Category: Affiliates
Anne Kadet’s Analysis Falls Very Short
Affiliate marketing is not about quick profits, sleazy promotions or fly-by-night operations.
Rather, affiliate marketing offers people the opportunity to make a living by producing web content. That content can be determined by a person’s passion, interest or savvy, but at the end of the day it’s a very democratic way to do marketing.
Instead of having to build a website that has the arbitrary watermark of being taken seriously (one million viewers), affiliate marketing offers anybody with enough passion and voice the opportunity to support their work and eventually grow that into a full time business.
So, I was frankly astonished when I read a piece by Anne Kadet about the last Affiliate Summit West and affiliate marketing in general in SmartMoney Magazine. It is a poorly written piece of journalism or opinion and is comparable to an 8th grade history report on the French Revoluition (having taught 8th grade, I think I can make that comparison).
Shawn Collins summed it up Kadet’s piece in video form better than I can in text:
Kadet‘s surface appraisal of the entire affiliate industry falls short of many of the criticisms or questions she could have raised about affiliate marketing had she dug a little deeper.
Videoclix.tv Is the Future?
VideoClix.tv is attracting a good deal of attention and for good reason. Basically, anything mentioned in a video becomes a keyword that leads to a clickable affiliate link. Even Revision3’s Diggnation is employing their technology…
I can’t imagine this sort of technology remaining independent for too long and expect to see a Google or someone snap them up or replicate the idea.
This is the future of affiliate marketing…
Are All the New Folks Gone Yet?
OK, good.
Let’s get back to business.
But seriously, I have had offers to buy CPN, offers to blog under my name, offers to roll CPN up into other marketing blogs… but I just can’t pull the trigger.
I’ve been blogging here since October ’06 (around the time I started on Twitter coincidentally). That’s not a good reason to keep anything going, but in this case I can’t leave the place that made me a Z lister.
This blog has been such a constant in my life and I strangely miss it when I take a week or four off.
So, from here on out I’m back to the 3-4 posts a day covering the strange and fascinating world of performance marketing and its intersection with whatever is next.
Thanks for playing along… it will be worth it, I promise.
Monetizing Attention
Merchants and Affiliates Face the Tax Man?
Merchants and affiliate marketers have been able to avoid the complication of state taxes on transactions, but that may be coming to an end if a New York state bill is made law and catches on with other cash-strapped states…
InternetNews Realtime IT News – ‘Amazon Tax’ Lands in New York: “The so-called ‘Amazon tax’ closes a loophole for Internet retailers who derive sales through affiliate programs in which Web site owners place a link to the merchant on their site and earn a commission on sales made from referrals. In lobbying for the bill, the industry group representing New York retailers had argued that the exemption from the sales-tax collection requirement gave out-of-state online retailers an unfair competitive advantage. “
Keep an eye on this one.
How Will Mobile Browsing Change Web Marketing?
Marketing on the web is a constantly evolving practice mixed with a touch of art and success based on intuition. In other words, it’s very hard to come up with a solidified tried-and-true formula for marketing on the web that can be easily replicated. There are just too many variables, and time is an incredibly important vector in web marketing.
Add to this mix the realization that mobile web browsing will explode in the coming decade and web marketers should not feel guilty for scratching their heads and trying to figure out the best way to position themselves for the future.
Mobile Browser Market is Transforming and Will Grow to 1.5 Billion Units in 2013 | Press Release | ABI Research: “While a large number of phones today still use browsers with very limited web browsing capabilities, many smartphones are incorporating browsers that support the latest capabilities such as AJAX and RSS, as well as websites optimized for viewing on a mobile device. ABI Research sees this segment of the mobile browser market accounting for the vast majority of growth over the next five years, as the open-Internet browser (OIB) segment for mobile grows from 76 million in 2007 to nearly 700 million browsers delivered in 2013.“
How do we, as web marketers, make sure that we are in a position to play in the exploding mobile field? Display ads as we know them don’t work in a mobile paradigm. So, here are a few thoughts and possibilities for how to succeed in the mobile world:
1) Increased focus on mobile friendly sites that work both on the web and on mobiles and include clear call-to-actions (either affiliate, branding or lead based).
