Here’s a short speech I did at Affiliate Summit East this past June in Orlando, FL during the “Lessons Learned” session at the end of the conference (thanks for providing this, Shawn!).
http://video.affiliatesummit.com/embed/iframe/panel/cid/P77YJ6Z3KQQGB897
I normally don’t post links without adding something original to the conversation.
However, this article by Sally Falkow on building an email list with social media is a must read…
http://falkow.blogsite.com/public/item/155255
I came across this via Andy Beal, so make sure to check out his informative discussion on the issue as well.
A company in our space will soon be releasing a platform which allows for the ability to place affiliate links in bittorrent files. Affiliates will be able to place links and check stats while advertisers will be able to select the placements depending on file type in an automated system which looks very much like a CPA network.
The company wishes to remain anonymous at this point, but will make an announcement in the next month.
I had a beta walk through tonight, and this has the potential to be huge.
Thoughts? Legal issues? Is anyone else doing something similar?
Google is ramping up its Checkout platform.
I’ve heard rumblings from my sources within the company and from a few of the merchants involved in the Checkout program that something major is on the way… soon.
Tonight, it seems that Google has added Checkout to the main search page in a very prominent way…
Here comes the fun.
I’ll release some info when I can, but let me know you opinions on how this relates to affiliate marketing. Strap in… it’s going to be a wild ride in the coming weeks.
[EDIT] Jonathan (TrustNo1) has also posted on this development over at ABestWeb. Be sure to follow the conversation there as well!
Are you a new CPA network, or one that is trying to grow outside of its traditional box, or a merchant program courting new publishers? Then you need to know how to treat them.
My advice?
1. Be upfront about payouts, pay rates, offer types, commission structures.
2. Google them and do research. Don’t rely on a business card, word of mouth or a forum for all of your insight. Impress the publisher with how much you knew about them before you called, and they will take the hook.
3. Interact on forums with them… argue or agree on industry issues they care about… just show that you care (and if you don’t care you should look for another line of work).
4. Don’t try to throw money, iPods, stereo equipment, cruises or other gimmicks at publishers to activate and retain them. It won’t work. If it does work, it doesn’t say much about that publisher.
5. Ask them advice on a potential new offer or industry issue by phone, im or email. People love to give feedback and state their point of view. Let them know you’re interested in theirs.
6. Don’t pressure them for leads when they have a down month. Pressuring never works.
7. Send Starbucks gift cards or cheese and wine baskets out of the blue. It’s the little things.
8. Ask them tough questions about how they are promoting your program or network offers. Don’t take gloss answers, but let them know you are actively looking at every publisher with some scrutiny to keep the quality of your offer or network high.
9. Don’t pretend like you know what you don’t know or that you are smarter than you really are… be humble and accept advice and complaints from publishers. Make a detailed “ADVICE” and “COMPLAINTS” list with info on who gave the input and how you can act on it. Then, act on it and email/call/im the publisher to let them know you are on top of things. You don’t have to make all the changes or tweaks the request, but let them know that you’re at least listening and entertaining the idea.
10. Treat the smallest publisher the same way you treat the highest performing loyalty site. It’s hard, but it works.
Have more advice? Leave them in the comments or send me an email.
Shawn Collins has posted an interesting piece on AffiliateTip based on a question he received regarding the appropriate time to fold your affiliate program if it’s not working.
Here’s the question…
Ask Shawn Collins: Time to Close the Affiliate Program
After three months, my company’s CEO is getting ancy regarding our affiliate campaign. We’re a somewhat niched market and we’ve had an account with Commission Junction that has so far yielded very little activity and even fewer sales. At what point should we simply pull the plug on our affiliate campaign?
Shawn writes that 3-6 months time should be sufficient to determine if a new affiliate program will gain momentum, if it is proactively managed. That proactively managed part is the key. If you don’t have someone competent, dedicated and even zealous about getting your program off the ground, then chances are your program is going to need far longer than 3-6 months to take off (if it ever does).
Then Shawn throws out three (in my opinion) great points:
Networks and merchants do a horrible job at retaining affiliates. For the most part, I think most networks and merchants have figured out the activation part since that part of the paradigm relies mostly on affiliate action. However, retaining affiliates requires skill, finese and tenacity not often seen in networks or merchant programs.
