ASE09 Session: Profitable Performance Marketing: More Money for You
Session Description: Presenting actionable items for 7 main topics, including social media, negotiating, points of sale opportunities, content that pulls, partnerships, prioritization, and the expense of inefficiency. The panel consisted of:
- Lisa Riolo, Consultant, LisaRiolo.com (Twitter @lisariolo) (Moderator)
- Jason Oates, VP Media Services, Datran Media
- Durk Price, President, eAccountable OPM LLC
- Chuck Hamrick, Affiliate Manager, AffiliateCrew.com
This session was a perfect mix of business 101 and affiliate marketing. I think a lot of affiliates get into this thinking they’re going to get rich quick and don’t really consider that they’re really creating a business. So this little business intro and how it applies to performance marketing was a nice session.
Bullet Point Review!
- Top line thinkers focus on revenue, whereas bottom line thinkers focus on profit.
- You might think you can, but you can’t do it all. Learn to delegate.
- Develop tools and methodologies to do more with less.
- Think long term and potentially sacrifice short term gains.
- You should be spending less than 50% of your time putting out fires.
- Prioritization
- 1st Priority -> High growth & unknown costs
- 2nd Priority -> Highly profitable growth
- 3rd Priority -> Profitable with limited growth
- 4th Priority -> Undetermined growth and costs
- Coupons are one of the best performing verticals.
- Affiliate marketing is not a brand meter.
- 6-12 month curve; don’t expect overnight results or a 90 day ROI.
- Everything is negotiable; evaluate other programs.
- It doesn’t hurt to ask but remember it’s a business relationship.
- Make sure to negotiate with 2-3 partners at once – and that they know you’re exploring other options.
- Be data driven and use data to your advantage.
- Find someone that’s going to vouch for the vendor you’re negotiating with and ask for referrals.
- Be more available and transparent.
- Three uses of email
- Acquisition
- Retention
- Monetization
- Many people using feedback loops and opening dialog in order to improve.
- Find ESP that will work on a performance basis – they will help you weed out non-responders.
- Synchronize your email expertise.
- Use employees in the smartest way possible for maximum operational efficiency.
- You need metrics before you negotiate either internally or externally.
- Points of Sale
- Up-selling
- Add-on Products and Services
- Continuity Programs
- 2nd Sale and Renewals
- Providing valuable, free content is a good way to capture emails to market to.
- To decrease unsubscribers, offer other subscriber options with different frequencies or options.
- Positions 3-5 on the SERPs are the secret sauce of SEO.
- Calling a customer to confirm a sale will encourage return business.
- Know key metrics – average order value, conversion rates, lifetime order value (that one is tricky).
- You can’t just be an OPM, you have to be a consultant.
- Doing more targeting is effective.
- A monthly affiliate newsletter isn’t that effective.
- Just keep the parasites out.
Overall I got a lot out of this, and I hope others did too. I wished the panelists had had a bit more fun with the topic to liven things up, but I understand there’s only so much you can spice up such a dry topic. Here’s the presentation, though this is clearly an older version since Karen White didn’t end up making it and Durk & Chuck stepped in:
Read MoreASE09: Tuesday Peter Shankman Keynote
I’m a lover of both Chris Brogan and Peter Shankman, but I have to say that I took more from this keynote than Chris’. I was surprised that Peter wasn’t TOO hyperactive, but was still incredibly entertaining and engaging.
- Peter Shankman, Founder & CEO, The Geek Factory (Twitter @skydiver)
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- HARO has grown to just under 100,000 subscribers in 14 months.
- It’s helped 24,000 journalists.
- $0 to just over $1,000,000 revenue in 14 months.
- Peter worked at AOL News launching their digital news.
- You can’t make anything viral, but you can make something good.
- Social media is trust.
- Social media is the ability to screw up to a bigger audience in a faster amount of time.
- We’re a society that loves to be finders.
- Doing something to be nice gets you remembered, not just recalled.
- We covet what we know.
- 4 Ideals of Social Media
- Transparency -> Immediate Trust -> Viral
- Relevant
- Brevity
- Top of Mind Presence
- Social media is 2 way communication – you must be prepared to talk and listen and respond.
- Giving people what they want, when they want it.
- Have you ever asked your audience how they like to get their information?
- The average attention span is 2.7 seconds, or 140 characters. (Coincidence, Twitter?)
- There are three categories email falls into
- Ones you can answer immediately and delete.
- Ones you have to wait until you get back to the office to reply to.
- Ones that aren’t getting to the point and require too much attention to figure out what it is they want or need from you.
- Learn how to write; take a class if you need to.
