Breathe Easier, California Affiliates!
I had the pleasure and pain of driving up to Sacramento yesterday to sit in on the hearing for AB 178, which I’ve talked about before putting California affiliates in jeopardy. Lisa Picarille and I hopped into my car and made the drive up, and about 10 minutes away from our destination, we get the news that the hearing had been postponed. The bill has been changed to a two year bill. What does this mean, exactly?
Believe it or not, I couldn’t find a sufficient actual definition for what a two year bill is online, so I can only pass on what I was told in basic layman’s terms, which may be better anyway. Basically what this means is that the hearing has been postponed until January, when it will be up again to be heard in hearings. We were told by several seasoned lobbyists that if it’s not heard in January, this bill in this current incarnation will be dead. However, the issue won’t necessarily go away. We will need to keep an eye out for other bills to make sure language isn’t shoehorned into other bills that could affect affiliate livelihood and tax nexus, and we also have to pay attention in June when budgeting starts to make sure no strange budget items that could affect nexus show up.
This is a small victory and California affiliates can certainly breath easier for awhile, but it’s not over yet. We’ve won the battle but the war rages on. Of course, there’s a lot of blog coverage on the happenings of yesterday, so check out their points of view as well:
- Mr. Lewis Goes to Sacramento – David Lewis
- Calif. AB 178 on Hold for Now – Lisa Picarille
- California Hearing Postponed – that’s a good thing! – Rebecca Madigan
- No Hearing for California AB 178 – Shawn Collins
- Commission Junction’s Internet Retail Tax News
Back from Affiliate Summit West 09
Well, for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or didn’t see me at Affiliate Summit West 2009, you’ve likely been wondering why I didn’t post from the conference.
Let’s just say that the only way to be connected when travelling is to bring your own internet with you. Wired and wi-fi didn’t work for me while in Las Vegas, but I’m back to reality here in California and back to a stable internet connection!
I have wrap ups, summaries, exciting events that happened, and notes from the sessions I attended to share witih you. But, we can leave that for later. In the meantime, I just want to give a big shout out to Stephanie Lichtenstein, Karen & Joel Garcia, Wade Tonkin, Lisa Picarille, Connie Berg, and Michael Buechele for providing excellent company during the conference. Also big thanks to Buy.at and oneNetworkDirect for providing awesome prizes that I won, but I’ll get into that later too 🙂
Read MoreCribbed Content for December 22nd
The holidays are upon us finally! I suck and forgot to post this shorter version last week! Hanukkah started on the 21st, and Christmas is around the bend this week! Do you have sugar plum fairies dancing in your head yet? Here’s a few interesting things from this past week to keep your feet on the ground until you’re off for the holiday officially!
- Are you an affiliate? Take the AffStat Survey Here and let your voice be known in the industry. This coming year the results will be made available through FeedFront Magazine rather than by purchase.
- Speaking of FeedFront, publishers Shawn Collins & Missy Ward of Affiliate Summit have put together a compilation cover complimenting their story about the women of affiliate marketing. Yours truly is on the cover in the lower right hand portion, sharing space with some truly awesome and amazing women that I both adore and admire!
- ShareASale hosts a great party at every Affiliate Summit, and this coming January for Affiliate Summit West 2009, they’re hosting an 80s prom themed “Under the Stars” party. Righteous, dude.
Cribbed Content for November 14th
I hate to say it, but I feel like I’ve been slacking on this blog for some time now. Ever since the beginning of October after my whirlwind trips to CJU, BlogWorldExpo, and then the Social Media Marketing Summit and the notes I was able to post from there, I’ve kinda let things go into auto-pilot, with only a few really good posts that were original content.
I also tried to work on a new blog, Beach Front Office, a chronicle of working at home and telecommuting. However, I’m not so sure if I should be separating that information into a new blog or including it into this one. My original intent for TrishaLyn.com was to be a whimsical look at marketing and my career as a young woman. I feel like I really do have a unique take on most things as I am learning as I go and don’t have a marketing degree – just a theatre arts dramatic writing one. So, I ask of those kind readers – which would you prefer? I keep my work at home stuff separate at BFO, or integrate it here into my whole experience as a young woman in Affiliate Marketing who telecommutes? Any opinions are welcome!
All that said, I feel better! And here’s a recap of some of the more interesting articles around the blogosphere that I read this week.
- Lisa Barone live blogged the Effective Affiliate Strategies session at PubCon this week. Good notes!
- Another take on PubCon from an affiliate standpoint was the faithful Shawn Collins with his PubCon 2008 Recap. I’m sure either Manda or Brandy will post a recap of their PubCon experience once they get back to Texas next week.
- For my blogger buddies out there, DailyBlogTips posted a handy article 50 Simple Ways to Gain RSS Subscribers. I need to work on this myself, I admit.
- Black Ink Project 2.0 is now available for the low price of $97.
- Back to Lisa Barone, she also posted a recap of her entire PubCon Liveblogging Coverage.
BlogWorldExpo 08: Affiliate Marketing Secrets for Bloggers
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!
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
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.
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