The most important point is that affiliate marketing performance is not based on how much money you throw at your program. That’s why this is an often frustrating and slippery business. As Jeff Doak cited in the last Weekly Insight podcast with Jeff Molander, Cingular spent around $1 BILLION on brand advertising last year. Even if they threw 1/100 of that at affiliate marketing, it wouldn’t suggest a successful program. You can’t quantify relationship and that’s something big brands are just realizing with the emergence of social media.
I blogged about Sidekiq’s debut a few weeks back. The meta search engine has since taken off in popularity due to rave reviews from users (for good reason). I’ve actually replaced Google with Sidekiq as my browser start page and search engine of choice.
Within the Sidekiq video directory (which is available at video.sidekiq.com or the video/tv browse category within sidekiq.com), the Sidekiq team has added a new search functionality. Founder Steve Hemmady emailed to let me know about these new functions as Sidekiq continues to kiq butt in meta searching…
I also wanted to let you know that over this weekend, we added intelligence to it’s server called Sidekiq IQ. Sidekiq IQ server, intelligently crawls the Internet space, extracts relevant links, compiles a directory of information & makes it available through the Sidekiq UI interface.
Steve and Anuta Udyawar were previously behind Onepage.com (which was sold to Sybase). Onepage had a similar model to Sidekiq’s IQ with an easy to use rich UI combined with an intelligent server. It got several great reviews and developed a following based on its ease of use.
Steve is right when he pointed out to me that:
“In general, good usability comes from a combination of easy to use rich UI with intelligent/smart & scalable server as in the classic cases of Google Maps & GMail.”
If the early versions of Sidekiq are any indication of the future direction, expect to hear lots about this meta search engine in the coming months. I’m particularly enjoying the “Domain Search” function so I can keep track of which domains Shawn Collins is snapping up!
Great job, Steve and Anuta!
Is this the future?
Rockstar Traffic is the self serve platform that directly accesses the ArcadeRockstar social gaming community. ArcadeRockstar is a 100% opt-in community of casual gamers that are both motivated and qualified consumers. With 90%+ historical advertiser retention rates our results speak for themselves.
Are other programs doing this and I just don’t know about them?
http://www.rockstartraffic.com/
If you are an affiliate or publisher, dealing with the plethora of CPA networks can seem like a daunting task. However, there is a lot of money flowing in the networks, and there is a lot of money available to publishers or affiliates with the right amount and right kind of traffic. You may have that and not even know it.
Every veteran has an opinion or a piece of advice on how to deal with these networks, and every experienced affiliate marketer will point you to their favorite two or three networks as “the best to work with.”
The truth is, if you know what you are doing, working with various networks can give you a good insight into what the current trends and highest performing CPA offers are at the moment. Working with more than one network, and with networks that are not necessarily the most talked about can also open doors to better relationships, higher payouts, quicker payouts and better offers.
The trick is to know how to get your foot in the door with these networks, and how to deal with the publisher specialist, or publisher manager, you’ll be working with.
These are networks like Hydra, AdDrive, Market Leverage, Rextopia, RocketProfits, FiliNet, NeverBlue, or eMarketMakers. Azoogle, Adteractive, Websponsors, Advertising.com etc are also out there, but there is already a tier system developing in the network space, so trying out just one of those is not representative of the CPA network genre as a whole.
So, here at five quick tips for newbie’s (and perhaps a few veterans out there) contemplating the idea of trying out a CPA network that have come from my years of experience in the network space…
1. Call and talk to a person. Don’t just send in an email. Publisher directors (comparable to affiliate managers in an affiliate network) absolutely love to get phone calls from affiliates or publishers. I promise. Ask them questions about the types of offers, payouts, or whatever is on your mind. They know all about their program and most of them love to talk about how their program is different, or better, than the competitors. Let them know the level of your interest at the beginning of the phone call and how long you have to spare in the conversation. Then just make sure you have a notebook to write down all the info they will surely give you.
2. Be upfront. If you decide to join a specific network, go through the application process and then call the network or company and speak to a publisher manager. Let them know about your application and tell them that you have a few more things you’d like to add to your application. Tell them what type of offers you are looking for, give them reasonable expectations about your traffic levels and ask them how they can help you. The networks are more than willing to give you two or three points on how their specific program can work with you as an individual. Plus, that phone call sticks you in the head of the publisher director who can later tip you off to high converting offers or bump your payout.
3. Immediately find out about payouts. You can do this before you join a network. But make sure you ask about when you will get paid. This varies from net10 to net45 based on the network. Don’t ever assume the net payout number!
