Super Affiliate Marketing

As reported by Vinny Lingham the CJ Publisher Advisory Board was finalized this week.  The full members of the board are:

Adam Viener, Imwave, Inc.
Connie Berg, FlamingoWorld.com / iShopDaily.com
Craig Cassata, MrRebates.com
Dan Murray, Ravenwood Marketing
David M. Lewis, 77Blue
Eva Klein, FatWallet
Jennifer Nissenberg, Upromise
Jeremy Palmer, QuitYourDayJob.com
Michael Coley, Amazing-Bargains.com
Paul Nichols, Ebates.com
Scott Jangro, MechMedia, Inc.
Scott Kluth, CouponCabin.com
Steve Schaffer, Vertive, Inc
Vinny Lingham, Clicks2Customers.com

These members will be the voice of the Publishers within the Commission Junction network.  Kerri Pollard, VP Client Performance, said:

“At Commission Junction, we are always looking for ways to develop sustainable relationships and improve our services to our clients in order to drive quality results. Keeping with that tradition, we aspired to enhance the communication channel between Commission Junction and our publishers. As a result, I am proud to introduce our Publisher Advisory Board (PAB).

Commission Junction will proactively obtain feedback from the PAB regarding successes or opportunities they observe throughout the lifecycle of a business or technical initiative. The PAB will collaborate with the Commission Junction executive board to implement enhancements in order to warrant success for all parties.”

McCoy and I (commonly known in Vegas as “the Ryan’s”) are just finishing up a whirlwind trip where we’ve been wined and dined by some of the merchants we represent here in Las Vegas. A big thanks goes out to Karen White, Katie and Marco of the Wynn Hotel for their hospitality. It’s always fun to meet up with other “affiliates” and hear what angles and approaches they are taking - this particular trip we mingled with lots of content heavy affiliates who promote Las Vegas travel from a variety of angles and who generate traffic from a wide range of techniques. We listened as some extolled the value of craig’s list ads for driving traffic while others combined offline / online strategies such as mailers with a private label domain.

 McCoy hit the nail on the head as we debated the pros and cons of sin city - “nowhere are you able to dream as big as when you are in Las Vegas”. Indeed, as I’m typing this I look out over an amazing city that was once nothing but a desert - the city appears to be nothing more than a mirage - speaking of which - it’s time to head out to Wolfgang Puck’s for lunch with the good folks from MGM.

Google is rolling out changes to AdWords by week’s end. There will now be a column that will rank each keyword/ad and how it is performing on a three part scale, “Poor”, “OK”, and “Great”. This will help clarify why some ads have astronomical bids and some are just normal. In the coming weeks there will also be an algorithm change that will give advertisers the benefit of the doubt where little keyword data is available. Rather than jacking the bids through the roof, Google will allow a lower bid price until more data and performance is established.

Check out more coverage at Search Engine Land, and the official post from Google.

There is an interesting discussion going on over at ABestWeb on the Oreck forum. Paul Schroader, a founding member here at Super Affiliate Marketing is getting raked over the coals for requesting contact information from affiliates. The question boils down to this: do you let affiliates into a program after just reviewing their sites? Or should you do as Paul does and require updated contact information before allowing a publisher into your program? Paul asked me for my opinion on the issue and I chimed in:

…This is an interesting discussion and will be more and more relevant as this industry matures. This really is a double edged sword. Do you approve affiliates even despite not having current (or verified) contact information? (I know that some of us have it listed on the websites in our profiles, but there are many that don’t update that contact info or don’t have contact info listed at all). If you don’t approve these affiliates, how many super affiliates will you miss out on?

When I got into the business six years ago, I took the approach to stay anonymous. No contact info on my websites, register for all forums under a nickname rather than my own name etc., I found myself making a decent full-time living doing a cross between affiliate marketing and search marketing (both SEO/SEM). The turning point for me personally was reaching out to programs and affiliate managers to understand their program, their goals and putting my name out there.

