ad:tech San Francisco: Affiliate Marketing – The Big Challenges
Session Description: As the affiliate marketing industry grows, it continues to encounter challenges on multiple fronts. One front burner issue for brands and advertisers remains affiliate legislation. From New York to California to Texas, the nuances of tax collection in each state are still being worked out and, in many cases, litigated. With this vital issue still in flux, what are brands and marketers doing to move forward? How can advertisers keep track of the state-by-state laws, and how can they develop strategies for today and for the future? Trademark legislation is also a key issue for affiliate marketing and we’ll explore how brands walk the fine line between protecting their brand and getting wider exposure. Finally, we’ll tackle how affiliate legislation in various states will impact all online retailers.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Carolyn Tang Kmet, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Groupon (Moderator)
- Angel Djambazov, OPM, KEEN Footwear
- Rebecca Madigan, Executive Director, Performance Marketing Association
- Brian Looney, Senior Director of Business Development, CitizenHawk, Inc.
- Seana Montgomery, Senior Paralegal, McAfee
Impression comment
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate marketing has become a legitimate marketing channel.
- Ad Tax, aka Amazon Tax
- Lots of spin going on from the pro side.
- No physical presence – not required to collect sales tax.
- Reality is that there’s no money involved
- What does it mean for merchants?
- If you have an affiliate program in states where this passes, you must now collect sales tax for all purchases made into the state, Or
- Terminate affiliates (obviously the feared option).
- What happens when it passes?
- 25-35% loss of income to affiliates.
- Lay offs, downsizing, some companies may close entirely.
- People move out-of-state.
- Income tax decreases.
- Legislation has been beaten back 25 times.
- Passed in 5 states.
- 8 states in play in 2011.
- Brand Protection is Important.
- Typosquatting relies on typos in URLs.
- Bad spelling is as prevalent as the common cold.
- Typing too fast, fat fingers, old keyboards that stick, small keyboards on mobile devices.
- More than 20% of all Internet traffic is typed in.
- 15-30% of the time the URLs are misspelled.
- Companies often classify this as a legal issue instead of a marketing or traffic issue.
- Defending yourself against a typosquatter is expensive when you get lawyers involved.
- URDP – uniform domain name dispute resolution policy.
- Trademark infringement considered anything confusingly similar. Typos don’t count but content does. $1500 to file a complaint in court.
- You’re not filing against the domain name, you’re filing against the domain owners.
- Turn trademark enforcement into a profit center.
- Laws are international, but more enforceable on .com & .net.
- Marketing channels are business tools. Each should be employed for a specific purpose.
- You’re obligated to police your brand – your trademark can get canceled if you don’t prove you’re actively policing infringements.
- Learning from KEEN Footwear.
- Be sure your affiliates understand what affiliate marketing is.
- Affiliate publisher joined, tried selling his own brand of shoes thinking affiliate meant an endorsement similarly to the definition of “affiliate” in the TV world. Eventually showed up at the corporate offices demanding Keen CEO do more to leverage their partnership in trying to sell is shoe related product.
- Not all publishers understand what the channel is. Educate them.
- Be sure to clearly define all legal aspects.
- 20% of your affiliates are driving the majority of the revenue.
- What can you do to measure impact of amazon tax:
- Monitor legislation in states crucial to your success.
- Join the PMA to help.
- Stay informed through geekcast.fm, ReveNews.com, PMA blog.
- Create a contingency plans with a different payment or advertising model to not loose these valuable partners.
- Garbage can bills popping up including more junk trying to get out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax. Just says “don’t do business in our state”.
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 51: Interviewing Adam Riemer
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
Mike is taking a break from podcasting for awhile to focus on his business! I’m going solo this week, still talking to conference speakers, this time chatting with Adam Riemer about his upcoming speaking gigs at PubCon South 2011 at the Norris Executive Conference Center in Austin, TX. For a quick 15 minutes we discuss:
- How Adam got started online.
- How to Start a Successful Affiliate Program – Adam will be speaking along side Chuck Hamrick, Peter Hamilton of HasOffers, Brook Schaaf of Schaaf-PartnerCentric, and Paul Schroader of PS Web Solutions.
- Site Review – Focus on Affiliates – Fellow panelists are Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit, Peter Hamilton of HasOffers, David Favor of David Favor & Associates, and Roger Montti of MartiniBuster.com.
