A New Adventure in my Career
Since 2008, I’ve been fortunate enough to work in Performance Marketing at a variety of positions, and to work at home for most of those. I’ve been an affiliate manager and, for a time with FMTC, I was running all the sales, marketing, customer service, and social media. It’s been an exciting adventure, that’s for sure. For the last 18 months or so, I have been working on starting my own marketing agency, Blinkstar Media. The time has come, however, to put that on hold for awhile and start a new adventure working in direct marketing, going back to commuting to an office every day.
Read More#EntrepreneurLife Ain’t Easy
Just like pimpin’, that #EntrepreneurLife ain’t easy. While I’ve been in the market for a new “opportunity” for a year now, I think it took about 4 months for me to come to the realization that I needed to just do this on my own and stop relying on another outsourced program management agency to hire me. Over the last 8 months I’ve been able to really dial in on my pitch, my merchant recruitment methods, and work on how I want to structure my own brand of affiliate program management, without the confines of someone else’s work styles or resource limits.
Read MoreASE09 Session: Keeping Your Affiliate Program Clean
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Learn advanced approaches to running a clean affiliate program. A review of the systems, processes, tools and techniques used by leading affiliate programs to keep their programs clean. The panel consisted of:
- David Naffziger, CEO, BrandVerity (Moderator)
- Jamie Birch, Owner, JEBCommerce (Twitter @JamieEBirch)
- Graham MacRobie, President & CEO, Alias Encore (Twitter @grahammacrobie)
- Joshua Sloan, CEO, Sloan Tech (Twitter @sloanzone)
This session contained a lot of useful information targeted mostly to companies with an affiliate program and also outsource program managers. Some of the information was useful for affiliates, especially the need for a good relationship between affiliates and affiliate managers. The session consisted of short presentations by David Naffziger and by Graham MacRobie and then the floor was opened up for questions.
The presentations gave a brief overview of some of the common forms of abuse affiliate programs need to avoid. These include PPC violations, Cookie Stuffing, Legitimate link replacement, transaction lead fraud, and Brand Squatting. Some of the ways given to combat abuse were to know how your partners work – know how traffic is normally sent, who else they work with, is their plan consistent with their performance, and is their traffic pattern different from the normal. Examples of various software was give, a couple from Brand Verity and also free alternatives.
The question and answer portion gave several very good tips. One of the first was that no program should auto-approve, that affiliates each be inspected to make sure that they are who they say they are. Another was to go over the terms and conditions listed for the program at least once a year; it is better to have over strict rules and regs. that are lightly enforced rather than not enough. This will help in the long run because if abuse is found it can then be removed. Less than desirable affiliates are likely to group in the smaller networks as they are less likely to be discovered. More abuse is likely in a new affiliate program. Having the highest payout can make you a target on account of greed. Many of these comments can be used both by affiliate managers and also act as warnings to affiliates as to the relationship they should have with their manager.
Read MoreASE09: Monday Chris Brogan Keynote
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
The keynote address was pretty good. In effect it gave an overview of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s new book, Trust Agents. It was based on research that shows that there are more than one type of currency. One of the most important one of these is social capitol, which is based on trust. Once you gain the trust of people they will look for your opinions, and trust them, thereby making it much easier to sell things to them. People will trust your recommendations of products and services. Knowing the “insider vocabulary” can be a major advantage, and most important: “be known as a person” Julien Smith.
The keynote was mostly a conversation between Julien and Chris. I am looking forward to completing the rest of the book and will be posting a review when I do so.
Read MoreASE09 Session: What the Heck is a Website Nowadays?
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Businesses may be changing the way they look at web presence. Can you just have a blog? Is a Facebook presence alone a good idea? Does Web 2.0 mean the demise of websites? The panel consisted of:
- Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami, Network Solutions (Twitter @shashib) (Moderator)
- Kelly Harman, President, Zephyr Strategy
- Melanie Mitchell, SVP, Search Strategy, Digitas (Twitter @melaniemitchell)
- Ramon Ray, Editor, Smallbiztechnology.com
This session gave an interesting and entertaining look into how the role of a website has been changed recently with the advent of Social Media. One of the chief points that I took from the session was that your website should be the anchor for all the other forms of social media which you use. Ramon Ray brought out some points that are easy to remember and contain a lot of useful tips, these are:
- Focus on the customer.
- Have a plan of action.
- Have an easy to remember name.
- Be informative.
- Security – have as much as is needed for your site.
- Easy customer contact = good customer service.
- Have fresh content.
- Be found.
- Be simple.
ASE09 Session: How to Monetize your Site with Widgets
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: This presentation discussed how to enhance your site using various widgets, what works and what doesn’t, and how effective different widgets are to your site. The panel consisted of:
- Woody Wood, Product Manager, Amazon (Twitter @AmazonAssociate)
This session gave an overview of what a widget is, and what it can bring to your site. Many examples were given from the Amazon Associate program and a couple of examples from other sources. One of the chief reasons for using a widget is to add interactivity and functionality to your website. A key point that was mentioned was that a widget should be used to augment your site, along with all of the links and banners, instead of replacing them. Several suggestions were made as to what works and what does not. Included in the what works category were things like:
- Use the right widget for the job: focus on targeting the widget at relevant material to your site.
- Place the widget in the most effective spot: for example, in the center of the page for a one off topic specific item, or on the sidebar for something that is more long term.
- Use the widget as a self expression tool: add comments and recommendations to the items to make the relevant to your audience.
- Change content regularly: make sure that people want to return to your site.
The only negative thing I took away from this very well put together presentation was the mention of the very short duration of the cookie given by the Amazon Associate program. This will most likely not stop me from using Amazon widgets on my site, but is a little disappointing.
