Category: Affiliate Marketing

How are things going with your email newsletter as we head into the all-important holiday season?

Trends don’t look good if you’re doing your email marketing the same way you did things in 2004…

Before the tabbed layout, open rates to Gmail had been above 13% for 15 weeks. They never dipped below that threshold unless there was a specific holiday. For instance, weekday opens for Gmail fell to 12.5% on the week of Valentine’s day. Open rates between Christmas and New Years are an abysmal 10.5%. Something about spending time with loved ones just isn’t conducive to combing through your inbox. Weird, right?

What bothers me in this case is that open rates stayed down for 3 consecutive weeks. From looking at a year and half’s worth of data, I can say that kind of behavior isn’t normal. I’m not willing to declare an emergency just yet. After all, I don’t even know what the adoption rate is on Gmail’s side. However, I would say this is an early indicator, and we’re definitely keeping our eye on it.

via How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog.

Of course, GMail isn’t the only email provider but you’d be downright ignorant if you chose to ignore the new tabbed interface of the service. Since the changes started rolling out earlier this summer there have been handy “how to survive” guides that you should read (such as this one). Whether this is anti-competitive or helpful to users (or somewhere in the middle), the reality now exists and marketers must deal with it.

While it may only be Labor Day, you should be in full swing of planning out your holiday season promotions. There’s a very specific calendar mindset that successful email marketers use (you should read that), so it’s time to dive into your email marketing provider analytics (we love MailChimp but affiliates and marketers should be careful when using the service and look to others like AWeber) and see what kinds of trends you can spot from the data over the summer.

One of the most helpful things you can do for your own lists and subscribers is education. Even outlets such as No Agenda, one of my favorite podcasts, is relying on user education to make sure their email newsletter (via MailChimp) gets delivered to listeners’ inboxes after seeing a dismal drop in user contributions (they don’t run ads) since the GMail changes.

Email marketing is just as important, if not more so, than ever as we enter into the 2013 holiday season. Make sure you’re doing your homework before things really heat up and plan for success.

I was hoping for Charlotte, but the “wisdom of the crowd” makes it otherwise…

After conducting a poll of over a dozen cities in the U.S. and Canada, we found that the most popular city for next year is New York City.

via Affiliate Summit East Will Return to NYC in 2014

Good read from industry legend Tim Storm on the ShareASale blog…

FatWallet started when there were already a number of coupon sites to be found on the internet (and hundreds more yet to be started).  One of the great differentiators early on was that I hired employees to help build and operate the site, where many of my competitors clung fiercely to going it alone.

via #Lessons Learned: A Guest Post from Legend Award Winner Tim Storm | ShareASale Blog.

Tim is one of those people that I’ve always looked up to. Reading his thoughts about building a great team and finding the right people is so important for the affiliate industry. Let’s face it, we’re a group of hard-nosed folks who do like to go it alone. That works sometimes, but often you need a team around you to challenge and compliment your talents.

From VentureBeat courtesy of Scott Jangro on FB:

“Be very careful when you sign up to affiliate networks. Do all your analysis. Profile the traffic, and then make an educated decision for yourself. Even though we were managing to get $200,000 a week of sales for all but nothing, this is not a sustainable business model.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-marketing-scam/#f1Ue76oSercfP2GX.99”

To be honest, I can’t blame the guy. Despite the correct admonitions by affiliate marketing heavyweights in the comments, it’s a shame that an industry with so much promise continues to field a bad reputation from large scale brands (and state governments looking to make tax revenue from affiliate sales).

I love and believe in the affiliate channel, especially when it is “democratized,” but it only takes a few bad actors and not enough storytelling to ruin the message.

@samharrelson no, they want people who complain on Twitter but don't do a damn thing to exact change

— Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) August 12, 2013

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This week, MarketingTrends is turning into a group blog focused on the always fascinating space of online marketing, analytics, trends and thought development. If you’re interested in blogging regularly about this space and want to be a part of something special, email me sam@marketingtrends.co or @samharrelson on Twitter.

I plan on operating much the same way the old ReveNews did with no editorial approval process, comments wide open and actual pay for bloggers (see below for more on that).

MarketingTrends will look different as we move into Phase 2 this week so stay tuned for the new theme and features.

This is something I’ve had planned for a while, but a conversation about ReveNews tonight made me speed up the process.

When Affiliate Summit acquired ReveNews in February of this year, I was elated. As a former editor and publisher of ReveNews (and the one that ushered us through the incredible process of moving from MovableType to WordPress with an updated look/feel in 2008-2009), I have a deep love for the community and ecosystem of thoughtful bloggers and commenters that once made the site a mandatory read for folks in the online marketing industry.

