Affiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 4: Listen to your Community
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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!
This week we’re less all over the map, more focused on affiliate conferences, social media and communities, and once again our cherished shout outs. Of course our favorite topic of all time, Twitter, makes an appearance as they were in the news this week. The show comes in and just under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure.
- Social Media: Facebook caves into community pressure again, YouTube adds a Twitter Button
- Jermey Palmer uses surveys to make his affiliate marketing education products better.
- Twitter: Salesforce.com creates Twitter brand management service for companies and sells it for 1K/month, Twitter will have paid pro accounts
- Conferences: Jim Kukral organizing the monetization track for Blog World Expo Oct. 15-17, CJU dates announced Sept. 15-17, Big Omaha tech conference for midwesterners announced. Trisha will be attending Web 2.0 Expo and ad:tech SF next month.
- Shout outs: Sam Harrelson who called us Aff Marketing Maniacs, Brook Schaaf & Karen Garcia for their efforts with the Lobby Day against CA AB 178, Tim Robinson and shameless plug for Comic Book Fury
So please, go check it out and comment and let us know what you think!
Read MoreCalifornia Assembly Bill 178
Many in the affiliate marketing industry are aware of what happened last summer with the New York State affiliate tax, also known as the Amazon Tax. The state laws were amended to include affiliates as agents of the merchant, requiring the merchant to charge sales tax for purchases made to New York residents. As a result, many merchants took the easy way out and decided to drop all NY state affiliates from their programs. This resulted in an immense loss of revenue for several affiliates.
Unfortunately, several other states are following suit, most notably California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Connecticut. The most pressing of which is California, looking to enact the new bill ASAP with a hearing scheduled for April 13th in Sacramento.
In layman’s terms, AB 178 changes the definition of a “retailer engaging in business in this state” to include any retailer that works with affiliates in this state where the gross receipts or sales prices is over $10,000 per year. Feel free to read the entire bill online here.
Being a California resident myself, I can tell you that this will have a huge impact on the affiliate marketing industry. One of the major affiliate networks, Commission Junction, is located in Santa Barabara. Several super affiliates are also based in California. As well, Amazon, one of the largest affiliate merchant programs out there, has already testified that they will drop all Hawaii affiliates if Hawaii’s legislation passes, so that can’t be good news for California or the other states.
This bill is short sighted and ill conceived, and we need the help of everyone in the affiliate marketing industry to fight it. A legislative day has been planned for next Tuesday, March 31st, where several of us are going to Sacramento to speak with legislators and their staff about the ill effects this bill will have. If you are interested in also participating, please feel free to email me at trisha [at] newedgemedia.com and I will gladly pass the information to the organizers.
Read MoreAffiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 3: Twitter in a Tumblr with a splash of Gary Vaynerchuk
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!
We’ve finally determined that the audio problems were due to my headset this week as I stole the stand alone boom mic from my husband’s computer and the sound is excellent. Third time’s the charm! So now you won’t have to listen to a bad recording for our quality content!
We jumped around a bit today and covered a lot, so this episode is longer than the last two clocking in at about 40 minutes. We talk a lot about Twitter and decided that we live most of our lives through Twitter. We also give some shout outs at the end, as I promised last week.
Show Links:
- TweepMe and the creator’s account being suspended.
- Still getting used to the new Facebook.
- A few more words about Gary Vaynerchuk and his SXSW video.
- WeFollow, a survey about Twitter, and the Twouble with Twitters (careful, the video is on autoplay).
- Sony made a deal with Google to enhance their Sony Reader line up (watch out, Kindle!)
