Commission Junction is offering a webinar for merchants and advertisers to see if CJ and affiliate marketing is the right move for your business. If you need a good affiliate management agency to properly launch and grow your affiliate program you should use Experience Advertising. Here is the break-down on what Commission Junction is offering in their webinar for prospective advertisers courtesy of their site:

Affiliate marketing is one of the most cost-effective investments you can make, but getting started can be challenging if you’ve never done it before. Determining if affiliate marketing is right for your business is the first step for you and your company. We’ll guide you through understanding the benefits of the affiliate channel and choosing an affiliate network and a service plan that meets your needs. We’ll also provide you with a number of resources and:

• Give you the basics on affiliate marketing
• Share the steps for launching a program
• Help you avoid costly mistakes

Is affiliate marketing right for your business? Find out in this complimentary webinar.

I just received an email that the Overstock.com affiliate program is moving from the Linkshare Affiliate Network to the Commission Junction Affiliate Network. And guess what? They email had no From in the sender as has been the cases for ages with the Overstock.com affiliate newsletters. That has always irked me! I even pointed it out to them but they couldn’t seem to get it fixed. I’m sure they will better luck sending emails properly through Commission Junction. Here is the main information in the email I received:

We are delighted to announce that the Overstock.com Affiliate Program will be transitioned from the LinkShare network to the Commission Junction network. As many of you are aware, we have had a long and mutually successful partnership with LinkShare, but feel at this time it is in the best interest of our Affiliate Program to make this change. We look forward to and appreciate both networks’ commitment to ensuring that it is a smooth process for our publishers. The transition to Commission Junction will begin within the next three to four weeks.

It goes on…in other news…and proceeds to list out a bunch of specials. Going for one last promotion push before bailing Linkshare! Hope the transition from Linkshare to CJ goes well, this can be a very difficult thing to accomplish.

Will Jangro break the curse??

Lots of good nominees this year and congrats to all the finalists:

Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards Finalists Announced — MissyWard.com: “The Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards Gala is affiliate marketing’s most prestigious, competitive honor for the leaders in the space. Award winners are recognized because they are innovative leaders with vision and influence.

The Pinnacle Awards Gala is open to all attendees of Affiliate Summit West 2009 and takes place Monday, January 12th from 5:00pm-6:30pm in the Brasilia room at the Rio Hotel Las Vegas.”

Congrats to all the winners and congrats to ShareASale for being so awesome:

ShareASale Blog » ShareASale Performance Awards: “This marks the inaugural announcement of (to be) annual ShareASale Performance Awards.

While we reserve the right to add awards in the future, it was our goal this year to keep things pretty simple so we have designated 6 specific awards.”

Must read on affiliate marketing’s real value in the sales chain during these tough economic times from Scott Jangro (aka Jerry Maguire).

Be warned… this is not a cheerleading piece.

The Year Affiliates Saved Christmas, Really? | Jangro.com: “As affiliate marketing gets a larger and larger percentage of retail sales, and taps more and more into ‘already had’ customers, it becomes devalued. For the health of this industry and channel, these things need to be understood and addressed.”

Way to go, Jangro.

Along with the bone-headed “affiliate tax” that New York state has tried to implement in the past year (head here for more great and in-depth discussion on that topic) in hopes of collecting about $50 million, Gov Paterson is now considering levying an “iPod tax” to collect revenue from music and digital downloads:

NY Governor Proposes iPod Tax - MarketingVOX: ”
Slot machine 2.0

Hoping to expedite the close of the state’s $15 billion budget gap, New York Governor David Paterson is proposing a tax on music and other downloads made online.”

Insane.

Look, I’m a tax-and-spend liberal. However, I’m also a realist. Taxing individual consumption of things such as digital music is not only impractical and dumb, but considering the other avenues of revenue available for NY state, it’s insulting for the citizens of the state (not to mention the ludicrous affiliate tax).

I think the Beatles sang it best… “my advice for those who die, declare the pennies on your eyes, cause I’m the taxman and you’re working for no one but me.”

Evidently, we’re all going through an 80’s thing in affiliate marketing (see previous post):

ShareASale Blog » Blog Archive » ShareASale Under the Stars (Like Totally) Party

Sunday January 11th

Time: 8-12PM

Drinks (including 80s ‘spiked punch’), light appetizers, party favours, disco balls, etc…

DJ will play us our favourite 80s tunes all night.”

One can only hope this madness ends soon.

Sad. I really enjoyed the Relevantly Speaking blog. It is not common that an affiliate network is willing to blog about things besides “company news and offer promotion.”

Mediatrust Blog: “First, Relevantly Speaking as you know it today will change drastically. First, the blog portion will cease to exist. As proud as I am of the work we’ve done on it, we just don’t have the resources to continue writing two blogs for our company. That said, all of our blogging will be done here at blog.MediaTrust.com. The focus of that effort will be performance marketing, company news, and offer promotion. The goal is to really concentrate on our brand and make sure our blogging efforts really support our core business of performance based marketing.”