4. Ask about incentivized traffic. The publisher director you speak to will surely throw out some of the network offers that have been doing well as a selling point. Whether or not you yourself have incentivized (you give your readers/users incentive to fill out a lead form with a special offer or service) traffic, you will be competing with other affiliates or publishers who do in some cases. Once you’ve joined, look for the offers that are marked as “Can Be Incentivized” or “Cannot Be Incentivized” and think about what kind of competition you may be up against. Incentivizing an offer results in lower lead quality, but higher lead counts… so keep that in mind.
5. Get to know your publisher manager or director. Affiliate marketing is all about relationship, but so are the CPA networks. Getting to know the person you are working with in a network can be a make-or-break proposition. In my experience as a publisher director, I would often give insider tips about which offers are (in reality) performing the best or which offers are going to be pulled in the upcoming weeks, or they can even bump your payout. It’s not always showbusiness… sometimes it’s showfriends.
The key to working with CPA networks is to understand the difference between how they are set up and what they can offer you as compared to affiliate networks. As a gross generalization, affiliate networks have rev-share type offers with recognizable brand names. CPA networks have performance type offers that stress lead generation and quick turnaround. So, it’s a much more efficient and upfront marketplace than the affiliate networks in that issues such as chargebacks and payout rates can be settled up front rather than after the fact.
So, do your homework, ask around and, most importantly, talk to people at the CPA networks.
I’ll be posting a “How to Deal with Publishers” later this afternoon from the CPA network side of things. Hopefully, shedding some light on the networks and how they operate will increase affiliates willing to work with them and cause some much-needed conversation in our industry/
Every network needs more publishers and affiliates.
It is wonderful to have a niche network, but in order to cover production and overhead costs, there is a statistical point on the revenue curve that you have to achieve in order to stay afloat. Since angel investors and venture capitalists still haven’t discovered affiliate marketing (yet), companies in this space have to find that statistical sweet spot quickly and efficiently in order to survive the first four months.
There is a beyond interesting conversation going on in the comments about the nature of affiliate marketers and those who need help and education and those who are educating the affiliate managers they work with. Brian Littleton of ShareASale and Jim Kukral of BlogKits have pointed out the need to help bloggers overcome the learning curve normally associated with affiliate marketing and steps they are using to do so. Jeff Molander is arguing for the need of more intelligent affiliate managers that don’t need the constant schooling from saavy affiliates.
Where is the combination for your network or merchant program? Do you rely on affiliate managers to be good salespeople and hope they know what they are talking about? Do you actively recruit people to work for your network who have industry experience on both sides of the fence?
And where do bloggers fit into all of this? Are bloggers truly the next long tailed collection of eager and willing affiliates waiting to be discovered so that they can begin to make some money from the time and effort they put into the craft? Blogging is an art, and when done well can be a beautiful thing. Is your network actively seeking out these artists to help diversify your affiliate base?
I’d go so far as to say that within three years, affiliates as we once knew them will be gone. Static sites with html banners will always have a place, but that place is constantly being eroded by the vast ocean of content. If you’re not making content or at least updating your site, you may face a daunting task as search continues to evolve and social media continues to be adopted.
Well, it’s almost a done deal for close to a billion dollars.
The ramifications are huge for Europe and potentially for working with international affiliates via Advertising.com. I still can’t believe AOL/Time Warner is the buyer, but it makes sense with their strong push towards moving from a subscription revenue model to an advertising revenue model. I wonder how many investors will dump their shares after the buyout?
I’m definitely going to be asking Zanox about their thoughts on this at the Summit.
For more info and discussion check out Fraser’s UK affiliate blog and follow the news on BUMPzee.
I’ve been experimenting with blogs and static websites for a few of the affiliate sites I run and manage.
Within the last 3 moths, the blogs have finally over taken the static web pages in terms of profit. This is utterly crazy to me because I’ve been updating the content on the blogs while the niche sites have been relatively stagnant in terms of content. Plus, it’s much easier/cheaper to build a blog affiliate site rather than a static site because the content should come easy!
Does that mean that content isn’t that important for an affiliate site?
I would argue no, because I’ve seen an increase in repeat IP’s processing repeat purchases. For instance, one of the affiliate sites I manage is a NASCAR themed site (I don’t miss a race), and the repeat buyers are about 79% higher on the blog/content site rather than the static content site.
