At first glance when starting to compile this week’s Cribbed Content, it didn’t look like much was going on.  My Google Reader was kind of light, as were the other scoops and news coming across my desk.  But then when I really started to dig, I found some cool stuff!  Including a really easy Twitter Contest from DIY SEO to win a Kindle!

• Last week I reported that Affiliate Summit East 2009 was all sold out of booths.  They’re now all sold out of Meet Market tables as well, the first time for them that they’ve sold out of exhibitor space before Early Bird pricing was done.  Congrats to the ASE09 team!
• Speaking of Affiliate Summit, co-founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins were in Dallas at the Inbound Marketing Summit speaking about monetizing blogs.  Missy was kind enough to share their slides from the presentation.
• Affiliate network ShareASale is toying with an Affiliate API and has released the initial sections for use.
• Google recently changed their trademarks policy in regards to AdWords paid search ads.  Search Engine Land wrote an article on how to protect your brand under Google’s new trademark policy, and Geno Prussakov also wrote an article on how this applies to affiliate marketing.
• Apparently Google mucked around with PageRank… AGAIN… and devalued Twitter profiles.  Which is fine with me since I realized awhile back my twitter page was  PR9 when this here blog was only PR2 (currently my twitter page is a PR3).  What really irritated me was that, out of nowhere, this blog went down to PR0 out of nowhere with no real changes other than a redesign (that, if anything, should have HELPED SEO).  So in my opinion Google can shove with with their PageRank racket anyway.  Anyway, Andy Beard explains a few things about the change.
• I’ve seen a certain someone from a certain CPA network tweeting a lot in the last two days about making money from Twitter with CPA ads.  That seems to be ALL this person is tweeting about and it’s getting on my anti-spam nerves.  So instead of calling this person out, I’ll be passive-aggressive and just pass on this article for everyone: 10 Irritating Mistakes that People Make with Twitter. Thanks Nikki Pilkington for a good article right when I was thinking about it!
• I’m a big fan of to-do lists.  There’s been some talk about different apps recently (I was turned onto Toodledoo and love its integration with iGoogle homepage).  Nate Moller wrote a great article on why to-do lists are key to entrepreneur success that any slightly unmotivated or scattered entrepreneur should read!

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This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more.  The panel consisted of:

• Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
• Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
• Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics

To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.

Bullet Point Review!

• Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
• Don’t just observe, participate.
• Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
• Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
• Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
• Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
• Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
• Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
• Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
• Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
• There is a need for a new metric.  Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
• Need for interests to be measured (APML).
• How do you target?  Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
• Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
• See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
• Use social networking for lead generation.
• No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
• Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
• Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.
• Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
• Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
• Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
• Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
• Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
• Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
• If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
• Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
• Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
• Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
• Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.

Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking.  It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.

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Pay Per Click (PPC):

• A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each click they refer to a merchant’s website.  PPC offers some of the lowest commissions and high conversion ratio since visitors need to only click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.

The most common search engine utilizing PPC is Google AdWords, however some PPC affiliates are also fond of Yahoo and MSN due to the lack of saturation of the market there.  The downside is that not as many consumers are using Yahoo or MSN to search than Google.  Some of the most successful super affiliates are PPC affiliates.

PPC is the core of search engine marketing (SEM).

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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