Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 5: Staring Down the Governator
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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.
Read MoreCribbed Content for March 6th
I haven’t had the chance to do very many of these during February… the month was filled with birthday celebrations, a vacation, and a lot of Wii in the evening since I’ve been strangely obsessed with Guitar Hero and Animal Crossing: City Folk. But since I’ve been back from vacation I’ve seen some great stuff, so I want to share.
Forgive me, some of it will be a bit out of date.
- Geno Prussakov put together a great list of affiliate marketing events in 2009.
- California is looking into a tax for online sales. Scott Jangro has written an open letter to the California outlining why it’s a bad idea. I am going to take his advice and grab the letter to send myself as a resident of California.
- Read the full California Assembly Bill 178 and contact your representatives to explain why this is a bad idea for affiliate marketers in California!
- 20/20 contacted the Performance Marketing Alliance for some background on affiliate marketing for a series they’re doing on the proliferation of work-at-home schemes. It’s good to see that they’re able to do some positive PR for the industry already… very promising since they’re off to a slow start.
- I wrote another guest post for Marketing Pilgrim, this time on The Search Engine Known as Twitter.
- If you’re at all interested in reading about my rambles about my Caribbean cruise vacation, check out my Posterous blog.
When a microblog stands in for a real blog…
Anyone who follows me on Twitter (if you don’t yet – what’s your excuse?) could see that I was more than making up for my lack of internet on my laptop by tweeting notes from the sessions I was in. I strained one of my fingers on my dominant right hand Sunday night bowling with the folks from GTO Management, and even taking traditional written notes was a challenge.
So before I kick off all the notes I took at the sessions (it was lighter this conference than I have in the past), here’s all the tidbits of knowledge I tweeted while attending sessions at Affiliate Summit West 09.
From the Buy.at Party at Moon:
- http://twitpic.com/11sw2 – Tear the roof off at Moon buy.at party
- http://twitpic.com/11t7v – From the roof of the palms
From The Ultimate Pitching Guide Session:
- @skydiver just said re pitches on twitter “if u can’t pitch in 140 char u need 2 work on brevity anyway”
- Twitter has replaced focus groups- @skydiver
From the ShareASale Under the Star’s 80’s themed party:
- http://twitpic.com/1243s – Jon levine @ sas party
- http://twitpic.com/124e8 – Gettin’ down at SAS party
From Affiliate Videos: Where do they work best? Session:
- Video session: Youtube is larger than Microsoft in search engines- 77mil uniques
- u don’t have to have a professional prod studio to develop video
- .tv traffic increasing but still nowhere near as high as .com
- very brand & vertical specific video creative is the most requested
- People buy from people – at the end of the day video is the most effective medium for that. Amen!
- I love @andrewwee for bringing up ShamWOW in his question!
- get out there & try it!
From the Pinnacle Awards Gala:
- Nice touch on the tux & beer @shawncollins
- Right on for Train Signals donating $10k for Breast Cancer Research- squish a boob save a life!
- Mike Allen – Affiliate of the Year
- AM of the yr- @djambazov Angel
- pinnacle award exceptional merchant CelebrateExpress.com
- pinnacle award Affiliate Mktg Advocate @mellies! Melanie Seery
- pinnacle award Best Blogger @jangro! Scott Jangro
- affiliate marketing legend – congrats to Kellie Stevens!
- congrats to thew winners!
From Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages Session:
- 2% avg conversion rate: 2009 year of conversion optimization
- test everything assume nothing
- Lisa Crossly Hunter: what are your affiliates doing that your search team can borrow from?
- start now, but don’t start without a plan. And test.
- gen rule of thumb- at least 100 conversions for at least a week (per element you change, I forgot to include that in the tweet)
From the Affiliate Triathalon:
- http://twitpic.com/12mj4 – #asw09 Brian Littleton of SAS @ Affiliate Triathalon
Of course if you’re REALLY bored you can just go to Twitter Search and enter in “#asw09 trishalyn” and see EVERYTHING I tweeted while at the conference 😀
Read MoreCribbed Content for November 7th
Welcome to November! I can hardly believe we’re in November already… it seems like it was September just yesterday! Do me a favor and remember that there’s Thanksgiving to think about before Christmas and stall on decking everything out in red and green for a month, will ya?
