Linkshare has released a deep linking interface which allows affiliates to link directly to any page of a merchant’s site. This is a really cool feature Linkshare as added. Many affiliate request the ability to promote or review a particular product. There are tools, link Popshops, which allow affiliates to pull the product code from any CJ, Linkshare or Shareasale merchant with a datafeed. This new Link Share tool could really enable more affiliates to get productive! We’ll see how it goes…let me know your thoughts about Linkshare’s new deep linking tool!

There is some talk about California adopting a similar law to the NY state affiliate tax law. Linkshare has just put up a page to address the questions about this issue. Here is the link: http://www.linkshare.com/advertisers/ca_state_tax/

I really hope states think about the affiliates best interests when looking at these issues. Let me know what you think!

One of the biggest impediments to newer affiliates getting into the affiliate game is their lack of ability to get a niche website online fast and easy. Most savvy affiliates already know how to get a site online and start publishing articles and content. However, most newbie affiliates have a harder time setting up their site, adding the affiliate banners and adding pages of content to their sites. Often times, affiliates will turn to site builders that are hard to use and cumbersome. Enter the free affiliate site builder, a tool created to help both novice and experienced affiliates to set-up a new, niche affiliate website for their favorite merchant quickly and easily. The tool was developed by Experience Advertising a leading affiliate program management agency.

The free affiliate website builder leverages the Word Press platform to enable affiliates to erect a new site under a minute. As far as I know it’s the fastest website builder on the planet. You can build either a subdomain site or build a site on your own domain name. In its beta-version release, the affiliate site builder has constructed over 700 sites over last few months. Currently, the site builder tool is only available for affiliate programs managed by Experience Advertising via the Commission Junction affiliate network, but soon will be able to be used for general website building purposes. The cool thing about the affiliate site builder is that it automatically adds the affiliate banners and affiliate’s PID into the site’s layout. So when the site is done the affiliate just has to log into their Word Press back-end and started adding content and articles. What could be easier?

Initial feedback has been tremendous and soon the site builder will be adding additional features to further enable affiliates to produce and syndicate their content quicker and easier. Let me know what you think about the free affiliate site builder tool. Oh did I mention we are hosting all the affiliate’s sites for free forever? Let me know if you have any suggestions to make the tool even better, I look forward to hearing from you all!

Most companies, when running their PPC search campaigns, only reserve phrases in their ad groups with 1,2, and sometimes 3 words, such as “Fort Lauderdale Florist.” However, according to Hitwise, longer search queries averaging 5 or more words long increased 10% in Janauary over a year ago. This represents a tremendous opportunity for both advertisers and affiliate marketers. Usually, keyword tools only provide shorter phrases as suggestions, so it’s up to you to come up with good, longer combinations. You should also look to anticipate what people might be search for, such as: “Where do a find a florist in Fort Lauderdale.” You might still come up for some of these phrases with the broad-match features, but it never hurts to have a bunch of longer, more obscure phrases reserved in your account. If you are using an SEM firm to manage your PPC you need to speak to ask them what strategy they are using to build out and test new search phrases. If they don’t really have a strategy tell them to get one or go elsewhere for your PPC management. If you are handling your PPC management internally you should evaluate your keyword lists every month and look to build them out. Your keyword lists should never be “finished”, they are always a work in progress. If you hear back otherwise re-evaluate who is managing your PPC.

For affiliate marketers this represents a great opportunity to get cheap clicks on obscure, longer search phrases. Since more advertisers running affiliate programs don’t use a lot of longer phrases, it’s a golden opportunity to get that positioning for cheap. If you are an affiliate and would like to discuss how I go about building keyword lists, you can contact Evan through this website. Now get out there and build out your keyword files darn it!

Hey all, I wanted to invite everyone in the Internet Marketing world to join our new Cost Per News Social Network powered by Ning. Our new social network will be bring together many affiliates and affiliate marketing professionals, into one community. The purpose of our new affiliate marketing social network will to help affiliates learn to be better, productive affiliate marketers. Please check it out and feel free to make any suggestions you may have. Tell all your friends about it. Click here to join the Cost Per News affiliate marketing social network! Thanks!

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.

In the bleakness of the current U.S. recession, a bit of good news about online retail from ComScore. Online retail sales were up 2% in January compared to a year ago. However, the ComScore report also mentioned that twice as many people think the economy will get worse over the next 3 months and three-quarters polled are cutting back on their spending, which isn’t a good sign for retailers. Traditional retailers took a pretty big hit in January, with sales declining between 6% and 14% in categories like cars, electronics, furniture, and apparel.

