Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 20 [32:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!

We’re a little late this week but got going relatively quick.  We chat a bit about social media and taxes in this episode, and have a good time doing it.  I think we were keeping Mike warm with our banter!  The episode comes in at a chunky, too-fat-to-fly 32:30. In in this episode we discuss:

• Google Buzz is a Buzz Kill
• Audience Conference 2010 is now open for registration.  This year’s theme is Comedy.
• Kevin Smith’s Social Media battle with Southwest Airlines
  • SModcast – Listen to 107: Go F— Yourself, Southwest Airlines and 106: Thinicism
  • YouTube Videos of Kevin’s Final Words
  • Southwest Airline’s Blog: Not So Silent Bob and My Conversation with Kevin Smith
• Follow hashtag #noadtax on Twitter for updates on the fights against the advertising tax in multiple states
• More information on the tax issues going on in various states can be found at:
  • Performance Marketing Association: California Affiliates – It’s Time To Get Involved
  • PMA: Vermont Affiliates – Your Urgent Help is Needed
  • PMA: You Can Help Fight the Advertising Tax
  • Affiliate Advocacy: Tension Mounts in Maryland
  • AA: Illinois Internet Sales Tax Bill Surfaces
  • AA: Virginia Gains Momentum and Double Threat
  • Stephanie Lichtenstein’s blog: Top Ten Things On My Mind This Month
• EDIT: The Sacramento and San Diego trips we talk about were canceled late tonight.  The CA bill will be heard in the morning and we may make a trip on Monday for the house hearing.  Stay tuned!

Want to catch up with us & ask questions for the next show?  Find us on Twitter: @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn.  Or leave us a comment!

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Date: Monday, January 12th, 2009.  Session 4c, 11:30am.
Session Description:  This session outlines how to best manage affiliate relationships to reach major revenue goals without additional budget. Tactics focus on non-monetary incentives to increase affiliate performance. The panel consisted of:

• Chris Kramer, Co-Founder & Media Director, NETexponent (Moderator)
• Darren Eilers, Founder & CEO, DME Media, LLC
• David Lewis, CEO & Founder, Cashbaq
• Kevin Smith, Affiliate Marketing and Business Development Manager, Brown Shoe Co. – Shoes.com

OK, this session wasn’t what I expected it to be.  It seemed more like a session on how to treat or work well with super affiliates, which I’ve attended before and got kind of the same tips from.  Maybe I perceived this wrong, but I expected some tactics on how to creatively promote affiliate programs without money, but it turned out to be how to fire up your top affiliates, and still mentioned money.

Bullet Point Review!

• The majority of affiliates say they make most their money from less than 5% of the merchants they promote.
• David says: compensation does matter.  We’re willing to promote products and brands with zero compensation up front.
• David says: if you know our business, we’ll talk to you.  Without knowing that basic fact, all of the other things you can say don’t matter.
• Darren says, to managers: relationships matter.  Keep in mind that everyone does things differently.  They do expect a better relationship than any other affiliate.
• Darren says, to fellow affiliates: You can’t expect a merchant to call you back unless they have an incentive to.  So the affiliate has to sell you on themselves.  Pitch you.
• David says: the compensation has to sometimes be different for loyalty sites.  Get datafeeds cleaned up.  Better sales will come from that and the creativity affiliates use with datafeeds.
• Darren acknowledges: we know that it’s sometimes an uphill battle for merchants to get the datafeeds fixed by their IT departments, but if the affiliate doesn’t get the datafeed that’s clean, they have to go with someone else.
• David notes that he’s personally working hard to create a standard taxonomy that everyone uses for datafeeds to make that portion of the industry more uniform.
• The key is keeping it updated.
• Chris noted that the number 1 thing affiliates wanted from them are custom landing pages.  The second was product feeds, third promotions and incentives, and fourth was coupon code offers.
• Kevin wants affiliates to know that they can get help when they need it.  The more information we as merchants can give the affiliate, the more money they make, more sales for us.
• David warns that the conversions really have to be solid.  It’s better for the merchant and the affiliate.
• Kevin includes information about the products and company in their newsletter.  He tosses out as much information as he can that will help the affiliates.
• It’s hit & miss in terms of the merchant giving information to the affiliate in terms of what they’ll use.
• A lot of the money they make is reinvested.
• David uses an analogy of a bobsled team for the merchant.  They’re the head of the team and just need the push from the merchant to get rolling down the track.
• Darren advises that you take your top affiliates and let them help you test landing pages.  He’s usually willing to work with merchants that ask for that kind of help since he’ll ultimately receive the benefit.
• Chris warns though that a lot of affiliates don’t want to be guinea pigs and how often are you willing to take the risk?  Darren responded that it depended on how long he’s worked with and trusts the merchant.  He doesn’t mind being a guinea pig if it means he can make more money.
• David warned against merchants making knee-jerk reactions.  Use the data and make decisions based on that.
• Darren says if you know them and spend the time to get to know their business and form a partnership, merchants are usually more willing to give them inside data to help them out.
• Are there three different teams compensated separately?  Many merchants have the SEO team, SEM team, and Affiliate team.  If the program is run correctly the affiliates help all three teams.  it’s all of our sales, not my sales or your sales.
• Kevin says more affiliates looking at CPM than CPA – with the economy there’s not as much money out there for CPA offers anymore since they don’t return like sales do.
• David relayed something he read that said 73,000 stores will close in the US this year (estimate).  If someone comes to them and says they’re cutting their commissions, it’s a mistake but OK, they’ll look at your competitors more.  Someone has something similar and will boldly raise their commissions to stand out.
• Darren warns that before you lower commissions across the board, take a look at your top affiliates.  Weed them out and tier your structure.  Maybe increase compensation for the top affiliates and lower it for the others.
• David says to reward those meeting your goals.
• Kevin notes that they did that and it worked great.
• Kevin adds not to be knee-jerk reactionary.  Try to look at a monthly picture.  For them the 2nd Saturday of every month is their big Saturday Sale, and affiliates know that.  Being transparent helps them stand out.  Allow them to lean on the merchant.  Brand equity is very important.
• Kevin has seen more volume with coupons and loyalty sites.
• Chris shares more poll results amongst affiliates: What matters most before joining?  1. Commissions 2. Product being sold 3. Brand 4. Tracking platform 5. Terms and conditions 6. EPC 7. Affiliate manager/outsourced program managers 8. Return days 9. Action occurrences
• Darren says to look at your affiliate manager very closely to analyze the relationship.  When the AM gets to know what the affiliate does, they can customize incentives specifically for them.
• Darren also says to give your top affiliates your true top performing keywords.
• Chris asks if a big brand can get away with paying less commissions.  Darren says they can if their conversion rates are higher.
• Chris asks how much competitive research do you do?  Darren says they know what the published commission rate is.  They also look at the EPC but that doesn’t really tell them too much.
• David notes that they’re big and kind of already have the big brands, so they ask different questions before they join a new program.  Are you making our life easy?  Do you have an 88×31 non-animated gif?  Do you link to the homepage or deep link?  Is it something we think our members will see as quality?  Does it look like it’ll convert?
• Darren says he’ll try to get a hold of the affiliate manager to work with them to improve their site, but there’s only so much they can do so sometimes it’s hard to do that.
• Kevin creates banners on a daily basis.  They’ll accommodate different sizes if asked.
• Although David says he doesn’t look at banners.  Darren advises that they have to meet the challenges of Google changing, so they need to change.  Banners have been around so long and they’re surprised that there’s still so much emphasis on banners. They do their own creative because it’s faster and they know what will work with their visitors.  If the merchant won’t allow that, it’ll hurt them.  They’ll work within their guidelines for sure.

There was a lot of good information and wasn’t much time for a Q&A session, so there was none.  Despite it not being what I was going in for, it was still a good session and dropped some handy tips from some top affiliates.  There was also some good data points in the slides, so here they are for your viewing pleasure as well:

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Announcing a momentous occasion – the first ever contest from TrishaLyn.com! In an amazing feat of social media at it’s best, prizes have been graciously donated by a number of sponsors, mostly through Twitter! Now you have a chance to win, and let me tell you, I wish I could keep some of these!

Prizes:

• First Prize – Six month subscription to Trackur.
• Second Prize – Creative Vado Pocket Video Camera.
• Third Prize – Six month 125×125 ad spot on FreshySEO.com.
• Random Entry “Door” Prizes – 50 custom printed business cards from PsPrint, a Secrettweet.com Logo T-shirt, Create Your Own Reality: The Ancient Wisdom book by Sharyn Abbott, and a fantastic free sticker selection from StickerGiant.com,

To Enter:

All you have to do to win is write a blog post telling your readers why you read TrishaLyn.com and link to both the main URL TrishaLyn.com and to your favorite post. Simple, right? Well for our first contest we’re going low-key. To submit your entry, post a comment with a link to the post. You must submit your entry via comment – e-mail entries will not be accepted! Winners will be determined by the quality of content – because that’s the name of the game!

And, for the random entry prizes, I’ll put all the names in a hat and draw some for the random entry “door prizes”. This will be fun!

Deadline:

I want to give a decent amount of time for contestants for formulate and post their entries, so the deadline for this bad boy is Sunday, June 15th. Two solid weeks should be enough time to get the post refined and posted.

Prize Details

First prize is a six month subscription to Trackur, a great aggregation service produced by Andy Beal to help monitor your online reputation. Track keywords, brand names, branded terms, etc all from one super easy to use platform. I’m already a Trackur evangelist having blogged about it long ago, and that’s only after a 14 day free trial. The six month subscription donated by creator Andy Beal is valued at $108 for the Standard service and is an invaluable asset in monitoring your brand online.

Second prize is the techie talk of the town – the Creative Vado pocket video camera. A direct competitor to the Flip Camera, the Vado is lighter, smaller, and being talked about as the next best thing in internet video. This prize has been graciously donated by James Seligman of JamesSeligman.net. On his blog, James addresses the challenges of running various forums and his dabbling in affiliate marketing. The winner of this prize (valued at $100) has their choice of Pink or Silver for the camera – and should, of course, send me their first video with it to share!

Third prize was donated by Eric J. Odom from FreshySEO.com. The 125×125 ad spot on FreshySEO.com’s homepage, valued at $100, is located above the fold on the right hand side of the page. FreshySEO.com gets an average of 900 unique visitors per week. The blog covers many topics important for SEO professionals and amateurs alike, with frequent updates and helpful information. The winner will have to provide their own banner and the URL for the ad, which will be live for six months on the website, putting your ad in front of over 21,000 potential leads! So make it alluring!

Random Entry “Door Prize” Details

A sweet logo tee donated by Kevin Smith of SecretTweet.com. Secret Tweet allows anyone to post an anonymous tweets through the @secrettweet Twitter name. The shirt (pictured right) is valued at $25 and is available in an adult size requested.

Everyone can use some help achieving their goals, so author Sharyn Abbott has graciously donated a copy of her book Create Your Own Reality: The Ancient Wisdom (retail value $24.95). Create Your Own Reality is a different kind of self-help book, with tips and resources on how to make all the money you want, lose all the weight you want, and be as happy as you want. The book is 208 pages and includes over $99 worth of free bonuses.  More details about the book can be found at www.CreateYours2.com.

For a customized door prize, PsPrint is donating an order of 50 full-color 1 sided business cards. Winner will have a free account created for them at PsPrint.com and an order placed into their account. The winner will be responsible for designing and submitting the cards, either using their own design or one from the Design It! online tool. Help can be provided if necessary. For some generic fun, John Fischer from StickerGiant.com has donated a selection of stickers. Stickers will be randomly selected from their free stickers stash.

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