The Performance Marketing Expo will be coming up September 27-29th in Miami Beach, FL at the Eden Roc hotel. There are some really nice sponsorship packages available and they are going quick! There are basically 2 sponsorship levels. The conference is going away from the traditional boring Booth/Exhibit Hall concept for a more intimate show focused on coordinated networking and educational sessions from Internet marketing industry leaders and experts. There will be many super-affiliates in attendance which is absolutely priceless to be able to rub elbows with the top super-affiliates in Affiliate Marketing. The conference agenda is completely amazing, check it out here. Also, please see the speaker list. See the Performance Marketing Sponsorship packages here.

With the growth of affiliate marketing and the companies that practice and profit from it, care must be maintained in order to avoid unethical and even criminal practice within these services provided.

Since the emergence of affiliate marketing, there is little to no regulation in the practices of marketers, and merchants alike. Some affiliates have used spam, false advertising, forced cookies, adware and other unscrupulous activity to drive traffic to merchants and sponsors. Even with the advent of a terms of service clause used universally throughout Internet marketing, this unethical activity still exists.

Currently there is no real authority curtailing such practice. While some affiliate networks have released codes of conducts to guide practices and set ethical standards of online advertisers, true regulation has not yet been enacted to control the industry.

The solution, without pushing for government agency regulation or even an industry-funded watchdog is through education and training into the nuts and bolts of marketing. What has been lacking in the affiliate industry is a true curriculum that would allow for the training of perspective marketers. Whether on the industry level or the university level, teaching the methods of affiliate marketing along with other more standard practices of business marketing offers a keen eyesight to what practices are successful, and not as well which ones are ethical and which are not. This training could streamline affiliate marketing and improve its practice and efficiency in the future, allowing for increased freedom and expansion of the business as a whole.

As the Internet grows and offers more and more ways to reach consumers on a point and click basis, Internet marketing groups will push for news ways to integrate affiliate theory into the marketplace. The responsibility of members of the industry grows to set limits to how these practices can be used to lure potential consumers.

Affiliate theory has also spawned a new business in itself. Affiliate sites turn large profits in conjunction with merchants, making it a business onto itself spawning groups and companies that rely solely on an identity as an affiliate to generate profit for them. As profits grow larger, so does the moral responsibility by these companies to take action to thwart the spread of unethical practices within their business.

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet business practice that has grown exponentially since its inception in the early 1990’s. Rapidly, Affiliate Marketing is becoming an industry standard for the Internet. It might be time that the industry itself takes a look at how it can regulate itself, to avoid advances in unethical behavior.

In an effort expand into new avenues of online marketing and optimizing the resources and scope that the Internet has to offer; industry professionals are looking to affiliate marketing, or performance-based marketing, to open new doors of opportunity. Through this marketing theory merchants and affiliates alike are finding success. Merchants will either use an affiliate network like CJ, Linkshare, or Shareasale…or opt to use an on-site affiliate tracking program like Hasoffers.com.

In layman’s terms, affiliate marketing is using one website to drive traffic to another. Rather than utilizing direct online advertising, affiliate websites help steer potential customers to the merchant or brand seller. In return, merchants offer rewards such as cash or gifts for the traffic. Methods used in affiliate marketing include search engine optimization; improving traffic via algorithmic search results, search engine marketing; promotion through paid placement and email marketing; a form of direct marketing. The key is to pull traffic to a website that in turn deflects that traffic to the merchant.

Marketers have several options when creating affiliate websites. Pay per click search engines promotes advertisers’ offers. Websites geared to comparison-shopping and brand loyalty websites/directories that offer reward systems for membership lure specific demographics to advertisers. Offering coupon and rebates on brand related websites that focus on sale promotions bring traffic to the appropriate merchant and product as well.

Niche websites offer a pinpoint market and/or demographic that is ready made. Weblogs, email lists and shopping directories also allow for pre-determined markets. Websites with adbars use more customary and recognizable forms of advertising to reach a target audience and demographic.

Effective affiliate managers are essential to developing a health and growing affiliate program. Without good, pro-active affiliate management in place many companies fail with their affiliate marketing efforts. In order to grow a large, productive affiliate program using a good outsourced affiliate management company is recommend.

As the Internet grows and offers more and more ways to reach consumers on a point and click basis, Internet marketing groups will push for news ways to integrate affiliate theory into the marketplace. While this makes it easier for merchants to offer their products and services it also allows for clearer avenues for consumers to research and eventually purchase the products and services they need and/or desire. Affiliate theory has also spawned a new business in itself. Affiliate sites turn large profits in conjunction with merchants, making it a business onto itself spawning groups and companies that rely solely on an identity as an affiliate to generate profit for them.

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet business practice that has grown exponentially since its inception in the early 1990’s. Rapidly Affiliate Marketing is becoming an industry standard for the Internet.

Affiliate Marketing has become a useful tool for advertising and exposure over the worldwide web. Through the use of web publishers (affiliates) utilizing formal advertising methods, merchants create traffic to their product or services. In return merchants reward the publisher sites with cash or other types of rewards.

Beginning in the early 1990’s, it is well chronicled that the adult industry were the first to employ such marketing. Cyberotica was an early innovator of affiliate marketing with a cost per click program. In 1994 CDNOW introduced its BuyWeb program. The idea behind BuyWeb was a click through program that allowed consumers to peruse reviews or a list of albums from music websites clicking on an artist or album they are interested in giving them the opportunity to purchase it. In coordination with Geffen Records the idea of remote purchasing was born. Geffen contracted CDNOW to create a program that could handle order fulfillment. CDNOW could directly link an artist on its website to Geffen’s website, bypassing the CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist’s music page.

In 1996 Amazon launched a program of banners and text links through affiliates for individual books to link to Amazon’s home page. Affiliates earned a commission for each click that led a consumer to their site. These first steps have led to rapid growth in this style of online marketing. Currently it is estimated that affiliates are earning billions of dollars in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources including retail, gaming, travel etc.

At its core affiliate marketing is using one website to drive traffic to another. Affiliate websites help steer potential customers to the merchant or brand seller. Methods used in affiliate marketing include search engine optimization; improving traffic via algorithmic search results, search engine marketing; promotion through paid placement and email marketing; a form of direct marketing. These methods have driven online marketing to new levels. Affiliate marketing offers a low-key approach to online advertisers but plays a significant role in the strategies of e-retailers. So much so that it has spawned the need for management agencies that specialize in the complexities of the approach.

Media Groups have helped fueled this industry practice, creating new avenues in which to steer consumerism to the supply of merchants. The formation of these companies and groups has enhanced the scope of affiliate marketing and will continue to do so as the Internet and its ever-changing market continues to grow.

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.

Hey all! Affiliate Convention Denver 2009 was a great show with lots of great speakers and awesome attendees. I gave 2 presentations on Affiliate Marketing 101 and I think they went quite well. Got lots of good feedback from the the crowd which was standing room only. In case you are interested here are my Powerpoint presentations (created with Zoho.com):

Let me know your thoughts and feedback and my Affiliate Marketing 101 presentations!

Everyone knows social media is on fire right now, but how leverage it for affiliate marketing seems to be up in the air. There are so many social networks out there it’s hard to know where to start. Using an effective social media strategy for promoting your own sites is a great way to increase traffic and build followers and friends. By building up your friends and followers on social media networks you will have more people to broadcast your messages to and more people to interact with. Once you starting building up your friends and followers you are well on your way to promoting via social media. Another thing you can do is add “follow me on Twitter” logos and icons to your websites/blogs, so people will do so. You can also add it to your email signature to futher build your friends and followers. If you would like to read a more in-depth social media guide for affiliate marketing click here.

Computers and the Internet have finally come full circle for the average American looking to make money through promoting products and services online. Blogging and site building has enabled many more people to earn money through affiliate marketing. I don’t know about save the economy, but affiliate marketing can definitely provide a means for more Americans to earn income online. Currently, there are several states that want to impose taxes on merchants with producing affiliates in those states, as is the case in New York. This can only be a bad thing and counter-productive to the growth of affiliate marketing as a vehicle for more people to earn money online. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of this happening, but people in their local states can protest and petition against this happening and get angry about it. It definitely has a negative effect on affiliates as merchants may choose to not working with affiliates in those certain states, which I don’t think is the answer at all. The merchants will just have to restructure their own margins to accommodate this change and make it work. The various affiliate networks seem to be stepping up and fighting this impending legislation more vigorously, so thats good. Everyone in the affiliate marketing world needs to mobile to fight this. The states are just looking for revenue anywhere they can get it.

Affiliate marketing truly is a vehicle towards earning income online by promoting various online retailers and websites. There are many supposed affiliate marketing gurus that novices come across, but they only want to sell you something themselves in the end by telling you how to make money through affiliate marketing. Stay away from anyone considered a guru! Affiliate marketing is very much about content, writing, and putting a heck of a lot of time in on your keyboard getting work done. I would venture to say that typing speed is one of the most important factors in how much content you can produce online. So I always recommend to work on becoming a faster typer. Doing a lot of reading online is also a good way to improve your own writing skills, which will help you craft better, more intresting content for your site visitors.

Blogging and blogs have really opened up the doors to many affiliates that struggle with creating their own sites in HTML. Now anyone can create a blog, put up the affiliate banners, and start writing. This is why I created the free affiliate site builder for the affiliate programs we manage. It allows you to get up and running with a .com or free subdomain site is under a minute. Everything is hosted for free and you can build as many site as you would like. There are other site building tools as well you can use like Synthasite. Once you are up and running with a niche site or blog, you can go to work adding articles and other useful/interesting information without worrying about building the pages in HTML and FTPing them to your server.

Content is one biggest part of affiliate marketing because sites with good content rank well in the search engines. Leveraging pay-per-click or PPC keyword marketing is also a great way to generate traffic to your site or in some cases directly to the merchants site, but more and more merchants are moving away from allowing that. So affiliates need to have their own niche sites or send the traffic to a dedicated page on their site which pre-sells for the merchant. A good pre-sell page can really help convince the consumer that they should buy from the merchant and maybe even promote a coupon code to increase conversion likely hood. Making PPC work is not easy at all but affiliates do make it work so it can be done successfully. I always recommend a very slow, controled experiment with about $100 to see how many sales occur and if any ROI is present. Testing out 100s of keyword niches in this manner may leave you with 20 or 30 that are profitable and can be run effectively to create a profit channel. Using PPC and organic SEO together is the best approach towards creating sustained long-term traffic and affiliate commissions. Make sure to make your site “stickier” by adding newsletter sign-up, Twitter follow, email this page, bookmark this page, etc.

Affiliate marketing is still a growing industry that is really seeing more interest due to the current economic crisis. As people look for way to generate additional revenue, they will be turning online. Affiliate marketing is the best way for the “average American” (I only mean that in the most general sense) to generate income by marketing products and services online. This industry needs to be supported and embraced in order for it to really flourish for more people. So yes I do think affiliate marketing can save the economy! This was more of a ramble than a well-constructed piece, so take it for what it’s worth. I’d love to know your feedback and thoughts! Happy Easter!

Guest Blog by Josh Todd

We’ve all had them. A month comes along where all of your top converters are in the mud, you’ve created 2 brand new landers for some hot new campaigns, just to get an email from your AM telling you that they were “paused for tracking reasons”, and to top it all off, the almighty Google has decided to ban you from AdWords again. What’s a troubled affiliate marketer to do in times like this?

