I wanted to let you know about a great company to see if you can work with them.

Face Time Strategy Direct is a customer acquisition center that is 100% sales focused and specializes in direct response inbound campaigns. From hard and soft offers to cross and upsells, they have perfected the formula for closing the sale. This is a perfect solution for direct response advertisers that need calls closed, and companies with offers that want them up-sold on a CPA or Per Call basis. Visit their website for more information.

If you would like to speak to them directly please contact:

Bridget Shields, Business Development Manager
phone: 321-265-5138
email: bshields (at) facetimestrategy.com

As part of their commitment to presenting exclusive CPA offers to affiliates, sterkly is announcing the launch of three new exclusive CPA offers.

FreeTwitTube is a safe, secure and FREE app that allows users to interact with the videos they watch without ever leaving YouTube.  By combining live streaming and never-ending content from Twitter™ with the vast video selection from YouTube™, users get a more social video experience. Once downloaded, users will see the FreeTwitTube easy-to-use toolbar under the video player whenever on the YouTube website. The toolbar not only shows tweets, but also reply and retweet whenever they choose. FreeTweetTube combines the power of Twitter & YouTube to give a richer video experience.

ezLooker is also a safe, secure and FREE app that allows users to transform their Craiglist search experience in a speedy slideshow that’s easy to use and pleasant to view. It offers three viewing options to users: regular text view, image view and multi view. It allows users to bookmark their favorite advertisements and share the ads on Facebook with ease. It’s the first of its kind in the market and exclusive through the sterkly affiliate network.

John Maxwell, a famous leadership authority and author of 60+ books, offers people multiple experiences focused on leadership development, his expertise. The two main learning experiences are:

1. John C. Maxwell Certification Program, a full-length leadership certification program including 5 complete systems of distance learning and a three day live training. As a John Maxwell Certified Coach, Teacher and Speaker, graduates are certified to coach, teach, and speak to any individual, company, or organization anywhere in the world utilizing John Maxwell’s curriculum, products, books, brand and learning systems. After signing up, subscribers receive one hour-long video introducing them to the John C. Maxwell Certification Program.

2. A three part video series in which they learn how Influence = Income. As a veteran in the leadership development industry, John Maxwell’s 3I’s video series shows subscribers how to influence their own lives for the better, impact others’ lives positively, and generate income through this process. After signing up, subscribers receive three 45 minute to hour-long videos over the period of approximately one week.

Traffic Types
The following traffic types are acceptable:

Display: banner
Display: text links
Contextual
Social Networks
Search: SEO
Search: PPC*

*Some restrictions apply, such as brand keywords.

sterkly, a premiere digital marketing company that stands for “strong, smart, marketing,” who have been operating in stealth mode since 2007, just opened their affiliate network to the public this past month. The sterkly team is comprised of established CPA marketing experts that have extensive experience in the bundling software space, empowering affiliate networks with offers, enabling exclusive offers and leveraging an expansive space of existing partners.

Apart from exclusive offers, such as the ones just mentioned, sterkly has punctual payments, quick-responding account managers and a leading affiliate tracking platform. The sterkly team takes pride in generating over 3 million installs a month and in building long-term, collaborative relationships with affiliates. Join the pride to get started promoting the FreeTwitTube, ezLooker and John Maxwell offers on the sterkly affiliate network today!

As sterkly says “Those who hesitate, go hungry.”

