Sam Harrelson

I recently posted about a new Partnercentric managed program called AdventureQuest focused on the exploding online gaming market.

Another gaming company, K2, has also opened an affiliate program with a 90 day cookie, 10% payout and PayPal only payments.

The K2 Network, Inc. Affiliate Program provides a way for you to be a part of the exciting and constantly growing universe of online gaming. K2 Network’s games have a large audience and our subscription base is increasing at a steady pace. You can make money as an affiliate of K2 Network – all you need is a website.

Until gaming companies such as Capcom and BioWare are snagged up by the large media companies, expect more gaming companies to follow suit. It only makes sense that these companies would seek to use the affiliate platform to increase word of mouth advertising and reward loyal gamers.

I think there’s a great overlap between the world of gaming and affiliate marketing in terms of metrics, performance incentives and general macro percentages. Perhaps they will implement mobile into their ad platform as well and begin to recognize the power of Jeff Doak’s “Marketing is Flat” philosophy.

Email me or comment below if you’re a merchant or network looking for affiliates and I’ll post you below…

Forums? Email newsletters? Blogs? Email blasts? Plaxo? Web2.0 stuff?

The question that merchants and networks always have is how they can they find more affiliates. Here are five quick tips I’ve been successful with while working in the network space…

1. Have attractive offers (more is not better… we all know what FreeSlide did). Attractive offers are offers that are easy to understand, are consistent in payout and can even be niche focused.

2. Blog, podcast or do videos that discuss the industry and important issues rather than just producing fluff content describing how super awesome your network or program is.

3. Participate participate participate.

4. Don’t have long and annoying signatures on your email messages. Put them in text, make them quick and easy to read and understand, and put your phone number or maybe url at the most. If an affiliate wants your AIM or your Skype info, they’ll ask.

5. Have a gimmick that makes you stand out… use Twitter for communications, have a crazy color scheme, send Lego toys to affiliates… do something different.

What did I leave out?

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:

• I would recommend running your affiliate program with three ongoing directives: recruit, activate, and retain affiliates.
• It’s essential that you recruit affiliates into your affiliate program, have a process in place to activate them, and then work to retain them.
• Affiliate marketing isn’t like other marketing channels. Money alone cannot power it – you need to focus on the relationships of your affiliates, too.

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!