So, if you’re going to do affiliate marketing, make sure you consider the type of content you are providing to keep the visitors coming. Repeat visitors/customers are invaluable!
Agree? Disagree?
Google Analytics or WordTracker?
I honestly enjoy the WordTracker service. Google Analytics is great for analyzing what sort of traffic is coming to your site as well.
Realizing what sort of traffic is coming to your site based on the keyword is definitely helpful. Here’s a little of my secret sauce… you must make a differentiation between what is considered a “money keyword” and a “traffic keyword.” That’s common knowledge among most of the established affiliates, but if you’re just starting out, that wisdom will save you lots of time.
I like to convert my keywords at a certain percentage, depending on which niche site I’m using. So, you have to decide which keywords are most valuable to you depending on the traffic or “money” keywords.
Keep in mind that the type of offer and the profit margin has a great deal to do with how effective your keyword might/shoudl be.
Play with keywords, check out WordTracker and Google Trends and see what you can do. This is still a relatively new market in the general world of marketing. It’s a lot of fun to experience and try to predict, but you can really break down your keywords into what is profitable and what is not.
Here’s my final tip for figuring out what keywords to include in your efforts:
Look at the backlinks of your competitors!
Let me know if you need help!
1. 2,104 Visitors have added Cost Per News to their Favorites within their browser since the beginning of December. Aww. Thanks! I like you too.
2. It’s easier than a SEO company’s booth babe in Vegas (too harsh?) to advertise here on Cost Per News. Check check check it out at http://ads.costpernews.com or click on the dollar sign to your left <~~~
3. I need your input on a question that has been bugging the hell out of me because I can't get good data on it… Do you prefer to have a new window open when you click on a pic/link here? Or would you rather the window you’re currently viewing CPN in go to the link you click? It doesn’t hurt my feelings either way, so be honest. Just please help me make that decision once and for all.
4. For the 45% of you still viewing this site on Internet Explorer… ugh… you disgust me. Change your ways and repent!
5. Girlshapedlovedrug by Gomez is a fantastic song. Go download it at your favorite non-drm vendor. I suggest emusic.com, but Rhapsody is good for hearing everything and is quickly becoming a favorite for me since I’m always chained to this laptop.
6. ReveNews is picking up the content again. If you haven’t been there in the last few days, go read the interesting debates going on about the nature of business blogging (for free) in the comments. Good stuff.
7. Thanks to Jangro, I’ve been fixing some back end bugs this weekend that I had been avoiding. You won’t notice it (hopefully), but the site will be a little sharper, prettier and load even quicker.
8. I’m thinking about taking down the MyBlogLog widget. I love widgets and I’ve had a good time with MBL, but I’m not getting much out if besides seeing Molander’s pretty face every day. I’ve even been asked by other bloggers why I don’t visit their sites. The truth is, I read about 450 blogs through feeds. I promise that I visit your site, but my avatar doesn’t show up on your MBL widget because I’m reading your feed. I’d prefer people start using RSS, so I feel like I’m encouraging the dis-use of RSS by having the widget up. Eric, get your Yahooligans to help you write a script to allow people reading the feed to count as a “visitor.” You guys have done an incredible job at responding to the community concerns so far, and that’s my biggest concern about using MBL going forward.
9. I’ve grown a beard for Affiliate Summit so that I can look like my hero Dave Winer. Beards look good on me, I think. So, if you’re looking for me at the Summit, I’ll be the bearded dude without a shower. My wife hates the beard, btw.
10. I’m doing a few interviews with networks, affiliates and merchats at the Summit for CPN. I’m particularly excited about meeting the executives at Zanox and picking their brains on and off the record about the industry and international issues. If you’d like to setup a meeting, interview, presentation, steak/lobster dinner or just buy me a beer or three, send me an email (sam@costpernews.com). I’m flying in on Friday and flying out on Monday night on the red eye.
11. Blogging is hard.
12. Affiliate Marketing is hard. If you think you know what you’re doing, you probably don’t.
Constructing a site and finding affiliate programs to promote for your site is becoming easier and easier. However, one entry level barrier for new affiliates is how to transfer certain data files to their affiliate managers or merchants. I think we need to lower the entry threshold for new affiliates, so I was excited to discover something new this week.
On Wednesday a merchant that I work with on one of my affiliate sites recently asked me if I’d like to use a new service called BoxClouds to transfer some non-crucial files that normally would be shared via FTP.