These numbers reinforce the need to focus more resources into online retail as more people shop on the Internet as opposed to going out to the malls and stores. People are looking to save money anyway they can, so they are visiting coupon sites more than ever! This is excellent news for the affiliate marketing community.

Some of the categories losing steam this year already are luxury good, event tickets, toys, and office supplies. Looking for ways to save money, consumers have been flocking to coupon websites, which is great for the affiliate marketing industry. Coupon code sites drive a tremendous amount of traffic for online retailers, and this trend should only increase throughout the year. So online retailers should look to push out more coupons and deals through their affiliates to take advantage of the changing tides.

Commission Junction UK has launched an official blog and it looks pretty nice! Full of good posts. You can check it out here: CJ UK Blog.

I wonder when Commission Junction USA will launch their own blog. Probably pretty soon if they see the UK blog doing well. I think they should seriously consider it, since its a great way to get word out about new happenings at CJ. And there are plenty of interesting and smart people working at Commission Junction, so filling it up with good posts about affiliate marketing and new developments at CJ shouldn’t be too difficult.

Provided by Guest Blogger Seth Sarelson, RevTrax

As many of you might know, RevTrax is an in-store affiliate network. We offer printable coupons from major brick & mortar retailers that pay an affiliate commission on each in-store sale. Considering that 89% of consumers browse online before making a purchase*, but < 7% of retail sales actually take place online**, promoting brick & mortar merchants presents a tremendous opportunity for all types of affiliates.

To this point, I want to share an example from one of our clients:
Jackson Hewitt Tax Service® is a leading tax preparation firm with approximately 6,800 franchised and company-owned offices throughout the U.S. in the 2008 tax season. The company doesn’t accept online filings and has never had an affiliate program before.

In past years, the client has distributed online coupons to save $ on tax prep and distributed frequently via partnerships with large employers. Links to these coupons were typically not promoted heavily because the affiliate didn’t stand to gain financially from driving an in-store sale.

By working with RevTrax, the client was able to approve each individual affiliate to closely control distribution of the coupon. RevTrax tracks the number of times each coupon is viewed and printed and each printed coupon contains a unique promo code that is associated with the affiliate ID. (Many of our clients use a unique barcode instead of a promo code).

Click Here to see sample (you’ll notice that the unique promo code is added when you actually print the coupon)

The client provides aggregate POS data on a regular basis and RevTrax is able to tell the merchant and the affiliate how many times the coupon was viewed, printed, and redeemed for each affiliate.

The IRS started accepting returns on January 16, and since then affiliates have seen response rates ranging from 11% to over 20% of printed coupons converting into redemptions at Jackson Hewitt locations. Jackson Hewitt is paying the affiliate for each redemption.

You can join RevTrax to work with Jackson Hewitt, CompUSA, TigerDirect, S&K Menswear, and others by clicking here .

The author is co-founder at RevTrax, an in-store affiliate network. Seth can be reached at Seth@RevTrax.com or 646-649-4317.

* BIG Research 2007
** Forrester, “The State of Retailing Online” 2007

Hello everyone! It’s with great sadness that Sam is leaving the Internet Marketing industry. Sam and I had discussed possibly selling the site a few months back at which time I told him to hold onto it becuase I thought it was so great. So, I was quite suprised when I read Sam’s post the other day and saw how the site was going to be sold. I reached out and a deal was struck. Good Karma for working on a Saturday I suppose! After I acquired the site from Sam he told me that he was glad it was going to a good home. He did such a great job with the site, I will do my best to take it to the next level.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Evan, live in South Florida, and I have been in online marketing since the late 1990s. My first web project was a free auction site modeled after eBay called utauction.com. At the same time I was selling antiques, vintage clothing, and costumes on eBay and through ecommerce for DecoDermot.com. After that experience, I moved on to join a start-up ecommerce company in the health vertical called Dentalplans.com. It was a tremendous learning experience that lasted 5 1/2 years. When I departed, I decided to go into outsourced affiliate management because that’s what I really enjoy doing. I have worked with thousands of individual affiliates both large and small and everyone in between over the years. I never get sick of receiving phone calls at all hours of the night and weekend from affiliates hungry to learn how to marketing online. I’m really glad I decided to focus my energy into affiliate marketing full-force because it’s such an exciting, dynamic space to be in. My goal is to help as many companies as possible to benefit from my experience, knowledge and methods in growing their affiliate programs and marketing online in general.

So what do I plan to do with CostPerNews.com? I’m not quite sure yet actually. I do plan to make it a level playing field, not favoring any one network, conference or forum. I plan to launch a forum on the site and invite a ton of people in the industry to join. I think that will go over well. I will be asking for blog contributors who would like to post articles on performance-based marketing to the site. I am open to suggestions from people in the online marketing world as well.

I look forward to continuing to make CostPerNews.com a leading Internet Marketing website. I’d love to hear from anyone interested in contributing to the site in any way. If you would like to learn more about what my comapny does please visit Experience Advertising. Talk to you soon!

I stumbled into the affiliate marketing world years ago.

I’m walking out of it today.

My experiences in the affiliate marketing world have been incredibly positive when it comes to interpersonal relationships. However, it’s time for me to move on. I’m not happy.

Why am I not happy?

Mainly because I don’t like the way online marketing continues to debase the human factor of interaction in attempts to “monetize” and find cracks in the sidewalks to plant sour seeds.

It’s not you, it’s me.

I’m just not interested in the day-to-day minutia of being a marketing professional anymore. I’m sure I’ll always keep up with the main trends and I’ll certainly keep up with the space in terms of how it affects social media, etc.

But these questions just don’t turn me on anymore…

“Why doesn’t tinyurl allow for better cookie tracking so that I can make affiliate sales from Twitter links?”

“Why does Google punish me for selling links when TechCrunch does the same thing?”

“How much should I invest in my StumbleUpon account in order to drive 1,000 pageviews a day?”

“Can you help me tweak my Twitter account so that I can drive sales thru my landing page?”

“How can I get more fans to join my (self-created) Facebook page?”

“Who do I need to pay to add outbound links to the affiliate marketing page on Wikipedia?”

“Is FriendFeed worth it? Yeah, I know you say it’s neat for finding out information and learning about new things, but will it make me money?”

And It is these sorts of things that have slowly driven a wedge between my own idealism and (what I see as) the current trajectory of online marketing. Beyond a growing distaste around such issues, I generally find myself on the wrong side of the fence for effective marketing. And I’ve been on all sides of that online marketing fence… publisher, affiliate, CPA network, email marketer, agency, vendor, OPM, and God knows whatever else… I’m coming to grips with my own realization that it’s not for me.

For me, the expectations have never met the promises. These days, I’m only feeling more alienated. As a result, I’m choosing to opt-out rather than becoming a constant nay-sayer or voice of doom and gloom.

To quote Lennon, “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.”

On top of all that, I just don’t see myself as an “online” or even “affiliate” marketer anymore. I’m not saying I’ve grown beyond those labels. I just don’t feel that those pairs of socks go with my outfits now.

PLEASE do not get me wrong. I respect, admire and love so many people in the affiliate and online marketing space (and will continue to do so, of course). This is not a personal affront to anyone in the space or the space itself, but more of a realization that I have to move on.

As a result, I’ll be shutting down CostPerNews (or (fire) selling it if someone is interested) and doing my posting over on my personal site.

I’m also going to be working on the podcast network I’m developing (Thinking.fm) around issues I am excited about these days (science, religion, Nascar, parenting, tech, politics… the site is still being developed, so excuse the mess… will be up and going by February). I’m really excited about those sites.

And hopefully, the gang will still allow me to take part in GeekCast even though I’m turning in my affiliate hard card. I hope so (check out the site redesign, btw).

I’m also doing more work in the non-profit world (Hunger Initiative) and continuing my journey towards whatever end awaits me at seminary.

Yes, of course it is my hyperbole than anything to say I’m “quitting” marketing since we are all marketers in whatever we do. I should rephrase that and say “I’m quitting the professional guise of being an online marketer.” There, that feels better.

–

Two and a half years ago, I wrote this and my career only exploded afterwards:

So, with these realizations and my own skewed since of lefty politics and social views I’m embarking on a mission to do better… to make things good… to connect people to good things they might not have known about… to form community… and to use my skills to leave the internet a better place than it was when I found it (way back in the Prodigy Bulletin Board days).

Lofty goals often mean periods of worry, anxiety and joblessness in terms of “career” but sticking to my flower-guns has got to be a better policy than being miserable knowing that I’m not using my full potential.

So, who knows what’s next, but it will be shiny, rusty, exciting, boring, profitable, unprofitable and creative. I will make this work (whatever in the hell this is).

So, who knows what’s next? I will make it work. I will make it worthwhile.

Thank you all so much for the incredible dedication of readership as well as the inspiration you’ve provided me in the comments and emails.

Here’s to a new beginning and learning from the past.

Great stuff:

Social Media Marketing Madness [cartoon]