Internet Marketing From The Real Experts
I’m excited to say that an article I wrote is included in the book Internet Marketing From The Real Experts
My article on Affiliate Manager Communication Strategies appears on page 15. Unfortunately since I wrote that article towards the beginning of FeedFront’s publication, it says I’m the marketing manager for PsPrint.com, which if you follow my blog you know that’s not true anymore. Oh well! I’m excited to be part of the gang of 88, and look forward to reading the entire book (well, the articles I haven’t already read in FeedFront).
From the back of the book:
What do Jay Berkowitz, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, Jim Kukral, Ted Murphy, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Mari Smith have in comment? They all walk the walk when it comes to their Internet marketing expertise. And they also have joined dozens of innovators and thought shapers to share their ideas, advice, and insight.
Internet Marketing from the Real Experts is a collection of affiliate, email, blogging, podcasting, video, search engine, and social network rock stars that break down the how and why of Internet marketing in a clear, easy to understand way.
Their voices, their ideas, their action items, and their lessons learned from mistakes – all for you to grow your business the day you start reading Internet Marketing from the Real Experts.
I know that all those flattering words are really meant for the caliber of people listed on the back cover, but I’m honored to be among them in print! Better yet – all proceeds are going to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Maybe now I will write that book I’ve been thinking of!
Read MoreDay 3 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
Tuesday January 19th
The final day of Affiliate Summit started bright and early with the Pinnacle Awards scheduled before the last day’s keynote by Brian Clark. This was a change for the conference agenda, which usually puts the Pinnacle Awards in the afternoon after other sessions. I like the change because it gets the awards out of the way, and didn’t interfere with any other sessions or independent parties planned in the evening. I seem to remember last year that some of the award winners had to jet quickly after the awards to get to a charity poker tournament, among other places.
The winners have been blogged all over, but here’s a quick recap just in case this is the only blog you read (unlikely): Affiliate of the Year – Nicholas Koscianski. Affiliate Manager of the Year – Matt McWilliams. Exceptional Merchant – eBay Partner Network. Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Angel Djambazov. Best Bloggger – Jeremy Schoemaker. Affiliate Marketing Legend – Scott Jangro.
Next up was Brian Clark’s keynote. He admitted at the beginning that it was his first keynote, so I guess he did pretty well all things considered. Of course, I have a whole post devoted to the keynote that I’ll go into later.
Once again, I intended to go into more sessions on Tuesday, but got sidetracked with all the networking possibilities. As well, I was given a demo of a new affiliate network of sorts, Impact Radius. It gives merchants and affiliates a way to also reach out and work with more traditional media partners. I had an opportunity to interview one of the founders, Lisa Riolo, about the launch of the new network, which will also be another blog post coming up soon.
I made it a point to get to Jim Kukral’s session How To Get Motivated For Success!, which I’ll of course be posting a recap for. It was a great kick in the pants to get going with projects that have been stalled for awhile. I know Eric Nagel wrote an entire post about Jim’s kick in the ass.
While in Jim’s session, I heard via Twitter that Daniel M. Clark of Geek Dads Weekly was invited to speak on the GeekCast.fm Live panel. I was bummed since I wanted to participate with that panel/group like I did at Affiliate Summit East 2009, but happy for Daniel. I went into the session for a moment, but left in favor of running back up to my room for a few things. As I understand, the session was some industry talk followed up with a lot of “how to podcast” type questions, so it looks like I personally didn’t miss much information that I didn’t already know.
The evening ended with a fail on the part of the Rio. A BlogUp mixer was planned at the VooDoo Lounge, which was official and everything, not just 100 people crashing the lounge for a mixer. Unfortunately, it was raining and since the lounge has an indoor and an outdoor area, the lounge ended up double booked with another much larger group of people. So we tried cramming into the bar at the steakhouse for awhile, overwhelming the poor bartender on duty. Finally, the Rio moved the charade down to the iBar and served complimentary champagne as a mea culpa.
