Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 5: Staring Down the Governator
Tuesday
Apr 7, 2009
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:
- My second job as a California lobbyist against AB 178
- Affiliate Voice: The Voice of the Affiliate Industry launched this week. Their president is Melanie Seery of NYAffiliateVoice.com
- Twitter dropped their auto-follow service, so we took a look at 3rd party apps like Tweet Later.
- Mike explored Max Banner Ads as an adserver for his blogs.
- 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
- Another tech blog by our pals Sam Harrelson and Scott Jangro called Cloud39.com
- 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
Free Toolsday 10/21 – MaxBannerAds
Tuesday
Oct 21, 2008
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!
BlogWorldExpo 08: Affiliate Marketing Secrets for Bloggers
Thursday
Oct 16, 2008
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!
