Cribbed Content for March 28th
Here we are in the home stretch of March, getting ready for spring! I personally can’t wait, but in the meantime here are the links for the week.
- Shawn Collins over at Affiliate Summit already announced that Affiliate Summit West 2009 will once again be in Las Vegas at the Rio All-Suites Hotel & Casino. I’ve come to terms with this…next year I’ll know not to schedule any meetings with the phrase “meet me in the lobby”.
- Sam Harrelson does a great screen cast about creating a monetization plan over at Affiliate Fortune Cookies. He’s using a project of his Sci-Fi Tales as an example. Good stuff so far.
- In line with Sam’s project, ProBlogger has a great post today on 20 Types of pages that Every Blogger Should Consider. I know I’ll definitely be adding a few of those pages to this site.
- SEOBook is reporting that Google has officially listed Mahalo as spam. Of course, that’s how post author Aaron Wall is interpreting their internal spam document. But I have to say, he’s got a bit of a point.
So go out there and get your affiliate links set up, work on a monetization plan, throw up some pages, and make sure it’s not spam!
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 MoreQuote of the Day
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
-Steven Wright
I shouldn’t be this apprehensive about flying home to Oakland, but I always am!
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 MoreDebriefing from Affiliate Classroom LIVE Training
The training has been over for about 2 hours now and I’ve been sitting in my hotel room on the 16th floor with a brilliant view of west Las Vegas thinking about whether or not I should share my views with you on the training tonight or wait until I’ve had some time to absorb it and wind down more from the experience to write about it.
However I’ve decided in the interest of reporting to you, I should talk about my initial impressions at least while they’re still fresh in my memory. I will be dropping names!
First, the event was hosted by Anik Singal from Affiliate Classroom. Super gracious guy and a pleasure to talk with. Good job Anik for a great event!
The first speaker of the day was the keynote by Ned Farra. Ned talked a bit about Zappos.com and their history. Being previously unfamiliar with Zappos, it was interesting for me from a case study type point of view.
Next we heard from Bryan Rhodes & Stephanie Harris from Shaaf Consulting on a typical affiliate manager day. A lot of GREAT tips & tricks on how to allocate your resources (i.e. time & money) where they’re best served, making your job more efficient, and coping with being an affiliate manager. I think this was one of my favorite sessions of the day because they were engaging and even as fairly new to this game as I am, I could totally relate! I think this is the most actionable session for me.
Afterward we heard from Clarke D. Walton, a lawyer specializing in internet law. Some people seemed bored by this, but I was fascinated by the legal side of things. He shared some great case studies that really helped me to understand the legal perspective of affiliate marketing.
Amit Mehta, a 7 figure super affiliate, then talked about how to recruit and keep super affiliates. Good stuff, a lot of which I’d heard before, but definitely worth while. I learned some new tricks that I’m DEFINITELY going to keep in my back pocket 😉
I admit… the next couple of sessions were after lunch, which I was rushed through and had to take with me back into the meeting room, and I was less than enthused about the content. Todd Farmer & John Vehlewald from kowabunga gave a good talk about the difference between CPA and Traditional affiliate programs. It was interesting from a publisher point of view, but not very useful to me as a manager considering our printing products and the types of campaigns we run.
Lisa Riolo talked about metrics… I wish she could have gone a bit more in depth but the overview was good. Actually, more in depth in this setting so late in the day might not have been the best idea, so I’ll accept it! She did help me really understand how to make metrics more actionable.
Next up was Michael C. Jones from Pepperjam talking about affiliate marketing technology. Okay, I’ll admit it – I was bored. Partly because he was using a slide presentation that wasn’t included in the packet of materials we were given, contained a ton of information, and talked too fast. I’m really hoping that I can approach him via email later this week so I can get the PPT and really read it and soak it in. It was some stuff I already knew regarding coding and whatnot so nothing too ground breaking for me, personally.
Worst/Best Session of the day came from Heather Paulson. I was really interested in the topic of engaging affiliates and she started out great…then she seem to lose the audience. Keep in mind that this was an affiliate manager training day, so when you ask how many people have ever heard of xx tool and no one raises their hand, saying “uh, you should” may not go over well. The rest of her talk kind of went sour in my mind from there. Her information was overwhelming and almost pointed to “you can’t do this, hire me to do it!” without actually saying that. Maybe I took it the wrong way, I’m open to that, but it just rubbed me the wrong. I admit though, I did pick up some useful tips that will really improve my actions as an affiliate program manager, so it wasn’t all bad.
Lastly Rachel Honoway talked more about the new AC Certification courses to become a bona fide “certified affiliate manager”. I really want to take the courses! They’re fairly reasonably priced ($1500 for a 10 module course).
Oy tomorrow is a lighter day with just booth set up, registration, and the meet market, but work is work!
Read MoreCribbed Content for February 22nd
Yes, it’s that time again… time for me to ignore my writing degree and grab content to share from other sources. It’s not plagiarism… it’s flattery & link bait 🙂
- Trackur is live! My dreams of total reputation management are coming true! Now, to fulfill my dream of the company reimbursing me to buy Andy Beal’s new book Radically Transparent.
- Google launched a beta version of AdWords for Video. If I were a bit easier on the eyes I’d be posting AdWord laden videos left & right!
- Affiliate Summit West 08 kicks off on Sunday for set up & the Meet Market. As if I haven’t already mentioned this a million times.
Tonight I forfeit my own bed for accommodations at the Rio in Las Vegas to get my training on Saturday. See you there!
