Archives for September 2007

The Amazon affiliate program has launched Amazon Widgets, which are “small, visually dynamic, easily configurable tools that allow you to feature products from Amazon on your website, blog or social networking pages.”

In as little as one minute, affiliates can populate a widget with their favorite Amazon products, their comments about those products, etc., and select from a set of color and layout themes to match both their mood and website.

Widgets are an extension to the classic Amazon affiliate link offerings, and as with other Amazon link formats, you can earn referral fees of up to 10% with the widgets.

My favorite is the Product Cloud Widget, which shows clusters of product titles that are relevant to your page. The font size of the title in the cloud indicates how relevant the product is to your page – the larger the title, the more closely the product should match the topics on your page.

This is a good widget for sites with frequently changing content like blog pages, as it dynamically updates for relevancy.

More details at http://widgets.amazon.com.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will be launching a new entity called fbFund with Accel and Founders Fund, according to TechCrunch.

The size of the fund will be $10 million (coming from Accel and Founders Fund) with anywhere between $25 to $250 thousand in grants available for each selected startup dedicated to developing Facebook applications. Founders Fund and Accel will get the right of first refusal for the first round of financing of any company in the fund.

Good news to hear about this big stake in the Facebook apps. Some affiliates and merchants already have Facebook apps, and I think we’ll be seeing lots more in the near future.

Affiliate Summit recently launched a Facebook app, Ask Affiliate Summit, where affiliate marketers can ask questions and get answers about affiliate marketing from myself and my Affiliate Summit co-founder, Missy Ward.

Affiliate marketers are making a strong showing at the inaugural Affiliate Summit conference in the U.K., as registrations, exhibition and most sponsorship opportunities have sold out.

On September 28, 2007, attendees of Affiliate Summit London will meet at the Olympia Conference Centre in West London.

Kicking off with a keynote address by Linus Gregoriadis, head of research at E-consultancy, the conference hails other industry experts speaking from companies such as Affiliate Window, Lycos Europe GmbH, Sedo and TradeDoubler.

To reserve one of the few remaining sponsorships, visit http://www.affiliatesummit.com/07london_exhibitors.php.

All types of passes for Affiliate Summit London are sold out, but should cancellations be received, those spots will be available for registration online at http://www.affiliatesummit.co.uk.

I’ve been reading a lot lately in forums, blogs, etc. about problems affiliates, merchants, or networks have with one another.

Often, I think the issues come down to misunderstandings and poor communication.

An example of this is a discussion on ReveNews regarding a CJU recap from Sam Harrelson. Affiliates and affiliate managers are having an exchange about CJ, and CJ isn’t part of the conversation.

Why not?

There is a relatively small circle of folks in the industry that have a voice on blogs, podcasts, forums, Tweets, videos, etc.

I’d imagine that silent majority among networks, affiliates, and merchants has some great feedback and advice, but they’re all “too busy.”

Well listen here – if you care about the industry, invest in it with your insight. It doesn’t take so much time to contribute.

There are some folks that share a lot – they info tithe, meaning they spend a good 10% of their week helping, sharing, informing, correcting, and generally growing the industry.

Haiko de Poel Jr., Sam Harrelson, Jim Kukral, and Kellie Stevens come to mind.

That’s not for everybody, but how about 5% of your week… or 2%. Be a part of the conversation.

ValueClick recently announced that their Mediaplex technology division has released a series of enhancements to its behavioral targeting platform that simplify the process for advertisers and agencies to develop, manage, and optimize behavioral targeting campaigns.

The enhancements to Mediaplex behavioral targeting capabilities include new functionality, simple configuration and innovative campaign management tools.

“This announcement is the most recent that illustrates how the CJ and Mediaplex platforms are becoming increasingly compatible with each other, with this latest capability putting easily-executed behavioral targeting in the hands of marketers instead of technicians or programmers,” commented John Ardis, VP, Corporate Strategy, ValueClick, Inc.

“As we’ve paved the pathway between these systems, affiliate marketers can benefit from the enhanced targeting, tailored messaging, reporting, etc. that advanced adservers provide, and can also finally reconcile and properly attribute response and conversion across various programs such as affiliate, display, email, paid search, natural search, rich media, video, etc.,” continued Ardis.

It will be interesting to see when and which CJ merchants try this out.

More details at http://www.mediaplex.com/.

There has been a lot of buzz in recent years about mobile transactions and affiliate marketing, but I haven’t really seen much of it in practice.

But today there was an interesting article in Adotas, “Shop Online On Your Sprint Phone“:

Today, Sprint Nextel Corp has launched a mobile portal designed to allow shoppers to buy 7 million products from 30 online retailers. Some of these retailers include Wal-Mart, shoes.com and bluefly.com.

Exciting stuff, and certainly a big opportunity for affiliates that can move quick and establish a mobile presence with a unique value proposition.

But the question I have – is this all trackable by the affiliate networks?

I sure hope so, but I’m not clued into the nuances of mobile browsers and whether they act the same as regular Web browsers.