Sam Harrelson

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.

—

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?

Traffic makes online marketing work. Traffic really makes affiliate marketing work.

We all have paid for traffic and most of us have a firm idea of what sorts of traffic and how much of that traffic makes a site or program profitable.

But we’re all wrong.

Well, most of us are wrong. Let’s think about what “traffic” means in the particular context of online marketing. I think we’re missing out on current and future trends if we keep a static definition of traffic without pondering how we arrive at that definition.

When we start to think about what traffic means, some powerful things can start happening in our heads that we can easily translate into bottom line numbers.

Traffic should be easy to describe and picture in our minds. People go to a specific website hoping or interested in finding information or purchasing possibilities concerning a certain product, good, program or service. How can we think any differently than that about traffic?

Easy. It’s an eight lane superhighway with commuters on both sides… it is not a one lane golden brick road leading to the Oz of your website.

There is something to see behind the curtain, so if you’re stuck in the black and white worldview of throwing money at publishers and affiliates in order to receive “traffic” to you site, you’re going to realize that the man behind the curtain is not what he seems.

But no worries. You had the power to leave that worldview all along, Dorthy.

Let’s take traffic into technicolor and think about how to partner with affiliates and publishers in a way that allows traffic to flourish.

The blog A VC sums it up the best with this prophetic oracle…

Here is the future of media:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 – Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it. Thanks Dave.
4 – Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

For one, you have to give up trying to garden-wall your content. Content is a mustard seed that starts small but quickly matures into a seed bearing bush.

That bush is pretty, but it attracts unwanted guests like ravenous birds and insects who quickly take over your garden and start moving from the mustard bush to other plants that you’d like to protect.

But mustard bushes are hard to get rid of, so you end up spending more time trying to find a way to keep the birds and insects out of the garden than you do on the actual tending and care of the garden itself.

So what do you do?

Allow your content to be completely gleaned by the birds and insects? Put up a protective barrier around the mustard bush in order to keep the birds and insects away? Rip the mustard bush out of your garden and throw it away in order to protect your other flowers?

It’s a tough decision.

But if you have that mustard bush of content already in your garden, you’re hopefully not going to rip it from the ground to keep the predators away. So, wall off or embrace the predators?

Stop walling off.

Let the birds and insects come and pick your content and do with it what they will. Put devices in place so that other parts of your garden may be secure, but allow those with interest in the content you are providing to glean and consume as they like.

Why?

Because you are allowing for the consumption of your content (or product or service) to be determined by the consumer. Instead of trying to force feed interested individuals a certain amount or type of content, you’re allowing the interested individual to make their own decision about the type of content consumption they will make.

As Steve Rubel points out…

Marketers must recognize that people increasingly will consume content in small bites, not large. Brands have an opportunity to introduce consumers to this content by creating platforms where people can aggregate the niche content they care about. In addition, they should move now to make sure existing online investments are ready to be chunked down so people can integrate it into other platforms.

It’s called microchunking. You’ll be hearing a good deal of that word in 2007, so get comfortable with it. Not only does this sort of content consumption enabling allow users to make their own decisions about the amount of content they want from you, it enables our illustration of an 8 lane super highway above to be created.

Micro-transactions have been an option since the turn of the century and were made famous in online marketing (and the movie business) by Brian Clark…

Sometimes, you want to charge just a little bit — such a small amount of money that traditional credit card processing services start to eat up the whole thing with fees. Enter micro transactions or micro-payments, an interesting option for people looking to sell digital content goods for between a dime and a few bucks.

Micro-transactions have caught on with many players in the online marketing world and are an acceptable way to offer payment in today’s market. Microchunking is also undergoing a similar path to adoption and will change the way we do business in online and affiliate marketing because getting people to visit a specific site will no longer be necessary.

Instead, smart merchants or producers looking for traffic will begin to recognize that by partnering with smart affiliates and publishers who are using microchunking techniques and allowing the content to be split up and made mashable, they gain much more in long term, quality and sustainable traffic.