- You have 1 paragraph to get someone’s attention and keep them interested.
- Paramount Studios CEO Barry Diller was known for getting to the office 30 minutes early and opening his Rolodex and calling 4 or 5 people randomly just to say hi -> this created good will and helped build relationships that could later be leveraged.
- Peter checks Facebook every day and sends people a short note when it’s their birthday – this is his version of the Barry Diller method.
I know that now I have to find a Poken since they just look so cool and really start to think more about the altruism of business, something I don’t think most people think about. As an added bonus, Peter showed us a video that was just GOOD and so it went viral. Here it is – it’s a bit longer than a video I’d normally watch, but it’s worth it. Funny yet touching. Enjoy!
Here’s the recording of Peter’s Keynote as well for your viewing pleasure:
Read MoreASE09 Session: Advertising on Facebook
Session Description: Learn about advertising on Facebook and how affiliates can reach over 100 million members. Join us for a panel discussion including a Facebook representative covering all you need to know. The panel consisted of:
- Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzLocal, LLC (Twitter @dennisyu) (Moderator)
- Zac Johnson, President / CEO, MoneyReign Inc. (Twitter @moneyreign)
- Jeremy Schoemaker, President, ShoeMoney (Twitter @shoemoney)
- Alex Schultz, Manager, Facebook (Twitter @alexschultz)
Unfortunately a lot of this session went over my head. This session was really geared more for people who have already played around with advertising on Facebook. I was hoping for more of a how-to, but I guess the session that I missed at Affiliate Summit West in January was where they did the intro, and this was a follow up. I did get some notes, so I’ll go ahead and share them in hopes they might help you!
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- It’s been a big challenge scaling up to 20 million users.
- A few months ago it seemed like they were changing policies every week, so they have tried to cut back on changing policies
- They are now focusing on helping the advertisers.
- The targeting is incredibly specific, and they can now target by birthday.
- They’ve set up the email affiliate@facebook.com – 24 turn around time for answers if you have a problem with denials.
- Advertisers need to understand that keywords in their system don’t mean the same as in Google so there’s a bit of a learning curve.
- Remember to make ad copy brief to draw the eye to it.
- Try changing the background color of the ad to get attention.
- A lot of people don’t use the Facebook reporting, but it’s useful to see who’s actually clicking on similar ads and target them even deeper.
- Direct linking is okay, but test to see which works best for your offer.
- There has been a lot of complaints about inconsistencies in the approval process, but if you upload 99 ads and 1 gets declined, it’s a mistake not inconsistencies. Email them and they can easily correct the mistake.
- If you play on the boarder of ethics, you’ll have a difficult time getting approved.
- Fan pages work well for organic rankings. They work like a newsletter.
- If you use a vanity URL that’s a trademark, it will be taken down because it violates trademark laws.
Some of this did actually help me, so I hope it helps you! Alex from Facebook had a TON of information to share, and I was a bit surprised that Zac Johnson and Jeremy Schoemaker were so quiet as they’re usually pretty outspoken, but it was still a lot of good information for affiliates who are already advertising on Facebook.
Read MoreASE09 Session: What the Heck is a Website Nowadays?
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: Businesses may be changing the way they look at web presence. Can you just have a blog? Is a Facebook presence alone a good idea? Does Web 2.0 mean the demise of websites? The panel consisted of:
- Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami, Network Solutions (Twitter @shashib) (Moderator)
- Kelly Harman, President, Zephyr Strategy
- Melanie Mitchell, SVP, Search Strategy, Digitas (Twitter @melaniemitchell)
- Ramon Ray, Editor, Smallbiztechnology.com
This session gave an interesting and entertaining look into how the role of a website has been changed recently with the advent of Social Media. One of the chief points that I took from the session was that your website should be the anchor for all the other forms of social media which you use. Ramon Ray brought out some points that are easy to remember and contain a lot of useful tips, these are:
- Focus on the customer.
- Have a plan of action.
- Have an easy to remember name.
- Be informative.
- Security – have as much as is needed for your site.
- Easy customer contact = good customer service.
- Have fresh content.
- Be found.
- Be simple.
ASE09 Session: How to Monetize your Site with Widgets
Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.
Session Description: This presentation discussed how to enhance your site using various widgets, what works and what doesn’t, and how effective different widgets are to your site. The panel consisted of:
- Woody Wood, Product Manager, Amazon (Twitter @AmazonAssociate)
This session gave an overview of what a widget is, and what it can bring to your site. Many examples were given from the Amazon Associate program and a couple of examples from other sources. One of the chief reasons for using a widget is to add interactivity and functionality to your website. A key point that was mentioned was that a widget should be used to augment your site, along with all of the links and banners, instead of replacing them. Several suggestions were made as to what works and what does not. Included in the what works category were things like:
- Use the right widget for the job: focus on targeting the widget at relevant material to your site.
