Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 10: Gonna Make a Change
Podcast: Play in new window | 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!
Unfortunately this week we had a mic failure on Mike’s part, so even though I could hear him when we were recording the podcast on Skype, when listening back he was inaudible. I tried amplifying it and leveling it and everything, but it was a lost cause. So instead, we decided I’d give you a recap on what we talked about since they were all pretty important issues. Basically, we’re taking a page from Shawn Collins’ book on podcast failures ;). So the title refers both to all the changes going on with tax rules and disclosure regarding affiliates AND to the change Mike has to make to get the recording right next week!
The recap episode is a short and sweet 26 minutes on the dot since it includes a Jackson tribute at the end.
In this show, we discussed:
- A recap of Affiliate Convention.
- Amazon dropped North Carolina affiliates and sent a warning letter to Rhode Island affiliates. Darren Rowse wrote about it on Problogger.
- The FTC is tightening it’s rules regarding disclosure, but it’s still ambiguous enough to leave affiliates questioning what this means for them. Daniel M. Clark wrote an article on the FTC disclosure issue, as well as Brian Clark of Copyblogger’s wrote about how to turn disclosure into a selling point.
- Twitter servers took a hit yesterday when the news about Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke. Are they ready to be a major search engine?
- Rumors swirled about other celebrity deaths – this doesn’t make Twitter look like a legitimate resource in the eyes of skeptics.
- Finally, Rest in Peace to Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who both passed away yesterday. We pay tribute to MJ and pontificated on whether or not we’d see affiliates attempting to capitalize on these events. I see just now that Shawn Collins is thinking about this topic as well on his blog.
BlogWorldExpo 08: Making Money Online with a Blog
This was also commonly referred to as the “Super Bloggers” panel. The members consisted, in total, of:
- Jim Kukral, JimKukral.com (Moderator)
- John Chow, JohnChow.com
- Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com
- Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net
- Brian Clark, CopyBlogger.com
- Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
Jeremy was late due to some quality Vegas partying, but once he did arrive he had some quality things to say. They all did, really, but I especially enjoyed Darren & Brian’s takes as I had never heard them speak before and I’d heard John & Zac.
Bullet Point Review!
- Jim asked what their number #1 money maker on their blog was:
- John Chow: Switching from an ad network to direct advertising sales using the OIO Publisher Direct plugin.
- Zac Johnson: Direct ad sales
- Darren Rowse: Recommended affiliate products.
- Brian Clark: Launching a membership site & selling WordPress themes.
- Selling any old crap decreases content value; sell things you actually believe in.
- Bloggers just want to write, not sell, so plugins are useful.
- Write about something that’s interesting or else it’s not sustainable.
- Revenue: 1. Direct Ad Sales 2. Affiliate Programs 3. AdSense.
- BC: Selling things (information, membership, etc) instead of advertising makes more money.
- A couple of years ago readers would complain about ads, but now they’re accepted as par for the course.
- The amount of money to be made in “non-sexy” niches is ridiculous.
- Start with what your readers want to buy, not what you want to sell.
- Offer incentives to sign up for your newsletter – 3x the money to be made with subscriptions.
- Newsletters vs. RSS – it’s way more beneficial to get people onto your email list.
- Aweber – BlogBroadcast tools count is included in RSS subscribers & sends an automatic newsletter with your blog posts.
- Many people still have no idea what RSS is, so offer delivery by email too.
- Blogs don’t have to look monetized.
- Sell yourself using consulting.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Wait until 100 or 1000 readers to bother displaying RSS numbers on the blog.
- RSS subscriber count is powerful for branding and can be factored into ad prices.
- JC: Rule of thumb when setting an ad price – what is the ECPM for that same spot on an ad network? Double that. Offer the ad to run for a month at a time or a quarter, depending on price.
- Condense your header – big headers take up valuable space.
- How much traffic do they see through search? DR sees about 40% to ProBlogger and 60% to Digital Photography School.
- Chitika is a good ad network with powerful blog widgets for contextual, relevant ads.
- Write for your users, not Google. Search traffic is just a bonus.
- It’s a tricky line to keep your editorial integrity and still sell stuff, so don’t sell willy-nilly.
- Build a business – get repeat customers, loyal readers.
- What percentage of the time do they work? A LOT – you have to bust your ass, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme.
- Always look deeply at a product & only recommend valuable things.
- Announce it
- Talk about the product info, merchant or manufacturers information.
- Share testimonials of readers.
- Review your experience with it.
- Credibility is key with sharing information.