The temptation at this point is to despair. “Why me?”, you might ask yourself, “I’ve worked so hard to get where I am, don’t I deserve some time to kick back and relax?”. You can justify it any way you want, but the bottom line is, if you aren’t creating new campaigns every single week (or even every single day), you are putting yourself in harm’s way. It’s not 2002 anymore, and we all have to work just a little bit harder to keep on top of our game.

Does this mean that you should give up and quit? Accept the 9 to 5 for the web development firm and give up your dreams of owning an island shaped like Australia off the coast of Dubai? Of course not! What you need to do is take a closer look at what got you into this mess in the first place.

In the affiliate marketing game, you need to follow the ABC’s. Always Be Creating. That’s right folks, coffee is for content creators. So you’ve just launched a campaign? Pat yourself on the back and get started on the next one right that very second. Even if you don’t get very far, starting is the hardest part, and once you are over that mental roadblock it’s easy to pick up where you left off. What’s that you say? You don’t need to create any new campaigns because you are doing five figures daily already? Bingo. We have just identified your problem.

When you work for yourself, there is a tendency to congratulate yourself for success with laziness. I’m not saying that you just quit working altogether, it’s more like the focus of your day gets a little blurry. You are still in the office working on your computer, but now it’s posting on forums about your success and refreshing your stats every 5 minutes instead of creating content. Almost all slumps in this business are caused by the lack of fresh content to fill the gaps. It’s not going to matter if one of your campaigns takes a hit if you’ve got 3 more ready to take its place.

So how do you break out of the rut? How do you beat the slump into oblivion? Simple. Your job is creating campaigns, testing, testing, and testing some more. Set a goal for yourself on how many new campaigns you will launch every single day. It doesn’t matter if it is 1 campaign or 10 campaigns. You know how much time you have to devote to your business, so set a goal and stick to it. I guarantee you, if you do this, you will be ahead of 95% of affiliate marketers. There is no possible way for you to know which campaigns are going to be winners and which ones are going to be losers. The best way to beat the odds is through sheer volume, and some good ol’ fashioned dumb luck. When you get a few conversions on one of those new campaigns, then you know what to focus on with your optimization efforts.

Follow this simple plan, and you will break the cycle and get back into the game. I promise.

About: Josh Todd is an Affiliate Manager at 365 Ad Solutions, serial internet entrepreneur, musician, gamer, and armchair film critic. As an internet marketer, he has done everything from creating niche stores to sell products on eBay Partner Network to promoting CPA offers in competitive verticals such as Ringtones and Dating. As an Affiliate Manager, Josh has helped dozens of affiliates realize their full potential and grow their part-time hobby into a full-time business. For more affiliate marketing tactics, check out Insideaffiliate.net.

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!

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

Interesting possibility for the thread that Rebecca just posted on the Performance Marketing Alliance’s blog regarding Haiko’s datafeed standard from 2005:

Data Feed standard update at Performance Marketing Alliance: “Haiko de Poel just emailed me with a link to a data feed standard he developed in 2005 and posted on A Best Web. It is really concise and certainly looks like it covers details important to affiliates.”

This is the sort of involvement that a lot of people from ABW in particular have been asking for in terms of what sorts of issues the PMA might address within the realm of affiliate marketing. Hopefully, issues like ethics, merchant communications, etc will also be addressed there in the coming days and weeks as the PMA moves into its formation stages.

If you haven’t read the Industry Association Meeting thread on ABW definitely head over there for the conversation.

Linda Buquet also has a neat idea on Twitter today:

@billykay An aff group w/in PMA would have so much more clout, could decide on issues that the larger group needs to tackle etc.

It seems to me like the PMA conversations across the wide spectrum of affiliate forums like ABW, blogs like ReveNews, etc have moved to the next level. That is a good sign for the possibility of the alliance both having a life and being beneficial to all ranges of affiliates.