- Place the widget in the most effective spot: for example, in the center of the page for a one off topic specific item, or on the sidebar for something that is more long term.
- Use the widget as a self expression tool: add comments and recommendations to the items to make the relevant to your audience.
- Change content regularly: make sure that people want to return to your site.
The only negative thing I took away from this very well put together presentation was the mention of the very short duration of the cookie given by the Amazon Associate program. This will most likely not stop me from using Amazon widgets on my site, but is a little disappointing.
ASE09 Session: SEO Tools You Can Use Today
Session Description: This session is a quick moving brain dump of how to use the most advanced powerful tools to help you with SEO. Expect to learn how you can walk out and use several SEO tools to grow revenues today. The speaker was:
- Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive (Twitter @wilreynolds)
I’d never previously had the chance to hear Wil speak, despite meeting him a few times. It always seemed poorly matched up against other sessions that were more relevant to me as an affiliate manager. This time I made sure to make it to Wil’s session, and I was NOT disappointed. He’s an SEO genius and did, in fact, give us tools that I used TODAY!
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- Tool: Google Insights
- Tool: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Formerly MSN adCenter Add-in for Excel)
- Watch your bounce rates, because even if keywords rank this is a problem.
- Always check Google Trends for the keywords.
- Evaluate bounce rates daily for each keywords (this catches problems quickly)
- SEER did this for a client and caught a page 1 ranked keyword with a bounce rate sometimes as high as 80%)
- Home page was ranked for the product search instead of a product page.
- Ranking is a big distraction.
- If you are analyzing search engine performance by where you rank you would never have caught the issue – analyze SEO by more than just rankings.
- Tool: Microsoft adCenter Labs Audience Intelligence – remember to search for singular keywords and plurals.
- Affiliates need to know research vs. commercial queries to help convert traffic.
- Marketers need to know what kind of message to put in front of people when searching.
- Plural tends to convert much better, but is not a hard & fast rule.
- Know the flaws before you use any tool so you know how far to trust the data.
- Yahoo Keyword Suggest is better than Google’s because it’s a general phrase match and not a character match.
- A 40 to 60 ratio isn’t enough to suggest a strong patter – go for closer to 30 to 70.
- Look for the queries highly skewed to one side or the other (commercial v. noncommercial) & look for high degrees of confidence from the engines.
- Test against your own data set on keywords that are currently ranking well before using the tool so you knoe how far to trust the data.
- You have to look at things through a marketing lens and not just take the word of the tool’s data.
- Affiliates need to take advantage of hot keywords because they can move much faster than larger corporations.
- Major competitive advantage: big companies move slow. Their inability to act for mid/long tail/hot keywords = opportunities for you.
- Don’t look back too far because trends rapidly change. Look at more current data sets, around 30 days old at most.
- Check out the Rising Searches area towards the bottom in Google Insights to see what trends are on the rise.
- Don’t go back more than a year data-wise, unless you’re looking for seasonal trends.
- How is a product getting hot? How do you rank for it?
- Try moving it up one level in the hierarchy of the site – possibly link from homepage in a hot product section.
- Top 200 products no more than 2 clicks from home page.
- Suits = slow = opportunity for you
- Google’s algorithm seems to be favoring large brands more and more; you’ve got to find ways to compete. Lots of ideas at blogstorm.co.uk
- Link building is about exposure to stimuli.
- You can’t have all the ideas – you need a Spark. Put yourself in a position to have great ideas.
- Install Greasemonkey script in Firefox.
- Install Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey
- It’s about being exposed to things that will trigger your brain to a link building opportunity.
- Tool: Google Trends Hot Trends
- Paid Tool: SEOmoz Labs – has a graphical representation of links.
- Put plug-ins and stuff at the bottom of the HTML code in case they hang up loading so they don’t stop everything else from loading.
- Wikipedia links help.
- Paid Tool: Hub Finder from SEO Book
- Tool: SeoQuake
- Seed Keywords allows you to find scenarios if you’re having an interal battle over which keywords would work best.
- Google Universal Search’s thumbnail pictures will definitely start to influence clicks in search.
Questions were really peppered in throughout the presentation, and Wil didn’t get to all his slides but promised they’d be made available and any links would be shared through Twitter if asked. It was a terrific session and I learned a ton that I’m ready to go back and start using now! For your benefit, here’s the presentation:
