I just got done with the Commission Junction Coupon Code webinar and I thought it was really good. Very well prepared and full of information and good ideas. Here are some of the highlights from the couopn code webinar:

- Coupon codes are gaining popularity based on the bad economy, here are the latest percentages of where web visitors are going on the Internet: Search 37%, Coupons 25%, Comparison sites 17%, Auctions 17%

- Coupons are the fastest growing category on websites, boasting
#1 in the top 10 website categories
- October 2008 to November 2008 up +32%
- Unique visitors to coupon sites are up almost 50% over a year ago
- Coupon Sites in general are up 34% year or year growth
- 62% of US shoppers are using coupon when shopping online.
- Searches for “coupon” doubled to 19.9 million, while “discount” rose 26% to 6.3 million searches.

Strategies for merchants using coupons effectively with affiliates:
- Plan for Success
- Add negative match to search policy
- limit redemptions
- Purchase threshold
- Beware coupon stacking

Coupon Code’s viral nature: Coupons can be great because they get spread around to firends and family.

How to maximize coupons so they don’t hurt your margins:
- Coupons aren’t all or nothing
- Choose higher margin products
- Coupons can be product specific
- Use coupons to clear out inventory
- Use custom codes and links
- Create exclusive coupons
- Use vanity coupon codes

- Recent studies are showing that online shoppers are shopping specifically because of special offers and coupons.
- Coupon codes create urgency

Regarding whether coupon codes create long-term customers or not:
- Coupons create customer engagement
- Customers love the “treasure hunt”
- Loyalty is built-up over time

Disspelling the myth that coupons destroy the brand:
- Holiday Season 08 - coupons really went mainstream
- Even high-end stores are in the game
- Have a good strategy when rolling out coupons

Advice for affiliates on how to use coupon sites and make their site more valuable. Goal should be to have a site visitors bookmark and share with their friends. Check and see how well the coupon is performing on your site. Put your coupon codes into your newsletters. Develop long-term advertiser relationships.

Advice for merchants:
- Not just a discount strategy
- Great for new customer acquisition
- Coupon code traffic sticks

Questions and Answers:
- Can coupons be offered without codes? Yes they can. Doesn’t have to be a code, could be free shipping, or new product launches, and gift cards.
- What are the best perfoming offers for coupons? Percent or dollar off. Answer: some sites see dollar off and some see % off converting better. Recommendation to advertiser is to test different strategies and maybe a combination. Research shows that dollars off the sale are more effective, but it depends on the nature of the business/offer.
- What is the negtive match aspect about? Answer: advertisers should make clear in their SEM policies whether they want the affiliates to show up in search for your trademarks with the word coupon.
- Will the affiliate receive the commission if the link isn’t click by the buyer. Answer: is to embed to coupon code within the text link or banner ad.
- Vanity codes are higher converting and affiliates like them too!

All and all, I think it was a good webinar. They covered most of the hot topics and there was a good amount of statistics to back it up. I personally think all affiliate merchants should be using coupon codes to their benefit. I’d love to know your opinion on coupon codes best practices for affiliates and merchants. Thanks!

Everyone knows that Google and the other search engines look at the number of inbound links you have going to your site as one of the factors determining your website’s search rankings. There are many ways to acquire more inbound links to your site, but the one that I find works well, and is enjoyable, is blog commenting. There are literally millions of blogs out there that you can go and comment on. When I am looking for new blogs to comment on I usually do a Google Blog Search. This will pull up lots of recent blog posts under a particular search phrase. This method is particularly good for finding niche blogs to comment on. Once you find some good blogs to comment on, you can add their RSS feed to your feed reader to get their latest blog posts instantly. When you post a blog comment you are asked for your website url, which is where the click-thrus and link juice comes from. Not all blogs are “do follow” however which means the search engines spiders are following those links, but I tend to not worry about that because just posting a lot of comments is good no matter what.

Another cool aspect of blog commenting is that at the bottom of most blog’s comment box you can choose to be emailed when someone replies to the comment or comments on the blog post. This is great because it reminds you of the conversation and allows you to go and post another comment quickly and easily. When you have done a bunch of blog commenting, it will pretty much self-perpetuate itself. When you are getting 50-100 emails a day from various blog conversations, consider yourself as having arrived! Always make sure to post quality blog comments or your comments won’t be approved and therefore not posted on the blog.

When getting heavily involved in commenting on blogs, often times you will be introduced to the blog owners and that can turn into a great friendship. Often times blog owners will email you or comment reply to thank you for your participation. The blog owners want you to post good comments to add content to their sites and keep the conversation lively.

Blog commenting is one fantastic way to build your website’s inbound links, thereby increasing traffic and rankings. It does have to be done in abundance to get a good effect, but every little bit helps! Like most things in online marketing it’s a volume game, so the more effort you put into it the more you can get out of it. Let me know your thoughts about effective blog commenting strategies. I look forward to hearing from you!

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!