Happy Birthday Tiny Prints!
If you’re anything like me, you love to see your photographs shared with family, friends, and everyone! Sometimes there’s just nothing better than to see a photo you took in print. I love Tiny Prints for combining designers more talented than I am with my cherished photos for announcements, invitations, and holiday cards.
Today is the last day to save during Tiny Prints’ best sale of the entire year. Their birthday is this week and from now through March 4 (yes, today!), they are giving you the gift of 30% off everything. There has literally never been a better time to order with this kind of sale at your disposal.
Tiny Prints is the industry leader when it comes to personalized stationery, photo gifts, and more. Whether you need birth announcements, graduation party or baby shower invitations, photo iPad cases or notebooks, and any of your personalized stationery needs, Tiny Prints has it all. Their designs are spectacular and fresh – the kind of invitations or cards that make the recipient go “Wow!” when they open the envelope.
All of their products are customized to your needs. You choose the photos and text to add to their awesome designs and then…you impress the recipients.
Oh and the part about there never being a better time? Totally true since this is their best sale of the year.
Visit them now (the sale ends tonight at 11:59pm Pacific Time) and choose from any of their products and when you check out, use the promo code BDAY10 to save 30%.
Happy Shopping!
Read MoreHOW Conference Post-Game Show
Well I’m back in the Pacific Standard Time Zone after 4 days in Boston. To date, it’s safe for me to say that the HOW Design Conference has been the best for PsPrint to attend so far! About 80% of people stopping by our booth had never heard of us before, which isn’t necessarily bad. This has been a relatively untapped resource for us, and we excitedly passed out samples of our printing, paper stocks, and information on the Reseller Program.
A neat feature of this show was that the expo hall wasn’t open the entire day – we only had to staff the booth from 8-9 am, 12-2 pm, and then 5-6:30p on Monday only. I believe the “Resource Center” hours (their moniker) were set this way to avoid stepping on the toes of too many special sessions. The real star of this conference is, of course, the educational sessions for designers. The expo hall is just a bonus for vendors to be able to toss some marketing voodoo at a prime audience.
I think we’ll definitely go back next year to the HOW Conference, being held in Austin, TX. Of all the trade shows I’ve been to as a representative of PsPrint, this was by far the most successful. Everything arrived on time, our booth looked great, and the audience was truly interested in what we have to offer. Overall, a great feeling!
Of course, I had to visit Faneuil Hall & Cheers, and did take some pictures that I’ll share tomorrow once I pull them off my camera. My hotel (pictured above) was pretty decent for a Best Western, and I have some tips & such to share about Boston for those of us going back for Affiliate Summit East in August. But that, my friends, I’ll leave for another day.
Read MoreFeedBurner FAIL
Something wonky happened a few days ago and I didn’t notice… sorry feed readers!
Here’s the posts you may have missed…
- Effective Email Case Study – TubeMogul
- Link Glossary – Alt Text
- Comfortable Branding by Name (Video)
- Hard Sell Tactics DON’T WORK
- Developing Professional Business Cards with Sharp Company Logos
- Link Glossary – Backlinks
- Cribbed Content for April 11th
- Twittermethis v. Twattermethat (Podcast)
Analytics Glossary: Conversion Funnel
Conversion Funnel:
- The series of steps that move a visitor towards a specified conversion event, such as an order or registration sign up. Funnels vary for every site, but best practice is to limit the depth a user must engage to convert.
A more common term for this is the ordering process. Here at PsPrint that’s what we usually say to describe the steps a consumer has to go through to place an order. It’s always a good idea to review your conversion funnel every year or so to make sure that the UI (user interface) is easy to understand and isn’t garbled with useless information or unnecessary steps. Remember that the easier it is to convert, the more likely the conversion is.
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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.
Debriefing 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 MoreGetting ready for Affiliate Summit West 08
Twitter is alive with activity. The summit has set up a group twitter that tracks whenever someone uses the keyword asw08 in their twits. This is very cool, especially considering I didn’t know Twitter had this capability!
Everyone seems to be in a rush to get things done. Jim Kukral from ScratchBack.com is MCing the keynote on Monday. He’s twittered several times tonight about the video he’s working on for the presentation. At ASE07 in Miami the keynote was Ze Frank, a hilarious individual, so I’m hoping for no less at ASW08.
Stephanie Agresta from Stephanie Agresta Consulting is also a speaker and author of the Internet Geek Girl blog. She’s twittered off and on today about her flight information and getting ready for the trip from out east. Sam Harrelson from Affiliate Fortune Cookies has been twittering as well and he’s even had to change his flight because of inclement Northeastern weather.
Of course myself, I’m twittering here and there about getting ready. I’m not lucky enough to have a nice new company supplied laptop, so I’m on my own personal laptop this weekend. I do have a press pass, so I be working on keeping the interweb updated from the blogger’s room through this blog and Twitter. I’m committed despite my chunky clunky Dell Latitude laptop :p.
As a final note while I’m getting my laptop set up tonight, I encourage everyone associated with affiliate marketing in any way to check out this month’s issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine. Besides there being a keen write up of the PsPrint Affiliate Program, there’s a lot of great affiliate manager tips. I’ll be attending the whopping 10 hour Affiliate Classroom LIVE affiliate manager training on Saturday in Las Vegas before the summit. I’m eager to get in there and take notes… is it too much to hope for actual desks? :p I know that it’s at the Rio and from all the conference space I’ve seen at hotels in the last year, I’m sure there won’t be surfaces to write on readily available, so I’ll be taking my clipboard with me.
Hope to see you there! I’m considering bringing my camcorder with me to the exhibit hall, so if you’ve used PsPrint in the past, come on by for an impromptu video plug!
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