Career

Fired on the First Day

Posted on May 2, 2008 in Career | 3 comments

A little wisdom to start your weekend – remember to be grateful for what you have. A friend of mine was telling me a story earlier that made me remember how lucky I am to work for a laid back company.

He works at a small marketing firm in San Francisco and they hired a new bookkeeper. On her first day, she was 15 minutes late. The boss brought her into her office and immediately told her that it wasn’t going to work out since she was late, and that she was fired.

Now when my friend told me this part, I thought it had to be a joke to teach the new employee a lesson…turns out the boss was dead serious. She has zero tolerance for lateness, and cut the woman loose immediately.

So just reflect on what you have and be thankful that you don’t work for that woman 😉

Who’s on YOUR A-list?

Posted on Apr 25, 2008 in Career | 2 comments

What does it mean to be on the A-List? It’s subjective, I’m sure… A-List can be different depending on the industry, niche, subject, category, you name it. An actor on the A-List would never show up on the A-list of an affiliate marketer.

My A-List is pretty much the same people who appear in my sidebar links – I’ve chosen to give them the link love. Most of which are affiliate marketers like Shawn Collins, Missy Ward, Sam Harrelson, etc. But I’ve also got to give shout outs to some other good blogs out there like those belonging to Linda Sherman, Jim Kukral, and Andy Beal. These are the blogs I learn the most from, and these people are my A-Listers.

So who’s on your A-List? Give them some love & a shout out!

Get a Mentor!

Posted on Apr 17, 2008 in Career |

I don’t have one… maybe if I did I wouldn’t be cursing to the FeedBurner gods asking why my feeds are mysteriously cut short all of a sudden despite having my settings in wordpress and FeedBurner set correctly.

I digress… watch Jim Kukral talk about the importance of a mentor while I go in search of my usual creativity (and perhaps a FeedBurner mentor of my own!).

Good People Day

Posted on Apr 3, 2008 in Career | 1 comment

So Gary Vaynerchuk at WineLibrary is at it again, enthusiastically making up holidays as he fancies. He’s come up with April 3rd as Good People Day, a day to thank those that help you, inspire you, etc. He explains it better than I, so here:

So I’m left to wondering who I should thank. I guess there’s several peeps out there that inspire me. Here we go, in no particular order.

• Anne Casanova, my manager. She’s awesome!
• Sam Harrelson. A great blogger, generally nice and helpful guy.
• All the people I follow on twitter for constant entertainment.
• All the people who read my blog. Y’all rock and give me a good motivation to keep talking.
• The GeekCast crew for making me laugh hysterically once a week, so big ups to Jim Kukral, Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins, and Sam Harrelson once again.
• My best friends ever for always being there for me, Katie Shaw, Lorenza Martinez, Rachel Nuckols, and Jennifer Morrill. None of them are big interwebbers, so no links!
• Karen Garcia is a great for random questions via Twitter. So is Deborah Loxly!

Day 3 of asw08 – Part 2, Fin!

Posted on Feb 28, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Of course the best way to keep readers is to create a sense of anticipation in one’s blog, yet I assure you that was not my intention in waiting until today to finish my recap of Day 3. The Nevada dryness and, I come to find, altitude was not conducive to my attempts to fight off a bug that’s been going around here. So I returned home from ASW08 yesterday, slept ALL day, and already feel better just being back here on the California coast with my 20 ft above sea level home and cool air.

So where was I? Somewhere around Asymmetric Warfare. This was a great panel about affiliate fraud, something I’m not entirely familiar with how to combat. I picked up some great tips and can’t wait to receive a copy of the presentation from moderator Graham MacRobie. There was a TON of information, such as tips on how to prevent fraud, a list of countries to be careful of applications from (these countries are REALLY easy to create offshore corporations at so it could be fraudulent), and information on typo-squatting, tasting, and kiting (not sure if I spelled that right).