I really don’t see how it costs anymore to keep up a high quality blog rather than one focused on telling a (what will probably be dwindling) reader base about the HOTTEST NEW OFFERS! in a network.

And the interviews from places like the last Affiliate Summit were top-notch.

Oh well. Economy sucks.

Ashley from CJ wrote and wanted to pass the word about some of the recent positive trends CJ is seeing this holiday shopping season as number continue to roll in:

Below is Commission Junction’s same store retail sales growth for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in comparison to comScore’s recent announcement on e-commerce spending.

Nice job to the affiliate marketers, merchants and CJ who contributed!

I logged into my AIM mail account today. That’s not something I do frequently. However, if these new widgets I found waiting for me are any indication of future development, I may be giving AIM (how about AOL Mail?) a second look.

AOL is famous for having been a walled-garden portal in the past. However, as I wrote last week, AOL is really on the ball with the whole spirit of the open web by introducing ways to bring in content from such places (competitors?) as Yahoo Mail, GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc on the main AOL homepage, which does millions of impressions every month.

And the results from this newfound embracing of openness are more engagement, more pageviews and more attention. AOL is on to something.

With these new widgets in AIM mail, you can integrate Yahoo Mail, contacts, AIM, AOL Finance, Mapquest, etc within your inbox. GMail has this same feature with its Labs platform, so it’s good to see competition there. The trick with AIM is that they are bringing in properties from outside the AOL universe (unless the AIM Mail team knows something about a Yahoo/AOL deal that we don’t). Nifty.

However, my main question is if this is a sign of the future? Will you eventually be able to update Twitter or your Facebook status (or send Facebook messages) within AIM or AOL mail as you can on the AOL home page? If so, that will be very compelling. Will I ditch GMail for AIM even if that happens? Perhaps not, but I will definitely take a second look at my AOL/AIM mail.

It’s time for web-based email clients to grow up and become platforms instead of proprietary gardens of in-house developers. I’m glad to see AOL is helping to make that happen.

Comics were a huge part of my dorky teen years (but I only read the cool comics that you had to ask for from behind the counter). I still have soft spot in my heart for all things Marvel, DC, Image, Darkhorse, etc.

So, I was excited to see that Pepperjam now has the Marvel affiliate program in their network. Pepperjam also has the Star Trek affiliate program, making it a nostalgic choice for fanboi’s and geeks who, like myself, appreciate the finer things from Jim Lee or Frank Miller. Come to think of it, they also have MGM (Stargate) and Warner Bro’s (DC merchandise, Batman, Harry Potter and 300). Lots of geek cred there.

The Marvel program has 45 day cookies and starts at 7% and works up to 10% with volume. There is supposedly a datafeed on the way as well.

I’ll definitely be checking that one out for Christmas since Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk were such big hits this year and there is always a crowd hungry for X Men and Spiderman goodness (plus there’s the upcoming Wolverine and Avengers movies in the works).

Good stuff.

Marvel Launches Affiliate Program on Pepperjam Network

Amazon continues to make interesting and noteworthy improvements to its associates program. I wrote off the ability make any money with Amazon a few years back because of my own lack of success with their offerings on my affiliate sites.

However, I’ve been using Amazon more and more with great results on click-thru’s. They have so many options for affiliates and publishers (esp in niche categories that aren’t serviced well by traditional affiliate networks (which is a funny term to use since Amazon had an early affiliates program…but I digress).

If you haven’t given Amazon a shot in a while, you might want to reconsider.

Here’s an email sent out to associates/publishers this morning with details on new Deals widgets:

Dear Amazon Associate:

As you’re gearing up for the holiday season, don’t miss out on the new and improved Deals Widget. Now you can display the hottest deals from Amazon on your web page. The Deals Widget lets your users browse discounted items and ongoing promotions from the Amazon.com product category of your choice.

The new widget lets you display the deals most relevant to your website to improve customer retention and conversion.

Deals by Category
You can now configure the widget to display discounted items and promotions from any Amazon.com category of your choice! Simply use the drop down to select a specific category and we’ll keep the widget updated with the latest deals from that category. Remember that your viewers are more likely to click through a widget when the deals are relevant to the theme and topic of your site. You can now use the ‘Deals by Category’ feature to place relevant Amazon deals throughout your site.

Gold Box Deals
You can continue to display Gold Box deals using the Deals Widget. Gold Box deals are limited quantity offers that run for a specified time. The Gold Box deals widget lets your viewers browse through the latest Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and Our Best Deals.

Multiple Sizes
The Deals Widget is available in a variety of standard sizes and can be placed anywhere on your site. Available sizes include: Sidebar (120×400, 160×400), Large (250×250, 300×250, 336×280) and Banner (468×60, 728×90).

Create a Deals Widget in just a few clicks. If you want to display a list of handpicked products, be sure to try out the My Favorites, Carousel, and Slideshow widgets.

If you have any questions or feedback on this feature or the Associates Program, please contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program