Affiliate Summit is definitely the best Affiliate Conference and probably the #1 Internet Marketing conference there is. No where else can you go and learn, network, and share with so many affiliates/publishers, networks, and companies in one place. I mean they get thousands of people every year and every year it grows and gets bigger. Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, the owners of the show, do a tremendous job at orchestrating exceptional shows twice a year. Now they are doing local meet-ups which I’ve heard are great. They have an exceptional staff to help in the process so everything runs as smoothly as possible. I go every year and have since back when it was in Orlando. Their Vegas shows are always epic. Affiliate Summit East NYC is right around the corner, August 21-23, 2011, so make sure to get your tickets before it sells out. Here are some great reasons to attend the Affiliate Summit in New York:

1. Great People – you are guaranteed to meet tons of exceptional people involved in the Online Marketing industry at Affiliate Summit. It’s a really friendly atmosphere and bustling with people of all types. There are also quite a lot of international folks that fly in from other countries for the show. Some good people watching there too because they will try to stand out. The affiliate marketing industry is really friendly by nature and so you will undoubtedly meet people that can help you further what you are doing. Building relationships is what it’s all about, and meeting people in person always kicks it off on the right foot.

2. Great Speakers and Panels – Affiliate Summit always has great speakers and panels of experts on a wide range of relevant and timely issues to the Affiliate Marketing industry and online marketing in general. I will be speaking this time around..Yaaay! I hope you can come out and see me present about how to use LinkedIn to maximize your business development. You can go to Affiliate Summit just for the networking, but why do that when you could go and learn so much from the speakers, so I highly recommend getting the passes that get you in to see the speakers. Here is the Facebook Event for my speaking session, make sure to RSVP!

3. Great City - New York City is a great place to go to a conference. I really like the Hilton hotel for the venue because you can really bump into and meet people more easily than at a sprawling conversion center. Not to mention you can stay at the hotel and be more comfortable because you can just go up to your room if you need to whenever. Adtech was much better when it was at the Hilton, so I’m glad Affiliate Summit is still there. I don’t think I need to say much about New York City, great food, great sights, great times all around.

4. Great Parties - They always have really good parties at Affiliate Summit NYC. You have to find out which are the best though, which can take a little digging around and talking to people to know which ones will be the best. You can try to get invites to the ones that sound great. You really can’t go wrong though. I’m not huge into conference parties these days, but I like to go at least for a little while to see who I might bump into or meet. I might go out late one of the nights to get the full experience. Usually I’m pretty focused on business and talking to people, so the parties are like a fun novelty. If you go to the right ones you can really have a blast.

5. Great Networking - If you like to network, then Affiliate Summit is for you! You can’t help but network and meet people with that many people at the show. If you are proactive and willing to go up to people and introduce yourself, you can really make some amazing connections and you never know who you might run into that can help you further what you are doing more than you ever imagined. Their “Meet Market” event is really great to network at and you are definitely going to get a lot out of the experience. Make sure to bring a lot of business cards and you should try to gather as many as you can yourself at the show. A couple hundred business cards is definitely do-able.

These are some great reasons to attend Affiliate Summit East! This year will be a great show, so I hope you will attend and we can meet. Thanks and I look forward to seeing you there!

The inaugural Performance Marketing Expo was recently held in Miami Beach, September 28th-29th, at the beautiful Eden Roc Hotel and resort. The PMExpo was a really awesome event, filled with amazing speakers and high-quality attendees. Here is a summary recap of some of the keynotes and sessions that took place at the Performance Marketing Expo Day 1:

TRENDS EXPERT: “I’m Going To Tweet You Up!” – Michael Tchong, Ubercool Inc. – Wow what an awesome presentation Michael Tchong put together on social networking, gadgets, and how it affects the lives of ordinary people. Michael’s talk was really inspirational and motivating to say the least. He backed everything up with facts, figures, and quotes which was really great because all of his points were substantiated with data. His multimedia presentation really had the crowd excited and there was a ton of great feedback from audience.

CONTENT EXPERT: Producing Dynamic Content THAT MATTERs to your Target Market – Stephanie Nelson, CouponMom, New York Times Best-Selling Author, Coupon Mom’s Guide to Cutting Your Grocery Bills in Half
CouponMom, Stephanie Nelson, was an amazing addition to the Expo and a crowd favorite. Her story of how she was able to grow her celebrity and website over the years was extremely inspirational. Stephanie has been featured on Good Morning America, Oprah, and over 70 National TV appearance. She related her experiences growing her company and how that translated into huge traffic increases. Stephanie gave a great explanation of her story, which was a really inspiration to the audience. She is a true super-affiliate and gave a tremendous account of how she because one, which was huge hit.

