Category: Affiliates

CPA Empire has been rebranded into the choice domain affiliate.com.

This move reminds me of how Pepperjam has successfully rebranded itself as a “next-gen” network in the mindset of many affiliates. It will be interesting to see if affiliate.com can do the same for CPA Empire, which hasn’t always had the sunniest of reputations on the affiliate forums, etc.

Here are some excerpts from the press release…

“affiliate.com provides us with a premier name to go along with our leadership position in the affiliate marketing industry,” said Steven Richter, President and General Counsel for Media Breakaway. “However, we are doing more than simply changing the name of our affiliate marketing division. Our goal is for affiliate.com to become the next generation of affiliate networks.”

The company also announced that it will be undertaking a number of key initiatives as a part of the name change. These initiatives include the development of a proprietary tracking system that will provide affiliates and advertisers with accurate, real-time reporting and an easy to use interface to access performance data on all their campaigns. In addition, business development efforts are being focused on bringing in more top performing international offers, as the company continues to increase its presence in the global market. The company will also be expanding its affiliate management and advertiser support teams and enhancing the affiliate manager training program to ensure that the team is providing the highest level of support in the industry.

“Through each of these initiatives and others we will put in place in 2009, we plan to take affiliate marketing to the next level in technology, services, and support,” said Richter. “We are dedicated to helping our affiliates and advertisers grow their businesses and become more profitable.”

Sounds like there may be some competition in store for Affiliate Classroom as well (“enhancing the affiliate manager training program to ensure that the team is providing the highest level of support in the industry”).

The affiliate.com team also has a blog up and running as well.

Shawn Collins also has a post about the rebranding.

For those of us with allergic reactions to statistical spreadsheets, a new feature in Google Analytics makes seeing which keywords convert almost fun…

YouTube – Motion Charts in Google Analytics: “Learn to use Motion Charts in Google Analytics to analyze your data in five dimensions. “

Electronic Voting 2.0 – ReadWriteWeb

One of the keys to success in affiliate marketing is getting your site or link in front of the people who are looking for the info, services, etc you are representing.

Google has helped create the affiliate marketing landscape by becoming the world’s database of information as well as being fairly transparent on what it takes to rank well in the search result pages organically (not to mention the ability to pay for positions on relevant keywords).

So, this new move by Google to ramp it up on the recognition and indexing of PDF’s is promising for smart affiliates given that history. Why? Because PDF’s are a great way to produce quality content on specific topics. Instead of having to invest the time, effort or money into OCR efforts themselves, affiliates can let Google do the heavy hauling and have the info indexed. Nifty.

Google Search Indexes Scanned Documents – AppScout: “Google today, however, announced a new technology that lets the search engine perform Optical Character Recognition on scanned documents saved in Adobe PDF format. OCR converts the picture of words into actual words. “

And here’s the Official Google Blog post about the new feature.

Here are some examples of what’s in store:

repairing aluminum wiring

spin lock performance

Lots of opportunity there!

For those of you not content with Google’s present level of omnipotence, here’s more for you to chew on:

Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages: “Today Google introduced some changes in the way they index content from blogs / RSS feeds.

Earlier they were only using links from RSS feeds to determine the resultset for link: operator but now they consider links that are mentioned on web pages as well very similar to Technorati.

This means that if another blog (abc.com) has linked to your own blog (my.com) from his sidebar, Google will now show abc.com in the results as well when you query for link:my.com.

If there were a Technorati Rank like parameter for Google Blogs Search, almost every blog may have seen major fluctuations in their rank due to this simple change.”

If you do your affiliate marketing via blogs (or even RSS), take note because this will definitely have an hand in determining your site’s PageRank as well as its organic rank.

The bigger question is how this might (in the long term) affect affiliate marketers. Affiliates necessarily rely on links as the lingua franca of doing business because the nature of the economic model. Will Google slap affiliate sites with too many commercial (affiliate) links in the search results?

Fun stuff to ponder on Halloween!

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

Wow, email, chat, RSS and now SMS all in one lovely package.

Game changer!

OMG – Webmonkey (thanks to my pal @bmoore622)

http://www.viddler.com/player/fde939d1/

I really do love Basecamp, BackPack and Highrise. All three of these products make up a substantial part of my business life as an affiliate and I can’t imagine having to hack together a “getting-things-done” solution without them.

Even my wife, a physician, loves and uses BackPack on a daily basis.

So, I’m excited to see this new addition to Highrise (a fantastic CRM manager):

37signals Product Blog: Big new Highrise feature: Deals: “Deals let you keep track of proposals, bids, RFPs, and project sales right inside Highrise. Highrise has always been great for keeping track of the people you do business with, but now with Deals you can keep track of the business transactions as well.

Now you’ll know which proposals/bids are pending, which you’ve won, and which you’ve lost. Enter notes about the deals, attach proposals or contracts to the deals, and keep a log of any changes. Now you’ll know how much money a particular customer has paid you over time or how much you’ve left on the table from deals you didn’t win.”

Seriously, if you aren’t using BackPack or Basecamp (at least), you’re missing out.

Having worked on both the network and publisher side of affiliate marketing over the years, I’ve definitely wracked my brain for a solution to the affiliate approval process problem (hereafter known as AAPP… kinda catchy, no?).

Jamie Birch has a new in-depth post on the issue from an affiliate manager’s point of view. Jamie has just launched his new JEB Commerce OPM company and is heavily dealing with the AAPP now.

Jamie’s previous work at Coldwater Creek and Converseon gives him authority on this issue, so if you’re a new affiliate wondering why you got denied for a program, definitely give his post a read (plus subscribe to the blog because it’s loaded with good content already):

Why is my application to affiliate programs always denied? | JEBCommerce – Affiliate Management and Online Advertising: “Along with the known affiliates applying to your program, there are hundreds and thousands of applications that come through that are either suspect, fraudulent or simply incomplete. If you are an affiliate manager reading this, you’ll probably be nodding your head and maybe even have a chuckle. If you are an affiliate that seems to receive more denials than approvals when you apply to programs, this article is just for you. I’d like to highlight some of the things that managers see every day that you may be doing and need to avoid in order to get your applications approved. So let’s get started…”

Perhaps most valuable of all are the list of suggestions at the bottom. Good stuff.