Sam Harrelson

Is there such thing as an “exclusive offer” that only one network has access to distribute to its publishers or affiliates?

I’d argue no.

In order to be a true exclusive, a network has to basically create an offer in-house and brand it with either a partner brand (unlikely for most networks) or create a brand to superimpose on the generic exclusive offer’s backend. In this case, if a network creates such an “exclusive” and it is successful, nothing prevents a competing network to quickly develop a similar offer and impose a new brand on top of that one. This is what most networks have attempted to do when creating “exclusives” to lure in new publishers or affiliates.

I argue that it’s not the offer’s exclusivity of style that can achieve that goal, but the brand exclusivity of an in-house offer.

For instance, take the FreeSlide $1.00 pay per email (and later zip) offers that originated with the AdDrive network and quickly spread out through the CPA network world like a fast growing wildfire. FreeSlide as a brand may have been an exclusive, but there were so many knock-offs so quickly that the exclusive nature of FreeSlide quickly vanished. What remained was the brand, which did prove to have staying power and put AdDrive on the map.

In that way, AdDrive figured out how to monetize and attract new publishers with offer brand , rather than just with offer exclusivity. The fad has now passed and FreeSlide is not accepting new signups, but the brand exclusivity is permanently ingrained on the brains of every one in the email marketing world.
The trick is not to establish a unique in terms of function, but establish a unique in terms of brand. That is the selling point that many small CPA networks seem to be missing, but if they were to start thinking of creating ways to insure the long term benefit of a certain in-house brand, rather than trying to out-do competitors with payouts, they could also find the sweet spot of offer creation.

On tonight’s episode of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert issued a $5 challenge (in the spirit of Microsoft) to the first person who changed the definition of “Reality” on Wikipedia to include “Reality has become a commodity.” I’m posting this about 2 mins after he issued the challenge, and I’m sure it’s already been accomplished. The Wikipedia watchers are going to have another long night (or morning on the other side of the pond).

However, reality is not just about our phenomenological experiences. It also encompasses our daily interactions with other humans and technologies. Affiliate marketing is a facet of that reality for most of us and for millions of users who don’t realize that they are participating in “affiliate marketing.”

How should that reality be defined? Should it be purely a commodity based reality? Or is there greater value in helping your visitors, customers or users realize that the reality of affiliate marketing interaction they are participating in with your site is not just a commodity… it is also a relational experience in which they can share, learn or grow as a human.

How to do that?

It greatly depends on your program, site or shopping cart process. Whatever your case, I would start with a the realization that relationships can make you money (if that’s what your ultimate goal is), and work from that point of realization. Try out things to accomplish that goal. Value based relationships want to occur… so don’t hold them back behind a commodity based fence.

I think there’s a great deal of value in allowing for a deeper level of affiliate marketing reality which transcends the artificially imposed boundaries of pure commodity.

Most of you are familiar with larger CPA networks such as Azoogle or CPA Empire, but should you be looking into the possibility of working with CPA networks that are smaller in scale?

What about Rextopia, MarketLeverage or LevelClick?

I asked Lindsey Kane of IceWaterMedia‘s CPA network LevelClick about such differentiating factors and why publishers or affiliates should consider working with their network rather than a more traditional affiliate network (CJ, Linkshare or ShareASale) or one of the larger CPA networks.

Here is her response:

“We have several exclusive offers that you can not find on any other network. Also, all affiliates and advertisers receive a subscription to “Lindsey’s List” which is our weekly newsletter. In addition, we offer a wide range of tools/campaigns for contextual marketing which is our specialty.”

How important are “exclusive” offers to recruiting affiliates? I’d say they can help build a network’s brand, but they are definitely not selling points for a network in a crowded marketplace.

However, Lindsey’s other two points about “Lindsey’s List” and helping affiliates and publishers with their contextual marketing via unique tools or campaigns are unique and potentially valuable selling points for LevelClick. These are the types of services that the smaller networks can provide for affiliates and publishers, and a reason to at least investigate a possible relationship.

The idea of an email subscription which takes the normal affiliate newsletter to the next level (affiliatenewsletter2.0?) could, with the right content and community development, become an extremely beneficial differentiating point. Publishers and affiliates, like most merchants and networks, enjoy putting names with faces. Newsletters with personalities can fill that need (think Adbumb a few years ago). Nice idea, Lindsey.

Helping affiliates and publishers consolidate or improve their contextual advertising programs can also gain a network a friendly reputation and increase word-of-mouth buzz about a certain affiliate manager or network.  Affiliate marketing and even email marketing is about relationships… affiliates and publishers will be much more inclined to work with people they respect and learn from.

