Shawn Collins' Blog

Affiliate marketing and other stuff from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Archives for March 2006

Affiliate Summit Double Header Preview Call

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On Thursday, March 30th at 3 p.m. EST / Noon PST, Affiliate Summit and Conference Call University will be hosting the second Affiliate Summit Preview call with two bold-faced guests: Dave Taylor and Jim Bouton.

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First up on the mound will be the Blog Father himself, Dave Taylor, Principal of Intuitive Systems, Inc.

Dave is one of the most respected minds in Internet marketing, and he’s sure to have some insight to take your business to the next level.

The starter for the second game will be Affiliate Summit keynote speaker, Jim Bouton.

Major League Baseball player, best selling author, inventor, and motivator, Jim has seen and done pretty much everything. Let’s see what questions YOU the audience can fire at him.

So block out one hour of your day on the 30th, and register for this free conference call at AffiliateSummitPreview.com.

U.S. Gov’t Tries to Kill Internet Gaming Affiliate Programs – WWSPD?

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Reuters reported this week that a U.S. House committee approved a bill aimed at stamping out the $12 billion Internet gambling industry by stopping businesses from accepting credit cards and other forms of payment.

According the the report, unlawful gambling, under the legislation, would include placing bets on online poker sites, for example, and any other online wager made or received in a place where such a bet is illegal under federal or state law.

The bill, H.R. 4411, Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, will now move to the House floor for consideration.

I don’t think I have to tell you how much of an impact this would have on gaming affiliates – of course, it would be huge. No longer would Americans be able to pay via credit cards, checks, wire transfers and electronic funds transfers to play with offshore gaming sites.

Being that today is St. Patty’s Day, as well as the early part of March Madness, where tons of Americans gleefully bet on college basketball, I’ve got to wonder… What Would St. Patrick Do (WWSPD)?

In addition to today being a wonderful day of green beer and wagering, St. Patrick�s Day is also a holy day, as St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland; the one who brought Christianity to the Irish.

St. Patrick told the people of Ireland that the shamrock was like the idea of the Trinity � that in the one God there are three divine beings: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In affiliate marketing, the trinity of big money programs would be gaming, adult, and pharmaceuticals. While these areas are objectionable to some, they represent big money and possibilities. You all saw that a National Debt of $9 Trillion (yeah, that’s a T) was approved this week, right?

Well, my Libertarian side says let’s leave online gaming alone, and just tax the hell out of it (along with adult and pharmaceuticals). People can continue to make their own choices, the over-spending government can chip away at the National Debt, and gaming affiliates can stop losing sleep.

Back to St. Patrick, legend has it that he drove the snakes from Ireland. I think we need to call him back into service and get him to also drive the snakes out of the US Capitol Building. Pogue Mahone, politicians!

Dress the Affiliate Summit Staff

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One bit of feedback that came out of the last Affiliate Summit was that many people could never find somebody on the staff when they needed them.

Missy Ward, Cory Booker, and Shawn Collins

Since we were wearing white Polo shirts, we ended up blending in too much with the crowd.

We’d like to fix that this time around by giving the Affiliate Summit attendees the opportunity to dress the staff in a way that they will stand out.

Should the Affiliate Summit staff were pants, shorts, Polo shirts, t-shirts… what?

Go to mydrobe.com/event/170 and tell us how we should dress. Please include details in your comments, like if you’d prefer that we were neon green t-shirts with STAFF in bold letters on the back.

Building Your E-mail List with Mailgrab Functionality

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I wrote about a company called Instant Attention last year, as I was impressed by their slick, effective technology for beating pop-up blockers.

At the time, I was touting this new breed of pop-ups that were using DHTML to get the pop-ups to pop past the blockers.

Recently, they rebranded as AdImpact, and their “floating layer technology” has a really cool, new feature: Mailgrab Functionality.

The Mailgrab Functionality enables their customers to use the popup layer to display a quick mail form, rather than directing user to a new page to opt-in to an e-mail list.

When you use this type of pop-up, the e-mail information (name, e-mail, and date) is saved directly to your AdImpact account to export to your list.

However, they also have built-in direct autoresponder integration for the following services: AutoResponsePlus, Aweber, GetResponse, IntelliContact, and ProAutoresponder.

Personally, I use AWeber, and it was very easy to set up the integration. You can see an example of the pop-up with e-mail opt-in at the Affiliate Tip blog.

Ask Shawn Collins: Paying Deferred Commissions to Affiliates

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I have a potential merchant with a travel site – they want to utilize cost per sale campaign with me but they don’t want to pay our affiliates per booking (they call it creative revenue) – they only want to pay when the visitor uses the booking (they call departed revenue). I am happy to try and set this up using our affiliate tracking software, but could you suggest how I could pay our affiliates monthly, as some of their bookings can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 12 months before they use their bookings.

This is actually quite common for affiliate programs in the travel and hospitality businesses. I’ve frequently heard the term, consumed bookings, with regards to paying affiliates when a flight, cruise, hotel room stay, etc. has taken place.

So affiliates that are already running these sorts of offers will not be surprised by the commissions being in limbo until the booking has been consumed.

As far as setting up the affiliate reporting when a commission has been confirmed to them, there are a couple ways to go about it.

You could have all transactions set as pending and then confirm them as the travel takes place. Of course, this can be a bit time consuming as the affiliate program scales up.