I’ve since played with the BoxClouds service for a few days and am happily surprised with the ease of use.
From the BoxClouds site:
BoxCloud’s “drag and share” functionality makes sharing files a snap through a small application you install on your desktop. You decide what to share simply by dragging files from your desktop over your buddy list. Your files and folders are hosted directly and instantly from your computer without any uploading. Once shared, your contacts can then access your files over a regular browser — they don’t need to download or configure anything.
While I wouldn’t suggest using this for sensitive documents or data files, I do think applications such as this or box.net are making file transfers so easy that eventually how we work together in the affiliate marketing world could figure out a way to innovate secure and safe file transfer system.
FTP is nice but not every affiliate or affiliate manager knows how to use it. Email is certainly not safe, and not always certain to land in the inbox of the recepient. IM transfer is difficult-to-sketchy at best due to different platforms and security settings.
What do you use to transfer files with your partnering merchants, affiliates or affiliate managers? Could a service such as BoxClouds (with more security) further the entry barrier to affiliate marketing?
This is the greatest thing I’ve read in a long while (and not just because I’m trying to figure out a way to make a living out of blogging… ok… maybe it is just because of that)…
3. Blogging is an art, same as any other method of self-expression. Some people are better at it than others.
6. Blogging is a great way to make things happen indirectly. I say that all the time, and will KEEP saying it till people finally get it [I’m not holding my breath].
20. Blogging will never be a mainstream activity so long as being able to write well and often remains the main barrier to entry.
30. Yes, the blogosphere is a great place to get laid. No, I’m not telling you how I found this out.
37. Z-Listers are every bit as selfish, self-important and psychologically flawed as A-Listers. Except the former don’t have large armies of people with real and/or imagined economic & social incentives for tripping them up. (Amen… Wayne, are you reading this??)
Whether you’re a blogger or not, pay attention. This applies to your program as well.
Thanks, Hugh.
I’m committing the ultimate immortal (yet most unoriginal) sin.
I’m starting a tag virus. Apologies.
But unlike the “5 things you didn’t know about me and won’t ever really remember” meme, this one is valuable… it’s about business cards.
Here is my business card…
Well, that’s not really true. I don’t have business cards. I think they are somewhat silly.
I carry around about 250 blank cards at shows and make the cards up on the spot depending on how well I like the person or how goofy they are to me (taken from one of my online heroes, Hugh McLeod). So, if you receive a flattering card from me at Affiliate Summit or in the mail, that’s good. If you receive some ironic poetry with a caustic tale, that’s probably a reflection of how I feel about your strategy or program.
For instance, here’s one I might give to Carsten Cumbrowski…
I respect him.
So, I’m going to tag 3 of you to show your business card on your blog. You know the deal after that… you have to tag 3 others and so on.
So, I tag the following to get this going:
Make it work, because it can be a pretty cool experience for all of us…
I’m a big fan of stats, so I get giddy around this time every year when Shawn Collins releases the annual AffStat report.
This is an industry that is constantly changing, morphing and requires a yearly update in a statistical fashion.
From the AffStat site…
Below are the questions being asked for the AffStat 2007 Report:
- How does your program determine commissions?
- Does your program have dedicated management (no other duties for affiliate manager)?
- How many affiliates do you have?
- How many new affiliates do you acquire per month?
- How many click-throughs do your affiliates generate per month?
- What is the conversion rate for your affiliate program?
- What percent of your affiliates are active (defined as having generated at least one click last month)?
- What percent of your affiliates earned commission last month?
- What percent of the total transactions on your site are generated through affiliates?
- Do you approve affiliates automatically or manually?
- Which network(s), solution provider(s), or software program(s) do you use to track your affiliate program(s)?
- Do you have a blog for your affiliate program?
- What was the largest commission you paid to an individual affiliate in one month?
- Do you permit your affiliates to bid on your trademark name(s) in pay per click search engines?
- What types of rewards and/or incentives do you offer to your affiliates?
- What is the biggest challenge in affiliate marketing?
- What’s your most effective method for recruiting affiliates?
- Which type(s) of data feeds do you provide to affiliates?
- Do you provide individual affiliates with exclusive coupons (i.e. coupons in name of affiliate site)?
- Do you allow affiliates to promote coupon codes that were not made available through the affiliate program?
- Do you manage the affiliate program in-house or are you an outsourced program manager?