BEHAVIORAL EXPERT: Personalization 2.0 – Where Is It Headed? – Paul Rosenblum, MyBuys – Paul gave a great presentation where he detailed real-world applications of on-site personalization which increases conversion rates for online retailers. Through using personalization techniques such as upsells, cross-sells, email personalization, much higher conversion rates can be achieved. Paul’s riveting presentation really conveys how personalization is the best way to increase website conversion rates.

SUPER AFFILIATE EXPERTS PANEL: Getting on the Affiliate Fast Track: Tips & Tricks from the Country Top Earning Super Affiliates
– Zac Johnson, MoneyReign • Eddie Alberty, MarketAmerica • Matthew Cheng, eCoupons • Moderator: Greg Byrnes, ParentMedia
The super-affiliates panel on Day 1 was really great and filled with lots of great pointers from the panel. The panelists were all proven super-affiliates and weren’t at all shy about sharing their best tips and techniques. Most of the tips revolved around list building techniques and re-marketing techniques which build loyalty and list size, which is extremely valuable to taking advantage of your website’s traffic and monetization strategies. Eddie Alberty of Market America conveyed some great points about cash-back portals and how to effectively monetize users. Overall it was a tremendous panel of super-affiliates that the audience really enjoyed.

Track 1: AFFILIATES, AFFILIATE MANAGERS, NETWORKS & AGENCIES -all of the Day 1 presentations in this track were excellent. I was very impressed with the level of knowledge and strategies that the speakers were more than happy to impart to the audience. Here is a list of the speakers and their sessions from Day 1 of the PMExpo:

My Coupons are Better than Your Coupons! How to Successfully Integrate Coupons into Your Affiliate Program or Publisher Site
– Brandon Zambroski, CouponSurfer, Inc. – Great presentation was given on proper coupon usage and integration.

If You Build it They will Come: How I Lost Over $500,000
– Sherry Comes, CoffeeCakes.com – Sherry gave a really great presentation on her experiences growing her sites and the lessons she learned from building and marketing her site. Her site now is extremely successful.

How to Improve your Affiliate-Advertiser Relationship (and Get a Higher Payout)
– Stephen Gelber & Danny Agurto, Intermark Media – Optimizing your Affiliate-Advertiser relationship is so important and leveraging techniques for obtaining higher payouts from Advertisers is the key to getting more commissions.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Internet Marketing
– Evan Weber, Experience Advertising – This was my presentation and I think it went really well. I tried to cover all the most important aspects of Internet Marketing in a short period of time. Someone from the crowd said that I covered it all in 25 minutes! I was really pleased with the feedback I received from my sessions at the Expo. Lots of people came up to me afterwards and told me I did a good job which was nice to hear.

Overall, the extremely high-quality speakers at the Performance Marketing Expo Day 1 was a big hit! There was soo much positive buzz in the air and numerous people came up and told me how much they had learned and were extremely inspired with all the presentation. The networking lunch also was really enjoyable. What a great start to the Performance Marketing Expo!

I’m so excited about how our Facebook Advertising campaigns have been going! I really think Facebook Ads represents the greatest opportunity for generating targeted traffic to your site or Facebook Fan Page of anything that has come along since pay-per-click search advertising on Google and Yahoo. Facebook really represents the next wave of almost limitless ad inventory for national advertisers, affiliate marketers, and small businesses due to their staggering reach. Really anyone can promote anything at all through Facebook Ads and get their ads in front of a very targeted audience.

The main reason Facebook is such a great advertising platform is the targeting is so good. For example, if you are selling baby toys, you can target only women, between the ages of 25-40, that are fans of Toys R Us, Huggies, or another “interest” that would imply they have small children. Another example might be you are trying to acquire targeted fans for your Facebook fan page which is a bar or nightclub, so you can target men and women, between the ages of 21-35, that live in particular zip codes surrounding the location of the bar or club, which is great for local businesses because you know your ads will only be seen in a local area. Another really cool aspect is that you can see exactly how many possible people your ads will be exposed to when choosing your targeting options. With the ability to target “likes” and “interests” of people on Facebook there really is a limitless amount of ad inventory you can go after to see if it converts into sales or leads for you.

Facebook Ads gives you the opportunity to try various images, titles, and descriptions, which means you have to continuously “tweak” you ads to get the highest click-through (CTR) and conversion rate for your ad dollars. That’s the nice thing actually, you can try various ad elements to get your best possible combination of all three elements. You should definitely use some kind of tracking system of some sort to measure the return-on-investment (ROI) of your various campaigns and ads themselves.

Facebook Ad campaigns can be run on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or a cost-per-impression (CPM – per 1000 ad impressions). CPC is a flat cost-per-click for everyone that actually clicks on your ad or “likes” your fan page. Cost-per-impression will charge you a certain amount for every thousand ad impressions you receive, which can actually work out better than a CPC in some instances. What’s nice is they show you what your campaign is working out to on a CPC and CPM basis so you can see which you want to run on.

While targeted pay-per-click search traffic from Google and Yahoo is still the best way to send relevant paid traffic your site, Facebook Advertising is the next huge wave of online ad inventory that can be leveraged to drive in customers and fans. If you aren’t using this platform you absolutely should. If you are interested in have a good, competent outsourced social media company handle it for you email: evan at experienceadvertising.com. Thanks and happy advertising!

The fine folks (not) of AM Navigator felt it necessary to trash Experience Advertising on ABestWeb a couple of years ago due to the fact that I was running a competitive ad in Google against their company name which wasn’t unethical, but designed to give companies options when looking for affiliate management companies. Geno P. obviously thinks he is an authority in the affiliate marketing space, which is probably questionable at best. So I would basically consider AMNavigator to be an unethical affiliate management company for slandering Experience Advertising because they are obviously insecure about their own company and feel the need to trash other OPMs that are doing a good job. I wasn’t going to even post anything about Geno and AM Navigator because I don’t even consider them competition but since the abestweb thread he wrote about my company ranks well in Google, it’s time to give him back some of his own crap and get a ranking just like he achieved for my company name (purely since I can). I work very hard to be ethical and a great affiliate management agency, so to have an issue with the my Google ad, which I took down immediately after it became an issue, is one thing but to brag about how well it ranks is only pissing me off and therefore this post was written to rank and call his company unethical as well. Grow up buddy and focus on working with your affiliates instead of espousing slanderous comments about other competitors.

Okay, so what types of affiliates, publishers, and partners are there really out there for Advertisers to work with? There really are so many different types, it’s such a large industry. Over the last 10 or 12 years affiliate marketing has really exploded. I mean it’s really a worldwide phenomenon. Here are some of the various types of affiliate marketers:

Webmasters – Webmasters are people building sites and people who own sites. There are an infinite number of webmasters out there who are in various stages of expertise and development of their website, or multiple website, that will likely have signed up for a CJ or Shareasale, and you can meet them through there and you can also flat out contact their website if you find it and say, “Hello, I found your website, I’d love to partner with you. This is pay out we can offer.” If you do it in large amounts you’ll get a certain amount of response.

Search Affiliates – SEO, PPC, media buying – there is a whole crop of affiliates who spend their own money and really try to leverage the search engines, Facebook advertising, and various other paid advertising models in order to generate an ROI for themselves with affiliate offers. This is a whole sub-culture, really you could say, because they are usually very entrepreneurial business minded, smart people, testing different things. These are affiliates you want to have as partners as long as they are following the right procedures and rules. SEO and media buying affiliates can really drive a ton of traffic and revenue for you. So these affiliates need to be catered to and made friends with.

Bloggers – bloggers are great for posting content about your company, reviewing new products, you can send them samples, you can say “hey review our product on your site, here is a sample”, which can be very effective at spreading the word. Not only that, anything bloggers write about tends to rank organically in the search engine. So its never bad when you have a blogger who is willing to promote your company or do a product review for your company as an affiliate. Mommy bloggers are very good affiliates and there’s probably an infinite amount of mommy bloggers that aren’t even in affiliate marketing right now that can be approached and proposed a business deal where they are being compensated on what they produce via their blogs.

Coupon Sites couponing has become very, very big. It has really exploded in the last couple of years with the recession, where people are going searching for coupons for particular merchants prior to purchase and they also find merchants before even thinking about purchasing via coupon sites. It’s a little bit of a double edge sword, in that you will get additional volume from the coupon sites, but you will see coupon sites sort of capitalizing on organic rankings related to your company name and the word “coupon code.” So you have to sort of take the good with the bad and really try to maximize the good and not really trouble yourself too much with who’s ranking organically with your company name and the word coupon code, because it’s going to happen as soon as you launch an affiliate program. But there is a tremendous amount of potential with coupon code affiliate sites because they likely have member bases and they usually drive a lot of traffic.

Review Sites – review sites are pretty popular among affiliate marketers. Affiliates will build a site that reviews five or six different advertisers in a particular niche, hosting is big with review sites, also dating, phone companies, flowers, basically anything where you can take four or five different advertisers and put them on one site and then drive paid search or organic search through those pages that feature different reviews, usually in a chart format. The affiliate would then earn a commission whenever he refers business to anyone of those advertisers. So that’s a very big and well converting demographic of affiliates traffic.

Loyalty Portals loyalty portals are very, very big. These are companies who have large membership basis and they are able to expose your advertiser offer to the membership base and there may even be a cash back component. There is many, many loyalty portals out there that you can place your offer in and it’s on a performance basis, so they have to be hunted down. Mall Networks is a good example of a loyalty affiliate publisher.

Incentive Programs This is where you are running into volume, but you are also running into possible issues because people taking actions when they are being awarded points can tend to skew down quality of leads certainly and then possibly sales and possibly increase the return rate. Virtual currency is another — it’s a quickly growing industry that kind of was born out the social networking thing where people are earning virtual currency and then there is companies who leverage affiliate advertisers to let people redeem their virtual currency and make purchases and save money and so forth. But again, a double edge sword, as you can get good volume, but you can also get some “iffy” sales and some sales that can tend to have a higher return rate.

Email Marketing – Email marketing has been around for years and it’s gone through a few different revolutions let’s say and it went from the wild west to something a little more regulated, and from what I can tell its pretty much the wild west again. It’s all about getting into the inbox. My recommendation is being very picky with it and don’t use everyone but pick maybe four or five email vendors that can blast your offer on a performance basis and just make sure everything is CAN-SPAM compliant and you shouldn’t have issues, and it should be an additional revenue source for you.

Partnerships and Business Development who in your company is handling business development? Is it someone who is pro-actively reaching out? Is it someone who is going after companies saying, “Hi I found your website or I found your company, we would love to partner with you on a rev share basis. Here is what we pay out by join our affiliate program and running it through our direct tracking program on site.” So you have to reach out to a lot of possible partnerships in order to get handfuls, but once you have a really good partnership on rev share or CPA basis, it tends to be a good producer and it tends to last a long time. So always look for partnerships and it kind of falls outside the realm of affiliate marketing. It’s one of those things you handle internally with a Biz Dev person, a business development director, that should be a very proactive person who follows up a lot. Yhey can definitely be going out and getting rev share deals for your company.