Alternately, you could upload a file daily with each instance of “departed revenue.” Then the affiliate tracking solution would have to run a process to match up the pending orders with the confirmed orders.

I’d urge you to contact the tech support folks to see what sort of process they can work out for you.

AffPlanet.com – Not Quite the First Free Affiliate Tracking Software

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I was just looking over a press release for a new affiliate tracking software, AffPlanet.com, and the claim in the headline of their announcement caught my eye.

Their press release proclaims that they are the “World’s First Free Professional Affiliate Tracking Software”. Interesting. Provocative. False.

Back in 2000, a guy named JB McKee started up an affiliate tracking software called FreeFiliate, which was later branded as Fusion Quest.

I mentioned FreeFiliate in “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants” (p. 194):

FreeFiliate is a free affiliate tracking service that is Web based – no downloading required – and is full featured, fully functional, and easy to use. This service is supported by sponsor advertisements, and there is an option to pay a setup and monthly fee if you want to not have the advertising on your pages.

It looks like the AffPlanet.com business model is pretty similar to the since abandoned model of Freefiliate. As George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Ask Shawn Collins: Viability of Search Engine Arbitrage for Newbies

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Q: Is Google AdWords still viable for newcomers? Is e-mail and e-zine marketing a better option?

Shawn CollinsA: In my opinion, there is a distinct barrier to entry for succeeding as an affiliate. The barrier keeps back all who are not innovative, creative and hard working.

If you can figure out a new way of doing things and really put your heart into it, you can succeed as an affiliate with search engine arbitrage, e-mail, content sites, data feeds, blogs, social networks… you name it.

Back to Google AdWords. It’s certainly a competitive landscape, but much of it is crowded by people who roll the dice blindly. No testing, no strategy – just throw a bunch of keywords against the wall and see what sticks.

So if you put some strategy behind your effort, keep an eye on things and continually test to optimize your campaigns, you’ll be in the minority.

Also, Google isn’t the Alpha and Omega of affiliate search engine arbitrage. You can also play around with Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and a host of others.

Dedicate yourself to success and you can make it happen. But if you give a half-hearted effort, there’s no need to wonder why your monthly checks are a disappointment.

Nick Smith Leaves Revenue Magazine

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Nick Smith, who filled the role of Publisher of Revenue Magazine since it’s inception, has stepped down from his post.

According to a post on the Revenue Magazine blog by Editor Lisa Picarille, Nick will “be working on an innovative television project with a new media component. His new job as sales director at Morphogenix is the opportunity of a lifetime that he couldn’t pass up.”

Good for Nick, but a shame for affiliate marketing. He built Revenue Magazine into a staple for the industry and has certainly left his footprint.

Back when word initially spread about the launch of an affiliate marketing magazine, I’ve got to admit that I was among the skeptics. I didn’t know Nick, and one of the early faces of the project was Herby Olschewski, who was something of an infamous character in the affiliate marketing space.

But shortly after the magazine launched, Herby disappeared and the magazine started taking off. Nick and his talented supporting staff have built a great resource for affiliate marketers, one that also serves as a sharp piece of PR for the industry.

Thanks to Nick for all he has done, and best wishes to the Revenue gang to keep on keeping on.

CafePress Affiliate Program Launches Dynamic TopicAds

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CafePress has rolled out a new affiliate link option that enables affiliates to better capitalize on breaking issues and trends.

The creative units are called TopicAds, and they are dynamic ads that use image tags to pull up relevant designs from CafePress Shopkeepers to display on the affiliate site.

According to CafePress, their TopicAds perform up to 3x higher than static ads.

The CafePress Marketplace includes over 25 million products, with over one million new products added weekly. So if you’ve got a site or blog that covers any sort of trends, politics, or hot button issues, you’ve got a large database of product to tap into with this new link type.

For instance, if you have a political blog supporting either side of the aisle and you wrote about the recent Dick Cheney hunting accident, you might get merchandise served up with the the catchy phrase: I’d Rather Go Hunting with Dick Cheney than Driving with Ted Kennedy!

It’s an interesting way to contextually capitalize on hot topics, and something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

For more details, visit http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/affiliate/topicads

Social Networks, the New Affiliate Frontier

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I was just chatting with Marty Fahncke as part of the Affiliate Summit 2006 Preview Conference Call Series.

After discussing the use of blogs by affiliates, Marty asked about some other ways that affiliates could promote their affiliate links. I touched on PPC arbitrage, loyalty sites, e-mail, data feeds, etc., I said I thought social networks were going to be an emerging type of affiliate in the coming year.

Social networks like MySpace.com, LinkedIn and Friendster have become increasingly popular, as they offer a more robust community environment than a discussion forum. Recently, they’ve permeated affiliate marketing with the launch of Return on Affiliate. Affiliate Summit is getting in on the action with the Affiliate Summit Social Network.

Earlier today, I saw that the most frequently searched term in the search engines, according to Wordtracker, is myspace.com. It’s clearly an area that should not be ignored, rather you should consider embracing it and monetizing it.

Anyhow, just about five minutes after I mentioned social networks on the conference call, I got an e-mail update from the Affiliate Classroom Blog with the title, “Social Network Sites: New Ad Channel.”

As Jeffrey Perren wrote in the Affiliate Classroom Blog, “Savvy affiliate marketers are going to be near the head of the line in using this new channel to increase income. And, bravo to those brave souls!”

If you’ve been waiting for the next big thing, here it is on a silver platter.