Category: Marketing

AOL and General Motors Partner on Auto Channel

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AOL and GM have joined forces on the auto front…

AOL and General Motors Partner on Auto Channel: “AOL has partnered with General Motors to launch a channel within AOL Money & Finance geared for small businesses who are grappling with costly auto-related expenses.

The new section, dubbed Small Business Autos (smallbusiness.aol.com/business-auto-center) features tips and tools for businesses seeking auto loans and lower cost fuel options. Among the site’s initial headlines are ‘Deducting Car Expenses’ and ‘Maximize Your Office on Wheels.’ Also included is Mapquest’s gas prices tool, which helps travelers and businesses find the best gas prices in a given geographical area.”

In many ways, this is a smart play for both companies as they look for more long term growth and results from the direct online (and pre-qualified) traffic searching for problem solving measures in an economic downturn.

The question I have is how or whether AOL will leverage its buy.at affiliate platform in conjunction with this partnership.

Anyone from AOL have insight?

Publisher Training Web Seminars from LinkShare

LinkShare is making good use of its new blog with the announcement of a series of upcoming publisher training web seminars:

Publisher Training Web Seminars | LinkShare Blog: “LinkShare now offers interactive web seminars for our Publishers. These sessions will cover Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced level training to help you make the most of your LinkShare partnership.”

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, or LinkShare, this could really be a helpful series. Or if you’re an old hack and familiar with their “1.0” interface but still have some questions over the new interface that was implemented earlier this year (like I do), this could be a big help.

I’ll try to listen in on a few of these and report back here.

YouTube Now #2 in Search: What Does That Mean for Affiliates?

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YouTube has passed Yahoo to become the #2 search engine…

TG Daily – YouTube surpasses Yahoo as world’s #2 search engine: “ComScore’s most U.S. search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft’s MSN sites.”

What does this mean for affiliates?

Here are three initial thoughts:

1) Affiliate marketers need to be supplementing content with video (hosted on YouTube).

2) Affiliates need to be making sure that their video endeavors are viewer and keyword friendly. In other words, although it is great to load up your videos with highly sought after terms, you also need to make your video enjoyable, memorable and personable. Are you not that interesting? Hire someone or start reading blogs about marketers using video (like Jim Kukral‘s).

3) Think outside the text paradigm and implement (YouTube hosted) video anywhere you can in your affiliate campaigns.

I know affiliate marketers who spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on Yahoo and MSN, which are now behind YouTube in terms of search volume. You might not have thousands of dollars to spend on search, but you do have the time and creativity to make good (and even viral) videos. Be creative and explore. You never know what will catch on.

LinkShare Addresses Downtime and Preps for Holidays

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In an email to affiliates / publishers this week, LinkShare’s co-Presidents (seems to be a popular trend with affiliate networks these days) laid out their plans to address the past downtimes and what the network is doing to head off any possible troubles during the holiday rush.

Even though this holiday shopping season is not expected to set record amounts of sells by any means, the November to January time frame normally is the boom time for affiliates and online merchants (especially in terms of retail merchants).

The full email is below…

Dear Valued Partners:

At this busy time of year for all of us, we wanted to take a moment to update you with some important information on how LinkShare is prepared to handle the expected increase in transaction volume in November and December.

Over the past several months we have experienced intermittent challenges with the performance and presentation of data in our reporting systems. First, we want to say thank you for your patience and your understanding as we have worked through these issues. Second, we want to emphasize that our core capability to capture and track clicks and transactions continues to be the most robust and precise in the industry.

We are happy to report that we have made great strides in all areas. Here is a summary of our current progress:

Account Access
We recently identified and resolved a database problem that was preventing user access to our systems during peak usage times. Since implementing and monitoring this fix last week, we are confident that prolonged, unannounced downtimes are unlikely.
Data Quality
The intermittent downtime we were experiencing contributed in many cases to inconsistent data in our reporting systems. The interruption in sequence and flow of data from the main database (MainDB) to our reporting servers created a lag in the system’s ability to present the most up-to-date information. Now that data access issues have been resolved many of the reporting issues will also be resolved.