Of course, there is no secret formula for determining which networks or merchants you should partner with if you are an affiliate or a publisher. Nonetheless, you should continually seek out new partners and investigate what is going on in the space around you.  Contact LevelClick or Rextopia or MarketLeverage and see what they can do for you.  Finding the right network or merchant to partner with early can be incredibly valuable in the long run, so keep an eye out and do your homework.

Right Media’s RMX Direct for publishers network has just completed a six month beta test and is opening to the public this morning. RMX Direct for Publishers is a simple and free solution for managing advertising networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites by placing ads from partnering merchants and program sites.

One of the differentiating factors of RMX Direct is that it’s built for publishers who sell their advertising primarily through multiple ad networks. The acknowledgment of the economic reality that publishers are working with various networks to fill their ad inventory (whether it’s email, website placements or registration path placements) presents a different outlook than most competitors in this space who unrealistically hope to reign in publishers in a binding partnership which offers little room for a fluid relationship.

At the moment, RMX Direct is working with nine other networks. RMX Direct allows a publisher to create competition for their ad inventory by letting them create direct relationships with those nine ad networks that are participants in the Right Media Exchange. In addition, publishers can increase the competition by adding in additional ad networks such as AdSense, YPN, and Valueclick.

Michael McNeely of RightMedia writes:

“These networks see the characteristics of each ad impression such as the user’s geography, frequency of ads they’ve viewed, and more. They bid in real-time what they’re willing to pay for each impression based on those characteristics. Additionally, publishers can add any ad network they already work with to the competition, guaranteeing that RMX Direct will only earn them more money than they are making today.”

This idea of an exchange aggregation point for a number of networks is a unique twist on the CPA/affiliate network space. Right Media even has some big names giving endorsements for the program as a result. One of those is Matt McAlister, Senior Product Manager for Yahoo who writes:

“It’s plenty robust enough to serve any small publisher’s needs, and some of its clever capabilities may prove useful to large publishers as well. You get a simple self-serve ad management system where you can drop in new creative including ad code from your ad networks like YPN or AdSense or even Feedburner. I’ve also loaded in a house ad. It took only a couple of minutes to setup each ad. Then you get your Right Media ad code to post into your web page templates. Done.”

When asked for a few stats or number from the beta test of RMX Direct, RightMedia responded with these numbers:

– Over 11 billion ad impressions served
– 3.75 billion ad impressions served in the month of December alone
– Over 16 million clicks on ads
– Over 300,000 conversions
– Over $1.4 million in publisher revenue run through RMX Direct
– 750 publisher accounts
– 350 discussions started in the community forums

Interesting. Particularly interesting in my opinion is the inclusion of the “350 discussions started in the forums” stat. Most web2.0 companies collecting beta test data don’t even keep track of that metric, so it is impressive to see an online advertising networking placing value in the community forum discussions going on about the product.

Is this type of partnering aggregation exchange network a sign of things to come as platforms and traditional advertising networks continue to fragment as publishers search for the best use of their ad inventory? I think so.

Andy Beal has launched an online marketing job board as an addition to the Marketing Pilgrim blog…

Andy has partnered with JobThread.com on the site for the backend, and initial job listings include the likes of Microsoft, iProspect, High Rankings, SEO Inc, Channel Advisor, The Rimm-Kaufman Group and Fox Interactive Media.

Nice work, Andy!

YouTube rockstar Shmuel Tennenhaus gives an account and analysis of all the recent YouTube news (Fox sues over episodes of 24 and Simpsons appearing on YouTube, revenue sharing with content providers, new search capabilities, Google enhancements) with his own flavor of commentary…

“Jack Baur is a badass”…

Many of us have played with the beta versions of Microsoft’s new OS, Windows Vista over the past few months. However, what features or potential issues in the operating system might give affiliate marketers a headache or reason to cheer?

Granted, affiliate marketing is an online business, so it would seem that an offline operating system would not interfere with what happens in a customer’s browser. However, Vista has (fairly) integrated the offline with the online and the blend may end up providing new challenges or cheers to those of us in the online marketing sphere.

So, here are some of the features affiliate marketers need to be aware of in Vista… particularly in the internet browsing (IE7) portion of the OS…

• RSS. It’s too early to tell if Vista’s IE7 integration of RSS feeds into the browsing experience will bear much fruit for those of us who have been preaching from the mountaintop about the benefits of RSS for affiliate marketers and merchants outside of pushing offer updates to publishers. There is real gold in growing a large and responsive customer base through RSS… and it’s much cheaper and much more effective than email.
  
