals, RSS is still virtually unknown.

For instance, I get blank looks from the students in my college classes when I mention that they can subscribe to our class blog feed in a reader. They’ve all subscribed to receive updates in their email inboxes (with an alarmingly large number of @hotmail.com and @aol.com addresses for 18 year olds!). GMail and the new Yahoo Mail are helping to change things towards RSS consumption with integration of feeds, but most users of webmail are still on platforms which allow them to function inside the inbox with enough ease and comfort to not be bothered with RSS.

Amazingly, 34% of the over one hundred subscribers to CPN use the FeedBurner email option instead of using the feed inside of a feed reader. So, let’s not expect the general public to hop on the RSS bandwagon while online marketers and thought shapers are still using email subscriptions as well.

Which brings me back to the original point. Email is becoming hot again because spam filters are working, individuals are smarter and email is still highly relevant.

Make your affiliate site or network based on a community based theme, and you’ll see the validity of “email marketing 2.0” On both the backend (data collection and aggregation) and front end (marketing to email addresses), the forecast is sunny.

Every day (depending on the quality), I’ll be posting a “comment of the day.”

Yes, it’s cheesy, but sometimes visitors don’t dig down into the comments here and miss out on some great insight. There’s better content in the comments here than the actual posts, so make sure you’re following those!

Here’s the CPN comments feed (which is just the comments. The full feed is over to your left in the menubar).

And here’s the quote of the day…

Jeff Doak of Kowabunga responds to the question of innovation in affiliate marketing…

Specifically, something like datafeed-driven storefronts (GoldenCan, KBStores, etc) comes to mind.

But generally, a focus on more measurability and more analytics — CPA as a metric allows full measurement of channel vs. channel; also marketing to niches by allowing influencers in those niches to get compensation for referrals. This latter concept is going to affect everything moving forward.

Thanks, Jeff!

And thanks to all of you for reading and commenting!

Google is an ad company, and a very good one. Yahoo is an ad company as well, but they are smart about social media.

However, the way people and consumers search is going to continue to shift away from Google towards a more social model (that is what Yahoo is positioning for with its recent acquisitions).

When this happens, CPC will explode and the split between CPC and CPA will finally be bridged.

Yahoo knows this, and so should you.

[Edit:  Ask.com knows this as well.  Check out their sandbox project, AskX.  Thanks, Andy!]

What innovations is affiliate marketing providing for the larger universe of online marketing?

1) Go micro.

2) Bridge the gap between the ABW flavored affiliate marketing community and the CPA network flavor of affiliate/performance marketing.

3) Leverage the tremendous amounts of inventory inside of the affiliate and CPA networks in a relationship with the tremendous (and exponentially growing) amounts of ad space available on the emerging media platforms.

4) Read the Long Tail.

5) Stop trying to reach consumers by letting people reach you.

6) Blog

7) Read blogs.

8) Listen to podcasts and watch Ze Frank.

9) Pull, don’t push.

10) Own your niche.

You may have notice the small text between the end of the post and the “Comments” option here on Cost Per News which says:

“Popularity: 3% [?]”

That little bit of text is supplied by an incredibly interesting plugin called Popularity Contest…

Popularity Contest is a WordPress plugin that keeps track of activity on your blog and calculates a popularity percentage for each post and page.

The popularity display you see:

Popularity: 27% [?]

is the rank of that post or page compared to the other posts and pages on the site.

Since page view counts, etc. are cumulative, newer posts will generally have lower popularity values than older posts. This, of course, evens out over time.

The values for different events (page views, feed views, comments, etc.) are configurable on a per-site basis, so each site may rank their content differently.

This is serious long tail stuff. However, over a given period of time, it is going to be incredibly valuable meta-data. If you have a network, merchant offer or CPA program, you should have a blog (a la Rextopia’s blog, FeedRex).

If you don’t, please let me know and I’ll help you set one up. EVERY network needs a blog, and this type of data would be INVALUABLE for your program’s blog.

Based on that data, I’ve set up a display of the top posts based on popularity. You can see which posts have had the most trackbacks, comments, views, etc. It’s not as interesting as the Popularity Contest plugin, but it is nice to see which posts have raised the most ruckus in the industry.

Of course, Molander’s podcast with Mrs. X on affiliate and CPA networks is at the top. I’m trying to convince Jeff to do another podcast on trademarks and affilaite marketing, so help me convince him.

Let me know what you think of the upgrades or if you have any advice!

Affiliate Summit has been sold out for just a few days, and now passes are beginning to pop up on eBay and drawing higher and higher prices every day (now upwards of $2500)…

This is good for affiliate marketing. It shows a healthy demand and a great product, in terms of both the conference and what affiliate marketing is able to produce.

Shawn and Missy have put together a show which everyone wants to visit and with the recent trade show hype over MacWorld and CES, people are beginning to realize the importance of these events. In my own opinion, I’d put Affiliate Summit above AdTech as a must attend show, and I don’t think that because there’s a banner over to your right —->

Even though it’s apples and oranges, I’ve always gotten much more “out of” Affiliate Summit than AdTech because of the niche focus. There’s something to be said about the impressiveness of the floor at AdTech, the people you meet and the list of speakers, but the Summit is quickly gathering enough steam to draw it’s own headliners who are appropriate to the niche of affiliate marketing.

Is the success of Affiliate Summit and the demand for tickets a sign (at least in online marketing) that conferences as we once knew them are slowly breaking down? In 10 years will all conferences be niche conferences? Think about CJU, SES, BarCamps or even (as much as I was appalled by the hubris of the name), the “Elite Retreat” (I feel dirty just for writing that).

At least Dave Taylor was right on this point… “The smaller the event, the more valuable It Is.”

Let’s make this interesting…I’ll donate a few dollars to the charity of choice for the person who comes closest to guessing the final amount of money an Affiliate Summit pass gets the week before the show.

Small is the new conference and it’s only going to get more micro.