It really isn’t that hard to do, and you can always get there by clicking your heels three times and saying “There’s no place like the feed reader… there’s no place like the feed reader… there’s no place like the feed reader…”

Try it. You’ll be surprised.

Yahoo gobbles up MyBlogLog for over 10 million.

This is not good news for those of us who have readily enjoyed the service over the last 8 months because the incubation period of this project has not had long enough to develop unlike del.icio.us or Flickr. Even though MyBlogLog has been a darling of bloggers everywhere (including myself), I think this might be the jumping the shark moment.

Expect lots of attempts at user spam and an end to innocence. Don’t be surprised if I remove the widgets here soon as the amount of spam has already been increasing on a daily basis.

Congrats to the MyBlogLog team, but I hope the integration goes well (unlike some other Yahoo services).

Affiliate marketing has a unique position within the world of online marketing.

The greatest world changers, whether in terms of religion, science, sociology, anthropology, or any other discipline have always been those pushed to the edges and marginalized.

There are two main types of marginalization:
1. Marginalization that is assigned
2. Marginalization that is embraced.

Marginalization is not accidental. Marginalization is a willful act that tries to maintain the status quo or protects the interest of those that hold the power or the money and attempt to maintain a grip on power by pushing those who disagree or attempt to push reform by marginalizing the trouble makers.

In many ways, I see affiliate marketers as the trouble makers in the general scheme of online marketing. It is a slippery channel, full of individuals not willing to easily slide into one monetized or easily defined column. That is dangerous, that is revolutionary, and that is important.

Because a group, such as affiliate marketers, are marginalized doesn’t mean that they don’t have power. Rather, they have even more power through their own imaginations, efforts, stories, convictions and forums.

Being on the periphery, or margins, and being pushed out by the power hungry center enables the potential for radical possibilities. As affiliate marketers, we are able to see things from the edges that online marketers and those in the center of power online cannot see. We are able to spot trends, such as social media and tagging, that those insulated and buffered within cannot see.

So, let’s embrace our position on the periphery in affiliate marketing. If “traditional online marketers” want to push us out to the edges of the marketing world, let’s embrace our position and enjoy the worldview which this affords.

Wow.

Now this is something to get excited about.

I’ve been a big fan of Second Life for a while in terms of its ramifications for studying sociology and metanarratives. However, it’s hard to translate such interests beyond just describing the coolness factor.

How to relate a platform such as Second Life to online marketing is not an easy task, especially when you are trying to convince the uninitiated. Sure, there’s already an audience of 2.5 million users there, but what does it mean for online marketing, and can you (or should you) really attempt to market to the users? I’d argue yes, but it takes a certain brand of marketing with a good handle of finesse and flexibility and a base knowledge of the pre-existing community.

Now, Linden Labs has announced it is opening up Second Life to coders and hackers everywhere (a la Firefox or Linux)…

Aiming to take advantage of its already-impressive momentum, San Francisco’s Linden Lab, developer of the Second Life virtual online world, will announce Monday that it is taking the first major step toward opening up its software for the contributions of any interested programmer.

The company will immediately release open source versions of its client software for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. In order to enter and move around the Second Life service, users must download and run this software on their computer desktop. But now, says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale, independent programmers will be able to “modify it, fire it up and sign on with it.” The company gave Fortune exclusive access to executives in advance of the change.

This is just the step that was needed to make the platform more accessible, more friendly and potentially easier to grok in terms of how to do marketing on a platform such as this.

Of course, this will take some time to roll out, but expect quick and numerous alterations, split-offs and eventually different “flavors” of Second Life within the coming years (such as how there are different flavors of Linux from Ubuntu to Fedora to Red Hat).

The burning question is when will Wayne Porter and his band of merry men create Affiliate Life (deliberate bait since Wayne doesn’t like the term “affiliate”) for all of us to enjoy??

Here’s the lineage of the infamous “5 Things Blog Meme” in terms of the SEO crowd. I had no idea I could be grouped with SEO’ers.

http://www.soloseo.com/blog-tag-tree.html

I’ve said the whole practice of SEO is almost meaningless in the current market and have been yelled at by a few, so I guess this is guilt by association!