Big Web Properties – Big Web Properties are great! What’s better than a site that gets a couple a million visitors a month with your banner on it. You have several large websites in the affiliate networks, one that comes to mind the Meredith Corp, they publish 10 huge magazines and huge online web properties. Big web properties are definitely more receptive to CPA deals and rev share deals than they ever have been and the more inventory they have, the more they need to fill that inventory with something that converts for them to make the money, hence affiliate offers.

Traditional Media You can get TV, print, and radio on a CPA basis on a rev share, it’s doable, it can be done, it has been done, I’ve done it myself. You have to propose these deals to the different media outlets and individual stations and say, “can you run some of your remnant inventory with our ads, and we’ll pay you on a performance basis, we’ll set up a dedicated 800 number, we’ll set up a coupon code, a dedicated URL.” You can run traditional media on a performance basis. So look for those type deals as well and there are few companies that specialize in that.

Phone Calls – generating phone calls on performance basis, usually done on a per call basis or a warm transfer basis or live transfer where you are paying extra amount for that transfer to the call centers. But there are companies out there who will do it on a strictly per sale basis. So you just have to find those companies and get your company kind of in with them and run the campaign. See if it works for both parties. If it does you continue, if not you move on and say thanks for trying or you can do it on a different metric and see if you can make that work.

These are some of the various different types of affiliate marketers you can work with on a performance-basis! Hope you enjoyed the read!

Here are some real-world affiliate marketing strategies that were discussed at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Why pay for affiliate marketing systems when you can get all the knowledge you require to make money online for free? Here are some really great affiliate tips, techniques and strategies:

Intro: Niche website/blog building is an integral part of publishing content on the web, generating traffic, and therefore producing affiliate sales. Content is king and the more content you are able to allow the search engines to “spider” and then rank, then more possible traffic you can generate to your sites. Here are some site, SEO, and linking concepts to get you moving in the right direction:

Site Building Tools – I highly recommend WordPress to build sites with (our free site builder with free hosting uses WordPress. There are many sites builders you can use to get a presence up on the web. Make sure to set it up properly with good titles and categories. If using WordPress, utilize tagging as well which multiplies the actually amount of spiderable pages on your site.

Site Organizational Strategy – When you go to launch niche sites, to promote affiliate merchants, make sure to stay organized in a spreadsheet with info like: Merchant promoted, platform used to build it, login info (passwords), and posting frequency, i.e. (Date.com, WordPress, Evan@exper.com (jimihen5478321), twice daily). This will help you stay organized and will allow you follow a pre-established plan of action. Strategize on posting frequency to maximize your efforts.

Daily content posting – Posting content daily (i.e. articles, bog posts, essays, merchant reviews, product reviews) is a great way to ensure that the search engines will be coming back to your site frequently to check for new content to “index”. Over time, the more frequently you post, the more pages you will have in the search engine’s “cache”. The more pages you have in the cache, the more possible times your site’s pages can come up in the search results for various search terms, i.e. “Purchase flowers in Las Vegas”. Daily content posting is the best way to increase the number of pages on your site and therefore increase the amount of possible traffic you can generate with that particular site.

Use the Best Plug-ins to Enhance Your SEO – One of the advantages to using WordPress to build your sites is all the amazing plug-ins you can add to your site to increase functionality and “stickiness”. Here are some links to the top plug-ins available:

http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/

http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/

http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

Socially Bookmark Articles – Social bookmarking is a great way to generate traffic, inbound links, and better rankings for your site’s content. You have to join the sites and create a profile. This will allow you to bookmark any articles you wish. You can submit your own articles to these sites and other people may bookmark them if they find them interesting. You should bookmark mainly other people’s articles and some of yours as well, so not to appear like a spammer.

Top Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites
Social Networking - Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each actual entity you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. This will allow you to advertise these groups on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be messaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn’t be abused. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and affiliate promotions. Try to avoid being annoying because you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally and with actual friends and business associates.

Coupon Sites – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are looking for coupons to save money with retail merchants. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliate to help them promote. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. You need some skills or tools to accomplish this. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well because it has unique content and isn’t just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition and possible duplicate content.

