Merlin Mann brings the funny and effective yet again:
The Merlin Mann Amazon Store Blog: “Welcome to the Merlin Mann Amazon Store Blog. This is a new site where you can buy a fucking camera.”
Good idea.
It puzzles me that “online ad spending” and “online marketing” are seen as one large homogeneous block by pundits and analysts.
Surely, this sort of thing is true for the Madison Ave crowd that relies on display and CPM advertising/marketing for their bottom lines:
eMarketer Cuts 2009 Projection for Online Ad Spend to Single Digits | Epicenter from Wired.com: “The revised projection data puts online ad spending at $25.7 billion in 2009 — a mere 8.9% over the $23.6 billion that will be spent this year and down from the 14.9 percent estimate it made only three months ago. In 2010 eMarketer estimates growth will barely return to double-digits — 10.9 percent — and that it will not be until 2013 before it hits 13.5 percent.”
However, what about performance marketing?
I have a feeling that as the economy continues to sour with no end in sight, performance marketing will increasingly be the “goto” for large companies and advertising agencies seeking shelter from the storm.
Nonetheless, I’m daily puzzled at why this isn’t happening sooner.
I’m not a huge fan of business books, Seth Godin, teleseminars, sales letters, etc.
However, I just listened to this podcast from Jim Kukral with Matthew Scott and it’s really good.
If you’re looking for some info-business type stuff to listen to over the weekend, I highly recommend checking this out:
Podcast: Good Sales & Marketing Wins!: “The Biz Web Coach talks with sales and marketing veteran Matthew Scott of LifesWorkGroup.com about how you can become a better salesperson and marketer. “
StumbleUpon is one of those sites that everyone uses (or should) but never really talks about. However, as Shawn and I talked about on GeekCast 44, SU has a ton of potential for driving quality “sticky” traffic to sites as well as creating community around them.
If you’re involved in affiliate marketing and not using StumbleUpon, you’re missing out.
And it looks like they are prepping for some major upgrades soon:
StumbleUpon Readies for Another Version Release | Brent Csutoras: “Around 8:00 pm last night, November 19, 2008, StumbleUpon made an announcement in their Beta Group discussions area that they have rolled the majority of their users back to V2 ‘to prepare for upcoming changes that will add new features and optimize many existing ones.’”
I’ll review them when they show up in my account. Head over to Brent’s site and get all the details of what is in store.
If you’re a (thin) affiliate marketer, take notice.
To quote the bard Bob Dylan, “things should start to get interesting right about now…”
Google SearchWiki brings custom search results | Webware - CNET: “Google’s SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.
Google has been offering SearchWiki as an experimental feature to some people for months, but starting Thursday it will become available to anybody who’s searching while logged in with a Google account.
‘This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,’ said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager. “
Head over to CNet to read the whole piece, but what do we make of this as an affiliate marketing community? Sign of things to come from the repository of the world’s knowledge or just some tinkering to placate the Digg crowd?
I’m thinking it’s a sign of things to come as Google recognizes that the concept of “search,” much like life itself, is subjective and personalized.
If you create good content and are a sticky affiliate, this is good. If you are a thin affiliate that relies mostly on PPC, count ye rosebuds while ye may.
In the future (generic, I know), the bulk of affiliate marketing will be driven by mobile devices and mobile transactions. Start building for that.
The new rage for some of the shopping-centric affiliates and publishers is crowd source comparisons. Looks like BeatMyPrice.com is doing well with the model.
There is a nifty ajax interface, lots of options and the inevitable selling feature of the “deal feel.”
People Powered Price Comparison » BeatMyPrice.com
1. Find the best price you can online
2. Visit beatmyprice.com
3. Enter the details
4. See if someone has found it cheaper elsewhere
5. Save! (otherwise your price becomes the one to beat)
I expect to see more and more of these as the deal space heats up with the faltering economy.
AppScout also has some info on the site.
