BlogWorldExpo 08: Affiliate Marketing Secrets for Bloggers
I was looking forward to attending this panel despite knowing that I probably knew all there was to know on this subject, because I knew two of the panelists. Boy was I wrong – it just goes to show you that there’s always something new to be learned when attending trade shows! The panel consisted of:
- Shawn Collins, Co-Founder, Affiliate Summit
- Mike Allen, CEO, Shopping-Bargains.com
- Tim Jones, Blogger, TheRealTimJones.com
I was proud of the boys – despite having a crowd of general noobs to affiliate marketing they did an excellent job and really threw out some solid information.
Bullet Point Review!
- Blended ads look nicer and work better.
- PopShops has a WordPress plugin that’s super easy to use.
- Remember to work the ads in creatively.
- Think and plan for the long term.
- Your blog is your brand.
- Be the expert.
- Share your space.
- Affiliate marketing is a great start but doesn’t stop there.
- Be careful – advertising the wrong way can tarnish your image.
- Think like a business and set goals.
- Craft a business plan and follow it.
- Look for other retail opportunities (your own affiliate program?)
- There’s lots of opportunity for creativity.
- Most people don’t know it’s an affiliate link and most don’t care (when using text links).
- .htaccess redirect helps clean links up – fairly simple process.
- 50%+ of subscribers come by email.
- Utilize social media to build readership and establish yourself as an expert.
- People have to get there before they can click.
- MaxBlogPress, OpenX are good free ad serving plugins.
- Ninja Affiliate 1.5 is a paid plugin that automatically ads contextual links to keywords you enter in.
- Peel away ads (page ears) also work well
- Target your ads to your audience.
- Yahoo! Answers works well to help establish yourself within your niche as an expert.
- Don’t venture too far outside your niche. You want to upsell and compliment your blog.
- The first thing you’d do? Tim says sign up with the affiliate networks. Shawn suggested doing a Google Search to get a feel for your competition. Mike advises to make sure your site works and that content is up before applying for the affiliate programs – the merchant has to want you.
- Spend the $10 on a domain & it’ll get over the first threshold when affiliate managers review your application.
I don’t have any notes from the Q&A portion of the panel because a lot of it was specific to those bloggers asking the questions – they wanted to know specifics. Personally I don’t think a Q&A session is really the time for that but I understand the desire for people to take any opportunity they can get to ask a question of an expert!
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Manual Approval
Manual Approval:
- An affiliate application approval process where all applicants are manually approved for an affiliate program.
This is the method I personally subscribe to since I prefer to look at the affiliates first to determine their quality level before clouding up the program with possibly bogus affiliates. I had an interesting conversation with Brad Waller back in August at the Affiliate Classroom LIVE event about manual vs. auto approve and he made the good point that it all depends on what your goals with a program are. For some, manual approval might be cumbersome if there is a large demand for the program but a small staff. It’s really something to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Domain Name
Domain Name:
- Controlled by the worldwide organization called ICANN, domain names are obtained on a first-come basis and are used to identify a unique website.
Okay in plain English, the main part of the URL between the www. and the .com (or .net, .org, etc.) is the domain name. So for this blog, trishalyn is the domain name. There are a lot of different companies that offer domain name registration that are connected with ICANN. One of the biggest ones is GoDaddy.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Browser Helper Object
Browser Helper Object:
- A DLL module designed as a plug-in for the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser to provide added functionality. Some modules enable the display of different file formats not ordinarily interpretable by the browser.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a FireFox user primarily and I have no idea what this means. Anyone? Bueller… Bueller?
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Social Media Marketing Summit: Brand Spotlight on Best Buy
This panel was done differently from the rest at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference at the beginning of this month. Instead of a self-moderated panel, event organizer Lisa Picarille moderated this by grilling the two panelists from Best Buy on Blue Shirt Nation (BSN), their internal social network. The panelists were:
- Steve Bendt, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
- Gary Koelling, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
These guys were hilarious AND on target – something that was supposed to help out the advertising guys with selling plasma screen televisions turned into such a great outlet for employees.
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- Started out with a couple hundred users across the network of stores.
- For the first few months it was just a collection of jokes shared with fellow employees.