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social communities is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous free tool for niche community building. Vbulletin for forums.

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time. There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:
- Blog roll links – when a fellow blogger links to your blog sitewide, you can reciprocate
- Blog commenting – posting comments on blogs related to yours (Google Blog Search)
- Forum posting with signature link – Join multiple forums, set-up sig links, start posting good comments

Site Stickiness – Site stickiness is a tremendous concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, follow on Twitter and FaceBook Fanpage, and RSS Feed.
RSS Feed Submissions – Every blog has by nature RSS feeds included. RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your content all over the web and into people’s feed readers. Your RSS feeds need to be manually submitted to get the best effect. Definitely check out Robin Good’s site for more excellent info on RSS and the top 200 RSS directories to submit to: masternewmedia.org

Content Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times. Here are some examples of article titles:
- “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
- “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
- “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
Also how to’s, breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.
Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate sites is a good idea because people will remember your site and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time!

Content provided by Experience Advertising, a leading affiliate management and social media management agency.

The Business Advisory Service is a UK based business utility management company. If you are a business, we can ensure that you are getting the cheapest gas and business electricity prices for your company.
The Business Advisory Service has just launched a social media and blogging outreach program to generate awareness of its services within the business community. Murray Newlands, known for his affiliate blog is spearheading this effort on its behalf.
In the UK some companies are paying twice as much as they should for their commercial energy. By using The Business Advisory Service the opportunity to make a saving are large. The Business Advisory Service works on a long term basis to manage and reduce a clients’ business electricity prices, saving them a considerable amount of money.
Affiliate marketing within the Business to Business arena is an area we see growing over the next few years. There has not been the boom in Business to Business affiliate marketing that we have seen in Business to Consumer affiliate marketing. We see the launch of this blogging outreach as the first step in the Business Advisory Service’s online marketing efforts. They will follow up with an affiliate program in the near future.
Business Advisory Service is one of the UK’s fastest growing companies in the commercial utility sector. Business Advisory Service switches the utility supplies for thousands of companies, accounting for millions of pounds of energy purchasing under management.

That the ’last click wins’ model that affiliate marketing is premised on continues to prevail underlines the inherent problems the industry faces in finding a credible alternative.
 
As affiliate marketing becomes more complex so industry players have been debating whether a multi-attribution model, that is apportioning parts of one overall commission amount to the affiliates involved in that sale, would better reward all touchpoints.
 
In theory this makes this sense. Understand the consumer’s path that leads them to the ‘buy now’ button and reward retrospectively for the multiple marketing efforts that influenced and guided their buying decision.

But delve a little deeper and a multi attribution model throws up more questions and subjective dilemmas than there are answers to.

An advertiser may find that two or three affiliates may be involved in a typical sale. Do you apportion the commission accordingly (by halving or dividing by three in this case) or do you weight it subject to a possibly arbitrary scoring system that attributes a ‘value’ to individual affiliates? What would then be the basis for this system; individual affiliate performance such as new customer acquisition numbers, average basket amounts, frequency of purchase?

From an affiliate’s perspective there are obvious concerns. If you run a cashback, loyalty or reward site and need to publish a commission rate what do you advertise when you don’t potentially know what you’re getting? What about affiliates working in the paid search space who need a guaranteed rate of return so they can account for their click costs and work their campaigns profitably?

By all means try to understand what value your individual affiliates contribute at various stages to your sales but rather than talk about dividing a commission according to an arbitrary click measurement why not just try to appreciate the value of each of your affiliates; both the volume drivers and by affiliate categorisation?

As multi-attribution continues to pose more questions than it answers many advertisers are getting on with the business of running their campaigns. The savvier are taking a step back, understanding the wider picture and apportioning commission rates that reflect the perceived or actual ‘value’ of their different affiliate types.

And ultimately that’s what performance based marketing is all about.