- What is your annual salary (including incentives and bonsues)? [in-house employees]
- Does your salary include incentives and bonuses? [in-house employees]
- What is your total monthly compensation for the affiliate program you manage (including percent of transactions if applicable)? [outsourced program managers]
- Does your compensation include performance incentives? [outsourced program managers]
Questions 2-21 are broken out by affiliate program type: pay per lead and pay per sale.
2007 is a watershed year of change for affiliate marketing, so if you’re in the dark about any of those topics, I’d recommend checking out the report. We definitely need more (good) analytics in this industry, and you need hard numbers to help make things tangible in your own site, network or affiliate program.
Now if Shawn would only update his book evey once in a while…
I know Alexa is seriously flawed, but every month or so I like to check the ratings for CostPerNews to see what sort of general trends have developed in relation to other blogs in this niche.
Alexaholic is a great tool for this, of course.
In this comparison, I used the self described “community blog” ReveNews, Linda’s 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blog, Shawn’s AffiliateTip, and Scott’s Jangro.com along with CostPerNews.
Lots of jagged lines and pretty colors, but there were a few interesting trends that we should take note of. For instance, here’s the two year reach graph…
The general trend had been upwards for 5Star, AffiliateTip and ReveNews over 2005 and into 2006, with June/July of 2006 being a nice peak for everyone, especially ReveNews. However, since then there has seemed to be a steady plateau for those blogs.
Jangro’s blog (along with Jeff Molander’s ThoughtShapers.com which I didn’t include) and CPN have also found a steady position of increase since July and are approaching the big 3 listed above. Then there are the newsletters such as my old stomping ground, the Digital Moses Confidential (Hagai has definitely figured out how to get the networks to advertise!).
CostPerNews officially launched on November 1, so I’ve been happy with the growth of the community, comments and maturity of my thought processing (blogging 4-5 times a day about online and affiliate marketing ain’t that easy, folks) in just a couple of months.
However, what do all these stats mean? Can you really quantify a blog’s impact on a community based on numbers? Is CostPerNews comparable to ReveNews? No… and to use a silly metric such as reach, rank or page view to try to compare any of these blogs with each other is just silly.
That’s easy to say, but when I’m trying to justify the time and energy put into this blog, saying page views and impressions don’t matter still doesn’t pay the bills (which looks like a rumbling Mt. Vesuvius on the kitchen counter).
So, when I’m meeting with potential sponsors or on the phone with merchants interested in possibly figuring out an advertising deal, how should I respond to the page view question? Normally, my response to such a question is:
“Well, if you have to ask that question, you probably don’t want to advertise on CostPerNews.”
Then we trade niceties and hang up.
These are also the same potential advertisers who ask questions such as:
Those are actual questions I’ve gotten in the last few weeks from potential advertisers who have contacted me. I keep a notebook for the good ones.
So, my point is that you can’t measure blogs with things such as page views or ranks. Especially in a niche industry. Read the Long Tail people… it’s a good quick read. If you are thinking about advertising here, please please please at least read the blog (or at least a few posts) before contacting me. This is not a splog and I don’t care to dilute the content just to get a few dollars from people who don’t take the time to either click around here or at least google my name.
Take the time to get to know your audiences and take the time to get to know the places where you might be placing your brand.
Interesting times, my friends.
The Affiliate Blog List has morphed into BUMPzee! (complete with exclamation point). This all came out of a blog post a few months back.
Scott Jangro, the brains behind the project and nominee for Best Blogger (I can’t wait to see who wins in all of the areas…pretty stacked competition in every category) at this month’s Affiliate Summit in Vegas, writes:
What’s with that name? I decided to go broader than affiliate marketing in the name, though that’s all there is on the site right now. Personally, I belong to a few other communities and I can see the same sort of thing developing, but they wouldn’t mix with the affiliate stuff very well. So, with future growth in mind, I went with a silly web 2.0 type name.
So, affiliate marketers, this is your website. Create an account, spiff up your profile, keep up with industry news, and create your own. Pretty soon, I’m hoping this will be a place to connect with other affiliate marketers all over the world. Personally, in a very short time it’s been responsible for my own meeting of several new people. And that’s pretty cool.
That is pretty cool, Scott.
This is exactly the type of tool our industry needs to use since we’re not adapting to the notion of RSS on a mass level. Instead, BUMPzee! offers a chance to aggregrate the content from lots of sites, see what others are finding relevant, and communicate in a social atmposphere.