For the sake of driving the point home, I talked more about the grass roots fight going on against California Assembly Bill 178, which is looking to do in California what the so-called Amazon Tax did in New York. Here are some links I mentioned and some from the March 3rd episode of Affiliate Thing:
- CAaffiliates.com ABestWeb forum
- Read the entire bill (Number AB 178)
- How to contact your California state law makers
- Comment on AB 178
- See the calendar for the California state legislature
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 2: Sweet Success
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Success! After some trials and tribulations with Skype, wookies, Call Graph, Pamela, and a totally un-listenable recording from earlier in the week, we finally have a decent episode! HUGE shout out and thanks to Joe Magennis of Geek Dads @ Home for some great step-by-step instructions to help a couple of fledgling podcasters out! We still had some issues with sound quality but I think I got most of those out in the edit. So, without further ado take a listen.
Yes, I’m late on sharing this, but I also have a feeling that most the people apt to listen already pay attention to the GeekCast.fm network 🙂
In in this episode we discuss:
- WordPress Theme Wars between DIY Themes/Thesis, Woo Themes, and WP-Unlimited
- Affiliate Classroom Rebrands to Lurn, Inc.
- Using Posterous to consolidate my personal blogs.
- Gary Vaynerchuk on Tumblr.
So please, go check it out and comment and let us know what you think! You can listen here or at our wonderful hosts GeekCast.fm!
Read MoreAffiliate Classroom Rebrands to Lurn, Inc.
Is it too soon to say “Rebranding Fail”?
I just got the news that Affiliate Classroom, Inc is re-branding themselves to Lurn, Inc. I must admit that my first impression of the new name is not a positive one. I immediately wanted to ask – what was wrong with Affiliate Classroom? Didn’t it say everything it needed to say? The press release they sent along with the announcement email answered that question:
“We originally set out to provide training and best practices for affiliates. The name Affiliate Classroom made perfect sense,” said founder and CEO Anik Singal. “But in late 2008 as our executive team developed our strategic vision for the next two years, we felt limited by the name. What we’re able to offer now is beyond simple how-to information for affiliates. Changing our name is strategically liberating.”
Okay, I can understand that. When your name is very specific and your goals expand to something greater, a new name is in order. So I can support them in the decision to re-brand to a new name that’s more all-encompassing to what they want to achieve. But Lurn? I’m not sure I can be on board with the new name; for some reason it reminds me of names like Knol and Cuil and other recent social media-crazed names that seem to be trying harder to be “cool” or “cutting edge” than functional and appropriate. Which made me sad to read further down in the press release to this:
Singal added, “We’ve been getting a lot of compliments on the new name. We think that it highlights our fun personality, while staying true to our vision of empowering our students to reach their goals through technology and education.”
Maybe I’m being overly critical about the name. Afterall, that’s just my two cents. I do have to hand it to Anik & his team that they’re awesome people who are doing a good thing for the industry so I really do wish them the best of luck with the rebranding effort. For their sake I also hope more people like the new name more than I do 😛
Read MoreCan You Shock A Marketer?
A few weeks ago, the proprietor of T-Shirt Hell announced that they were closing down, hosted a sale, and accredited the shutting down of the popular anti-PC t-shirt site to an increase in misunderstandings of the offensive humor and an increase in negative feedback. It seemed strange to me that they’d go 8 years in business and just NOW get fed up with the haters.
Of course, I’m not shocked in the least that it turned out to be a hoax – a sneaky way of drumming up some publicity for the site, generating sales in a tough economy when people are probably not as likely to spend their money on novelty t-shirts – unless threatened that they’d be gone forever. My reason for blogging about it isn’t so much that it’s noteworthy or shocking, but more so that I had no reaction beyond a quick “meh…figures”.
This begs the question: can marketers be shocked anymore? If this had been overly clever, I’d have to at least given them credit for successfully executing a good campaign in a down economy. Marketers tend to have “seen it all” in terms of schemes and campaigns and tricks to lure in consumers to buy their products. It seems to me that seeing a really clever campaign that I’d have to give props to seems fewer and far between. It’s also more abundant when my husband points something out and I just shrug my shoulders because I’m not impressed as a marketer.
So, can you be shocked by marketing and advertising anymore as a marketer, or are you too jaded by the nature of your profession to really be taken in by marketing on a consumer level?
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