I stayed for awhile, the it was on to another Las Vegas tradition – the buffet! A large group of us went to the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, one of my favorite buffets ever. Then again, I haven’t been to many. It was good times and good food with good people – one of my favorite activities! After dinner, I went and hung out with Heather Smith & Julie Vazquez, who were still at the iBar. Had a very pleasant last night of Affiliate Summit West 2010!
Read MoreASE09 Session: Advertising on Facebook
Session Description: Learn about advertising on Facebook and how affiliates can reach over 100 million members. Join us for a panel discussion including a Facebook representative covering all you need to know. The panel consisted of:
- Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzLocal, LLC (Twitter @dennisyu) (Moderator)
- Zac Johnson, President / CEO, MoneyReign Inc. (Twitter @moneyreign)
- Jeremy Schoemaker, President, ShoeMoney (Twitter @shoemoney)
- Alex Schultz, Manager, Facebook (Twitter @alexschultz)
Unfortunately a lot of this session went over my head. This session was really geared more for people who have already played around with advertising on Facebook. I was hoping for more of a how-to, but I guess the session that I missed at Affiliate Summit West in January was where they did the intro, and this was a follow up. I did get some notes, so I’ll go ahead and share them in hopes they might help you!
Bullet Point Review!
- It’s been a big challenge scaling up to 20 million users.
- A few months ago it seemed like they were changing policies every week, so they have tried to cut back on changing policies
- They are now focusing on helping the advertisers.
- The targeting is incredibly specific, and they can now target by birthday.
- They’ve set up the email affiliate@facebook.com – 24 turn around time for answers if you have a problem with denials.
- Advertisers need to understand that keywords in their system don’t mean the same as in Google so there’s a bit of a learning curve.
- Remember to make ad copy brief to draw the eye to it.
- Try changing the background color of the ad to get attention.
- A lot of people don’t use the Facebook reporting, but it’s useful to see who’s actually clicking on similar ads and target them even deeper.
- Direct linking is okay, but test to see which works best for your offer.
- There has been a lot of complaints about inconsistencies in the approval process, but if you upload 99 ads and 1 gets declined, it’s a mistake not inconsistencies. Email them and they can easily correct the mistake.
- If you play on the boarder of ethics, you’ll have a difficult time getting approved.
- Fan pages work well for organic rankings. They work like a newsletter.
- If you use a vanity URL that’s a trademark, it will be taken down because it violates trademark laws.
Some of this did actually help me, so I hope it helps you! Alex from Facebook had a TON of information to share, and I was a bit surprised that Zac Johnson and Jeremy Schoemaker were so quiet as they’re usually pretty outspoken, but it was still a lot of good information for affiliates who are already advertising on Facebook.
Read MoreBlogWorldExpo 08: Making Money Online with a Blog
This was also commonly referred to as the “Super Bloggers” panel. The members consisted, in total, of:
- Jim Kukral, JimKukral.com (Moderator)
- John Chow, JohnChow.com
- Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com
- Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net
- Brian Clark, CopyBlogger.com
- Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
Jeremy was late due to some quality Vegas partying, but once he did arrive he had some quality things to say. They all did, really, but I especially enjoyed Darren & Brian’s takes as I had never heard them speak before and I’d heard John & Zac.
Bullet Point Review!
- Jim asked what their number #1 money maker on their blog was:
- John Chow: Switching from an ad network to direct advertising sales using the OIO Publisher Direct plugin.
- Zac Johnson: Direct ad sales
- Darren Rowse: Recommended affiliate products.
- Brian Clark: Launching a membership site & selling WordPress themes.
- Selling any old crap decreases content value; sell things you actually believe in.
- Bloggers just want to write, not sell, so plugins are useful.
- Write about something that’s interesting or else it’s not sustainable.
- Revenue: 1. Direct Ad Sales 2. Affiliate Programs 3. AdSense.
- BC: Selling things (information, membership, etc) instead of advertising makes more money.