2) Dedicated mobile sites that are light on bandwidth but heavy on immediacy.
3) Heavy reliance on geo and demographic targeting as well as device targeting. Marketing experiences on an iPhone are much different than on a BlackBerry or a Motorola Q (not to mention non “smart phone”). Mass marketing and mobile are not happy bedfellows.
4) Mobile landing sites that encourage the “learn more” approach where the viewer can get more information via email, rss or related channels. AdMob is doing very interesting things with this concept.
5) Diving even more into the long tail and finding communities and hubs where dedicated and highly motivated readers/participants are more likely to use a mobile device in a marketing scenario and follow through with a purchase/conversion/sign up.
Whether or not you’re interested in the mobile space as an affiliate marketer or as a merchant leveraging the affiliate channel, one thing is clear… you need to be interested. Turning a blind eye to mobile and not being prepared for the future will lead to an expensive exercise in playing catch up in the coming years.
It’s True, Web Marketers ARE Polluters
Steve Rubel posits that we are in for a global climate change type scenario on the web caused by the proliferation and unbridled polluting of web marketers…
Micro Persuasion: An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web: “The web is facing it’s own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest.”
I completely agree with him.
Steve’s supposition that consumers (yes, I still hate that term) are ignoring blanket marketing messages is accurate (at least from my stats and many other affiliate and online marketers). Remember how all the characters ignored the massive Coca-Cola billboards in Blade Runner? We’re there. We’re polluters of the senses and the web.
So, what do we do? What’s our analogue to the Kyoto Protocol?
1) Make good content. Be sticky. Offer a long term appeal and value proposition to people. Stop making MFA sites or PPC thin sites. Plus, they just aren’t economical…the margins aren’t there anymore.
2) Go multimedia. Make video, do podcasts, take pictures. People like that kind of thing. See #1.
3) Stop rehashing what everyone else is saying and talk about what you know. Find ads to structure around what you know. Those ads are out there.
4) Stop thinking that StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, YourMamaHasASocialNetwork are all great places to get traffic. They’re not. They’re terrible traffic for marketers who just want performance conversions. They are good for marketers who are making good sticky content. There are very few marketers like that on the web at the moment.
5) Think outside the box. Brainstorm. Don’t rehash. You can be an individual and be a marketer. Those things are not mutually exclusive despite what Techmeme or the eBooks tell you (and stop reading eBooks).
We do need to clean up our act and build for the future. Or, you can keep playing the short term game while those of us in the performance marketing world evolve and adapt and realize the benefits of a more “green” type of web marketing. Your choice.
I Can Has Great Marketing
Angel Djambazov of Jones Soda’s affiliate program pointed me to what might be the greatest marketing scheme of all time… making your LOLCat famous.
Make Ur Lolcat Famous Contest « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures – I Can Has Cheezburger?: “Jones Soda wanted to put a lolcat on their clever soda bottles across the country. So we asked if we can run a contest to find that special lol. (It’s like American Idol, but we don’t has to listen to ur singing voice.)”
Despite my wife’s eye rolling every time I check icanhascheezburger.com (or wear my tshirt from them), I still love LOLCats.
Well done, Jones Soda (and Angel).
So Wrong It’s Funny
Shoemoney® is early on the April Fools’ Day jokes…
How Long Until Someone Is Killed At An Affiliate Summit – ShoeMoney®: So lately I have been asked a lot why I no longer attend affiliate summits. Well this is basically it. I think I would have had a lot more fun at the affiliate summit back a few years ago when I used to love to get drunk and crazy but that is not really my thing anymore. Mix that in with the fact each time I was asked to speak it was a complete train wreck. Then mix in the death threats, and the fact its kind of become a thug conference … well I just have a hard time justifying paying money to experience that… if that makes any sense.
This is why I don’t watch much TV these days… I have posts like this on the internets to laugh at and entertain me.
Head over and read the whole gut-busting post (and don’t forget the comments from the Shoemoney® Sheep Show as well).