- What Adam’s been up to lately – working in-house managing the JobFox Affiliate Program and blogging up a storm at AdamRiemer.me, ReveNews.com, and SearchEnginePeople.com.
- We didn’t mention it in this re-record, but Adam’s been training for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, which he’ll be walking with Team Affiliate Marketers Give Back – Jen Goode, Missy Ward, and Angel Djambazov in Denver, CO June 25th & 26th (donate to Adam today!)
Want to catch up with us & ask questions for the next show? Find us on Twitter: @AMF_Podcast, @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn. Like us on Facebook! Leave us a comment!
Special thanks to GeekCast.fm for hosting Affiliate Marketing Fanatics.
Read MoreNoFollow vs. DoFollow
First, the definition, courtesy of Dot Traffic Glossary:
Nofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider not to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will not influence the website indexed. Nofollow attribute values are most often used on sites with user generated content, like user comments and blogs.
Dofollow is basically the opposite of this. Many bloggers refer to this as link love. By allowing the search engine spiders to follow those links, you’re increasing their page rank status and allowing their ranks to influence your rank. Which is not what you want if you’re looking to increase your page rank, necessarily.
There’s a debate raging amongst bloggers and it seems like most smaller blogs are going the Dofollow route. By spreading the link love you’re helping out your fellow bloggers, who are more inclined to reciprocate. Blogroll’s are a prime opportunity for this. The larger bloggers don’t seem to be weighing in on the issue (at least not from what I’ve seen) so perhaps for a blogger with a larger audience they couldn’t care one way or the other.
Since this is a bit outside my expertise, I’ll admit, I posed the question to my 59 Twitterati followers for their opinions:
Shawn Collins of Affiliate Tip: “Event with nofollow in my blog comments, the comment monkeys constantly attack with their spam.”
Scott Jangro of MechMedia: “I’ve been fighting so hard with the spammers recently, I’m starting to question my own long-time use of dofollow.” He also added “I agree with Sam on the size of the blog though. Mine was until the past few days a PR6 which has me on every must-spam list.”
Sam Harrelson of ReveNews & Affiliate Fortune Cookies: “I’m all in favor of spreading the love, but there are SO many gamers out there that it makes DoFollow really unsustainable.” He followed up to say “Would just add that if it’s a small blog, you might make dofollow work. As it grows, it’s just too hard.”
Of course, these opinions totally fall in line with that I’ve observed in looking around. The little guys are all for dofollow to get the word out, but once you cross that line you become a “comment monkey” target. Scott Jangro wrote a really reflective post about it back in February called Attack of the Comment Monkeys (don’t know how I missed it from the RSS feed…).
I think one thing all bloggers and internet marketers in general can agree
on is that Spam is a problem. Not only is it definitely annoying, but it also pollutes the well (as Jason Calacanis pointed out in his keynote at Affiliate Summit West last month). It makes a lot of legitimate internet marketing look bad, and it’s a fine line before someone misunderstands persistent follow up and due diligence for the dreaded SPAM label.
Where do I stand? Long time readers of this blog will note that I use links a lot in my posts. Basically I do this for two reasons: 1. I like to give readers an easy reference of what or who I’m talking about. 2. It’s just nice karma. This blog is hosted by Blogger, and according to their Help Center they automatically add the nofollow tag to the templates. Which is probably why I have a page rank of 0.
So I’m going to edit my template as an experiment. For anyone else curious on how to do this for blogger, there’s a great tutorial online here. Let’s see what happens, shall we?
Read MoreGoogle Buys DoubleClick – Googlezilla Attacks!
It’s official! Google has closed the deal and purchased online marketing agency DoubleClick, who also run affiliate network DoubleClick Performics. There are already graphics up on the DoubleClick and Performics homepages announcing the merger. According to Performics it’s business as usual and the two companies will work independently for now.
There’s no word yet on how this merger will affect Google’s amazingly successful AdWords or the ever growing Performics, both tools of the successful affiliate. It’s easy to speculate that eventually both will be rolled into one mega-monster network offering PPC, CPA, and CPC opportunities for affiliates. Truth is that we just don’t know. While that seems it would be the obvious long term goal, Google is known for innovation and could completely knock our socks off with something else in store. Only time will tell!
More blogs on the Google acquisition of DoubleClick:
- Shawn Collins at Affiliate Tip
- Heather Paulson at ReveNews
- Om Malik at Gigaom
- Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim
