Sam Harrelson

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:

–Loxly aka Deborah

–Jim Kukral

–Shawn Collins

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:

• “So, what kind of stuff do you cover on the blog?”
• “Do you cover CPA Networks?”
• “Are you going to Vegas, dude?”
• “Can you do a post about our new programs if we sponsor you?”
• “Could you put a few affiliate links in the posts?”
• “So what’s the difference between your blog and advertising in Revenue Magazine?”
• “Can we preview your posts before you put them up so that our legal can approve them?”
• “Can we do a pay per post arrangement?”
• “What do you think is the future of affiliate marketing?”

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.

Do datafeeds have a future?

Will the micro-fication and niche-ification of the web render them useless or cause even more adoption of them?

Why don’t CPA networks use datafeeds?

At the hipster coffee shop across the street from the university where I teach (and where I have my “office” for office hours, advisees and pontificating about online marketing), I got the following cup wrapper on my daily cafe mocha this morning…

Interesting.

It’s an ad for NyQuil and DayQuil from Proctor&Gamble on a coffee cup. I understand advertising such things in heavy rotation during this time of the year (Affiliate Summit will also be Affiliate Flu Summit, I’m sure… that’s why I’m staying out in the desert at night!). I also get the reference of “… Keeps You Going” to caffeine.

However, this must be a branding attempt rather than an advertising attempt. Having a cold and needing NyQuil is not an emotional experience that I share with being at a hipster organic coffee shop. Branding yourself as relevant to the audience of such a coffee shop (where the slogan is “Community in a Cup”) is a smart move, though.

Who you are is partially defined by who you associate with.

The company behind the ad placement is BriteVision.

Who you work with, what offers you run and what networks you are a part of has a great deal of importance to how people perceive your brand.  Short term monetary gains are nice, but you can’t buy a good brand.  Keep that in mind when the payout might be higher and the grass might be greener in a less reputable field. That is especially true in the CPA Network affiliate/publisher bidding wars!

My first job in this industry was in the email marketing side of things, so I’m constantly thinking about that sphere and playing with tools to improve its efficiency, relevance and overall karma. Let’s face it… email marketing has a black eye (or two).

However, I still keep in touch with many of my contacts from that side of things, and they are telling me more and more everyday how hot list management and email marketing is becoming again. If you were involved in either of those markets in 2001-2003 (or BCS as some of us call it… “Before Can-Spam“), you know the serious amounts of money that were flowing in from large advertisers and networks and out the other way towards anyone with a few thousand names and emails. That money brought even more blood hungry sharks into an already vulnerable situation and eventually brought the house down.

However, email is coming back in a big way largely due to social media such as RSS, blogs, and emerging media (or “web2.0” for lack of a better term) sites. It’s ironic because RSS was to be the savior of the inbox and cause all of us to re-examine how we consume data. That is true in some circles, but for the vast majority of individuals, RSS is still virtually unknown.

For instance, I get blank looks from the students in my college classes when I mention that they can subscribe to our class blog feed in a reader. They’ve all subscribed to receive updates in their email inboxes (with an alarmingly large number of @hotmail.com and @aol.com addresses for 18 year olds!). GMail and the new Yahoo Mail are helping to change things towards RSS consumption with integration of feeds, but most users of webmail are still on platforms which allow them to function inside the inbox with enough ease and comfort to not be bothered with RSS.

Amazingly, 34% of the over one hundred subscribers to CPN use the FeedBurner email option instead of using the feed inside of a feed reader. So, let’s not expect the general public to hop on the RSS bandwagon while online marketers and thought shapers are still using email subscriptions as well.

Which brings me back to the original point. Email is becoming hot again because spam filters are working, individuals are smarter and email is still highly relevant.

Make your affiliate site or network based on a community based theme, and you’ll see the validity of “email marketing 2.0” On both the backend (data collection and aggregation) and front end (marketing to email addresses), the forecast is sunny.

Every day (depending on the quality), I’ll be posting a “comment of the day.”

Yes, it’s cheesy, but sometimes visitors don’t dig down into the comments here and miss out on some great insight. There’s better content in the comments here than the actual posts, so make sure you’re following those!

Here’s the CPN comments feed (which is just the comments. The full feed is over to your left in the menubar).

And here’s the quote of the day…

Jeff Doak of Kowabunga responds to the question of innovation in affiliate marketing…

Specifically, something like datafeed-driven storefronts (GoldenCan, KBStores, etc) comes to mind.

But generally, a focus on more measurability and more analytics — CPA as a metric allows full measurement of channel vs. channel; also marketing to niches by allowing influencers in those niches to get compensation for referrals. This latter concept is going to affect everything moving forward.

Thanks, Jeff!

And thanks to all of you for reading and commenting!

Google is an ad company, and a very good one. Yahoo is an ad company as well, but they are smart about social media.

However, the way people and consumers search is going to continue to shift away from Google towards a more social model (that is what Yahoo is positioning for with its recent acquisitions).

When this happens, CPC will explode and the split between CPC and CPA will finally be bridged.

Yahoo knows this, and so should you.

[Edit:  Ask.com knows this as well.  Check out their sandbox project, AskX.  Thanks, Andy!]

What innovations is affiliate marketing providing for the larger universe of online marketing?

1) Go micro.

2) Bridge the gap between the ABW flavored affiliate marketing community and the CPA network flavor of affiliate/performance marketing.

3) Leverage the tremendous amounts of inventory inside of the affiliate and CPA networks in a relationship with the tremendous (and exponentially growing) amounts of ad space available on the emerging media platforms.

4) Read the Long Tail.

5) Stop trying to reach consumers by letting people reach you.

6) Blog

7) Read blogs.

8) Listen to podcasts and watch Ze Frank.

9) Pull, don’t push.

10) Own your niche.

You may have notice the small text between the end of the post and the “Comments” option here on Cost Per News which says:

“Popularity: 3% [?]”

That little bit of text is supplied by an incredibly interesting plugin called Popularity Contest…

Popularity Contest is a WordPress plugin that keeps track of activity on your blog and calculates a popularity percentage for each post and page.

The popularity display you see:

Popularity: 27% [?]

is the rank of that post or page compared to the other posts and pages on the site.

Since page view counts, etc. are cumulative, newer posts will generally have lower popularity values than older posts. This, of course, evens out over time.

The values for different events (page views, feed views, comments, etc.) are configurable on a per-site basis, so each site may rank their content differently.

This is serious long tail stuff. However, over a given period of time, it is going to be incredibly valuable meta-data. If you have a network, merchant offer or CPA program, you should have a blog (a la Rextopia’s blog, FeedRex).

If you don’t, please let me know and I’ll help you set one up. EVERY network needs a blog, and this type of data would be INVALUABLE for your program’s blog.

Based on that data, I’ve set up a display of the top posts based on popularity. You can see which posts have had the most trackbacks, comments, views, etc. It’s not as interesting as the Popularity Contest plugin, but it is nice to see which posts have raised the most ruckus in the industry.

Of course, Molander’s podcast with Mrs. X on affiliate and CPA networks is at the top. I’m trying to convince Jeff to do another podcast on trademarks and affilaite marketing, so help me convince him.

Let me know what you think of the upgrades or if you have any advice!

Affiliate Summit has been sold out for just a few days, and now passes are beginning to pop up on eBay and drawing higher and higher prices every day (now upwards of $2500)…

This is good for affiliate marketing. It shows a healthy demand and a great product, in terms of both the conference and what affiliate marketing is able to produce.

Shawn and Missy have put together a show which everyone wants to visit and with the recent trade show hype over MacWorld and CES, people are beginning to realize the importance of these events. In my own opinion, I’d put Affiliate Summit above AdTech as a must attend show, and I don’t think that because there’s a banner over to your right —->

Even though it’s apples and oranges, I’ve always gotten much more “out of” Affiliate Summit than AdTech because of the niche focus. There’s something to be said about the impressiveness of the floor at AdTech, the people you meet and the list of speakers, but the Summit is quickly gathering enough steam to draw it’s own headliners who are appropriate to the niche of affiliate marketing.

Is the success of Affiliate Summit and the demand for tickets a sign (at least in online marketing) that conferences as we once knew them are slowly breaking down? In 10 years will all conferences be niche conferences? Think about CJU, SES, BarCamps or even (as much as I was appalled by the hubris of the name), the “Elite Retreat” (I feel dirty just for writing that).

At least Dave Taylor was right on this point… “The smaller the event, the more valuable It Is.”

Let’s make this interesting…I’ll donate a few dollars to the charity of choice for the person who comes closest to guessing the final amount of money an Affiliate Summit pass gets the week before the show.

Small is the new conference and it’s only going to get more micro.

I’ve disabled Akismet.

After too many frustrations and problems with false-positives, I’ve decided to use a mathematical algorithm plug-in to filter through spam comments and good comments.

So, try it out if you’d like.

You should see something like “Please add 9 and 8” with a box to fill in (the correct answer is 17, btw). This should help with quality comments getting held up in the spam box.

If the math problem doesn’t show up, you might need to log out of WordPress (go to www.wordpress.com and log out) and then comment, but that should be a rarity.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

Mobile marketing will be huge in 2007.

Widgets will be huge in 2007.

iTunes will continue to be huge in 2007.

The iPhone will be huge in 2007.

Put it all together and you’re on to next-gen marketing.

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The Apple iPhone is already legendary and has just been announced this morning. Expect this thing to fly off the shelves. With the popularity of the iPod firmly established, this device could be just as successful.

Interestingly enough, the iPhone will run OSX and use widgets.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Marketing…widgets…iTunes…mobile…killer ap?