However, there are currently some infrequent, yet persistent inconsistencies in the data in SynergyAnalytics that we are investigating. We are also improving the performance of Traditional Reporting and working to resolve remaining data inconsistencies. We expect to make swift progress in these areas in the coming weeks.

Investing in the Future
Over the last 10 months, we’ve made significant investments in our systems. We have replaced our data center networks, reinforced our database systems, upgraded our ad and click servers, assigned additional servers to existing services to allow for increased capacity and automated fail-over, and installed a new software system to monitor and report on performance. These investments have prepared us to handle not only the additional load we expect in November and December, but well into the future.

In our effort to be as transparent as possible, we want to make you aware of some upcoming scheduled maintenance windows over the next few weeks:

Thursday, October 23, 2008 5:00pm – 9:00pm EDT (GMT-4) – Regularly scheduled software release.

Thursday, November 6, 2008 5:00pm – 8:00pm EST (GMT-5) – The last scheduled software release of the year.

On behalf of the entire team at LinkShare, we truly appreciate your business and your patience. We look forward to building even stronger partnerships and wish you strong sales during the 2008 holiday season.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Levine
Co-President

Yaz Iida
Co-President

AOL Combines buy.at with Goowy Widgets

AOL’s integration of its services into the Platform-A advertising operation continues as it is now combining the recently acquired Goowy widget application with its buy.at affiliate network (itself acquired last year).

This is a big deal for a couple of reasons. First, this opens up affiliate marketing, in earnest, to the social web. Affiliate marketing has traditionally been restricted to the realm of static sites and blogs because of limited tracking technology and creatives. However, this widget play changes the game.

For example, Ticketmaster.com is the first buy.at advertiser to work with Platform-A in developing and distributing this new affiliate feature. The widget, called “EventEngine,” can be tailored to promote specific Ticketmaster events. All ticket purchases that originate from Ticketmaster’s widget are credited to the buy.at affiliate network publisher.

Once a publisher places a widget on their website, anyone (including the publisher) can grab that widget and place it on various locations on the Web, including social networks, desktops and blogs. The original publisher earns revenue for each sale driven by the widget.

Secondly, this makes sense for advertisers. Ticketmaster’s example with EventEngine shows that widgets can and will transform the online advertising and marketing landscape in the coming years by leveraging the best of the social web and performance marketing. In many ways, this is the type of solution that many of us have been calling for, and it is great to see an ad or affiliate network finally answering the call.

Nice work, Platform-A.

Affiliate Summit Meet Market Becoming the Place to Be

At the Affiliate Summit West event in Las Vegas in January, the Sunday “Meet Market” took on a whole new dimension. Rather than a cavernous room with sparsely attended tables and a disinterested audience, the the Vegas event launched a Meet Market that was packed and full of considerable buzz about the affiliate industry.

Hopes were high for this week’s Affiliate Summit East Meet Market. And, ASE did not disappoint…

The room in which the Meet Market took place was absolutely packed and every table was surrounded by interested participants.

What makes the Sunday Meet Market different from having a booth in the main exhibition hall on Monday and Tuesday? I asked that question to a number of attendees and most expressed (both on the exhibitor and non-exhibitor side) that the Meet Market allows for more intimacy than having a full fledged booth. Plus, the event happens on the “first” day of the show (even though many attendees are flying in on Friday and early Saturday in order to take advantage of the networking opportunities then), so there is an excited energy that runs throughout the crowded room.

While there are certainly benefits to having a booth (branding, affiliate recruitment, a space to work deals and a way to get your message out), the Meet Market is quickly becoming a can’t miss event at the Summit.

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Thanks to Hugh McLeod for pointing this out:

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: “This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software …there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: ‘A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.’ “

Something to think about as we trounce forward through the murky and undrained swamp of large scale social technologies (especially as marketers)…

Disqus API Plugin Update

For people like Scott Jangro that are fans of the Disqus API plugin (instead of the Javascript one that has all the fancy features), there’s an update according to Disqus’ Daniel Ha (Disqus being the commenting platform used here and on numerous other sites):

twitter: danielha: If you use the API version of the Disqus WP plugin, we’ve released an interim version with a few updates. Get it here http://snurl.com/2tkt5

I’d love to see the API plugin become as full featured as the Javascript plugin and would probably make the switch if/when that happens. Until then, I’m sticking with the features.