Sam Harrelson

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).