Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for November 2006

Are CPA Networks a Threat to Affiliate Networks?

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There is a tinder box of controversy over at Sam Harrelson’s Cost Per News. The debate is around whether CPA Networks are a threat to affiliate networks.

Sam solicited voices from the affiliate marketing space to sound off on the issue.

Opinions came in from Jeff Doak (My Affiliate Program and KowaBunga! Technologies), Deanna Key (Rextopia), David Lewis (77Blue), Wayne Porter (FaceTime), Missy Ward (CPA Empire, Affiliate Summit), Linda Woods (PartnerCentric), and myself.

Interesting perspectives on both sides and some heated exchanges in the comments area.

Join the conversation at http://www.costpernews.com/?p=95.

Standards and Best Practices in Affiliate Marketing

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The NAI (Network Advertising Initiative), a cooperative of online marketing, analytics, advertising and email companies who are committed to addressing important privacy and consumer protection issues in emerging media, has scheduled an event on affiliate marketing.

The NAI Strategic Forum: Building Trust in Affiliate Marketing, taking place Tuesday, December 12 in New York City, will bring together leading experts to discuss issues of accountability and abuse in affiliate marketing.

This NAI Strategic Forum will offer an opportunity for folks in the industry to learn, share, and build consensus on the threats currently confronting industry, and the proper responses from both the market and public policymakers.

The NAI Building Trust in Affiliate Marketing event will also serve as the starting point for an initiative to build standards and best practices in the affiliate marketing arena.

If you are not familiar with the NAI, they’ve got a long history of bringing organizations together to solve public policy problems, and they will be turning their efforts towards scrutiny of affiliate marketing practices in 2007.

Confirmed participants include representatives from aQuantive, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Datran Media, eBay, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Performics, and the State of New York Office of the Attorney General.

More details at http://www.networkadvertising.org/affiliate-forum.

Affiliate Marketing: Only the Performers Survive

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Just a reminder that I am conducting a free Webinar on affiliate marketing today at 2 PM EST.

The Webinar is geared to both affiliates and merchants – it will be a primer on the affiliate marketing industry. It’s geared more towards newbies than grizzled veterans.

Here is a description of the Webinar:

An overview of affiliate marketing and how you can benefit either from the affiliate side (selling the products or services of a company online) or the merchant side (managing a performance based sales force). Affiliate marketing guru Shawn Collins will cover the history, terms, vendors and opportunities in this industry.

Register now – limited space available. More details at http://www.readytalk.com/web-seminar-series/.

The Webinar is sponsored by the web conference provider, ReadyTalk.

Five-Thousand Foot View of Affiliate Marketing from zanox CFO

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I came across an Italian site, pc-facile.com, that features a good interview with Heiko Rauch, co-founder and CFO of zanox.

The interview by Adrien Hingert covers a wide array of issues related to the Internet and provides an interesting peek into the conversations that are taking place in Europe about affiliate marketing and beyond.

Here’s a small sample of the comments from Heiko Rauch:

“I see the future of online advertising in blogs, podcasting, ingame, communities as well as RSS feeds. I also think that affiliate marketing will integrate even more with the other online marketing channels, the entire business will be even more international and clients will be working globally and requiring services for dozens of countries from one single source. The performance-based approach will be largely diffused in the market.”

Read the interview in English or Italian.

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Affiliates at Affiliate Summit East 2006

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Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Affiliates, a panel session moderated by Candice Nobles at Affiliate Summit East 2006, is now available as a video.

Candice Nobles is the Senior Marketing Manager for Hewlett-Packard, Snapfish.

The session was an overview of topline issues that impact affiliates getting into affiliate marketing with the following panelists:

  • Larry Adams, Affiliate Product Manager, Performics
  • Stephanie Agresta, Vice President, Affiliate Marketing, Commerce360
  • Patrick Gavin, President, Text Link Ads
  • Brent Hill, Vice President, FeedBurner
  • Choots Humphries, President, LinkConnector

Issues covered by the speakers were data feeds, e-mail, buying text links, RSS feeds, and getting higher commissions from merchants.

Ask Shawn Collins: Hiring an Affiliate Manager

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Where can I post a job opening to source great affiliate managers?