The idea is that there are lots of affiliate marketing blogs to go through. We all have our feed readers, but may miss a really good entry. If you find a blog entry that you like, come here an give it a bump.
Say what you want about web2.0, but this is going to connect people, help people be discovered, allow the cream to rise to the top, and elevate the nature of discourse in the industry.
Great job, Scott. Keep it coming.
That’s a “we” in the sense of all of us and a “you” in the sense of someone doing something without much help or expectation of help/community from others.
Take the new open source alternative to the iPhone.
Completely open Linux base and you can customize to your hearts delight. No contract, no proprietary code to keep you out (except for the GPS but that’s hackable… and the iPhone doesn’t even have GPS as Scoble has pointed out).
Here’s a chart comparing the iPhone with the OpenMoko…
http://www.linuxtogo.org/gowiki/OpenMoko/iPhone
Interesting stuff.
So it has far less memory and no camera. You can add an SD card for up to 2 gigs and the camera… well… yeah, that’s a bummer. But, I’d rather have my soul than a camera on my phone.
I’m buying one, and you should too. Tell Jobs and AT&T where to stick their DRM. Stand up for your right to own what’s yours.
Who wants to help me build an open source CPA network?
I’m starting tomorrow. Let me know if you’re interested.
Yes, I’m dead serious!
Other networks, affiliates, merchants, tech guys, Firefox programmers, Linux programmers, consultants, Partner Makers, Affiliate Things, speakers of Porter-ese, guys with guylights and even SEO’ers are welcome to join the construction crew. Completely open source code and transparency from top to bottom. You can even take the code and start our own flavor of network.
It’s going to change the world (or at least what we’ve thought of as “affiliate marketing“) … why wouldn’t you want to help? Life’s too short not to dream big and work for good. This is the ultimate form of that good for our industry.
Open it up, distrubute the tools, encourage the debate and the mashing of teeth and watch the spirit of human ingenuity do the rest. Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. So are you!
1) Court only large publishers, affiliates and partners who can drive demand and make you “the big bucks.”
2) Have “brand loyalty” to one particular network based on their payout structure and refuse to work with anyone else.
3) Ignore CJ, Zanox, ShareASale, Linkshare because you work in “the performance marketing side of things” and don’t care to sift through all the ads in those places.
4) Ignore Azoogle, Market Leverage, AdDrive, XY7, Hydra, or RocketProfits because they “work with spammers and emailers.”
5) Trade in your morals and ethics (and those are relative, of course) in exchange for short term profit. You’ll wreck your program, network or affiliate site if you do.
6) Don’t read blogs, listen to podcasts, read books or think deep thoughts because you are interested in “practical” tips rather than theoretical ones.
7) Read an e-book by a self-professed expert, think “I can do that too!” and set up an affiliate link farm to rake in the AdSense dollars.
8) Go to bed at 11pm and not wonder how your program, network, site or affiliate link did that day in terms fo revenue, reach and relevancy.
9) Tell people you work in affiliate marketing because you like to work from home.
10) Don’t attend conferences, participate on forums such as ABW, WickedFire or AffiliatePrograms, and don’t try to make friends because this is all about the money.
The thing CJ has done right (and most CPA networks have done wrong) is to provide access, energy and opportunities to the smaller affiliates. These are affiliates who aren’t providing thousands of dollars in sells or leads every month. Instead, they are consistently providing a few hundred dollars every month.
If you include smaller affiliates in your network and offer them the chance to find their niche and provide consistent revenue for themselves and your network, you’ll find the revenues add up quickly.
So, stop attempting to woo just the “super affiliates” or the large publishers. Give the smaller affiliates a chance. Even if they are producing small amounts of money compared to an A List affiliate, there are still a good number of them. A small number multiplied by a large number is still a large number in economics.
So, don’t ignore them in your network or merchant program.
That’s “quantum marketing.”
The amount of inventory in ad networks created by publishers and affiliates is too high to sustain any sort of scarcity that could drive cpm prices higher for publishers or affiliates. However, this abundance of inventory creates a viable and incredibly valuable chunk of potential revenue for both the network and the partnering publisher or affiliate.
So, the affiliate marketplace is no longer constrained by a macro supply and demand metric. That is the key problem that many large scale merchants have been grappling with in their attempts to use the affiliate channel with any degree of success.
