Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 10: Gonna Make a Change

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Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A Publisher (Mike Buechele) and an Affiliate Manager  (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing.  From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!

Unfortunately this week we had a mic failure on Mike’s part, so even though I could hear him when we were recording the podcast on Skype, when listening back he was inaudible.  I tried amplifying it and leveling it and everything, but it was a lost cause.  So instead, we decided I’d give you a recap on what we talked about since they were all pretty important issues.  Basically, we’re taking a page from Shawn Collins’ book on podcast failures ;).  So the title refers both to all the changes going on with tax rules and disclosure regarding affiliates AND to the change Mike has to make to get the recording right next week!

The recap episode is a short and sweet 26 minutes on the dot since it includes a Jackson tribute at the end.

In this show, we discussed:

• A recap of Affiliate Convention.
• Amazon dropped North Carolina affiliates and sent a warning letter to Rhode Island affiliates.  Darren Rowse wrote about it on Problogger.
• The FTC is tightening it’s rules regarding disclosure, but it’s still ambiguous enough to leave affiliates questioning what this means for them.  Daniel M. Clark wrote an article on the FTC disclosure issue, as well as Brian Clark of Copyblogger’s wrote about how to turn disclosure into a selling point.
• Twitter servers took a hit yesterday when the news about Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke.  Are they ready to be a major search engine?
• Rumors swirled about other celebrity deaths – this doesn’t make Twitter look like a legitimate resource in the eyes of skeptics.
• Finally, Rest in Peace to Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who both passed away yesterday.  We pay tribute to MJ and pontificated on whether or not we’d see affiliates attempting to capitalize on these events.  I see just now that Shawn Collins is thinking about this topic as well on his blog.