Say what you’d like about Microsoft Cashback, but they seem to be getting the numbers right…
Microsoft Cashback: The Traffic Needle Is Still Stuck, But The Ads Are Rolling In: “Microsoft is reporting that according to Comscore, Live Search referred 12% of all commercial transactions across the web - a number that is much smaller than Google’s referral share, but one that is also significantly larger than Live Search’s market share, which hovered around 9% during the same period. This makes the Live Search user base very appealing to advertisers, as it shows that they’re more likely to purchase goods than their Google counterparts.”
I’m still not sold on the long term veracity of the program since Microsoft faces two serious challenges to Cashback if it is going to be seen as a reliable income stream: 1) affiliates doing this are smarter, more nimble and will eat into Cashback’s market share little by little every month 2) this won’t get (or sustain) the “Oprah crowd” that makes cashback sites successful because the lack of a community and/or branding for that purpose (I’m not being a Microsoft hater… just saying).
Still, the numbers are impressive. Glad to see Microsoft using Jellyfish for it’s potential and perhaps this will spur more companies into investigating the direct response space as the economy continues to stumble around like a stoned hippy at a Grateful Dead show.
Mozilla is best known for Firefox, but for fans of open source, sanity and alternatives to Outlook (or Evolution on Ubuntu), Thunderbird is a popular choice.
And now Thunderbird has an affiliate program to spread the good word (although you get points and pride, not cash… so it’s more for the fanboi’s than the serious affiliate business person).
Affiliates Home | Mozilla Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox | Mozilla Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox: “SpreadThunderbird offers a simple affiliates program (Beta) that enables members to support Thunderbird and earn fame and prizes.
SpreadThunderbird’s Affiliate Program is not the only program to help drive Thunderbird downloads.
We’re also interested in seeing more of these kinds of affiliate programs and if you’re interested in starting a similar program, please contact us”
I’m glad to see something like this, even if it is geared towards the diehards and fans.
I’ve been an off and on user of Thunderbird over the past few years and it is a viable competitor to Apple Mail or Outlook. While it doesn’t have native support on these platforms, the features often outweigh those costs.
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
Yahoo announces their Yahoo Deals platform:
Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Have I got a deal for you: “Retail isn’t all doom and gloom. While total spending may drop this season as consumers guard their net worth, Forrester Research predicts that online shopping will actually rise 12% over last year, mainly because half of online shoppers anticipate that the best values and deals will be found on the Web. And it goes without saying that they’ll also avoid the stress of crowded malls and long lines when they log on in their pajamas.”
Similar to Microsoft Cashback, the aim is to help consumers find the best deals for popular products.
Should be interesting to see how well they do with this…
Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media (which is the umbrella for such wide-read and influential blogs as Lifehacker, i09 (one of my favs), Gawker, Valleywag, Fleshbot, etc) writes about the coming online advertising apocalypse…
Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan: “Internet advertising is by no means immune. Advocates of the internet claim that the sector is both more mature than it was during the last downturn; and it’s more ‘measurable’ than other media. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 27% decline in 2000-2002. Good luck with that. The sector’s maturity also means that its underlying growth is more sluggish than it was in the late 1990s. In 2001, internet advertising swung to a 13% decline from 78% growth the previous year; this time the sector starts from a growth rate of 27%; I would hate to see what a swing as violent as the dotcom burst would look like. As for the measurability of internet media: sure, marketers and their agencies can track engagement and clicks in great detail online; but it’s still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer’s sales.”
What Denton and Calacanis, etc fail to come to grips with is that the model of ad welfare which has supported the Silicon Valley lifestyle and worldview over the last 5 years of web2.0 is not (and has never been) the reality of actionable advertising or marketing.
Despite Calacanis’ dire predictions of affiliate marketing’s irrelevancy at Affiliate Summit West ‘08, there is a brighter future for the industry compared to what the Valley will have to endure in the coming years.
Welcome to reality. Have a seat. Enjoy the view.