The limitless digital reservoir of content and inventory located in the existing ad networks will only grow exponentially as the web continues to expand more into our lives and subsumes every channel of offline content. Entertainment (mp3’s and torrented movies) and comparison shopping (Amazon, eBay) have already created a sustainable paradigm shift and every market will undergo these sorts of tectonic movements – and soon.
This includes the marketing market, which seems to be an illogical oxymoron, but in reality is a marketplace just as real as entertainment or shopping. Marketing offline has translated itself online in the form of our metrics (CPA, CPM) and business plans. However, that will change and online marketing (especially affiliate marketing) will begin to create new paradigms and languages which will prove much more profitable and effective for both advertiser and advertisee.
Offline content (whether music, movie, clothes, beer or marketing campaign) was easily proprietary in nature. You could easily set up walled garens to limit access (and distribution) of the “good stuff” to select customers willing to exchange a certain commodity of currency or attention. However, the digital nature of the web transforms that because what was once a tangible product are now digital H20 molecules in a rushing river or digital content (and that river always leads to a vast ocean).
Scarcity placed limits on choices for networks and for affiliates in the traditional economic setup. Now, those limits are rapidly vanishing. Affiliate marketing is in a very good place to help create the marketing equivalent of bittorrent technology.
Marketers discuss the term “audience” a great deal, but what does “audience” really mean? I’d aruge it doesn’t mean anything. It is undefinable and therefore cannot adequately be contained within a box. Audiences are the electrons of online marketing.
Both Jeff and Shawn/Lisa have podcasts that tend to cover similar topics, yet their audiences are different. Zanox and Commission Junction are both affiliate networks with reach in the US and Europe, yet the audiences are different. Market Leverage and Azoogle are both CPA networks, but have different audiences. CPN and ReveNews are both blogs about the world of online and affiliate marketing, yet we have different audiences.
How well do we all know our audiences?
In the blogosphere, we use tools such as MyBlogLog, Google Analytics and Feedburner to find out more about who’s visiting our blogs and where they are coming from. However, those tools don’t tell me much besides quantitative numbers. Numbers are wonderful and can be put together and taken apart in fantastic OpenOffice Spreadsheets (use open source!). But numbers don’t tell me much about the actual visitor. They don’t give me the kind of data that I’d love to have on who you are, what you like, what you don’t like and how I can get you to do something.
So when I write a blog post, am I writing to or for my audience or am I writing to or for myself? When Shawn or Jeff does a podcast, are they doing it for themselves (and their contributors) or are they doing it for the audience. When Market Leverage finds a great new offer from Dreammates, do they help construct the payout structure and creative details to fit their own vision or do they have their network publishers in mind?
How much of an impact should our audiences have upon the nature of our marketing efforts? Think about that before you make a decision. Is playing to your audience a measurable value and an quantifiable metric? Is there a way to measure the value of audience impact over and against your (or your network’s or your affiliate program’s or your podcast’s) own voice?
There’s grand money in a solution like that. Am I trying to build one? Yes. Can you use it? No. It is completely subjective and it’s called intuition. Some marketers have it and some don’t. It’s a skill, but it does require a working knowledge of ajax empathy coding with a little python powered gut feeling. Truly, the singularity is upon us.
The truth (and that’s a relative term as well) is that you can never fully “know” your audience. To know something is to fully understand it. You can describe the basic characteristics of your audience, and you can come close to making a definitive statement about how they behave and how they respond to your offers, podcasts or blog posts… but you should give up on any attempts to “know them.” Your audience is a misty fog that can’t be contained or defined.
Better yet, your audience is like the thousands of stars in the night sky. You can see the stars and point to them, but what you are seeing, pointing to and describing are those stars (or your audience) as they existed in the past. There is a distance between every podcast/network/offer/blog and audience. The stars you see and the audiences you want to reach vary in distance from you, and that distance affects how you perceive both stars and audiences.
The electron is the best example. We can see the trail left by the subatomic particle, but we can never see the electron itself. We know where it might be located (hence quantum theory and the term ‘electron clouds’) but we can’t positively define their location.
Even if you are within touching distance, you’ll never be able to put them under your thumb because what we see, and what we perceive, are always actions from the past.
So, learn to see the trails left by your constellations of quantum audiences. But don’t ever try to define them, and don’t get frustrated when you can’t completely reach them because your audience is constantly changing, and constantly moving. Such is the nature of all things… even affiliates, publishers, listeners and readers.