- Started in June 2006 – by October ’06 the execs liked it and threw money at them and said, “Grow it. Fast”.
- They actually gave some of the money back so they could take some pressure off and feel free to fail on the way to growing.
- Used the money to go to the stores around the country to get feedback from employees on what they wanted to use the BSN for.
- It no longer belonged to Steve & Gary; it belonged to the users.
- They needed to build trust – gave out t-shirts and stickers to woo the employees they talked to.
- Part of the success is relate-ability to Steve & Gary but not much. Gary said, “We can’t be interesting for that long”.
- Members became just as important, if not more, as admins.
- Early on they identified users who had admin potential and promoted some moderators.
- In 2 years they’ve only had to moderate 3-4 posts.
- Mostly users are moderating each other pretty well.
- The average employee age for Best Buy is 22, so these are the social media generation.
- A device/mobile version is coming so execs and higher up employees who rely on these devices more than the average sales clerk can access the BSN readily.
- Have there been any outside benefits? They hosted a video contest to help boost 401-K enrollment – something they thought for sure would fail when the HR department came to them with the idea. 401-K enrollment increased 30% with 40,000 more employees nationwide enrolling.
- Does it help control the “bad stuff” that gets out there? Not really; they do have about a 50% turnover rate, which is just the nature of retail.
- How do things get acted on? They pass on feedback to those who need to hear it. Example: the company was going to announce that they were going to be severely modifying the employee discount and that got leaked to the forums. Activity skyrocketed with concerned employees who put out there all the reasons why they needed the discount to stay as good as it was. Management listened and kept the discount unaltered because they not just saw people complaining but saw intelligent discourse on why people wanted it to stay the same, and they agreed.
- There have been a lot of smaller and medium sized issues that corporate has seen on the BSN and acted on.
- Now employees have a voice that matters.
- Has there been an impact on employee retention? This MAY be coincidental since they have no actual data to back it up, but they did notice that before the BSN, Best Buy had about a 60% turnover rate, and as of a couple of months ago it was down to below 50% for the first time ever.
- Has the venting been positive? What they see more often than angry venting is organic problem solving & collaboration. Example: person at store A says they have a fixture that doesn’t look right, person at store B chimes in to tell them it’s the wrong one and who they should call to get the right one.
- They can set up user names like any other social network, but they are traceable back to their employee ID if they break the rules.
- Videos are uploaded almost every day, original music; it’s interesting to watch how people group up, whether it’s by their personal interests, departments they work in, etc.
- BSN is all internal, but one step they took towards being external is BSN Bazaar. Vendors can set up a room & members can come look up product info.
- Also launched a universal gift registry, GifTag.com.
- Most companies aren’t built for co-creation like this; they’re built for command & control.
Points brought up during the Q&A
There’s no immediate plan to expand the BSN to consumers.- When an employee leaves the company, their account is blocked – it’s an HR thing. They’d love to keep them around; maybe it’s something they can work out in the future. If they rejoin Best Buy, their account can be reinstated.
- Has there been any correlated rise in sales? There might be, but they really haven’t been looking at that data or concerned with it.
- Sales aren’t the point.
- Used an open source platform called Drupal to set up the network; had to kill & resurrect it several times in the early days. Now they have a great relationship with the Drupal developers.
- There haven’t been any cases of management retribution that they know of. The closest they could remember was that someone complained (rather clearly and thoughtfully) about a particular product line the store carried and their negative opinion of it. Someone in purchasing, probably related to the decision to carry that line, saw it and asked them to remove all the posts. They refused because the employee hadn’t broken any rules and they were honoring the social contract.
- Any plans to sell this to other businesses? No, they’re not in that business.
Fascinating stuff; it’s great that the Blue Shirt Nation has stuck to the social contract of being for the employees and isn’t violating that with some evil corporate agenda. Sounds like something more retail chains might consider doing.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Sponsored Listing
Sponsored Listing (also Paid Listings or Paid Sponsors):
- A term used as a title or column head on search engine results pages to identify paid advertisers and distinguish between paid and organic listings.
On Google, these are the links highlighted by yellow on the top of the page and the right side that say “Sponsored Links” above them. These are the links that are the results of search engine marketing and pay per click campaigns.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