So what you didn’t get approved. I’m a 5 bar-earner in CJ a CJ Performer etc, etc, and I get rejected on programs all the time or have applications stuck in pending status. Be proactive, e-mail the program. If there is no contact info listed for them in CJ send them an e-mail through the CJ interface. Find out why you haven’t been approved. Offer to call them to find out more about their program. Although counter intuitive to some, there are affiliate managers who are weeding out affiliates by seeing who will put forth the extra effort.

There really is a paradigm shift toward less affiliates and higher performers–especially for major brands. I know that almost all of you can come up with a couple (several) examples where that isn’t the case, but as you rub shoulders with affiliate managers at Affiliate Summit, CJU, etc you’ll find many are starting to take this approach. So for those of you who are content to make affiliate managers “jump through hoops” for you, beware, your days of dominance may be numbered.

As the industry matures we will see more and more requirements from programs so that this will be seen as a more legitimate business. I have one program in my portfolio that I would never have landed if I wasn’t willing to jump a flight and meet the affiliate manager in person. Now this program is one of my top 3 programs that I promote…

I really believe that this discussion will continue to be relevant for a long time.  Merchants are finding out that their are a lot of affiliates that seem innocent enough on the surface only to find out that they are doing very sneaky things behind a merchant’s back.  You know what I’m talking about, geo-targeting ads in locations where the affiliate manager won’t notice, day-parting ads so they show during hours the affiliate manager won’t notice.  Just to name a few.  So rather than sacrifice your brand, have to worry about a extra policing of the program, why not only accept affiliates that are willing to provide this information?

What say you?

Congrats to Vinny Lingham and crew at incuBeta for securing $3.4 million in venture capital from Mark Shuttleworth’s HBD. The press release states that the investment will help the company expand its presence in the U.S. and U.K. and fund the opening of offices in Silicon Valley. It is great to see investment of this scale in the industry. Money has been flowing into the affiliate networks for a while, but its nice to see the recognition of an affiliate in terms of investment dollars. Good luck to all involved.

And the winner is:

[added] Follow up to “Choosing a Logo Part 2” and “Choosing a Logo” [/added]

Recently I have been working with a few companies that have been using behavior marketing, so far I have had a good experience. I was wondering if anyone has any feedback?

This last weekend was the Affiliate Summit down in Las Vegas, for anyone who has not been there it’s a great event. Many of the top vendors, merchants, and affiliates are walking the halls.  If you make one good contact or get one great idea, the entire trip has paid for it self. Of all the networking and material you learn, the most important thing from any conference is what you do right when you get back. You come back with a million ideas and half a dozen directions to go in, but if you never put anything into action then it was all a waste of time. Action is needed, even if you have no idea of how your going to get from point A to Z, all you need to do is get from A to B, C will follow.

We are still in the process of choosing a logo. Logoworks has been very good to work with and they’ve come back with these revisions:

Here is the starting point they worked off of:

Revision #1

Revision #2

Revision #3

Revision #4

Revision #5

Revision #6

So what do you think?  Improvement over the last ones? Which one is your favorites?  What type of changes if any would you make to your favorite logo?

Affiliate Summit played to a sold out audience of over 2,000 people. It was a great success. Congrats to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for putting on a great event. I think Wynn Las Vegas did a fantastic job in a major sponsorship roll with the party at the Tryst and at the Icebreakers networking event. Great job Karen, Katie, and others that helped out. I didn’t attend as many classes as I would have liked, but the networking was great. If you missed the one in Vegas, you can still catch the event in Miami which I’m sure will be a equally valuable.

It was interesting hearing the different sides of the debates in a lot of the classes. I wish Michael Jacobs would have continued debating Vinny Lingham in the “Parasites or Partners” track on Tuesday. I enjoyed the presentation but I believe that Michael’s logic regarding affiliate search partners was (is) deeply flawed. I think a healthy debate was taking shape that would have benefited merchants and affiliates alike and that the discussion was ended prematurely.

I’ve uploaded a few pics of the event to my Flickr account for anybody that wants to take a peek.