Some highlights I noted:

• Know your partners & reach out to them. Staying in touch will help weed out fraud.
• Check the WHOIS contact info for the affiliate domain name – will help ID fraud but also give you a chance to see if they have any other websites that your program would be a good fit for.
• Do what you can to own your own typo’d websites and redirect to your official website to avoid typosquatting (costly, but probably the best way to protect your brand).
• Don’t assume fraud will go unnoticed.
• Be wary of affiliates using redirects – not always a sign of fraud but worth a second look.
• www.torproject.org – proxy site to see the affiliates website as the rest of the world sees it, just in case they have an IP rule on you so it looks legit to the manager.
• Well thought out rules indicate vigilance against fraud & help to protect against it.
• Networks can help protect you because they trade info about globally bad affiliates and provide a first line of defense against fraud before the affiliate even gets to you.
• An audience member asked if it’s better to let everyone in or to be really selective, and the panelists advised to go for an approach right in the middle. Give the new affiliates a chance to succeed as lots have potential they just need to gain experience. Reach out to the little guy & try to help rather than cutting them from your program when they don’t perform.
• A good way to stay in touch with affiliates without being annoying to them is to just get an agreement with them about how often they want to be contacted. One call per month can be much more effective than a weekly blanket email.
• Understand how your company deals with transactional fraud before setting a policy that will affect paying your affiliates.
• If you’re really concerned, there are a lot of local task forces on police departments revolving around cyber-crime that can give you more information.

After that last session I packed up our materials for shipment back to Oakland and called it a day. I was still feeling ill, so I didn’t make it down to the un-keynote or the road rally. Hopefully when we go back to Boston for Affiliate Summit East 2008, I’ll be able to report more in-depth!

Day 3 Affiliate Summit – Part 1

Posted on Feb 26, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Still sick, I managed to get as much sleep as I could and skipped breakfast in favor of that goal. Once I slept as much as I could without skipping more than just some food, I headed down for the Super Affiliate Strategies that Work panel. I was interested to see how this differed from the What Super Affiliates Want panel I attended at the last Affiliate Summit in Miami.

It was a great panel, and I hear it was standing room only. Rock on – my sick self managed to score a seat otherwise I never would have lasted in there. It was a great panel by Kris Jones of Pepperjam, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, and John Chow. It was mostly Q&A from the audience with a little bit of moderation from Kris, so lots of good stuff. Someone actually blatantly asked about black hat tactics…to which he received a pretty unbiased response from John that he was just better off in the long run to stick with whitehat tactics if he wants to be a success overall. Which makes sense to me. Since this session was Q&A style it was pretty different from last year’s panel I already mentioned, which is good for me. I’d hate to get a lot of duplicate content. Some great points I picked up from the session are:

• Amit looks for a niche where there’s a lot of search traffic and builds a site with content & landing pages. Optimizes through SEO.
• Keep working on content & adding new things.
• Relevant content around affiliate links help the buyer make a decision.
• The long tail search terms are more stable for long term success.
• There’s an incredible risk for affiliates using black hat tactics. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity in white hat channels so you’re better off keeping your nose clean.
• John noticed that people were scraping his RSS feed and he started by sending cease & desist orders and trying to go after the culprits, but when the culprits became too many he just started throwing ads into the RSS and continued to make money off them.
• Develop your business system & that’s something that no one can just copy off of you.
• Amit uses an umbrella domain then makes sub domains for the more specialized, high traffic stuff or registers an alias and redirects the traffic.
• Social networks (resources, Facebook applications) are what’s hot right now.
• Yahoo & MSN seem to convert better for whatever reason than Google. Google users are more savvy.
• Spaces between 3 & 5 are the sweet spot in search results. Constantly bidding for the Sponsored Results box may not necessarily be worth your time.
• Day parting (bidding lower during the night) can increase ROI
• Continually split test everything.
• Have a great relationship with your affiliate manager and that will help you to leverage to increase commission rates or added bonuses.
• Amit advocates his strategy of bidding on hundreds of keywords and spread the sales between them, while Kris advocated creating a narrower ad campaign that’s very clearly related to your content.
• Some good programs & tips:
  • Winner Alert: everyday it sends you a report with what’s winning
  • Efficient PPC
  • AdWords Editor

Overall it was a great session, and in case I missed anything J. Botter live blogged from there as well.

After lunch and some hours staffing our booth, I headed to the Asymmetric Warfare: Battling Fraudulent Affiliates session. More on that later.