Free Toolsday for June 17th
Once again this week, it’s technically still Tuesday so I’m a bit late for the East Coasters, but hopefully this is worth it.
Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com said during the video panel at the last Affiliate Summit back in February that people go onto the internet for two reasons: to be entertained or to solve a problem. A great way to solve 80% of your business related questions is to go to LinkedIn Answers.
I haven’t had occasion to ask many questions since there are SO many useful questions in a variety of topics. In terms of business information that’s relevant to your working life, this tool kicks the crap out of Yahoo! Answers. This is targeted information in a really easy to find format. Unlike forums that can be filled with years of information out of context, LinkedIn Answers allows you to search for the information you need and find it fairly quickly.
Don’t take my word for it… go check it out! LinkedIn Answers. And remember if you’re an expert at something, share your wealth of knowledge and answer some questions too! Karma, people!
Read MoreMarch BAAMC Meeting
Last week I was happy to attend the March lunch meeting of the Bay Area Affiliate Manager Coalition. It was a great meeting and I was super jazzed afterwards. I found, when trying to sit down and write this blog post, that I was way too excited about it. I’ve been looking for a subject to test out a video with, so I decided to bust out my trusted Aiptek HD Camera and throw a little HD action at you.
Please feel free to give me any feedback. And leave comments! Thanks!
Read MoreDay 3 of asw08 – Part 2, Fin!
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!
Read MoreDay 3 Affiliate Summit – Part 1
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.
Read MoreDay 2 of Affiliate Summit – Suck All!
Almost a month ago I was granted a press pass for the Affiliate Summit. I was excited to get into the bloghaus and blog about the day as it happened. I was thrilled to walk around and network with people. I really wanted to get some great coverage of the Keynote (coverage hell, I wanted to just listen too), but… none of that happened.
Why? Because Las Vegas hates me. And there are far too many germs here. And somehow during the day on Sunday…I developed a cold. A bad one. Damn this dry air & germs!
So I didn’t get up in time to make it downstairs to have breakfast AND make it to Jason Calacanis’ keynote like I wanted to. I managed to grab some breakfast and share some stats about our affiliate program with my colleague here with me from PsPrint to help out and then to man the booth. I sent her out to get the table top sign made that wasn’t made in time for the show. I station the booth for awhile and talk to some good people before it’s time for me to head off to the morning session I planned on going to.
Oh, incidentally, for anyone who wants some GREAT coverage of the keynote, check out J. Botter’s Blog.
I digress.
I attended this morning’s “Video Innovation in Affiliate Marketing” panel. Good stuff, although I was a bit disappointed in moderator Melissa Salas reading off a prepared script pretty much verbatim. But I really enjoyed the insight from video professionals, and it’s comforting to know that content really is king, and that production value isn’t as important. Woo Hoo! I was wondering how you’d go about monetizing a video, but Revver.com seems to answer that. I’ll definitely be checking that out when I get back to the joy that is desktop computer (this older laptop isn’t that great). I really enjoyed Gary Vaynerchuk’s sense of humor & ballsy honesty. I’m excited with my new Aiptek A-HD 720P 5MP CMOS High Definition Camcorder
Some great points from the panel session:
- Most people come on the internet for two P’s – pleasure or problems. If you solve someone’s problem, it’s a good video.
- KNOW what you’re talking about. As long as you know your subject, you can produce great content.
- In the next 12 months, you should test video on your site. By 18 months from now, if you don’t have video on your website you may be in trouble.
- Video really works to sell as it gives your brand more credibility & builds brand equity.
- Depth of information is quality will translate to a successful video.
- Work on integrating video into your current web experience for the most effective video experience.
- The average video watched online is about 2 minutes long.
- An enormous amount of video watching is done at work, so keep that in mind. Melissa added that a Click to Listen button is much appreciated by these people.
- In terms of size & format, go for the best quality you can when shooting, even if it has to be compressed when uploading online. If you can afford it, shoot in HD. It’s where everything is headed. (Side note – this makes me really glad that I bought my new HD mini cam! It’s the one in the picture.)
Day 3 should be good – hoping for some informative sessions and to feel better.
Read MoreAffiliate Summit Day 1 – Grab My Nuts!
Okay maybe it’s been closer to half a day of festivities for me, but my feet are killing me already, I’m annoyed with the venue, and missing some boxes that were supposed to be shipped. But with my track record, it just wouldn’t be a true trade show if I had everything prepared like clockwork 🙂
After having some breakfast I went to set the room service tray just outside my door for pick up and the door shut behind me and I was without my key. So I had to call down to get someone to come up and open the door, but I managed to be helped by housekeeping first and got let back in AND got fresh towels. Bonus!
So I hauled down to the registration area and got my badge and went in with my colleague to set up our modest booth. We don’t have a big dynamic display like most companies do; just a table cloth with our logo, a banner, the highlighters we had made to give away, and the printed materials about our affiliate program. I brought the table cloth and sales sheets with me, we found the highlighters there shipped from the vendor, and the other things we’d shipped out here – our banner, a fishbowl for a giveaway, and a sign holder announcing our giveaway – were nowhere to be found. As well, there was no table there from the convention services company.
After procuring a table and still not locating the box or getting our manager on the phone to get more details about the shipment, we set up what we had and headed to the meet market, where we proceeded to be asked to grab Andy Rodriguez’s nuts & naughty nurses asked us to enter to win a hummer.
Yes, you read that right.
Of course it would have been genius if they two tables had been beside each other, but they weren’t. Andy Rodriguez Consulting was handing out packets of cashews and the company that hired the naughty nurses luring people in for a chance to win an H2 didn’t really interest me so I don’t remember the company name. They were some kind of information source like a magazine and I remember the man at the table was also at yesterday’s Affiliate Classroom Live event.
It was good… got some cool freebies (heee!) and did some light networking. My feet were soon killing me and I came back up to the room, only to find that my room key had somehow gotten demagnetized. Locked out AGAIN! So I opted to wait for security to come let me in rather than walking my tired feet all the way down to the lobby to get the card redone. I took care of it when I went out again for dinner.
So more will come tomorrow!
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