I can even say that it was ReveNews that launched my career in 2002-2003 as I was reading insights from people like Wayne Porter, Jim Kukral, Brian Clark or Jeff Molander and pondering what I could contribute to this industry. They took me in and made me a part of the ReveNews family in 2006.

However, watching ReveNews become just a press release outlet for Affiliate Summit since February has been sad to say the least. This once proud banner stood for insight and thought provocation and real dialogue in an industry still trying to find its own identity (and identities).

While I can’t purchase ReveNews and right that ship, I can take up Shawn’s challenge after I posted my own thoughts about ReveNews’ direction this afternoon.

Here’s the whole Twitter convo:

And I thought it would be a good thing for @Revenews when @affiliatesummit bought them.

— Sam Harrelson (@samharrelson) August 11, 2013

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To which Shawn replied:

@samharrelson is this in response to something?

— Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) August 11, 2013

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@affiliatetip Just sad to see RN go from a group blog w/ interesting views to a reblog of AS posts IMO.

— Sam Harrelson (@samharrelson) August 11, 2013

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Good point by Shawn on the previously dwindling but still salvageable content being produced by bloggers there:

@samharrelson the posts were sparse long before we bought it – just more obvious now with the AS content added.

— Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) August 11, 2013

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@affiliatetip right, which is why I was hopeful it would reclaim some of its old glory after you guys bought it.

— Sam Harrelson (@samharrelson) August 11, 2013

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And that’s where things turned. Shawn thinks that “print > group blog” but I find this sort of coasting to be the antithesis of what ReveNews once meant to lots of folks in our industry.

Not to mention that a healthy group blog is, in my mind, needed and required in an industry where the main group voice is behind an editorially produced dead-tree printing that serves as an advertising platform for the main conference of an industry and itself makes its owners money (with a traditional 20th century ad model) without paying its writers.

@affiliatetip if you say so

— Sam Harrelson (@samharrelson) August 11, 2013

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I was ready to leave things there and move on agreeing to disagree. Shawn wasn’t ready for that just yet.

@samharrelson industry response says so – how about you prove them wrong?

— Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) August 12, 2013

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To which I responded with a tongue-in-cheek:

@affiliatetip you're prob right. the industry surely wants more of what Evan did to CPN and RN's current path.

— Sam Harrelson (@samharrelson) August 12, 2013

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@samharrelson no, they want people who complain on Twitter but don't do a damn thing to exact change

— Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) August 12, 2013

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@affiliatetip marketingtrends.co is a group blog and i think it's more than a damn thing.

— Sam Harrelson (@samharrelson) August 12, 2013

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Which earned this:

@samharrelson looks more like a duo blog. Milli Vanilli take on marketing. I guess .info was taken?

— Shawn Collins (@affiliatetip) August 12, 2013

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So, we’re taking the challenge.

Moving MarketingTrends to a group blog paradigm is something I’ve had planned for a while, but Shawn’s tweets tonight reinforced my realization that something akin to what ReveNews was in years past is not only needed but required in the online performance marketing space.

Group blogging means turning over some aspects of control, such as in the editorial space. I’ve never liked the idea of a editor to correct grammar or thoughts on something like a blog and our bloggers will have the freedom to post when the spirit moves them, whether on the floor of a trade show with their mobile device or after carefully plotting out a detailed thought piece over a long weekend.

The look and feel of MarketingTrends will reflect its group blog nature and that new theme should be live this week. I’ve got experience doing this and I’m excited about how things are shaping up.

Our revenue model is not just based in a mid-20th century banner display ad model. There will be a few of those ads, but the majority of the revenue to pay bloggers will come from a content-specific marketplace, newsletter placements and micro-transactions. You’ll see what we mean when we roll out the redesign this week.

In many ways, what I wanted to do with ReveNews in 2008 is finally coming to fruition with MarketingTrends in 2013. I’m excited.

I hope you’ll stick around and participate.

One channel that’s particularly valuable for many marketers, particularly in the affiliate industry, is live video (for webinars, etc), so this is great news:

YouTube Creator Blog: Investing in you: more tools to build your channels: “Start live streaming if you have 100+ subscribers: All channels in good standing with at least a hundred subscribers will be able to live stream, within the next few weeks. Check your Account Features page for an ‘Enable’ button, and click it if you’re interested.”

Whether you’re doing search marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, social media, PPC or some combination of those it’s always important to at least have a framework plan set out.