Guest Post by: Kevin Edwards of Affiliate Window.

Since the credit crunch first reared its ugly head, tongues have been wagging around the affiliate world, with one main concern spilling out of people’s minds; was the looming cloud of a recession gilded by the sweetest of silver linings?

With every penny ever more precious, with every cent being counted, would the greater focus by merchants on return from marketing spend see an industry seeing significant year on year growth make the shift to a dominant mainstream channel? Or would overall reduced marketing spend mean affiliates would suffer along with press, radio and TV?

For a while it seemed that affiliates were at least safe, and were at best coasting to a better, and richer, future. As one might expect, merchants were increasingly enticed by the idea of a channel that only pays out on a tangible return. However, overall reduced marketing spend has seen a more significant shift as merchants have shifted focus on other media to CPA and ROI targeted campaigns. Aggregators, PPC and traditional display-based advertising are delivering on CPA and ROI based models that have begun to return lower CPAs than affiliates and higher ROI.

There’s a simple lesson to be learnt from this; it is no longer enough to simply drive sales. Whilst this represents a sea change in thinking for many, for affiliates to capitalise on the current economic condition it is imperative that two things are addressed, and soon:
Quality of traffic
Costing Models

Without a significant increase in the quality of traffic, or the way that traffic is handled, the opportunity that is available to affiliates, that sweet silver lining, is likely to evaporate. By changing the overall perspective of a volume driving channel to one that is linked to profitability, ultimately doors will be opened rather than shut.

This is not to say that fundamental upheaval is necessary. However, publishers need to accept that positioning and potential will need to be increasingly tied to the needs of the merchant rather than CPAs and EPCs as merchants become more educated.

A simple example of this would be loyalty sites, a group that have seen huge successes in recent times, but who have also left a bad taste in merchants’ mouths that have been burnt one too many times. Simply by developing offerings that tie into the LTV of a custome, for example an insurance bounty that only pays out on renewal of a policy they can create a harmonious model that would make significant steps toward realising the huge potential growth for affiliates that is currently available.

The affiliate channel currently sees itself at a fork in the road; partially through its own impressive and intrinsic growth, but also through unforeseen global economic changes. By acting quickly and sagely, it can make the move from being a specialist part of the marketing mix to something that consistently sits at the heart of all merchant’s overall media strategies.

Guest Post by: James Atherton of Vizeum.

There is a big unanswered question in affiliate marketing today – how can we give credit for an online sale in such a way as to reward all of the sites that played a part in it? Surely that would be fair but as yet there is no workable answer.

Imagine I’m buying a Pay As You Go mobile phone. First of all I’ll probably read reviews of two or three new handsets I’ve heard about (for simplicity let’s say I’ve visited one review site, although in reality it may be several), clicking through to retailers and back in the process. Having decided I want the new Nokia I’ll then go to my chosen comparison site to find the best deal on it, before clicking through to the merchant. Wait a minute though, here’s a box in the checkout for a voucher code… I’ll just pop back to Google to find a current code for that merchant, which will involve clicking on the site and hence dropping a voucher code cookie, which will win the commission for the whole sale. Wouldn’t it be great if the merchant could store the three cookies (this is possible) and then automatically split the commission three ways on completion? I guess it would be more popular with the review sites but then they probably work a lot harder to put their content together than the voucher sites anyway.

I’ve deliberately omitted another stage of the buying process here, the cashback or reward site. The problem is they need to know what the CPA is in advance in order to offer it to their members, so it would seem they would need a different set of rules altogether – and they may be the sites who prevent this idea from ever getting off the ground. The other problem with this method if it became the norm is that it’s open to abuse. What’s to stop unscrupulous affiliates linking to merchants using a link that momentarily visits another of their own sites, because if the commission is going to be split they might as well bag another share to make sure?

I don’t know the answer to this big question, but I look forward to the debate.

Guest Blog by: Richard Buckton of Digital TV Advice