Sam Harrelson

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?