Affiliate 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
Affsum Session: Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages
Date: Tuesday, January 13th, 2009. Session 8b, 2:00pm.
Session Description: Learn how to optimize your landing pages and increase conversion rates by 50-500% using simple techniques and technologies. Get that competitive edge by increasing margins and return on marketing spend. The panel consisted of:
- Olivier Chaine, CEO & Founder, magnify360 (Moderator)
- Trevor Claiborne, Product Marketing Manager, Google
- Lisa Crossley Hunter, Senior Director of CJ Search, Commission Junction
- Beth Kirsch, VP of Marketing and Business Development, uAmplify
I was expecting some gems in terms of site optimization, and boy was I not let down! I’d heard Lisa and Olivier speak last September at CJU, so I knew I was in for good stuff from them. I mentioned this session as one I planned on attending before leaving and Trevor stopped by to say hi. I had a chance to chat with him briefly in the bloghaus after the session and let him know what a great job they did as well.
Bullet Point Review!
- 98% of your traffic is wasted.
- 2% is the average site conversion rate.
- Copy heavy pages perform better later hours.
- There isn’t one magic answer.
- Ask yourself these questions about your visitors:
- Why are they here TODAY?
- How do they THINK?
- How do they BUY/STICK?
- What kind of dialog is best?
- Google’s website optimizer is a free tool to do this for you.
- A/B testing is your friend.
- So is multivariate.
- Best practices: start now, test often.
- Resource: Google Website Optimizer
- Share search channels.
- Cooperate with other departments with
- Ad copy
- Natural listings
- Trademarks
- Display URL Usage
- After testing, what works for affiliates is often different than what works for search.
- One page tested, search conversions went up 60% but affiliate went up 454%!
- You could be losing tremendous amounts of revenue by not optimizing.
- Don’t start without a plan.
- Don’t just copy what someone else did, it probably won’t work the same for you. TEST!
- Don’t assume an optimized page today is going to be optimized 6 months from now.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Just make sure you’re sending the most qualified traffic to the merchant page; you can’t really optimize their site or spend your time trying to help them that much.- How much data is needed? Generally speaking 100 impressions per change, but really, use a tool – they’ll tell you when enough data has been collected to pick a winning optimization.
- Is there a hierarchy of what to test? Not really, just pick a few things and go small first. Multivariate is complicated so start with something more manageable.
In the end, I really enjoyed hearing more from Lisa and Olivier – their expertise seems to know no bounds! Trevor also nailed it with the information about the Google Website Optimizer – my fellow attendees and I speculated that he was why most people came, to learn about the free Google tool! Unfortunately I wasn’t impressed by Beth – her speaking was really mumbled so I couldn’t quite pick up everything she said, and most her slides related to case studies and not a lot of tactics. Maybe at a smaller venue or had I been closer to the front I might have been able to hear her better. Ultimately these tidbits did well, but the slides will really tell you the background behinds these notes, so here they are!
View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: asw09 affiliate)
Also, Mike Buechele strikes again: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages.
Social Media Marketing Summit: Segmentation/Diversity
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.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Analytics
Analytics:
- Technology that helps to analyze the performance of a website or online marketing campaign.
Analytic data, while annoying for those of us that aren’t numbers people, are crucial to understanding where your visitors are coming from and what they want. It’s also imperative to know what you’re doing on your site is working and what needs to be changed. There are several free analytic tools out there, like SiteMeter, Google Analytics, and StatCounter.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
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: 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