Here’s a quick and easy post that helps spur some thoughts about marketing plans and what you could be doing to improve your campaigns…

Writing Marketing Plans – SEO Book: “Writing forces an analytic approach. The act of writing something down often brings about new ideas because it gets us out of the routine of ‘just doing’. Secondly, writing plans helps us write better proposals. A marketing plan is about both an analysis and a form of communication. It’s a means to get across your ideas to clients and other partners and convince them of the merits of what we’re doing.”

I wrote this on CostPerNews almost five years ago back in June 2008:

CPN went live on Nov 1, 2006 and I had no idea where it was going (and still don’t). 19 months later (at an average of 52 posts a month), we’ve hit the magic 1k mark.

I knew in October of ’06 that I wanted to have a place where I could write as frequently or infrequently as I wanted and cover the emerging web2.0 space and the connections I was (and still am) seeing with traditional affiliate marketing. I came up with the name while mowing the lawn that Fall and ran inside to register the domain before I forgot. Luckily, I didn’t forget.

I can honestly say that this little blog has been the most important vehicle for my own personal brand and business, helping me to get into doors that wouldn’t have been opened otherwise and helping me to get to know some pretty incredible people along the way. If you’re wondering if you should start a blog, take it from me… yes.

So, thank you for being there and listening to my crazy ramblings about Twitter and Tumblr and RSS and open source over the past couple of years. I’ve sold this blog, quit this blog (twice), re-acquired this blog and redesigned it (at least 10 times). And here we are again.

CostPerNews was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach an audience that I really did appreciate and enjoy interacting with on an almost daily basis. Few days went by from late 2006 until 2010 that I didn’t blog 4, 5 or 6 times on CPN.

Posts had high engagement with comments and emails. Often times, comment threads got heated as we fought to carve out the brave new social web while preserving a corner niche for affiliate marketing.

Eventually, CostPerNews was brought into an awesome partnership with ReveNews (now a part of the Affiliate Summit family).

I enjoyed my time as Publisher of ReveNews, but soon missed the community and quirky nature of web2.0-meets-affiliate marketing at CostPerNews, so I bought it back and resumed blogging there.

I’d sell the site for a second and final time as my family grew and I felt as if I’d run out of time for blogging and the commitment that CPN took to be successful.

Needless to say, I miss writing about the intersection of web tech and marketing. I miss the passionate community of CPN. I most especially miss the daily (almost monastic) practice of writing and writing and writing some more.

I miss the notion of shoshin, or “beginner’s mind” and the joy I had blogging on CPN in 2006 and 2007 when I had no idea what I was talking about but all the passion in the world for how Twitter and Tumblr and blogging were going to change affiliate marketing forever.

I want to get back to that. There are so many exciting developments in the intersection of web tech and marketing. So many of these intersections are products and fruit of what we were hammering out in 2006.

Now that Shawn and Missy have acquired ReveNews, we need more performance marketing blogs anyway 🙂

It’s time to reboot CPN.

MarketingTrends.co is my attempt to find that voice and that writing and that community that I once got to have. You can’t go back home again, but you can create something pretty amazing more than once.

That’s my plan here. I hope you’ll follow along and enjoy.

10 free icon font sets that are highly customizable and scalable. I used Sosa on an affiliate site redesign over the weekend and the results were fantastic, so wanted to share here as well…

10 Super Useful Free Icon Font Sets | Freebies: “Icon fonts are great because, as you may have guessed, they are delivered as a font. This gives them a number of advantages over traditional image icons. For instance, if you want to change the color, it can easily be done with CSS. Whereas with an image, you would need to have a separate version of the icon. Scaling and adding effects, such as shadows, is just as simple.”

So many folks I know who create “thin” affiliate sites (less than a dozen pages) still use fixed web site widths instead of making their site appealing regardless of whether it’s being viewed on a 27″ display, a 4″ glass mobile screen or a 7″ tablet.

It’s true, using responsive design (RWD in the post below) can cause more overhead, time and expense at the beginning of a site build, but the long term outcomes remind me of the conversations we had about using tables or CSS back in 2003 and 2004 when site creators couldn’t be bothered to “learn something new.”

All that to say, it’s time to fit your site into a responsive design model. It’s incredibly easy to do in 2013 whether you’re redesigning or starting with a new site.

Here’s a good read…

Responsive web design: the war has not yet been won » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks: “Well, no. As widely adopted as the RWD process is, there are still numerous designers, developers, freelancers, and agencies who continue to opt for the safety of fixed widths, or adopt the process in a semi-complete sort of way — like making several fixed designs that adapt to specific device sizes, or change only when the screen is at a mobile-like resolution.”

Go and do likewise.