  
• Security. Networks such as Linkshare and Digital River’s oneNetworkDirect have begun to move beyond the cookie, but how will Vista’s new security features impact programs and networks (the vast majority) which still rely on cookies for tracking and stats.

• Search Box. Vista has integrated a search box into IE7, similar to Firefox. Will users stick with the Google option or begin to use other search engines or platforms (such as Amazon, Wikipedia) which are built into the drop down options. How will this affect organic search, AdSense, keywords and even SEO?

• CSS, HTML and email. Vista’s new version of Office will put restrictions on the amount of code that can easily pass into a user’s Outlook inbox. While not every affiliate marketer or merchant relies on email, most of the newsletters I receive from networks, merchants and affiliate programs are loaded with html and tracking code. Impact?

• Widgets! Vista is encouraging movement of web browsing onto the desktop in forms of widgets. Watch to see how many users adopt and start demanding these services. Wayne, Carsten and I have been debating how to implement widgets into affiliate marketing, and Vista could change the conversation completely.

What did I miss? What has been put into Vista which should be noticed by affiliate marketers for good or for bad?

In preparing for an objective post on this week’s release of Vista and its potential impact on affiliate marketing, I decided to visit Microsoft’s newest attempt at tapping into customer generated buzz… “Show Us Your Wow.”

Microsoft is using the “Wow Starts Now” as it’s catch phrase for Vista similar to its other less-than-catchy “Welcome to the Social” for its Zune player (I hear “The Social” is a nightclub in Toronto…).

In my attempt to pull up www.showusyourwow.com, I was greeted by the unfriendly “you are not using IE7, so none shall pass” Black Knight (I even tried using my wife’s laptop which runs Windows but the same result with FireFox there)…

I know you are a business, Microsoft. I understand that you have to put up gate keeping Black Knights to force people to use your products, because if you let choice enter into the market you would sink rather quickly as a business. But at least let us poor Firefox users experience the WOW as well. It looks fun judging by her expression. I promise I won’t sneer (too much).

[EDIT: Just found out that ABW is discussing the issue of FireFox’s compatibility with Vista here.]

Scott Jangro’s BUMPzee affiliate marketing community has continued to grow and improve since its official launch about a month ago.

Now Scott has upped the ante with a plugin that can be placed on affiliate marketing blogs, which allows readers to “bump” a post right from the page where they are reading.

I’ve installed the plugin on the permalinks page here at CostPerNews. So, click on an individual post’s title to see the widget in action…

The number of users who have created profiles and actively use the site has grown to 144. While a small number, those 144 include many of the top minds, affiliates, merchants and networks in the affiliate marketing space. In this type of community, exposure to 144 of the top movers and shakers in the industry is highly valuable. I anticipate that number will continue to increase, but I can’t imagine a more high quality group of affiliate marketing professionals.

If you haven’t checked out BUMPzee, I do recommend browsing and setting up an account. The quality of content there is superb and will only continue to grow as the site itself reaches more and more readers and users.

Me.dium is a new service which makes use of our base and primal need as animals to share our experiences. Blogs do this, emails do this, and conversation through language does this.

However, there hasn’t been a scalable and measurable way to adequately determine the value of this human instinct we all share (even we only children who are shy and prefer our “alone time”).

Since affiliate marketing is best described as a relationship focused industry, it would be highly valuable for affiliate marketers to be able to quantify the social nature of traffic.

Me.dium might be a step in that direction.

In the real world, the people and activity around you constantly effect your decisions and behaviors.

No one has ever been able to benefit from these environmental influences online. Our current online experience deprives us of the wisdom of crowds and the day-to-day interaction that happens between strangers in the real world.

Me.dium reveals the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. Without having to do anything differently than you normally do, Me.dium shows you your online world and allows you to communicate with friends and others in a natural, contextual manner. It lets you see what else is around you and relevant based on what you’re doing – all in REAL TIME. Just like the way you interact in the real world.

What I think is valuable is the concept behind this plugin. In my opinion, this is World of Warcraft guild communing and socializing meets social shopping sites such as FatWallet or ThisNext. In many ways, this type of application democratizes the traffic pattern and allows users to influence their friends and others in a paradigm that models real life.

Interesting concept.

I was invited to a private beta for Me.dium, so if you’d like to try the service, let me know and I’ll send over an invite as well.

More from Jerry Paffendorf here and Ajaxian here.