- Endorse, review products.
- Sell advertising in newsletters, lots of merchants love that.
- Establish yourself as an expert.
- Remember that Teaching Sells!
This was a very informative panel, and a great way to kick off the sessions. The room was packed, and I especially liked Jim’s approach to using Twitter to get questions for the audience. With a tech set crowd like bloggers, it was highly effective and a great panel for sure.
Read MoreBlog World Expo Underway
From miss604’s Flickr Stream
Blog World Expo kicked off this morning and is going strong. Due to a late arriving flight, my desire to sleep overtook my desire to hear today’s keynote – the one I’m looking forward to is tomorrow with Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park & Fort Minor anyway. Ran into some familiar faces right away and hit the ground running into the super blogger panel moderated by Jim Kukral and featuring Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Zac Johnson, John Chow, and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney, who misunderstood the timing I guess and was 45 mins late 🙂
Great stuff from those guys and I was even randomly picked to win a copy of Darren’s ProBlogger book after asking a decent question. Of course, I’ll have more on that panel later.
Next I stayed in the same room for the affiliate marketing panel with Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit, Mike Allen of Shopping-Bargains, and Tim Jones of TheRealTimJones (yes, all familiar names if you listen to RedHatBlueHat). They had some really good stuff and brought up some tools and such that I’m definitely going to be looking into when my whirlwind crazy travel is done. Once again, more to come.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t blogged a lot about CJU. Due to the motel I was staying at being so far away and the internet there being spotty I didn’t have a lot of time to get those written up. But I’m working on it!
If you’re stuck at home with Twitter and trying to keep up with what’s going on out here, go to Twitter Search for #bwe08 and you can see all the tweets that attendees have tagged. I’m trying to keep mine updated as I remember to use TwitPic to share a photo of something.
Read MoreCribbed Content for January 25th
As promised last week, here’s my look around the web for interesting business, marketing, web 2.0, etc. stuff.
- Digg changed their algorithm. No one cared except Digg diehards.
- After two+ weeks, PrintSalesPro finally publishes a reprint of my All For One, One For All Printers post.
- LaTease Rikard, one of my StumbleUpon friends, took some advice after my post about our launch of the affiliate program (officially) and joined up and wrote about it.
- ProBlogger just today published Dropping The F-Bomb: Blogging with Naughty Words. I don’t see a whole lot of repeated topics on my jaunts through the blogosphere, but this is the second article on using the F-bomb since September. The first was Scott Jangro back in September. I wonder if this is really a wide spread phenomenon?
It’s been a slow week, so there you have it. Not much going on, really.
Read MoreCommenting is Marketing
I was looking through the nominations for the SEMMY awards and came across this great post by Darren Rowse over at Problogger. He talks about 10 ways to hurt your blogs brand by commenting on other blogs. It’s all pretty informative stuff that seems like common sense to me. This read comes at a particularly pertinent time for me as I was recently asked to compile a list of blogs that we should respond to as a company.
I grabbed a few to check up on and added them to my Google Reader to subscribe. I’m very sensitive to spam and I don’t want to be “that guy” (or girl, as is the case). I learned after reading Darren’s post that I’m not doing anything wrong. I’ve been making relevant comments (of course) and throwing in the PsPrint URL when it adds to the conversation of the bloggers post.
I post Darren’s question to my few readers here:
- What practices would you add to the posted list?
- Which would you remove from it (or modify)?
- What advice would you give bloggers when it comes to commenting on others blogs?
- As a blogger – do you police any of these types of things? Do you have a comment policy of any kind?
BlogOnExpo – The Day is Here!
Let the games begin! The BlogOnExpo started today, with PsPrint as an exhibitor. There are some great sessions available online FOR FREE! This is the first free online bloggers expo of its kind. Setting precedents is important people! The organizer has done a bang up job of getting some pretty knowledgeable people interviewed and contributing to the online sessions. Today’s contributions are:
Sessions
- Social Media – Neil Patel from ACS SEO
- Logo Design Trends
- What to Do When you lose your Biggest Traffic Source – John Chow
- SEOmoz Guides – Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
Interviews
- Matt Mullenweg
- Guy Kawasaki
- John Chow
- Darren Rowse
- Ryan Block
Having personally attended sessions with Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin on the panels, I can say that those will be great quality and I’m looking forward to checking them out. Darren Rowse is also a great guy (man behind ProBlogger.net) whom I enjoy following on Twitter, so that should be a good interview as well.
The expo will run for a few days, so mosey over and check it out.
Read More