There are the traditional venues like HotJobs and Monster.com, as well as the Craig’s List site for your city.

I run a private forum for affiliate managers, and part of the forum is an Affiliate Manager Job Center.

The cost to reach affiliate managers there is $150 for a three month ad. It can be booked at http://www.affiliatemanager.net/advertising.shtml.

Also, it’s not quite as quick and easy, but you might consider attending affiliate marketing events to scout out talent.

Visitor Enhanced Optimization for Affiliates

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I am a little late to the party here, but I just got around to reading The VEO Report by Colin McDougall, and found it to be very useful.

If you are not familiar with Colin McDougall, he’s a super affiliate who has developed a method to obtain natural search engine traffic. The approach is known as VEO (Visitor Enhanced Optimization).

Colin’s book, The VEO Report, details his method for building sites that won’t get banned or penalized by the search engines.

These are not merely the musings of a pretender. Colin is a guy I’ve known for years, and his success is real.

Colin spoke with Senior Google Quality Engineer, Matt Cutts, and the information gleaned from their interactions is the foundation for the book.

According to Colin, the information he shares in the book enabled him to gain top ten Google rankings on very competitive search phrases in a matter of days or weeks.

If I were to simplify what I learned from the book, it’s that you should create a site for people, not for Google. It’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

It’s a read I would recommend for any affiliate to establish a sustainable business, rather than short term gains from gaming the search engines.

Sub-Affiliate Interface

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Q: My site is an affiliate of a number of large merchant sites. How can I structure it so that each of my sub-affiliates will have just one account showing his combined total commissions from all sales on those merchant sites?

Shawn CollinsA: If I understand correctly, you are providing cash back to members of your site. If that is the case, there are a few ways you could provide the reporting to those sub-affiliates.

There is a service called Mall Networks that enables affinity organizations to set up online shopping portals. An example of their service is the NASCAR RacePoints Online Mall.

Many companies in your position will also build the interface in-house, so that it has the exact functionality they desire.

This can be a tricky approach if you don’t know which functionality you and your sub-affiliates will need. Also, home grown solutions run the risk of being inflexible to suit new industry trends as they emerge.

You might find what you need by setting up your own CPA network. A couple vendors to check out are DirectTrack and MyCPANet.com.

UK Affiliate Marketing Briefing

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E-consultancy has published their latest Affiliate Marketing Briefing, which includes a write-up of a roundtable discussion they hosted in October 2006.

The Affiliate Marketing Briefing document covers the following areas:

  • Market valuation
  • Market trends
  • Key points of roundtable discussion
  • Latest statistics
  • Useful resources

Attendees included Internet marketing experts from the following organizations: Argos, Alliance and Leicester, Aviva, BCA, Commission Junction, Dell, eConversions, Incubeta, Mylistforsanta.com, Ticketmaster and TradeDoubler.

Key discussion points from the affiliate marketing roundtable were brand bidding, landing pages, merchant-affiliate collaboration and communication, the need for integrated campaigns, and hybrid deals (i.e. publishers who want to combine CPA pricing with CPC or CPM).

Affiliate Marketing and Loyaltyware – Four Years Later

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It was four years ago today that Wayne Porter organized the “Performance Marketing Summit” to bring together affiliates, merchants and networks to discuss the role of loyaltyware in affiliate marketing.

The event took place at the Yale Club in New York City and featured a roster of folks speaking about the state of affiliate marketing and loyaltyware.

Minutes from the Performance Marketing Summit were recorded and summarized the presentations by many names still familiar today:

  • Elisabeth Archambault (BuckWorks.com)
  • Keith Kochberg (iMarketing ltd.)
  • Paul Nichols (eBates)
  • Henri Asseily (BizRate.com)
  • Shawn Collins
  • Joe Hatch (BuyersPort)
  • Tim Storm (FatWallet)

Check out copies of Elisabeth’s presentation and my presentation.

Read the minutes from the Performance Marketing Summit.

The conversation on loyaltyware has evolved over the years. Changes have been made, but there are still lots of dissenting views – time for another Performance Marketing Summit?