- Recently I wrote an article for the New Edge Media blog, Top 14 Tips for Affiliate Success. Check it out and be sure to follow New Edge Media on Twitter!
- Scott Jangro wrote a good post on Affiliate Marketing Network Blog Scorecards. The comments are interesting as well, so be sure to read the whole thing.
- Affiliate Summit now has a Fan Page on Facebook. Join up for updates.
- 37Signals now offers an affiliate program for their super awesome products, one of which is Basecamp, a great project management system that we proudly use at New Edge Media. Sign up for their affiliate program at http://affiliate.37signals.com.
- An interesting note about branding and your personal brand, Jim Kukral is going to re-brand himself next week. I’m very interested to see what he does and how this is executed, so stay tuned.
Ball: Dropped Stress: High
I have good news, and I have bad news. Hopefully this will explain why I’ve been asleep at the wheel here.
First, the good!
- TrishaLyn.com is now available as a mobile compatible site! Just point your smartphone browser to www.trishalyn.com! Thanks to Shawn Collins & the Geek Cast crew for mentioning this nifty plugin in the last episode and Shawn specifically for sending me the link.
- Speaking of Geek Cast, I was mentioned two weeks running. Apparently Scott Jangro and I will be the only audience members for their Geek Cast Live show from Affiliate Summit, and Lisa’s counting on me to help keep the boys in line. Ah, good times will be had I can FEEL it!
- Affiliate Summit East 2008 is SOLD OUT and takes place in a little over a week. I’m excited to be hitting Boston again and finally meeting some of these people I’ve been networkin’ with online since the last summit.
- Affiliate Classroom Live! is also in about a week, so I really REALLY need to get my act together and formulate some talking points for the round-table discussion I’ll be leading.
Now, the not so great.
I’m sad to say that after almost 2 years my beloved supervisor is leaving our company. I’m going to miss her tremendously as she’s been a complete pleasure and joy to work for! To be honest, I’m taking the change harder than I should because of….- I’m moving! Just from one city here in the East San Francisco Bay Area to another, nothing major. It’s just that I absolutely detest packing and moving. Luckily my husband acknowledges that I’m a weakling and useless in the actual heavy lifting, so I’m on packing and unpacking duty.
- With the change in my supervisor leaving, my job responsibilities are changing as well. I don’t think I can say much right now, but involves some shifting in terms of my focused projects within the marketing department.
Obviously the combined changes of job responsibilities, moving, taking a long weekend vacation to celebrate my 5th wedding anniversary, and taking off for several days to attend Affiliate Summit East are all a bit overwhelming. I hope to be rejuvenated after my vacation and be able to jump back into the swing of things with some excellent coverage of Affiliate Summit!
If you’re giving away stress balls at the summit, save one for me!!
Read MoreCribbed Content for June 27th
Surprisingly enough, this week is flying by for me. It seems like a slow summer week, but at the same time I’ve been awfully busy with some new projects at work and some thoughts circling in my head about a new website I may tackle soon. The idea is all there, but I have to flesh it out and, really, decide if I have time to do it! Here are your links for this week – the word around the campfire in online business.
- Once again, the affiliate marketing industry attacked as douchebags. And by people who call themselves professionals, no less. Shawn Collins did all the lashing out necessary in his blog Consultants Can Fix Affiliate Marketing.
- Congratulations to Lisa Picarille & Revenue Magazine for winning the Performance Marketing’s Most Vocal Advocate Golden Link award at this week’s Linkshare Symposium. It was worth is for her to be able to say “Sorry, Jangro”. If you don’t get the reference, go to www.SorryJangro.com
- Just yesterday on the heels of Google partnering with Yahoo and more talk of a potential Microsoft bid on the company, Yahoo officially announced their reorganization plans. In laymens terms, they’re taking some time to get their shit together 🙂
- More confusion is being perpetrated about the PMA by Shoemoney. Try doing some research next time before declaring something is a scam with shady intentions. Affiliate Classroom is NOT running it, they’re just providing a website and vehicle for it. Other companies are providing resources as well.
