Affiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 5 [52:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 are a touch late with delivering last week’s show to you. I was out of my office away lobbying against California AB 178 on Tuesday and then at Web 2.0 Expo the rest of the week, so Mike and I took today to catch up on a few things. We start all business and devolve into my rant on the etiquette of booth staff at trade shows. So be sure to heed my words and stop, collaborate, and listen!

A few things we mention this week:

1. My second job as a California lobbyist against AB 178
2. Affiliate Voice: The Voice of the Affiliate Industry launched this week. Their president is Melanie Seery of NYAffiliateVoice.com
3. Twitter dropped their auto-follow service, so we took a look at 3rd party apps like Tweet Later.
4. Mike explored Max Banner Ads as an adserver for his blogs.
5. A brief recap of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and the tools I found potentially useful: StartForce, Safari Books Online, and GooseGrade
6. Another tech blog by our pals Sam Harrelson and Scott Jangro called Cloud39.com
7. Shout outs: Stephanie Lichtenstein’s awesome work on the #advertisingtax organization and Facebook group, and Daniel M. Clark’s great help via Twitter.

This episode comes in at a mouth watering 52 minutes.

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode #5: Staring Down The Governator

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I won big while in Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit, but not at the tables or slots.  For someone who rarely wins anything, I’ve had great luck lately winning some goodies in the last three weeks, from three different affiliate networks!  I managed to win some cool prizes that will most definitely help me out in my blogging and social endeavors!

So with that, thank you SO MUCH and here’s what I won so far this year and from who.  2009 has turned out pretty awesome so far!  I apologize in advance, dear readers, as this will be a long post!

Flip Mino Video Camera from MarketLeverage

Last month, several bloggers I read hosted a contest by MarketLeverage, the “Share Your Secret” contest.  The rules were simple – share your marketing secret via blog comment and you can only use MarketLeverage as the example network.  I entered on a couple of blogs, and was chosen to be the winner from 11|15 Media’s blog!  So thanks Mike!  Here’s what I shared:

As I said there, my secret isn’t really a secret – work smarter, not harder. I picked up the saying from one of my college roommates and I’m sure some genius generations before me coined the phrase, but I apply that mantra to everything. I try to make things more efficient and do things better so that my time is more effectively used and I can work smart without necessarily making things harder on myself.

To apply that to the affiliate example, I use MaxBannerAds on my blog. When I label the ads, not only do I add the merchant name but I also add the network name, i.e. MarketLeverage, to help me to group them together when I go to look at reporting so I can easily group things for myself. That’s just one small example of how I work smarter, not harder.

There were a lot of great contenders, so I was surprised to have won!  I was given the choice between a 4th generation iPod Nano or a Flip Mino, and since I had just bought an iPod for my husband for Christmas and have my own classic iPod, I chose the Flip.  I have to give MarketLeverage extra thanks for such a good prize because I just realized that my Aiptek HD camera is on it’s way to death.  So yay!  I hope as soon as I receive it and check out the cool content they’re going to preload onto it that I’ll have the guts to video blog more

A new service from marketing master Joel Comm was launched at Affiliate Summit.  The service, called TextCastLive, is a SMS messaging service that texted updates to opt-ins about the conference, like when sessions were starting and other events.  They also peppered in some contests in.  During the tail end of a session, a text went out announcing that the 7th person to show their phone the good folks at the oneNetworkDirect booth would receive $500 in network credit.  So I wandered over and with the good fortune of being with some other people who showed their phones (or, their phones were immediately more visible I might say) I was number 7!  I was actually surprised to see that they have a lot of tech offers on their network, including Lavasoft which makes the awesome anti-spyware program Ad-Aware that I love and swear by!  So thank you to TextCastLive and oneNetworkDirect!

Merchant Bag from buy.at

When you see those bowls on booth tables that say “drop your business card here to win”, DO IT!  This is how I was the lucky recipient of the merchant bag from buy.at.  The bag was a veritable treasure trove of swag, all provided by the merchants on their network.  At face value, it was an awesome Patagonia backpack, designed to comfortably pad a laptop.  It’s nice a slim, which is a benefit since the current backpack case I have is huge and bulky.  They also handed me a $100 Ticketmaster gift card, and said there was a Bonobos gift card designated for me as well.  I shook hands and hugged those I knew, took a picture with the guys decked out for the Affiliate Triathalon (Kim & Ayako – I WANT THAT PIC!)  and wandered off.

I was stoked to get that, and later when I went to open the bag to consolidate some of the other swag I’d received at the show I found that there was even MORE inside!  A cool track jacket, which I unfortunately had to give away since it was much smaller than what I wear, a $5 Starbucks gift card, a nifty gel stress ball, a cool pleather (plastic+leather) & metal USB thumb drive, some nifty ear warmer headphones, and… oh I know I’m forgetting something!  So HUGE thanks to the people I know from buy.at, Kim Salvino, Ayako Bingham, Amy Ely and everyone else there!

So once again, thank you to MarketLeverage, oneNetworkDirect, and buy.at for their awesome generosity and great prizes!

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I know I haven’t done this feature in a long time, but I want to bring it back!  So here we go, and I’m going to tell you about a super easy ad-serving WordPress plugin called MaxBannerAds, brought to you by MaxBlogPress.

From the website, the description of MaxBannerAds is:

Easily add and rotate banners in your wordpress blog anywhere you like without editing any themes or touching any codes.

This is a great tool to use if you’re not so technologically inclined to want to mess with HTML codes on your blog.  You can put in the code just as you get it from the ad serving network (whether that’s an affiliate network or otherwise) and it translates that appropriately to the img url and destination url.  You can place the banners or text links before your posts, after your posts, at the top of the page, at the bottom of the page, or in your sidebar.  It’s really flexible and allows you to advertise efficiently.

There are a couple downsides to this plugin, unfortunately.  For one, with the free version you have to keep the “Powered by MaxBannerAds” link below the ad units.  You can pay for this tool for $47 and have that link removed, which isn’t a high price to pay if you’re effectively making money off of your advertising.  If you have multiple blogs, you only need to pay this fee once to remove the link from all your connected blogs.

The second downside I’ve noticed is that the sidebar links do not track impressions and accurately calculate click-through rate like the other ad placements.  That does make it a little more annoying to keep track of performance since you’ll have to go into the different network’s reporting to get that information instead of having it right there on your WordPress dashboard like the others.  Of course if you’re not using any sidebar widgets with MaxBannerAds, then you don’t have to worry about this.

Overall it’s a good tool, and totally worth it for free to leave the link and just accept their regular email correspondence as a trade off for using it free.  I highly recommend this tool for any blogger that’s a bit of a technie newbie that doesn’t want to risk breaking something!

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