- A couple of years ago readers would complain about ads, but now they’re accepted as par for the course.
- The amount of money to be made in “non-sexy” niches is ridiculous.
- Start with what your readers want to buy, not what you want to sell.
- Offer incentives to sign up for your newsletter – 3x the money to be made with subscriptions.
- Newsletters vs. RSS – it’s way more beneficial to get people onto your email list.
- Aweber – BlogBroadcast tools count is included in RSS subscribers & sends an automatic newsletter with your blog posts.
- Many people still have no idea what RSS is, so offer delivery by email too.
- Blogs don’t have to look monetized.
- Sell yourself using consulting.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Wait until 100 or 1000 readers to bother displaying RSS numbers on the blog.
- RSS subscriber count is powerful for branding and can be factored into ad prices.
- JC: Rule of thumb when setting an ad price – what is the ECPM for that same spot on an ad network? Double that. Offer the ad to run for a month at a time or a quarter, depending on price.
- Condense your header – big headers take up valuable space.
- How much traffic do they see through search? DR sees about 40% to ProBlogger and 60% to Digital Photography School.
- Chitika is a good ad network with powerful blog widgets for contextual, relevant ads.
- Write for your users, not Google. Search traffic is just a bonus.
- It’s a tricky line to keep your editorial integrity and still sell stuff, so don’t sell willy-nilly.
- Build a business – get repeat customers, loyal readers.
- What percentage of the time do they work? A LOT – you have to bust your ass, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme.
- Always look deeply at a product & only recommend valuable things.
- Announce it
- Talk about the product info, merchant or manufacturers information.
- Share testimonials of readers.
- Review your experience with it.
- Credibility is key with sharing information.
- Endorse, review products.
- Sell advertising in newsletters, lots of merchants love that.
- Establish yourself as an expert.
- Remember that Teaching Sells!
This was a very informative panel, and a great way to kick off the sessions. The room was packed, and I especially liked Jim’s approach to using Twitter to get questions for the audience. With a tech set crowd like bloggers, it was highly effective and a great panel for sure.
Read MoreBlog World Expo Underway
From miss604’s Flickr Stream
Blog World Expo kicked off this morning and is going strong. Due to a late arriving flight, my desire to sleep overtook my desire to hear today’s keynote – the one I’m looking forward to is tomorrow with Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park & Fort Minor anyway. Ran into some familiar faces right away and hit the ground running into the super blogger panel moderated by Jim Kukral and featuring Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Zac Johnson, John Chow, and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney, who misunderstood the timing I guess and was 45 mins late 🙂
Great stuff from those guys and I was even randomly picked to win a copy of Darren’s ProBlogger book after asking a decent question. Of course, I’ll have more on that panel later.
Next I stayed in the same room for the affiliate marketing panel with Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit, Mike Allen of Shopping-Bargains, and Tim Jones of TheRealTimJones (yes, all familiar names if you listen to RedHatBlueHat). They had some really good stuff and brought up some tools and such that I’m definitely going to be looking into when my whirlwind crazy travel is done. Once again, more to come.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t blogged a lot about CJU. Due to the motel I was staying at being so far away and the internet there being spotty I didn’t have a lot of time to get those written up. But I’m working on it!
If you’re stuck at home with Twitter and trying to keep up with what’s going on out here, go to Twitter Search for #bwe08 and you can see all the tweets that attendees have tagged. I’m trying to keep mine updated as I remember to use TwitPic to share a photo of something.
Read MoreBlogOnExpo – Day 2
It’s day 2 of the BlogOnExpo. It seems slow going, so get on over there and check out the content!
Sessions
- Which Blogging Platform?
- Go Beyond AdSense on Your Blog with Jeremy Schoemaker from Shoemoney
- Video Blogging
- Blogging Productivity
Interviews
- ShoeMoney
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
- Robert Scoble
- Pete Cashmore
Don’t just stand there… go read!
Read More