Hasn’t blogging and blogging platforms such as WordPress, Typepad, Vox, Blogger LiveJournal and even MySpace done away with the need for professional SEO’ers? Forget affiliate marketing, Jeff… it’s SEO that needs a serious reconsideration and wake-up call. It seems the entire base of that profession is running off of four year old momentum.

If you do practice SEO, please convince me that it is not completely worthless.

Otherwise, I’ll go on following the data I have and producing good content… which seems to do more for Google or organic rank than any (needlessly expensive) attempt at manipulation of the system.

Many of us have interesting stories to tell of how we ended up involved in the affiliate and online marketing space.

I just had a beyond interesting conversation with a well-known name in our little sphere and we spent a long time chatting about our backgrounds and what got us here.  I’ll post my story in the comments shortly.
How did you get here?

If you haven’t taken the time to grab a pass to Affiliate Summit West at the end of the month, you’re going to have to go to eBay.

Shawn is blogging that the conference has already sold out.

Great news for buzz and for the health of the affiliate marketing industry in general.

See you there!

Nice work, Shawn and Missy.

I’m putting out a call to all forward thinking marketers in the affiliate and online spaces…

USE TWITTER!

Why?  It’s not just vanity blogging, it’s instant communication with power and community.  I’m seeing what other segments are doing with the service, and it’s pretty impressive for networking.

With the Affiliate Summit just a few weeks away, this would be a great tool to keep in touch with co-workers and people you want to meet while on the floor as you can send and check twitter messages from your phone/pda/crackberry.

Seriously… just give it a try.

Here’s mine.  Do with yours what you will, but let’s start a little ecosystem of marketers in our space.

I don’t put a great deal of emphasis or attention on metrics such as page views or feed subscribers. There are much more effective measurements of attention and readership that I’ve developed and use.

However, during this time of blog introspection, some stats are encouraging:

1. Vlad points out in the comments that the site has grown from a Google Ranking of 0 at the end of October (when it was created) to a probable 6 in the next update. Thanks for sharing, Vlad. I wouldn’t have noticed and that made my day. Explaining my excitement to my wife was tricky, however. Keep up the great work on your blog, Vlad… it’s a daily destination for me.

2. Feedburner shows that for first time CostPerNews had 100 active users of the feed in a 24 hour period yesterday. That’s no where near TechCrunch, Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel… but this blog will never see those numbers due to the niche aspect. Having 100 active feed users (along with the other site readers not using the feed) put a smile on my face this morning. Online (especially affiliate) marketing is a small industry, so seeing triple digits in the feed count gave me a definite boost.

3. CostPerNews has had readers from every continent in the last month. Who ever is in Lebanon, TN seems to be a big fan, as well. Thank you Lebanon, TN! Beautiful city. Auckland, New Zealand and Reykjavik, Iceland are two places I’ve always wanted to see (my ancestors were Icelandic Vikings). Thanks for visiting. Can I come visit you?

4. About 57% of you are spending 8 minutes or more on the site. That’s a neat stat because it shows that you’re actually reading the articles and even commenting.

5. Cost Per News’ Technorati rank has been steadily increasing and we’ve been able to maintain a solid position inside the top 100,000 which was my 6 month benchmark. We’re closing in on 75,000 so my new benchmark for the 6 month mark (June ’07) is to be within the top 50,000. Doesn’t sound impressive, but again… this is a niche blog that has a glass ceiling of “page views” and “rank.”

So, thank you for continued visits and input. The last 24 hours have been filled with positive and encouraging emails and phone calls, and I do appreciate those. Stats are fun to review, but rarely tell you much about the actual nature of a blog or a site.

Online marketing is slowly realizing the old paradigms of quantitative numbers don’t equate with the actual quality of a site’s readership or the responsiveness a community may have to certain marketing techniques. For instance, Ze Frank’s community is relatively small by traditional metrics, but incredibly loyal and devoted. I’d rather have that community than a million faceless impressions if I were building a program.

By the way, I’m still searching the job offers and would love to make an announcement at Affiliate Summit later this month. Contact me if you’re in need of someone with lots of experience in this space!