Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for August 2008

Exclusive WordPress Theme from Revolution

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The popular series of WordPress Revolution themes are beginning to offer exclusive WP themes.

While the current Revolution themes can be purchased an unlimited number of times, the exclusive Revolution themes will be limited to 10 copies being sold, and then will be removed forever.

You can see an example of one of the non-exclusive Revolution themes at http://feedfront.com/, which is the site for FeedFront Magazine, the official magazine of Affiliate Summit.

The Revolution Exclusive #1 theme is a widget-ready, customizable theme that is geared towards “churches, rock bands or other websites that want the grunge-style look,” according to Revolution creator, Brian Gardner.

Revolution exclusive WordPress theme

The exclusive themes will include a PSD file as well, and they are being sold at a price of $499.95. There is a special launch price of $399.95 through Sunday, August 31st at 12:00 midnight CST.

LinkShare Plugin for WordPress

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I was just reading the latest LinkShare newsletter for affiliates, and one item caught my eye – the launch of a new WP plugin from them.

LinkShare Plugin for WordPress

The LinkShare RSS DealFeed plug-in makes it easy for WordPress users to promote RSS feeds from advertisers they are partnered with. Users simply download the plug-in, enter their token and choose the Advertiser feed they would like to promote. Publishers will need to be partnered with an advertiser to display that advertiser’s RSS feed content.

That’s cool to see LinkShare getting into the WordPress action, since pretty much any and all of my new sites these days are built on WordPress.

I went for a long time hand coding all of my affiliate sites, but it was just time to move on and make the process more efficient.

LinkConnector Brings on More Internet Retailer Top 500 Players

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LinkConnector has been on a tear this year with signings of Internet Retailer Top 500 companies. I noted a few months ago that they’d scored 7 from the list, and now I see another 5 on their roster.

  • BootBarn, Inc.
  • Gander Mountain (owner of Overtons.com)
  • Hats.com LLC
  • Tool King LLC
  • U.S. Auto Parts Warehouse

See the Internet Retailer Top 500 at internetretailer.com/top500.

Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing

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I just read the Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing Workbook by Jay Berkowitz, and it was an excellent and informative read.

Shawn CollinsIf you’re not familiar with Jay Berkowitz, he has a podcast that I never miss, he is the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, and a frequent speaker at marketing conferences (he’ll be at the Affiliate Summit Social Media 2008 event on October 5 in NYC).

As the name suggests, the book covers Jay’s ten golden rules of Internet marketing.

It’s a quick read, and I think it would be an asset for any affiliate or affiliate manager. Contents include 11 case studies, some practical exercises and tips, as well as consumer and B2B examples.

The book also includes a CD of Jay’s podcasts.

Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing is available at Amazon.

Make-A-Video from ShareASale

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ShareASale announced today that affiliates can now create and generate their own video creatives, and link them to multiple different merchants throughout the video through the use of cue points with Make-A-Video.

ShareASale Make-A-VideoMake-A-Video was announced earlier this month, but now it’s ready for affiliates to play around with it.

I checked in with Brian Littleton, President and CEO of ShareASale, about the release of Make-A-Video, and here is what he had to say…

“Our goal has always been to put the best tools in the hands of Merchants and Affiliates, enabling them to do what they do best. From an Affiliate perspective, I feel we have done that in this case by allowing them to focus on things like merchandising and content – and not on trying to create a video player or worrying about tracking.

Video content is an area of enormous growth potential as everyone recognizes, and the only hurdle for Merchants and Affiliates alike seemed to be the actual technical tracking… so we targeted our efforts there. Once a video is shot, it takes no more than 5-10 minutes to generate a full-featured video creative which they can then use immediately.”

This looks like an exciting feature from ShareASale and I will be testing it out very soon.

Watch a demo at http://blog.shareasale.com/2008/08/06/make-a-video.

Speaker Proposals for Affiliate Summit West 2009

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We are now accepting speaker proposals for Affiliate Summit West 2009, taking place January 11-13, 2009 in Las Vegas.

Submit a speaking proposal at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/09w_speakers.php.

A complimentary conference registration is provided to speakers. Travel and hotel are the responsibility of the speakers.

The submission deadline is September 12, 2008. Any submissions after this date will not be considered.

More details on Affiliate Summit West 2009 at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/09w_conference.php.

Affiliate Summit 2008 East Attendee Details

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The dust has settled on Affiliate Summit 2008 East in Boston, and we’ve got a breakout of the attendees that came out for the conference.

Attendees at Affiliate Summit events break out into five main categories: agencies, affiliates, merchants, networks, and vendors.

As you can see, affiliates account for the largest group of attendees at Affiliate Summit.

Affiliate Summit 2008 East Attendees by Type

The attendance at Affiliate Summit has grown steadily since the inception of the conference for each location. There were 2,341 attendees in Boston for Affiliate Summit 2008 East.

Affiliate Summit East attendee counts

Affiliate Summit Social Media 2008 will be the eleventh Affiliate Summit conference.

There are only 300 spots for this event, which is taking place October 5 in New York City.

Syntryx Scatter Diagram of Affiliate Ads

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Syntryx has developed a specialized search engine that crawls over 20 million sites and indexes some 1.5 million online affiliate and publisher sites across many ad networks, according to Internet Retailer.

The results enable Syntryx to provide data to advertisers about which sites rank high on traffic from particular keywords.

For example, in one study Syntryx used the terms “Christmas, xmas and holiday” in conjunction with popular electronics-related terms “DVD, digital camera, camcorders, HD and computers” and mapped those terms against the publisher and affiliate sites where eBay, online retailer Buy.com and the web arm of multi-channel retailer BestBuy.com place ads. The resulting scatter diagram shows considerable overlap between Buy.com and eBay, but that BestBuy.com is not advertising on at least 350 relevant sites.

Syntryx Scatter Diagram

This sort of intelligence could be huge for affiliate managers. I wish I had access to this information back when I was managing affiliate programs.

More details at http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=27514.

Turnkey Affiliate Coupon Site from AffiliateFuture

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UK affiliate network AffiliateFuture has released a coupon management system for affiliates called AF Voucher Framework.

Coupon Affiliates

AF Voucher Framework is a complete site with all the standard features of an affiliate coupon site.

It is ready to go out of the box, but the folks at AffiliateFuture urge affiliates to apply their own unique value proposition.

The code is simple to allow room for customization, and there is an admin panel that enables affiliates to add new coupons (from any network) and also to import their coupons directly from the AffiliateFuture xml service.

Here are a few examples of sites using AF Voucher Framework:

  • urvouchers.co.uk
  • whypayfullprice.co.uk
  • discount-code.eu

More details at blog.affiliatefuture.co.uk/af-voucher-framework.

Automated Image Feeds for Affiliate Marketers

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Kowabunga! released some findings recently from a two week test utilizing an automated image feed from Image Advantage.

Based on their observations, the process of matching images to ads generated significant gains for affiliates from the start.

Here is an example of the automated image feed in action from the bottom of an mpire.com page.

Image Advantage example

Kowabunga! currently provides Image Advantage as part of its ValidClick Search Network but may also incorporate the service into other solutions.

More details at http://www.kowabunga.com/kowabunga-press-release.aspx?id=300.